Enemy Aliens

An adventure that takes place in London during the Blitz, because all time-travelers end up in the Blitz sooner or later. This is a more "sandbox" style adventure, with several connected plot threads that the players can follow.

Where: London, England, Earth
When: December 2, 1940. World War II, specifically the Blitz.

Introduction

World War II, and particular the London Blitz, seems to draw time travelers like a magnet. Now it's your turn. You find yourselves on the streets of Whitehall on a cold December night. The all-clear siren has just blown, indicating that the bombing is over for tonight, anyway. You're near the seat of government, and the secret War Rooms. Not far away, civilians huddle together for safety in tube stations. A few stout Londoners still live in the houses that line these streets. Where to go, what to investigate -- that's up to you. There's plenty of danger and intrigue to be found in the middle of a war. Maybe you're not the only travelers from beyond in the area.

Adventure background

This section is intended for the GM only! If you’re a player, there are spoilers here.

This story has a deliberately loose structure; it's intended as a "sandbox" adventure. What the PCs do or don't do will depend on their personalities and interests, and what hints you decide to give them. If you have the sort of players who need a motivation to act beyond curiosity, there are a few hooks here, but you might need to make some adjustments for this story to "click" for them. I've listed some ideas for modification at the end.

As a sandbox, this story doesn't have specific acts where certain events occur. If the PCs need a rest, you might take this one slower. If the players are looking for something paced more like the 10th or 11th Doctor eras of the show, you might want to speed it up. You can move characters and events around as you see fit.

Historical background: London had been bombed almost every night from September through November 1940. The people of London displayed the character they're know for: "Blitz spirit" and "Keep Calm and Carry On." However, months of sustained bombing will strain anybody's resolve. NPCs might be determined and patriotic, or exhausted and terrified, or may alternate, even within a single conversation. Many children and vulnerable citizens have been evacuated to the countryside -- but not all (see "The Empty Child").

Churchill was working with his cabinet in secret War Rooms beneath Whitehall (see "Victory of the Daleks"). The Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization that would eventually merge with MI6, is active around this time. There are Nazi spies and saboteurs making efforts to disrupt Britain's war efforts.

This is only a very brief summary of what was going on in London in late 1940. This may be enough for your players, but if they're history buffs, you may need to do a bit more research. Fortunately, there's plenty of information online.

Running the Adventure

The PCs appear in an alley in central London, not far from Parliament. The area currently know as St. James Market makes a good spot. It's night, and the all-clear siren is blowing. The streets are deserted, so no one will see the PCs arrive. It's cold, but not snowy. There's almost certainly fog. If the PCs have enough context to recognize London, give them enough hints to realize what era they're in, and they'll get the hint to get off the street. What happens next depends on where they go:

If they head north, guide them to Piccadilly Circus Underground station, plot thread 1.
If they go south and pass a notice check, they spot somebody near what looks like a secret entrance. If they successfully follow, they can access the War Rooms and Thread 2.
If they go southeast, guide them through Trafalgar Square, to Charing Cross Underground station and Thread 3.
If they go into one of the homes, looking for shelter, that leads to Thread 4.

If the PCs don't do anything, a watchman can come along and chase them in whatever direction you think is most entertaining.

If you have a large group of PCs, you could have them make checks against gettings lost in the fog. Splitting the party is considered very bad in Dungeons & Dragons, but in Doctor Who stories, it happens all the time. Locating each other and getting back to the TARDIS was a major motivation in plenty of early-era stories.

Thread 1: Aliens in the Underground

If the party enters the Underground, they’ll find a bunch of people taking shelter. Families with children, business people, shopkeepers, folks who don’t know each other. It’s very crowded here. The all-clear has just been sounded, so the PCs won't have trouble getting in. People will be milling around and starting to leave; others won't want to go yet.

There are a few basic human stories with which to hook the PCs:

Archie, lost child. If the PCs ask around, they can pretty easily reunite him with his parents, Frederick and Daphne Turner. They’re at the far end of the station, pretty upset. Other strangers will try to help because Blitz spirit. They’re going to try to evacuate; Daphne has family in Leeds.
Gang of pre-teen pickpockets: Gerald, Terence, Graham, Antony, and Mick. They’ll try to steal from the party if given a chance. They’re not armed, and will try to run if caught. They should have been evacuated to the countryside, but ran away instead. They’ve all got parents who’ve either been killed or are overseas. They can be talked out of a life of crime, depending on what the PCs want to do with them.

