Support The Wertzone on Patreon

STICKIED POST

After much debate (and some requests) I have signed up with crowdfunding service Patreon to better support future blogging efforts. You can find my Patreon page here and more information after the jump.

Blogging Roundup: 1 June to 1 September 2025

News

• Updated sales figures for Brandon Sanderson and Sarah J. Maas revealed
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV announced
• First trailer for Fallout Season 2 revealed
• Original planned author of the Dragonlance Chronicles not announced for the very first time (debunked)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer sequel legacy show announces main cast
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 confirmed to be in production
• Mel Brooks to return with Spaceballs 2
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to end with shorter fifth season
• Trailer for Alien: Earth released
• Owlcat developing Expanse video game inspired by Mass Effect
• Mass Effect TV series gains showrunner, moving forwards
• Joe Abercrombie's The Devils optioned by James Cameron

Reviews

• Doctor Who: Season 15
• Doctor Who: Season 14
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• Foundation: Season 2
• Doctor Who: Season 13
• Doctor Who: Season 12
• Doctor Who: Season 11
• Doctor Who: Season 10
• This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline
• Doctor Who: Season 9
• Doctor Who: Season 8
• Doctor Who: Season 7
• Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay
• Doctor Who: Series 15 (Season 41)
• The Alters
• Doctor Who: Series 14 (Season 40)
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Doctor Who: Series 13 (Season 39) - Flux

Articles

• Where to Start: Traveller Buyer's Guide
• Franchise Familiariser: Traveller
• RIP Jim Shooter
• Where to Start with Classic Doctor Who?

 

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Updated sales figures for Brandon Sanderson and Sarah J. Maas

Updated sales figures for fantasy megastars Brandon Sanderson and Sarah J. Maas show that the formidable market power of Romantasy is not stopping soon.

Back in January 2024, I assembled the latest incarnation of my "SFF All-Time Sales List," which had sales figures of 37 million for Sarah J. Maas (in 32nd place on the list) and 40 million for Brandon Sanderson (in 29th place). These were very healthy figures.

The updated figures for Sanderson (via the Edelweiss catalogue) now have him at 45 million, which would move him up to around 24th place. Very healthy and impressive. Unsurprising as in the meantime he's released his long-awaited fifth Stormlight Archive novel, Wind and Truth, and is now working on a return to his perennially popular Mistborn sequence..

But the updated figures for Maas, straight from her publisher, are eye-popping. The updated figures put her at 75 million (!), which would rocket her up to around 17th on the list and instantly make her one of the biggest-selling, living fantasy writers.

To be clear, I don't think Maas has sold another 40 million books in just eighteen months. Instead, her publisher has noted that she is now published in forty languages, and it's likely they'd been severely underestimating her prior sales. Updated sales information from foreign sales is the most likely source for this large-seeming jump.

It is worth noting that Maas published her first novel only in 2014, nine years after Sanderson published his first book. This shows the full, unmitigated firepower of the Romantasy subgenre and its enthusiastic fanbase eclipses even that of fans of hard magic systems and intricate worldbuilding.

With sales growth like this, Maas is now looking likely to catch up to the likes of George R.R. Martin (at around 95 million) and the late Sir Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan (at just over 100 million apiece), and this is without any adaptation of her works. When one finally appears, I can imagine that only increasing her sales presence and profile further.

Where to Start: Traveller Buyer's Guide

So, you’ve familiarised yourself (franchisely!) with Traveller. You know your Vargr from your Hivers. You want to delve more deeply into the game. How do you do this? Where do you start? How deep down the rabbit hole do you go? How much money are you willing to part with, from “none at all” to “lots, please?” Here is a potted buyer’s guide to ease you gently into all things Traveller.

As Mongoose Publishing are the new IP-owners for Traveller (though they’ve been producing material in the setting for almost twenty years at this point), it makes sense to focus on their current, 2nd Edition (Updated) of the roleplaying game, as it is the only version currently being developed and expanded on a large scale. However, you can pick up a lot of the earlier editions of the game, especially as PDFs, from Marc Miller’s website and online sellers like DriveThru RPG.

Get Free Stuff! For Free!

Everyone likes free stuff, and Mongoose has you covered here. Last year they released the Traveller Starter Pack via their website which is completely free, and packs in a surprisingly large amount of content.

Traveller Starter Pack

The Starter Pack contains an introductory, streamlined version of the rules, including character creation and combat, and two complete adventures.

The main focus here is the Traveller Explorer’s Edition, which is a 60-page book containing the rules for creating characters, resolving skills and tasks, running combat and encounters, buying basic equipment, crewing spacecraft and even basic world and universe creation. As a concession to this being a free starter set, there’s only two Careers included: Scholar and Scout. However, Traveller’s infamously flexible skill system does allow for characters even of the same Career to be very different to one another.

The two adventures are quite generous. Death Station is a 26-page modern rewrite of a Classic Traveller adventure from back in the day, involving the exploration of a wrecked spacecraft. The rewrite is by Seth Skorkowsky, whose YouTube channel is a rich source of Traveller rules explanations and adventure reviews. Stranded is a 32-page adventure seeing the heroes undertaking a difficult cross-planet journey without their usual resources. Both adventures are well-regarded, and the Starter Pack is worth picking up to just get these adventures even for veteran Traveller players.

This free Starter Pack gives an adventuring group all they need to run a campaign lasting half a dozen sessions or so, or potentially more.

