All the Strange, Strange Creatures Volume 1

by Morgan Davie, Andrew Kenrick, Cassie Noble Beyer

‘There's a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you!’
For much of our history humans have gazed up at the stars and asked the question: are we alone in the universe? The answer, of course, is no! The galaxy is teeming with life. Aliens populate every corner of the universe, and many have visited our humble little planet.
All the Strange, Strange Creatures is aliens. Aliens the Doctor has encountered on his adventures. Aliens he has not yet met. Aliens he hopes to never meet again. This supplement provides the Gamemaster with the details of just some of the alien races that the Doctor has encountered, from Daleks and Cybermen to the Vashta Nerada and the Skovox Blitzer.
As well as providing rules and background for each of the aliens included, this supplement also gets beneath the skin of each of them. What makes them tick? What do they do? How do you use them in your adventures? What sort of stories do they appear in? What else might you do with them? And how do you go about making up your own aliens?

Genres: Role Playing Games, Science Fiction

160 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of monsters for the Doctor Who RPG, and it has a pretty nice selection of stuff. There are monsters from the current run of the show, some stuff from the classic era, and of course some things that have been in both. There's plenty of recurring enemies and also a few monsters that have only made one appearance. There were some nice surprises in the latter category, including the Jagrafess and the Carrionites. Of course, most of the stuff here has already appeared in the core book or one of the various sourcebooks covering each incarnation of the Doctor. So what makes this book worth having? For one thing, there are a handful of updates, like 3W Cybermen. More importantly, for the stuff that only appeared in sourcebooks, the monsters now get evaluation on their own merits instead of as part of an episode recap. Motives and psychology are discussed, often there are ideas for variants or ways to avoid the cliche adventure, and there are always two to four adventure seeds. The authors clearly had fun with those, as they include a version of Roald Dahl's The Witches and what I can best describe as Ender's Game with tabletop wargaming. Plus, there's great advice for running an adventure with the Weeping Angels and the Silence, both of which are potentially tricky foes for an RPG. There's also a brief chapter on monster creation, which gathers all the monster aspects published so far, gives a bit of advice on villain creation, and includes rules for playing some of the less inhuman creatures as PCs. All in all, this is a pretty good book, and definitely complements the core book well. I just hope it doesn't take too long to release Volume 2, though a little wait is worth it if they stat up some of the cool stuff that's been appearing in Season Ten of the show.