Either strand can be used to get the PCs into the Underground, if they haven't gone of their own volition. You can also use them to get the PCs to the far end of the station, where it's less crowded.

Once the PCs are away from most of the crowds, they can spot a humanoid figure loitering near the wall. The form is blurry, hard to focus on (because it's wearing a perception filter). It does something with its hands, steps through the wall, and vanishes.

If the PCs investigate, they'll find that the wall is a hologram with a force-field attached. Anyone who doesn't know what they're looking for will see a regular tiled wall, and it feels like one too. Players will need a Technology or Security check to pass through. If the PCs don't have the skills, or roll poorly enough, eventually hand will reach out of the wall and yank them in.

Beyond the force field is a short hallway leading to what looks like a waiting area of a typical 1940s train station. The PCs are greeted by Rezli, a short man with a big nose and a halo of white hair, who looks to be in his 60s. He's an alien black marketeer, but actually pretty honest. He's trying to help and take care of aliens who are stuck here, and trying not to get exposed. (If he had to pull the PCs through the force field, he scolds them for taking too long staring at a blank wall and drawing attention.)

Rezli is actually a blue-skinned Crespallion, using a perception filter of his own to appear human. He'll turn it off once everyone is inside, trying to conserve the battery. The waiting room is poorly lit, dingy, and mostly full of wooden benches, all of which are filled with travelers. These are all aliens or time travelers. The aliens have been on Earth for their own various reasons, but want to go home now that there's a world war happening. The time travelers either came on cut-rate tours, or didn't do their homework before coming. Either way, it's a lot more dangerous than they thought, and they want out. There's a teleporter in the back of the room that will take people to a hidden spaceport in the Scottish Hebredies, but it can only carry a few people at a time, and it takes a lot of power. In order for the power drain not to be noticed, it has to charge slowly, so it can only be used every few hours, and if there's bombing, they have to wait even more. So it's a room full of alien travelers with moods ranging from exhausted to unhappy to panic, and how they express those emotions depends on their physiology and culture.

Some of the travelers are human-looking species, or using technology to pass:
- Relvans, mother and child: Cassia and Tara (Terra) - Gerathians, group of six businesspeople - Xarfs, angry time-tourists, demanding to speak to the manager

Others are more obviously alien:
- A Vinvocci family (green skin, spikes, but humanoid) with kids - Etrogans (mostly humanoid, scaly with tails, only one gender) - a bonded pair - Wenskoff (short people with four arms) - five or six together

There are also three Batrejii, humanoids, shorter than average, with orange-tinted skin. They could pass for human in dim light. They're wearing all black, which on closer inspection is tactical gear, and they're armed. They've been trying to go unnoticed in the crowd. If they're spotted, or when they think the time is right, they'll make their move.

Beff: Leader and face of the group (female). Very serious about fulfilling their contract. Not easily diverted or bought off. Tries to keep the other two on task if they get sidetracked.
Eelar: The muscle (male). Still not very tall, but built like a wall. Will step in and threaten if the situation calls for it.
Jorm: The sneaky one (male). Shortest of the three, hides in the shadows, hard to notice.

The Batrejii are a trio of bounty hunters, and they're trying to track down someone specific hiding among the travelers. It's the Relvans. Cassia is the daughter of an ambassador, came to Earth on a fact-finding mission, fell in love, and decided to stay. Her human husband (Bill) was killed in the war. Now she wants to keep her daughter safe. Her plan is to catch a ship going to Vega, where she has friends. Going home, especially with a half-human daughter, will be an embarrassment to her father, but less of one than running around the universe missing. The Batrejii are supposed to take Cassia alive. Tara is something they didn’t bargain for, and don't know quite how to handle. They're also willing to blow the travelers' cover if that's what it takes to fulfill their contract.

There are a few routes the PCs could take to resolve this. Here are just some of the non-violent ones:

Convince the Batrejii that Cassia isn't in fact their target.
Convince them to let Cassia go, for Tara's sake.
Buy them off with something they want more than Cassia. Depending on where and when the PCs are from, they might have sufficient money or items that would be worth substantially more than their contract, enough to "disappear" and retire.
Intimidate them into backing down. If the PCs have any sort of galactic authority, that could work, or if any of them are Time Lords, they might play off their reputation.
Rally everyone else in the room to Cassia's defense. The PCs could play on everyone's sympathies and desire for a true love story, or they might convince everyone that the bounty hunters are likely to cause a travel delay.