To moderately expand your options, you can add in the PDF of the Traveller Merchant’s Edition for a very reasonable 75p (or $1). This alternate, introductory version of the rules focuses on merchant adventures on a cargo spacecraft. A cut-down version of the trading rules is presented, as well as the Merchant career option. In combination with the Starter Pack, this gives you a moderate version of the Traveller experience for almost no monies. A trip to the Traveller website will also avail free character sheets, spacecraft record sheets, sector and subsector maps, and more.

The ultimate free Traveller resources are also online: Traveller Wiki and the Traveller Map website.

Core Books

The free stuff has given you a taste, but now you want the full, real deal. Where do you go from here?

Your first port of call should be The Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022. Despite the slightly unwieldy name, this is the 100% full, complete core rulebook for Traveller 2^nd Edition Updated. At 264 pages it’s nicely chunky without being as shelf-destroying as many core rulebooks for other TTRPGs.

The book features no less than 12 Careers (well, 13 with “Prisoner”) and has the full rules for character creation, using skills, resolving tasks, operating vehicles and spacecraft, even building and designing your own spacecraft, as well as rules for using psionics and on living the rich life of a merchant. This is the full rules experience, but has little setting information: the idea is you purchase other books for setting information or create your own (or consult the Traveller Wiki, of course).

With the Core Rulebook and the aforementioned Starter Pack adventures, you already have enough materials to get off to a flying start. But there are several other core books that are worth considering, though still absolutely optional.

Players absolutely love stuff, namely weapons and equipment. What else are they going to spend their mission rewards on? This makes the Central Supply Catalogue Update 2023 an easy early purchase, featuring as it does a vast array (185 pages’ worth!) of new guns, gear and gadgets to enhance and expand any Traveller adventure.

Players also love more options, more ways of playing the game, more stats, skills and character generation ideas. This makes the Traveller Companion Update 2024 an easy recommendation. This book features ideas on how to convert the rules to handle genres such as horror or comedy (the book opens with a Douglas Adams quote), with different (and faster) character generation methods for those who want to get into the action more quickly. There are also rules for much more in-depth combat, including zero-gee vector battles, and more detailed rules for terrain, allies and recurring enemies.

The next step is spacecraft. Traveller is all about blasting into the big black on a trusty stellar cruiser, so having a variety of ships to choose from is fun. High Guard Update 2022 features tons more information on spacecraft operations, combat, ship weapons, designing new ships, crew roles, fleet actions and boarding actions. The book is rounded off by a massive 150 pages featuring numerous spacecraft from the Third Imperium setting, from tiny fighters to massive capital ships.

Other books in the core range are more specialised and you should only consider them if planning a campaign heavily revolving around those concepts. The Robot Handbook is excellent for anyone planning an adventure revolving around robots and cybernetics, but of limited utility to anyone else. The Vehicle Update 2025, due out later this year, expands the repertoire of ground and air vehicles for the setting beyond the basic types in the core book. The World Builder’s Handbook is great for any Referee (the Traveller version of a Dungeon or Gamemaster) more interested in creating their own worlds, whilst Bounty Hunter is useful for adventuring parties filled up with wannabe Boba Fetts.

 

Setting Material

Like Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller was designed as a generic roleplaying system allowing the players and Referees to create their own worlds, star systems and sectors, in their own setting. However, after a while the team found themselves adding names, locations and factions in a consistent manner. The result was Traveller’s official campaign setting: Charted Space, also known as the Third Imperium (earlier editions explored different time periods in the setting, but the current edition has returned to the original time period). Unlike D&D, which eventually developed over two dozen campaign settings joined together by a common multiverse, Traveller developed only a few settings, with the others becoming their own games: 2300AD and various ports of other science fiction universes to the Traveller rules, such as iconic 1990s space opera TV series Babylon 5. 

Getting to grips with the Third Imperium is straightforward. The sourcebook The Third Imperium gives an overview of the entire empire, with a strong focus on the planet Capital, the Sylean core worlds and the surrounding Core Sector. Whilst it’s a good book, the civilised Core Sector is more a setting for adventures revolving around diplomatic overtures, political intrigue and corporate espionage, rather than frontier adventuring. A new Traveller crew might wish to start with the rough-and-ready frontier.

Behind the Claw details the Spinward Marches and Deneb sectors, the original setting for the Classic Traveller adventures and material in the 1970s and 1980s. The Spinward Marches are Traveller’s answer to, say, the Sword Coast or Free City of Greyhawk, a highly-detailed border region between the Third Imperium and Zhodani Consulate where adventure is both frequent and dangerous. Many great Traveller adventures take place in this area, and the sector capital of Regina is the starting home of many a seasoned Traveller crew. The current meta-event campaign The Fifth Frontier War takes place partly in these sectors.

Meanwhile, Solomani Front details Terra (Earth), Sol and the entire Solomani Rim and Alpha Crucis sectors, where the Third Imperium borders the Solomani Confederation, as well as the Vega Autonomous District. This is for adventurers looking for more of a Cold War setting between rival powers, plus those who really wish to visit 57^th Century Basingstoke.

Ah, but what about aliens (even the human kind)? The Aliens of Charted Space has you covered. Volume 1 exposits on the Vargr, Aslan, Zhodani and K’kree. Volume 2 covers the Solomani, Droyne and Hivers.  Volume 3 features the Darrians, Geonee, Dolphins, Orca and Bwaps. Volume 4 explores the Suerrat, Za’tachk, Gurvin and Tezcat. Of the four books, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the iconic seven Traveller species, with 3 and 4 going into more obscure and lesser-known species. All four volumes also have information on equipment and ships developed by those species.

