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Firstly, I have to state in fairness that I was not left in the best of minds when I received this game. It has been endlessly delayed and I have had it on pre-order from my FLGS more or less since it was announced. Yesterday evening I found that it had just been released as a PDF in the meantime and was presented with the choice of whether to buy the PDF or wait a few more months to get the boxed set. I belatedly found that there was a boxed set + PDF bundle available on Cubicle7’s own store, but it only accepts PayPal which I dislike intensely and my FLGS don’t have the bundle deal so, I bit the bullet and bought the PDF instead. I harumphhed for a bit but ultimately, I was not going to wait any longer than I had to in order to read this supplement because I have really, really been looking forward to it. I haven’t written a review of the core game because I found that other people had already reviewed it and said much what I would say. But for the record, because it’s important to know what someone thinks of the core game when you’re trying to use their review as a guide to the supplements, I’ll summarise here and say that I think Cubicle 7’s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is one of the best RPGs I’ve seen in years. It’s imaginative, elegant and wonderfully presentable to people who have never role-played before. I never really stop lauding it.

So now that you know where I’m coming from, I’ll give my thoughts on the first supplement for the game.
This review is based on the PDF only. The boxed set contains • 138 page rulebook
• 32 page adventure book
• 7 cards detailing new gadgets and 5 blank gadget cards
• 180 new story point counters
• 86 easy reference creature cards and 6 blank creature cards

For the PDF version, the books are obviously more or less the same. The story point counters you’d have to print out and (hideously) then cut out into hexagons. The reference cards, you’d have to print out (everything is glossy colour, btw), cut out, and the glue back to back to get both sides of the reference card (picture on front, stats on back). So although it’s nice to see what the boxed set will contain, the usefulness of these in the PDF version is substantially reduced. I don’t think that’s a big issue for the PDF – you’re buying it just because you want a book of creatures and expanded rules for aliens. To me personally, PDF is fine for that. Anyway, something to be aware of.

Now the meat of the supplement – the main book. The 138 pages break down into 86 pages of aliens from the TV series, 13 pages of rules for aliens, 5 pages detailing the creation of alien race packages (i.e. playing a Judoon costs x story points and provides the following modifications) along with sample race packages (Daleks are *not* included) and, to round out the book, six pages on world generation (including random world generation tables) and three moderately detailed alien worlds complete with adventure ideas (each world gets a few sides).

The first question most people will ask is what aliens are included in the book. The answer, for me at least, is too few and too many. Of the 77 aliens included, almost all are from the recent series (i.e. Ninth Doctor onwards). The only rare exceptions are cases where they include older versions of current monsters, e.g. you get stats for Mondasian cybermen. But I do mean rare exceptions. You’ll find no Rutans, no Sea Devils nor any other classics. I don’t know why this is. Licensing issues with the BBC; being held back for a separate “Classic Who” supplement or simply that the target market for this game is followers of the New Who, not us long-time fans. But the book is so littered with references to classic Who that I can’t believe this last possibility. At any rate, they’re notable by omission. So what you’re getting in the Aliens and Creatures boxed set is most definitely not an encyclopedia of Doctor Who monsters. In fact, it feels quite sparse. As if to highlight the absences, a lot of the entries have been used not to deal with alien races in general, but with specific alien NPCs. Some we absolutely must have – of course, we must have Davros! Face of Boe is acceptable. But do we really want Thomas Kincade Brannigan? 98% of people reading this will be scratching their heads trying to remember who Thomas Kincasde Brannigan is. I’ll save you the trouble – he was the cat-person driving a car in the Gridlock episode that the Doctor talked to for a few minutes of screen time before getting out of his car again. You know – the one married to the dark haired Irish lass. They’d (mind-bogglingly) had kittens together. (Actual kittens). Remember him? Good. Think you need stats and a brief summary of him? No, me neither. It’s not as if he were the only catkind in the book – we also get general stats for the race, individual stats for the nurses the Doctor meets in the hospital episode and the cat nun from Gridlock. In short, I can’t see why I’d want Thomas Kincaid’s entry. (Though I still want to know how his human wife gave birth to actual, I mean real, I mean four-legged, mewling pretty little kittens).

I don’t wish to be critical due to a difference in expectations. For me, most of these NPC write-ups, hyper-brief though they are, have no value. If a GM wants to take the group to Station 5 and meet “The Editor” in person though, then at least you have stats for them. But the bios are really nothing that you wouldn’t know from the series. Which presents a problem from a game point of view. For example, the Editor from Station 5 (that was the Dalek build-up story in Season 1 with all the game shows). If you’ve seen the episode, then the brief description of his role and character traits is redundant. If you haven’t, then the bio is confusing and isn’t anything you could read and get an idea of who he is from it. And even the stats are redundant really. He’s a human with a bonus to spot irregularities in the news. That’s a bit of a problem throughout this book as DW:AITAS is not a game that focuses on combat or fine details of skill levels. The difference between two human NPCs might be massive in terms of personality and their role in the game, but on the scale of 1-6 attributes, you don’t really need to know that one is distinguished by the other by 1 point of Strength. That’s just not what matters. Which makes a lot of the stuff in this book feel a bit repetitive. For example, we get a big stat block for a Judoon trooper. And then we get a nearly identical stat block for a Judooon Captain with the Ingenuity and Awareness attributes one higher and a few extra story points. But there are people who will enjoy these small variations and it’s not a big issue for me. It’s odd how a few things were omitted however. For example, the Host Angels from Voyage of the Damned I couldn’t find. Yes, you can sort of represent these with the roboforms in the core book but given the small distinctions that warranted entire write-ups for other creatures, it seems odd. And if you’re going to start including NPCs as entries, it’s odd that we don’t get the Master. I suppose he’s being kept back for a different book. Or perhaps Time Lords don’t count as Aliens and Monsters, but then they included NPCs like Matron Cofelia (the Nanny from the adipose episode) who revealed no alien traits whatsoever unless you’re going to include her inhuman ability to keep a straight face whilst watching Donna and the Doctor miming at each other through windows. Basically, the developers for this product stuck tightly to what we saw on our TV screens and never let go. For example, the first entry is Adipose, but all we get are the baby ones. It would have been grand to have an adult but it seems the PCs are only ever supposed to encounter the one-day olds.

