Defending the Earth...

As of today, I'm the proud new owner of the Unit sourcebook "Defending the Earth" for Cubicle 7's Doctor Who RPG.

I have yet to read it completely, but after a first flip through the book left me with a very good impression. There is actually a lot of information about the old series as well as the new one in it. And I am seriously considering running one of the two included adventures at the next convention in Oldenburg (Oldenburger Rollenspiel Tage on the first weekend in february).

The sourcebook offers a whole chapter on UNIT history which, combined with the one on modern UNIT, gives a fairly comprehensive overview over the organisation. The chapter about UNIT personal offers some new and intriguing traits and skill expertises, as well as values for most important characters, starting from the Brigadier right up to Captain Magambo and Malcolm Taylor.



There is a chapter which expands on the fighting rules - which is very useful since the corerules don't offer much in that regard - including extended firearms rules, mass battles, and special circumstances that might come up in fights.

Then, there are a few pages reserved for UNIT cover ups, or at least of possible things to tell people if you can't say that aliens did it. The chapter includes a very very short option of including media interest in the game - which reminded me a lot of a similar chapter in the "Primeval" sourcebook. Primeval gave a lot more thought (and space) to this aspect of "secret organisations", so I may have to go back to read up on it there. This is definitely a plus for having the two games be completely compatible with each other. :-)

The chapter on gamemastering and building UNIT themed campaigns is about 20 pages long - and one of the more interesting parts of the book for me, considering the campaign I'm currently running. So, I'll have to look at that later.

The last part of the book (about 30 pages) is taken up by two adventures: "Prison of the Slavers" and "Mind the Gap", both of which are nominally set in England / London, but could, if necessarily, be moved to any other locale. There's also about 4 pages of adventure seeds included, which are similar in make-up to those in the adventure-booklet of the corerules.

Honestly, I think that this book is a great extension to the corerules. And now, I'm really looking forward to try these new things out at the ORT.