Clans of the Aslan is also worth a look for a deeper dive on the lion-like Aslan, a powerful alien species with mixed relations with the Third Imperium and Humaniti. The book explorers the Aslan social structure and hierarchy, the internal politics of a clan and how Aslan characters might come to be working alongside humans. This is very useful for those players who want to depict Aslan as an alien civilisation with their own motivations and history, rather than just furry humans.

Probably the last thing to look at here, though maybe not for brand-new crews, is the recently-updated Great Rift boxed set, which explores the gigantic Great Rift, a large region of lightly-settled space almost dividing the Spinward Marches from the rest of the Imperium, and dividing the Aslan from much of the Third Imperium. The set explores five entire sectors (Corridor, Reft, Riftspan, Afawahisa and Touchstone) with a large array of maps and details on worlds, alongside ideas for adventures. This is quite a lot of material and probably isn’t for the newcomer, but does provide a huge sandbox for adventures created by Referees.

 

Adventures

Of course, pre-made adventures are something a time-poor Referee may find themselves grateful for. A lot of the work is done for you, and some of these adventures are based on classic material published almost fifty years ago, with a corresponding amount of time of refinement, rewrites and Referee suggestions on how to improve them.

 

The best-place to start here is, again, the Traveller Starter Kit, which includes the Death Station and Stranded adventures for free. Even if your bookshelf is groaning under the weight of bought Traveller material, these two adventures are pretty solid and either could make a reasonable jumping-off point for any campaign.

Mongoose has many adventures for the game, and has started publishing omnibuses including five adventures at a time. These are a great way of getting a bunch of adventure content more cheaply, sometimes with exclusive new adventures added.

The Marches Adventures 1-5 is set in the Spinward Marches and includes two of the all-timer classic Traveller adventures, High & Dry (in which the party is given a starship, but has to first recover it from the crater of an active volcano) and Mission to Mithril (in which the party’s ship is immobilised, forcing them into a hazardous overland journey), along with three other solid adventures.

The Great Rift Adventures 1-5 is set in the Great Rift region and makes a great companion to the Great Rift boxed set, but can be enjoyed by itself. This includes three classic adventures, namely Islands in the Rift, Deepnight Endeavour and Flatlined, along with two other good adventures.

Not available in omnibus yet are the Reach Adventures line. This includes several notable adventures, most famously Marooned on Marduk, another well-regarded starter adventure for a new Traveller campaign.

Similarly well-regarded is Mysteries on Arcturus Station, which combines an updated version of the Classic Traveller adventure Murder on Arcturus Station with a new set-up adventure, The Hunt for Sabre IV.

Of course, these are all adventures designed for short or medium-length play, maybe between 1 and 5 sessions max. Traveller is renowned for its mega-adventures, huge campaigns that will last months or years. Again, I wouldn’t necessarily start with these (unless you are a very experienced GM from other games) but they are very impressive.

The most famous of these – and fortunately the most concisely-presented and cheapest – is Secrets of the Ancients. One of the iconic Traveller adventures, variations of this campaign have appeared for multiple versions of the game, and even inspired the 1992 video game MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients. This adventure blows open the backstory of the Ancients and explores what happened to them, over a 10-part campaign which moves from being a heist scenario to a combat adventure and even the most elaborate exposition/flashback adventure I’ve ever seen for an RPG. Seth Skorkowsky has a mind-boggling full campaign review exploring what happens in each part of the campaign (spoilers!).

Even bigger in scale, ambition and shiny stuff is The Pirates of Drinax. This is the ultimate sandbox campaign, in which the players arrive in the Trojan Reach Sector and join forces with the King of Drinax, who wants to re-establish the pocket space empire of his forebears, buffered between the Aslan and the Third Imperium. How the players accomplish this is completely up to them, from faking pirate attacks on nearby unaligned worlds (making them amenable to accepting Drinax’s protection) to fancy diplomatic footwork to blackmail to large-scale military campaigns. The boxed set includes a huge map of the Trojan Reach, several tentpole adventures (to take place at different points in the campaign), information on a new, advanced ship for the team to use, and tons of setting information and suggestions for how to guide the players, including what happens if they lose interest in working for Drinax and betray the king, or even trigger a large-scale war with the Aslan. There are also ideas on how to incorporate the Reach Adventures line into this campaign. The boxed set even has its own optional helper book, The Drinaxian Companion, which adds more ideas, adventure seeds and oversight help, and another adventure called Shadows of Sindal which ties into the backstory for Pirates and can be used to either enhance a Pirates campaign or be used as a standalone adventure. Some players play Pirates as a focused linear adventure lasting 10-15 sessions, and others as an absolutely massive campaign lasting five or more years. It may represent the ultimate Traveller experience.

For those who prefer a more Star Trek-ish experience, the Deepnight Revelation boxed set has your crew joining a long-range exploration mission into very deep space. And recently succeeding on Kickstarter is the Singularity campaign, which explores posthuman and transhuman ideas in the Traveller setting.

There is of course a lot more Traveller stuff than this. More specialised books about naval personnel and mercenary companies, books on designing entire sectors, and tons more adventures. But this is more than enough to be getting on with. Something useful to take a look at is the Journal of Uncharted Space series, which is effectively a series of magazines/compendiums of articles, background material new rules, mini-adventures and worldbuilding covering a vast array of subjects. There are now 18 editions of this tome, each adding more than 120 pages of material to the Traveller universe.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs.

