A few weeks back I was browsing the Cubicle 7 website and saw that they had a big sale ongoing for their hardcopy books for their Doctor Who RPG – as in the second edition core rulebook was going for £16, with the PDF bundled in, which is £6.33 less than they’re selling the PDF of the core rulebook (first or second edition) for on DriveThruRPG. In fact, there’s really steep discounts on physical product across the entire line – including the Doctors & Daleks books which adapt the game to the D&D 5E system – which makes me strongly suspect that Cubicle 7 are expecting to lose the licence and are trying to get rid of their old stock.

It would not be enormously shocking if this were the case. The second edition – heavily branded around the Thirteenth Doctor era – came out in 2021 and after that has had a fairly desultory amount of support compared to the extensive releases that were put out for the first edition, which emerged in 2009, went through three distinct printings (for the Tenth, Eleventh. and Twelfth Doctors), and had a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks put out for it, including a multi-volume series covering each of the first twelve Doctors’ eras respectively and guides for running campaigns based around UNIT or the Paternoster Gang. Oh, sure, there’s also been the Doctors & Daleks product line, but taking a big-name licence of theirs and repackaging it for 5E D&D seems to be Cubicle 7’s standard move if the licence in question of theirs allows it and they don’t expect to have enormous amounts of time left on it – see how they put out Adventures In Middle-Earth towards the end of their custodianship of The One Ring, and those books have largely been quick repackaging of second edition materials.

Between this and the lack of any content playing on the 60th Anniversary specials or the Ncuti Gatwa era, it certainly seems like the Doctor Who RPG simply isn’t that much of a priority for Cubicle 7 any more – particularly when they’re also quite busy with a range of Warhammer RPGs (two Old World-based ones, one Age of Sigmar-themed one, and two Warhammer 40,000 ones), and are also gearing up to put out a new edition of their The Laundry RPG based on Charles Stross’ eldritch espionage series.

This seems to be the curious doom of official Doctor Who RPGs – despite in principle being a choice bit of IP to build a game around, the franchise seems to have struggled to find a licensee who’ll actually make a major priority of making a success of an RPG based on the show. FASA basically treated it like the neglected, unwanted step-sibling of its Star Trek RPG, to the point where they basically used a reskinned version of their Star Trek system for it despite it being a poor fit. Virgin Books put out Time Lord at around the same time they kicked off the New Adventures novels, but it’s pretty obvious that that was a little self-indulgent treat Peter Darvill-Evans let himself have rather than something they were going to seriously support. And now the Cubicle 7 line seems to have spent the last few years in a state of managed decline.

But there was that brief little window when Cubicle 7 were going all-put to support it – an era when the line genuinely seemed to be doing well, had plenty of material coming out for it, and was getting critical plaudits, which has all come crashing down. It might be tempting to blame Chris Chibnall for this – goodness knows you can blame him for an awful lot of other stuff, given the absolute and total hash he made of the Thirteenth Doctor era. (And no, I’m not one of those people who think Chibnall botched the era from the start by casting a woman – in fact, I think his strongest season as showrunner was his first, the one when he was most overtly and consciously trying to follow a progressive agenda and showcase diversity, and part of the downfall of his era was the way all of that started to bleed away in favour of nostalgic bilge.) Having the core rulebook of the game be quite so heavily branded around an era which was so heavily rejected by many audience members (those who were still watching, at any rate) can hardly have helped.

However, I think Cubicle 7 made some unforced errors of their own with this edition of the game which can’t be attributed to Chibnall. Both editions of the game credit David F. Chapman as their lead writer, and both at least claim to be powered by the Vortex System, a bespoke game engine also designed by Chapman. However, the changes between the first edition (in its three distinct forms) and the second edition have taken what was a fairly solidly-designed if unexceptional little system and added some seriously wonky aspects to it – and on top of that, it’s flat-out changed the way action resolution rolls are interpreted, a change so fundamental that it’s really stretching the definition to claim that they both operate off the back of the same system. As it happens, I picked up a Humble Bundle package comprising PDFs of a large chunk of the first edition line a while back, so I’m in a position to compare here, and the results aren’t pretty.

Continue reading “Is the Doctor Who RPG Fading Away Into the Vortex?” →