The Master (reference book)

The Master
Key crew
Publisher:	FASA
Writer:	J. Andrew Keith
Illustrator:	Todd F. Marsh, Jane Bigos and Lucy A. Synk
Release details
Release date:	September 1986
Format:	Paperback Book, 64 Pages
ISBN:	ISBN 0-931787-94-7
The Doctor Who Role Playing Game Supplement Sourcebooks
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Next →	The Cybermen

The Master was the title of a 1985 reference book published by FASA. It gave a complex fictional history and informational guide to the Master, with advice to gamemasters of The Doctor Who Role Playing Game on how to approach the character.

The Master was originally released in tandem with CIA File Extracts, which retold the fictional information found in The Master in a unreliable in-universe document.

The Master was written by J. Andrew Keith, with additional material by Michael P. Bledsoe, William H. Keith, Jr., and Tom Kokkelenberg. Artwork was by Jane K. Bigos, Todd F. Marsh, and Lucy A. Synk.

Summary

to be added

Worldbuilding

• Merast is the Master's secret base between dimensions.
• The Master once clashed with the Colonel in the Sepoy Mutiny, which occurred in 1857 AD or 72,565 TL.

Notes

• This was a 64-page gamemaster's booklet with background information about the Master, including history, background, and activities, as well as notes on how to give The Master an authentic feel, and statistics for some other opponents of The Doctor, including Daemons, the Nestene Consciousness, Axos and Sea Devils.
• Although this booklet and its companion were originally sold together, they are usually found separately on the used book market. Since there have been more players than gamemasters, the player's booklet is rarer than the gamemaster's book.
• In the May 1986 edition of White Dwarf (Issue #77), Barry Bailey reviewed both The Master and The Daleks, which had been released simultaneously, and said of The Master that it "unaccountably has inferior production to earlier FASA Doctor Who products. Apart from the cunningly composed cover, the illustration is generally weak." Bailey noted that the statistics given for The Doctor's opponents in this supplement differed in format from those given in The Daleks, commenting, "it would appear that the Dr Who RPG is very poorly co-ordinated as a project." He also disagreed with some reworking of the Doctor Who canon, calling it an "irritating rewriting of the Dr Who mythos." Bailey was ambivalent about the usefulness of either The Daleks or The Master, and gave them both an average overall rating of 7 out of 10, saying, "If you intend using either of the two villains regularly, and don't feel you know enough from the series to be able to handle them, then you should use these supplements. Otherwise you'd probably be better trusting to your own judgement."

Continuity

• The Monk is explained to be the Master's sixth and seventh incarnations, with the end of TV: The Time Meddler ^[+]Loading...["The Time Meddler (TV story)"] causing a regeneration before the events of TV: The Daleks' Master Plan ^[+]Loading...["The Daleks' Master Plan (TV story)"].