Franchise Familiariser: Traveller

If you’re looking into tabletop roleplaying games and want to move beyond the obvious recommendation of Dungeons & Dragons, and maybe laser cannons are more your jam than wizards casting fireball, there is at least one other very long-running candidate out there to consider: Traveller. The roleplaying game of space adventure in the distant future. But where are you travelling to? We’re here to fill you in on the franchise.

The Basics

Traveller is a science fiction, space opera franchise co-created by Marc Miller. The primary medium of the franchise is the tabletop roleplaying game, which was first published in 1977 by Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) out of Illinois, of which Miller was the co-founder and owner along with fellow designers Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner and Loren Wiseman. Traveller was primarily developed by Miller, Chadwick, Wiseman and John Harshman.

Traveller was a smash hit on release in July 1977, perhaps helped by the release of a certain movie just seven weeks earlier that saw an explosion in demand for anything with spaceships, lasers and robots. Traveller also tapped into the nascent roleplaying market, where D&D was by far the most dominant game but was already being criticised for somewhat clunky rules. Traveller was revolutionary in its approach which eschewed multiple dice types for just using six-sided dies (d6s) and not using levels for character development, instead creating a robust skill system. Traveller also pioneered what would later be called the “Lifepath” system, where players generate their characters’ backstories, skills, aptitudes and relationships before the campaign itself begins. This was usually done in a pre-campaign special session, what we would now call “Session 0.” Though prep sessions for D&D were not unknown, Traveller arguably codified them as an integral part of the campaign. Famously (though somewhat exaggerated), the career system in Traveller could theoretically kill characters during character creation, leading to the game being dubbed the most hardcore and deadly roleplaying game around, though subsequent editions rolled back on this approach.

Traveller quickly became a mainstay of the TTRPG industry and one of its best-known games and constant sellers, and possibly the first TTRPG after D&D to crack a million sales. Its initial rules were extremely well-received, with a simple core concept which allowed for a huge amount of complexity in the form of rolling 2 six-sided dice, adding positive modifiers from skills, and trying to beat a target number depending on difficulty. This simple core had a very large number of modules built onto it through expansions, allowing for starship and robot construction, military operations and exploration (a nod at creating scenarios similar to Star Wars and Star Trek), planet and sector creation and so on. This system inspired the rules of various other games, including the official Star Wars roleplaying game from West End Games that came out in 1987, which was similarly d6-based.

The original version of the game is known as Classic Traveller and is identifiable from its minimalist plain black books with striking red text in the Optima font. The first three books were released in a boxed set to form the core rules system. The main books have no other artwork on the covers, and it was only later in the early 1980s that adventures started adding artwork to their covers. Classic Traveller ran for ten years, with a large number of sourcebooks and adventures published. GDW also encouraged third-party contributions, with numerous other companies and fans (individually or in groups) writing adventures and sourcebooks, some accepted as official canon. Famed TTRPG company FASA started life publishing Traveller adventures, for example, before they developed their own BattleTech aka MechWarrior universe, partially inspired by Traveller (especially the starmaps). Games Workshop also reprinted Traveller rulebooks for the UK market and created a range of miniatures for it, some of which were later repurposed for their Warhammer 40,000 game.

Sales of Traveller began to fall off in the late 1980s and the game was replaced by a new edition called MegaTraveller (1987), in which the Emperor of the Third Imperium is assassinated, triggering a rebellion and civil war. This era saw the publication of the first (and, to date, only) Traveller video roleplaying games, MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991), for the PC, Amiga and Atari ST.

MegaTraveller was supplanted by Traveller: The New Era in 1993, which adopted a full-on post-apocalyptic setting with a powerful computer virus ravaging human technology. It was controversial amongst fans and the fanbase fractured after its release, with many small groups developing third-party material ending their development of the franchise.

Game Designers’ Workshop collapsed during The New Era and the rights reverted to Marc Miller. Marc Miller developed Marc Miller’s Traveller, better known as Traveller 4^th Edition or T4, for release in 1996. The game’s setting is “Milieu 0,” set during the founding of the Third Imperium and avoiding awkward questions about canon.

Steve Jackson Games licensed the setting to release GURPS Traveller in 1998, using their GURPS (General Universal Role-Playing System) rules, which is set in a parallel timeline where the fall of the Third Imperium never happened. This was followed by Traveller 20 or T20 in 2002, an adaptation of the setting and rules to the Dungeons & Dragons, 3^rd Edition (or D20) rules system. In 2006 GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars was released, which chronicled the first contact between the Terran Confederation and the First Imperium. Comstar Games also released Traveller Hero, using their own Hero rules system, in 2006.

Marc Miller developed his own newer version of the game, called Traveller 5, for release in 2013, with a revised edition in 2019. This version of the game is incredibly deep, complex and simulationist, with less of a focus on the established setting in favour of allowing the Referee to create their own setting. The rules are broadly compatible with Traveller, T4 and Mongoose Traveller and can be used to enhance a campaign using those rules.

The current mainline development of Traveller was taken over by Britain’s Mongoose Publishing in 2008. Mongoose Traveller (an informal name, the official name is just Traveller) became the most successful line since the original edition. In 2016 Mongoose Traveller 2^nd Edition was released with hugely updated production values. In 2022 this was superseded by Mongoose Traveller 2^nd Edition Update, a minor revision of 2^nd Edition with new rulebooks. This has become one of the most prolific and best-selling modern tabletop roleplaying games, with many dozens of supplements, adventures and rulebooks released.