There are lots of paths to take here, depending on what tone you want to set, and how the PCs choose to approach it. You may want to remind the players that the Doctor would almost always go for a non-violent solution. Let the PCs drive the solution, and adapt accordingly. The Batrejii are determined, but they're also out of their depth (they didn't expect a war) and therefore nervous. It should be challenging to dissuade them, but not impossible. Choose whatever kind of skill check fits the situation best, most likely Convince, but you might also have a technology-based solution.

Thread 2: A Spy on Churchill's Staff

Thread 3: Nazi Sabatours

Thread 4: Missing Londoners

Ideas for modifying the story

Because this is a sandbox story, there's a lot you can do to modify it to fit your players' interests, or the characters' ongoing stories, if any. These are just a few ideas, but feel free to add or extend your own.

If any PCs are from "contemporary" England, they might run into an ancestor in any of the story threads (or want to track them down). Needing to keep their relative safe (and therefore their own timeline) is good motivation for a personal story.
PCs from this era or shortly before may be horrified at the extent of the war, or what's happened to places they know and love. They might want to intervene to change the course of the war. Doctor Who usually treats WWII as something that can't be changed or interfered with, but it's your story. If the PCs do interfere, how will that affect the rest of human history?
Maybe there's a reason why time travelers always seem to be drawn here. Is there a larger story at play? You could tie these events to a longer arc in your campaign, if you have one. Any of the aliens in the underground thread could provide a connection to other stories.
If you're feeling bold, or want to add some star power to your story, the Doctor and companions of your choice could easily turn up in a WWII story. "The Empty Child" and "Victory of the Daleks" specifically take place during the Blitz, but between the novels, audio plays, comics, and other stories, any Doctor is likely to turn up. Check out the TARDIS Wiki page on World War II for more ideas and references than you could possibly use.

Brian's notes

I designed this story to be a sandbox. Many of the other adventures are mysteries, which require the PCs to figure out what's going on first, and then determine a solution. Sometimes they decide on a resolution that's what I expected, sometimes not. But finding out "what's going on" is always something I know and they don't. In this case, I wanted a story with less mystery, just people going about their business during wartime. Obviously, "find the spy" is a mystery, so I didn't fully succeed, but I tried.

I hoped that I could split the party and have two or more plot threads dovetail, but that didn't happen. I even had a PC who had a stated flaw of "bad sense of direction," so I was hoping he'd get lost in the fog. Unfortunately, the other players knew about this flaw, and kept a hand on him through the early part of the adventure. I ended up starting with the War Room plot, tying that to the Nazi spy plot, and after that had finished, I moved them to the alien refugees plot. The missing residents plot never got used, but that was just a red herring anyway, so I didn't mind.

In the War Room thread, the PCs jumped quickly to the conclusion that the spies were being assisted by aliens or were aliens themselves. They assumed that the British hadn't found any bugs because they were too high-tech for 1940s spies to detect. It took me a while, and several character interactions, before I could push them in the direction of considering that one of the staff was a mole. I thought that would be pretty obvious, especially because I gave the generals rather paternalistic attitudes, but it wasn't as obvious as I'd hoped.

In the case of the alien travelers, our group wrapped up the other plot strands close to the beginning of a session, so I made that story more of a coda to fill the rest of the time. I played the Batrejii as not-terribly-competent, and arguing with each other over what to do. One of the PCs comes from a long way in the future, so I decided that as a result of inflation, what would be lunch money for her was a fortune to the Batrejii, and they were bought off pretty easily. I used the encounter with Rezli to give them a little extra gear. The players had been complaining that they didn't have any way of communicating when they were separated, so I put the comm-badges in Rezli's stock, but I also put in stuff they'd find really tempting, particularly the sonic screwdriver. It was a deliberate joke that all the items are broken in some way, or don't do what the players might hope. The comm-badges in particular I wanted to make them work for a bit instead of just handing them over. They players laughed at the jokes, and agonized over what to buy, as I'd hoped, but eventually settled on the comm-badges. Which they then forgot about for the next several stories and never got around to fixing. This is an opportunity for the GM to have some fun and get creative, so add whatever items you want to the inventory.

Time Agent Vanessa Kirby was also there for fun. Captain Jack Harkness is often treated as impossibly good-looking, so I imagine that cosmetic procedures are cheap and easy in the time he comes from. Once I'd decided on a beautiful woman Time Agent, having her look just like Vanessa Kirby (who was slightly less famous when I wrote this) seemed like a good joke, and a character the players could easily picture. When I ran the story, Vanessa simply turned up at random intervals to try to get the PCs to move along, or roll her eyes at their bumbling. I plan on using her again in the future, since she can turn up wherever.