Finally, there are things that just seem odd. For example The Beast was included from Impossible Planet. If ever there were a creature I’d forgive them for omitting it would be that one. But as they included it, it seems odd that it has such weak stats. No, a human’s not going to beat it at arm wrestling but a dalek, even a cyberman or a small squad of UNIT soldiers will take it down with relative ease. I suppose it can possess them, but in the episode, that thing was enormous. Looking at what’s presented in the set, I can’t help but think it’s no wonder the thing got itself captured. It does have a lot of story points though, so you can make up a lot of powers for it on the spot if you want.

I really don’t want to belabour this, but as the creature write-ups are the reason people are going to be buying this set, I have to comment on what seems to me like an odd approach to them. Many of the write-ups, most perhaps, talk about the creature by relating what happened in the TV episode. This goes right down to how the particular NPC was killed in the episode. I’m not sure what you’re expected to do with that. If you’ve seen the episode, then it’s an awful lot of space used to tell you what you already know. If you haven’t seen the episode, then I suppose it can be used as adventure ideas, but it’s a little clumsy and not always useful outside of context. But in either case, it seems to suggest that the developers expect you to re-run the Doctor’s TV episodes or disregard them. This conflicts with times when you’re obviously supposed to treat the episodes as having taken place, e.g. with the various NPCs you get in the core set. Maybe I’m missing the point somehow. But I think from a game point of view, this is all a bit misguided. I wasn’t expecting nor wanting trading cards for throw-away characters in the TV episodes. I was more expecting and wanting to be able to flip open the book and pull out some Rutan warriors.

I don’t want to overplay this however. There’s some good creativity in the book that builds on what we’ve seen in the show. There’s a bit of history for the Sontarens, which rationalises the variable levels of technology we’ve seen them use, they’ve added some extra background onto things like the plasmavore from Smith and Jones and the Sycorax, formerly the most backgroundless baddies in the Whoniverse, get a bit of history and work done on them. These elements are very nice and useful for a game.

Now the adventures booklet, as mentioned, is 32 pages long. About half of this is an adventure called The Next World. I obviously wont give away any spoilers for this adventure (although you find out who your enemy is fairly early on). It’s a nice premise. It’s a bit rail-roady and also, whilst DW:AITAS is not a game that emphasises force as a means to solve problems, is asking a bit much in a couple of scenes for the PCs to not just say “I’ve had enough of this” and wrestle their enemy to the ground. One energy weapon is not going to make a group of PCs run for their lives. At the same time, it almost sets the PCs up to use violence to solve the problems at the end. Anyway, that aside, it’s a decent adventure. Now the second adventure in the book, The Rosetta Plague is a rip-roaring yet clever roller-coaster. I’d read the first two paragraphs before I decided that even if the entire rest of the adventure was the Doctor picking his toenails, I’d still like it. Again, no spoilers, but someone put plenty of thought and energy into this one. I’ll just say that the flexible way in which you can change the roles of NPCs in this story, as well as the bizarre and scary (scary in a good way) nemesis, elevates this significantly above other adventures and its everything a Doctor Who adventure should be. The adventure is about ten pages. The remaining six pages of the booklet contain adventure outlines that are really on the whole quite good. One, an Arthurian set adventure, is so breath-taking in its premise that, what I would dismiss as over the top if it were less extreme, I forgive for the sheer madness of it.

So what to say in conclusion? I was somewhat disappointed by this supplement. As a great big collection of monsters, it falls flat due to limiting itself from going beyond the exact parameters of the new TV series (no adult adipose for example) and a surprising (to me) preponderance of throw-away (and sometimes dead) characters from the TV shows. Still, there’s good material in there. The race packages are certainly useful and I can see some GM’s, particularly younger ones, getting a great deal of fun out of the planetary creation rules. I didn’t mind the duplication of traits between the GM and players’ books in the core set, but to repeat much of them a third time in this set starts to feel like a profligate use of limited page counts. Some will say that the set wasn’t supposed to include classic monsters, but ‘supposed’ means nothing to me. They could have trimmed out a lot of the fat in this book and stuffed some of the iconic monsters in quite easily. Sure, people would start arguing about what they didn’t include, but it would have been a much more useful book and they could always do an A&C 2. I also have to criticise them for not doing anything much with the PDF format. Bookmarks are pretty much non-existant which is irritating. The adventures book scores good marks from me however. If you care about the creature cards (pic on front, stats on back), then you might want to wait for the print version. If you’re llike me though, you’ll have waited for this to be released long enough and you’ll buy it anyway.

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