In 2025 Marc Miller sold all remaining IP rights to the Traveller game to Mongoose, confirming their status as the official producers of all Traveller materials. Mongoose continue to develop Traveller, including the Fifth Frontier War sub-line.

For a more detailed look at the publication history of Traveller, please check out This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline.

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP:

Doctor Who: Season 15

The Doctor and Leela continue to explore time and space, but, after a series of unsatisfying adventures, the Doctor decides to return to Gallifrey on a clandestine mission of his own.

Seasons 12 through 14 arguably represent the "imperial period" of Classic Doctor Who's popularity, where it delivered certified banger after banger and many of the show's most revered stories were created. The stories were written by some of its best writers and featured the magisterial Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, along with the ultra-popular Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, the franchise's most enduring companion. Producer-showrunner Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes presided over this period of high-quality output, but the BBC was also inundated with complaints about the show becoming too scary for kids and too adult-leaning. Hinchcliffe decided to leave at the end of Season 14 and new showrunner Graham Williams had a mandate to bring back the show's warmth and humour, and maybe reduce the number of stories about, say, cracking the Doctor's skull open to replace his brain with that of a genocidal madman.

Things kick off with Horror of Fang Rock, which feels like it's just a continuation of the preceding era. The Edwardian setting, the focus of the lighthouse crew being stalked by a shapeshifting monster, and the general "classic horror movie" feel all feel like Hinchliffe is still around. The script by veteran writer Terrance Dicks, with Holmes still on board as editor, is responsible for keeping things on track. Managing to get four episodes out of a small lighthouse setting is impressive, and ably achieved by introducing new elements, new characters (via a shipwreck) and new capabilities for the invading alien force as the story proceeds. Louise Jameson also feels like she's settling in better as companion Leela, even if the writers still seem to occasionally struggle with a companion who's first response to danger is to confront it rather than run away and hide. Overall, a winner.

The Invisible Enemy follows that up by being one of the most unhinged stories in Doctor Who's canon. The opening, where the Doctor is possessed by an alien force and engages in a terrifying game of cat and mouse with Leela, is memorably creepy. The Fantastic Voyage stuff with clones of the Doctor and Leela going into the Doctor's body to eliminate the alien force is also good fun. It's the stuff between, with the alien shambolically taking over the medical space station, that is total guff, and the ending with the giant alien germ being guided around by his minions, may be among the funniest, least-threatening scenes in Doctor Who's history. In the middle we have the introduction of robot dog K9, who makes an immediate impression by shooting a guy in the groin (he was bad, so it was okay, I guess) and being sarcastic and unimpressed by the Doctor. Overall, a story that's probably worth watching only to see how absolutely bonkers it can be.

Image of the Fendahl is another location-limited story, with the Doctor and Leela confronting an alien skull that takes a bunch of scientists over in a priory. Having just had two stories where aliens can appear as other people and taken over people, this feels a bit redundant. The execution is fine, Wanda Ventham is a solid guest actor, but the plot is overly drawn out. The whole story is set in a single house and its grounds and writer Chris Boucher struggles to make the limited setting work as well as Horror of Fang Rock did (he immediately leaves the show after this, moving over to be script editor on Blake's 7, where he thrives). There's some creepy direction, but the final episode does descend into lots of running about and the Doctor spouting nonsense until he fully-expectedly wins. It's okay, but it's a bit Doctor Who-by-the-numbers.

The Sun Makers, on the other hand, is gloriously bananas. The script was basically written by Robert Holmes in an absolute fury over his tax bill, and unrestrained Holmes in full anger is a marvel. The Doctor and Leela arrive on Pluto, where the human race has been forcibly resettled to work off a debt to an alien race. People are taxed to live, eat and even die. The Doctor gets roped in when he stops a worker from committing suicide over having to pay his father's death tax (!) and is soon so enraged by the tax-collecting corporation that he happily agrees to set up a full-blown revolution.

Holmes's script isn't quite The Ark in Space or Talons of Weng-Chiang, but it is constantly witty, bristling with an undercurrent of vitriol. The cast is all on good form (even if the Doctor's motivations here are a bit lacking), especially Richard Leech as Gatherer Hade who delivers his insane platitudes to his superiors with aplomb. In fact, if you want a dictionary definition of "aplomb," Leech's performance is it. He is almost upstaged by Henry Woolf as his superior, the Collector, who comes across as Davros-from-Wish but plays it to the hilt, with his utter obsession with profit forecasts and achieving maximum business synergies (or whatever) even at the cost of thousands of lives, being genuinely repulsive. Everyone else struggles to compete, though there is a good turn by Michael Keating, soon to be immortalised as Vila in Blake's 7. Not Holmes's finest or subtlest hour, but this is a very entertaining story.

Underworld has an interesting idea, with the Doctor bumping into a bunch of Minyans, a race whom the Time Lords previously "uplifted" to greatness but inadvertently gave the tools to destroy themselves, leading to the Time Lord policy of noninterference in the affairs of other species. The Minyans therefore see the Doctor as a cursed god, a great idea that is abandoned after about one scene. The Minyans then arrive on a planet that has formed around a spacecraft they are chasing which holds the key to saving their species. There's a lot of running around in tunnels, rebels rebelling under the Doctor's tutelage (for all the Doctor's hatred of violence, he has no problem with other people doing it on his behalf) and a mad computer to cap it all off. There's a lot of interesting ideas here that aren't allowed to flower fully. The story also suffered severe budget limitations to the point where they couldn't afford proper sets, so instead built models and green-screened people into them. There are some scenes where this works really well, and some where it's a bit of a disaster.

