Doctor Who: Time Lord

by Ian Marsh, Peter Darvill-Evans

A universe of infinite possibilities

TIME LORD is the Doctor Who role-playing game, and with TIME LORD anything is possible.

This volume contains all the information you need to:

Understand the rules of the game
Play the role of any of the seven Doctors or any of their twenty-nine companions
Create original settings in which your friends can adventure
You don't know Doctor Who?

Part One of TIME LORD contains a brief history of the world's longest-running television science fiction series, and an abridged short story that demonstrates the unique appeal of Doctor Who.

You've never heard of role-playing games?

Part Two of TIME LORD introduces you to the concepts behind this fascinating and increasingly popular hobby, and contains a complete mini-adventure for one player that leads you effortlessly through the basic rules of the TIME LORD system.

Devised by two experts both the Doctor Who television series and role-playing games, TIME LORD is built around just one basic rule and is therefore one of the easiest of role-playing games to learn. Complete beginners can start playing almost immediately. The open-ended nature of the game system, on the other hand, and the richness of the Doctor Who heritage allow for the creation of fiendishly complicated and challenging games.

In addition to the introductory chapters and rules of the game. TIME LORD contains an encyclopaedia of Doctor Who information — details of the Doctors, their companions and opponents Gallifreyan technology and the TARDIS — as well as a complete ready-made adventure, advice about creating your own original adventures, and appendices covering advanced topics.

TIME LORD: complete mastery of space and time

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 1991

About the author

Dr Ian Marsh has been a university lecturer in criminology for many years. In that context, he has published numerous academic books on crime and justice, crime and the media and, more generally, sociology. Based on his experiences as an academic criminologist, he has recently started writing fictional books and his first crime novel, Murderer on your Mark, was published in December 2015.

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3074926.html

My role-playing game days are very far behind me now, but in my late teens I was pretty absorbed in the linked fandoms of postal diplomacy and RPG design. One of the major figures of the latter was Ian Marsh, co-editor of the famous zine Dragonlords, solo editor of the less famous Year of the Rat, and briefly the professional editor of White Dwarf, which is of course still going. Ian himself now runs a tabletop miniatures business in the Isle of Wight. I only recently realised that he and Peter Darville-Evans, the original editor of Virgin’s New Adventures, had collaborated on this role-playing game. I am no longer enough of an RPG fan to really evaluate it; the points that struck me were:

* No time needed for players to roll up characters, because character sheets for the (then) seven Doctors and their companions are already provided and players are expected to use them.
* An interesting mechanism for invoking chance: the referee establishes the difficulty of a particular task on a scale of 0-5, and the player must then “beat the difference”, by rolling two dice and seeing if the difference between the two numbers exceeds the difficulty of the task.
* Quite a strong time element, in terms of how long particular activities will take mattering a lot to the outcome of your scenario, perhaps deliberately echoing the time pressure of a 25-minute TV episode.

There are also two skeleton stories provided, one of the Doctor and Ace intervening in high politics of a spacefaring planet, the other an alien mystery in a contemporary shopping centre. I think for completists only, whether Whovians or RPGers, but interesting enough. (Not so sure about Colin Howard’s art here though.) I got mine in hard copy, but you can download it here, and I believe that more adventures are available if you hunt around.

[Arthur B]

Could have done with another editing pass to trim away truly inessential or irrelevant material - why would anyone reading this particularly need to know about John Nathan-Turner resigning as Doctor Who producer at the BBC in 1990, or other behind-the-scenes production details? On top of that, the original sample adventure is massively over-long - it's not that it's bad, but it is far too much material to expect a beginner referee to digest prior to running a game. Still, the underlying basis of the system is sound. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...

[Daniel]

An easy read if you are familiar with RPG'S and how they work. Well thought out, with easy rules and basics. Not overly complicated, though it could use a section with character set up and tables are all in one spot. Would work with the original series or the reboot.

[Ian Marsh]

I could have done a better job. But it was hard to research at the time.

Goodreads mistakenly attributes this book to Dr Ian Marsh, a university lecturer, rather than the Ian Marsh of White Dwarf and roleplaying notoriety in the 1980s. Doctor Who: Time Lord is that Ian Marsh's only book.

[Daniel Kukwa]

"Doctor Who's" attempt at a "Dungeons & Dragons" manual. It's not the greatest bit of work the RPG world has produced, but it did set the stage for a number of interesting imaginary adventures. It has now sunk into the soft loam of golden fanboy nostalgia, so I do have some rosy 20/20 hindsight at work here...