Things are capped off by The Invasion of Time, where the Doctor arrives on Gallifrey and promptly goes bonkers, seizing control of the High Council and allowing aliens to invade for no apparent reason. Obviously there's a whole reason for it, but it's not a particularly good one. Then, unexpected Sontarans! The story is an overlong mess, but it's also oddly watchable. We don't go to Gallifrey all that often so it's interesting to see more of the Doctor's homeworld, even if it's all a bit underwhelming (the Time Lords get outfoxed by some very dumb aliens, and there's some Standard Primitives living like two miles from the city who are a problem but then not, as the plot demands). Season 15 was under huge budget problems due to the rampant inflation of the late 1970s (hence the Underworld issues), which leads to the bizarre sight of the deep interior of the TARDIS looking like a British hospital. We also have Leela leaving for no apparent reason, and the huge open-but-missed goal of not recruiting Hilary Ryan's splendid Time Lady engineer Rodan (after an initial bout of wet-blanketitis) as the replacement companion.

Season 15 (***½) is well-intentioned, with some good ideas, but is ultimately a bit of a letdown after the preceding three seasons. Horror of Fang Rock and The Sun Makers are highlights, but The Invisible Enemy is enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. Every other story can be summed up as "promising but underwhelming."

The season is available on DVD and limited edition Blu-Ray. The regular edition Blu-Ray should be out later this year. The season is also available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on various overseas streaming services.

• 15.1 - 15.4: Horror of Fang Rock (****½)
• 15.5 - 15.8: The Invisible Enemy (***)
• 15.9 - 15.12: Image of the Fendahl (***)
• 15.13 - 15.16: The Sun Makers (****)
• 15.17 - 15.18: Underworld (***)
• 15.19 - 15.24: The Invasion of Time (**½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

WARHAMMER: DAWN OF WAR IV announced

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV has been officially announced. The latest instalment in the venerable real-time strategy series will be released in 2026 on PC. It will also be the first game in the series not to be developed by Relic Entertainment, with instead King Art Games taking on development duties for publisher Deep Silver.

Despite the new team, the game will be steeped in the lore of the earlier titles. Once again you take control of the Blood Ravens chapter of Space Marines and their Adeptus Mechanicus allies as they battle Orks and Necrons on the planet Kronus. Cyrus, a major character from Dawn of War II and its expansions, also returns as the commander of the Blood Ravens forces in this game. The game promises a return to the larger-scaled combat of the original title and its expansions, and promises an eyebrow-raising 70+ campaign missions spread across the four factions, whilst there will also be several multiplayer options.

Dawn of War was released in 2004 and was a smash hit success, praised for its detailed (and gory) combat animations, its cover system and replacing resource gathering with holding strategic points on the battlefield, forcing players to play aggressively rather than turtle in their base. The original game allowed players to play as the Blood Ravens, Eldar, Chaos and Orks (though only the Blood Ravens in the story-driven campaign mode). The game was expanded through three well-received expansions, Winter Assault (2005), Dark Crusade (2006) and Soulstorm (2008), which added strategic maps where players could plan their next assaults, as well as adding the Imperial Guard, Tau, Necrons, Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar factions.

Dawn of War was regarded as a major reason for the increase in popularity of the Warhammer 40,000 franchise in the United States, as well as renewed interest in the franchise in the UK and a boost for sales of the wargame and associated novels. Relic also used the same game engine to power their critically-acclaimed World War II series Company of Heroes, with its first entry released in 2006.

Dawn of War II was released in 2009 and was also successful, but the decision to move away from traditional real-time strategy stalwarts like base-building in favour of guiding a smaller group of tougher units around the map, with a stronger focus on cooldown abilities, was controversial. The initial release allowed players to play as the Space Marines, Orks, Eldar and Tyranids. The expansions Chaos Rising (2010) and Retribution (2011) added the Chaos Space Marines and Imperial Guard factions. 

Dawn of War III was released in 2017 and was highly controversial, with an attempt to appeal to both the fans of the previous games meaning it fell between the two stools and was not regarded as a good RTS or a good hero-focused action game, although the expansion of the game's scale to accommodate Titan-class units was appreciated.

The series has recently returned to prominence with the release just last week of Dawn of War: Definitive Edition, which repackages the original game and its three expansions into one title, with (modestly) upgraded graphics and resolution, and compatibility with modern systems and enhanced options for modding.

First trailer for FALLOUT: Season 2 released

Amazon have released the first trailer for the second season of their Fallout TV series.

The trailer confirms the second season will be set in and around the city of New Vegas, Nevada, the same setting as the iconic 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas. The TV show will revisit some of the same locations and factions, including the Strip and the Lucky 38 casino, the robot Victor, the Novac dinosaur, the antagonistic Caesar's Legion and the enigmatic Mr. House, now played by The Leftovers' Justin Theroux. The show also hints at a civil war within the Brotherhood of Steel, the first show appearance for the Deathclaw (Fallout's most iconic monster), and even suggests that VATS - the PipBoy-generated targeting system which seems to slow down time to allow for better combat reactions - might be an in-universe thing (or it might just be really cool slowmo).

Fallout's second season debuts on Amazon Prime Video on 17 December this year. After the massive success of the first season, the show has already been renewed for a third season, presumably to follow in 2027.

Doctor Who: Season 14

The Doctor continues to travel in time and space, but an emergency summons from his homeworld of Gallifrey results in him having to travel home alone to confront an old nemesis.

Season 14 of Doctor Who aired from 1976 to 1977 and is the last of three seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. Under the stewardship of Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, and impeccably led by Tom Baker, the series had acquired impressive critical results, with some of the highest-rated stores in the entire Who canon being made under their leadership, as well as excellent ratings. But the show had also attracted heavy criticism for leaving the kids behind and becoming too dark and adult. The show was relentlessly targeted by groups determined that the show should become safe, sanitised and predictable, something Hinchliffe and Holmes were not interested in.

The BBC was more minded to listen to the criticisms, though, and had to concede that Season 13's focus on horror had perhaps gone tad over the top for a show aimed at a family audience. Hinchliffe decided to leave at the end of Season 14, with Holmes likewise deciding to depart but he was asked to stay on into Season 15 to ease the transition. However, before they left, they clearly decided to give the complainers something to really complain about.

The season starts off relatively placidly, with The Masque of Mandragora, possibly one of the most forgotten-about stories in Doctor Who history. It's certainly not bad, but compared to the heavy hitters later in the season it's definitely flown under the radar. The story sees the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith inadvertently let the TARDIS be boarded by a hostile alien presence, the Mandragora Helix, which they unwittingly unleash in 15th Century San Marino. A guilty Doctor works to recapture the Helix whilst navigating political intrigue between Count Federico and his nephew Giuliano, whom he is trying to stop becoming the local Duke.

This is a reasonably good story, with some nice period detail. The serial was shot on location in Portmeirion, Wales (where The Prisoner was famously shot) where there were some buildings that at least looked the right ballpark for the time and region, which added a higher sense of production value, as did the superb costumes. The story itself is quite nicely executed, but the political scheming (despite riffing on Hamlet a lot) feels more interesting than the actual alien threat. I sometimes wonder if the story would have been better as a pure historical without the aliens. A good story without being too flashy. As a point of trivia, this is also the very first time - fourteen years into the show! - that someone asks how they can understand all the people they meet when they must be speaking wildly different languages.

The Hand of Fear starts off extremely dramatically: the Doctor and Sarah arrive in a quarry (an actual quarry for once, not one posing as a planet) and almost immediately get blown up in a construction accident. Sarah is possessed by a malevolent alien entity trying to regenerate its form from a single severed hand that landed on Earth millennia ago and storms into a nuclear power station to use its radiation to that end. This is a strong start that carries the story through most of its opening three episodes, with the sight of Sarah, wielding alien firepower, single-handedly storming a nuclear power plant being quite memorable ("ELDRAD MUST LIVE!"). The guest cast is compelling, and the prosthetics work for Judith Paris as the alien Eldrad is exceptional for the time.

Things drop off a cliff in the fourth episode, unfortunately, with the events on the alien homeworld being decidedly less interesting and Judith Paris' more skilled performance being replaced by Stephen Thorne's more bombastic and blustering one (revisiting his role as Omega in The Three Doctors). The resolution to the threat is also a bit ludicrous. This can be forgiven a little as they had to rush the end to the story to accommodate Elisabeth Sladen's decision to leave the show. Holmes outlined a loose ending which Tom Baker and Sladen disliked, so they rewrote it themselves to be more emotionally affecting. The normally magnificently aloof Baker gives one of his most emotional performances as he tries to get Sarah home and apparently succeeds (though, as we found out thirty years later, he was actually off by a few hundred miles), whilst Sarah's visible mixed feelings on going home versus continuing to adventure in time and space are well-sold by Sladen. Without this scene, the story would be a lot weaker.

The next story can only be described as a total gamechanger. The Deadly Assassin takes us back to Gallifrey, which we've visited very fleetingly before in The War Games and The Three Doctors, but never in this detail. The whole story takes place on Gallifrey and sees the Doctor return home and almost immediately be implicated in the assassination of the President of the High Council of Time Lords.

This is a remarkable story, first up for being the only Classic Doctor Who story where the Doctor has no companion for the whole story. There are some stories where he starts off with no companion but rapidly acquires one, but this is the only one where he has none at all, and this nearly continued for at least the rest of the season, but the writers found it so tough not being able to have the Doctor provide exposition to another character they changed their minds on that. It's also the story that rewrites our conception of the Time Lords, here presented as a stuffy, somewhat ossified species with unbelievable power but no will to use it, and instead consumed by their own internal concerns. It's also the story that establishes a lot of Time Lord iconography, including their costumes, ranks, government system, the Panopticon, the Matrix and the twelve-regeneration limit for Time Lords (something Steven Moffat didn't appreciate during his tenure when the Doctor hit the limit during his period in charge).

This is also the Doctor Who story - airing in 1976! - that adds its bit to the rise of the cyberpunk genre. The Time Lord computer system is identified as "the Matrix" and the Doctor interfaces with it through a VR simulation, eight years before Gibson. Doctor Who is rarely at the cutting edge of the latest science fiction subgenre, but here it was way ahead of the game.

The story hinges not just on an imperious performance by Tom Baker but an outstanding guest cast: Angus MacKay as Borusa (in the first of many appearances by the character), Bernard Horsfall as Chancellor Goth (probably the same Time Lord he played in The War Games), Erik Chitty as Engin and a splendid George Pravda as Castellan Spandrell, the Gallifreyan Poirot. We also have Peter Pratt becoming the second actor to play the Master, taking over from the sadly late Roger Delgado who passed away after Season 10 was filmed, delaying further appearances by the character. The Master's horrific visage, caused by a failed final regeneration, is a bit undercut by the prosthetics work being quite poor, but the idea of the Master, ravaged in agony, spending the last moments of his life trying to kill the Doctor and destroy Gallifrey, is appropriately evil. This is a great story that recontextualises a lot of what we know about the Doctor and his homeworld in a very entertaining way.

The Face of Evil, a disappointing and thankfully uncharacteristically mediocre script by future Blake's 7 showrunner Chris Boucher, drops the quality level significantly, although the idea - two descendant tribes of a crashed spaceship crew feuding with one another - is sound. The story tries to recapture the magic from the previous season's Planet of Evil, with a similarly impressive jungle set, but this set is less-successful, and they don't shoot it on film as much so it ends up looking cheaper. The central core threat of a mad computer system inadvertently driven insane by the Doctor during a prior visit which the Doctor barely remembers is also interesting, but under-explored, and not helped by the Tesh tribe being awful in both characterisation and costuming. That said, the story is buoyed to a high level by Louise Jameson's impressive performance as Leela, which is really above what the story deserves. It's unsurprising that the writers immediately decided to make her the new companion.

Boucher returns with The Robots of Death, an immensely superior script. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a massive sandcrawler where very rich miners try to keep their quality of life absurdly high by taking crazy risks, including crewing the crawler with a bunch of hyperintelligent robots who, surprise, rebel. More interesting is that some of the robots - which are all a marvellous design - have distinct personalities, goals and ideals, not all of them hostile. This is a story inspired a lot by classic science fiction, with a bunch of references to the works of Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl, and with some great pacing and characterisation, including a splendid guest turn by Pamela Salem (who will later return in Remembrance of the Daleks).

The story is let down a little by the story's descent into a fairly predictable pattern later on, and also by the higher-than-average bodycount, which the Doctor really doesn't seem to give much of a toss about. The Fourth Doctor disdains unnecessary death and destruction, but he also doesn't seem to be as remorseful as his predecessors or successors (excluding maybe Six) when a bunch of people die. The story also has a very abrupt ending, as if they almost had too much story for four episodes and had to cut hard.

The final story of the season is one of Doctor Who's most acclaimed moments, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It's easy to see why the story has gained the reputation it has. The production design is absolutely remarkable, the sets numerous and exquisite, the guest cast is on fire, Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are establishing a really interesting rapport, and Robert Holmes' script is witty, clever and accomplished.

The story essentially has the Fourth Doctor playing Sherlock Holmes, investigating the disappearance of a number of women in late Victorian London. He allies with the local police, gentleman doctor Professor Litefoot (Trevor Baxter) and showman Henry Jago (Christopher Benjamin). I get the impression that Holmes inadvertently let Litefoot and Jago take over the script, and the two actors rise to the occasion with two of the best guest turns in Who history (a spin-off TV show was even mooted, and eventually realised as an audio series for Big Finish). For a six-parter, the pacing is crisp and Holmes keeps inventing new ideas, plot twists and turns to make the story really sing.

Unfortunately, the story hits a bunch of stumbling blocks. A key one is that the experienced actor John Bennett has a spectacular turn as the villain Li He'sen Chang, but he is sidelined as the story goes on by Weng-Chiang, played by Michael Spice, a graduate of the Stephen Thorne School of Shouty Acting (not as good as the Brian Blessed one) and a vastly less compelling villain. There is also a problem with the story's requisite monster, a giant rat. The rat looks bloody awful, not quite Invasion of the Dinosaurs awful, but not far off. More annoying is that the rat is really extraneous to the story at hand and could have been disposed of without a problem.

There is also a bizarre problem here with the decision to cast a very English actor as a Chinese villain. Britain in the 1970s had plenty of actors of Chinese descent available to play the role, and Doctor Who had even previously gone down that route just five years before this story in The Mind of Evil, which used British-Asian and Hong Kong (then administered by Britain) actors to good effect

 (negating the traditional, "well, it was the style at the time" excuse). Using both yellowface and prosthetics to make the actor appear Chinese feels rather unnecessary, and only exacerbated because the character is not even the main villain of the story.

Finally, that issue of the Fourth Doctor appearing a bit uncaring about the titanic number of casualties in the previous story recurs here to an even larger decree: the Doctor cracks jokes about a guy who is basically murdered right in front of him. There's a thin line between having a more practical Doctor who shrugs off immediate crises to focus on resolving the situation, and one who appears uncaring and even cruel. Arguably this story crosses that line, even if only slightly.

Despite all of that, Talons is still a terrific story with an immense script which sees out the Philip Hinchcliffe era in style. It's hard to overemphasise how incredibly successful these three seasons have been, contributing at least seven stories that hold a claim to being the best Doctor Who stories of all time (The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang; some also add The Seeds of Doom). Hinchcliffe would be a very hard act to follow, as Graham Williams discovered very quickly.

Season 14 of Doctor Who (****½) is a terrific success, with only The Face of Evil being slightly disappointing and that still being buoyed by a mighty performance by Louise Jameson. It's sad to see Sarah Jane leave, though she does at least depart with two great stories for her character, and Leela is a fascinating replacement, though one the show will struggle more and more to accommodate in future stories. But this season contains at least three of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and the rest are not too shabby. An impressive season, but not one to watch with little children.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The season is also available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on various overseas streaming services.

• 14.1 - 14.4: The Masque of Mandragora (****)
• 14.5 - 14.8: The Hand of Fear (***½)
• 14.9 - 14.12: The Deadly Assassin (*****)
• 14.13 - 14.16: The Face of Evil (***)
• 14.17 - 14.20: The Robots of Death (****½)
• 14.21 - 14.26: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (****½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.