The Master (reference book)

The Master was the title of a 1985 reference book published by FASA. Written primarily from a real-world perspective, it documented the history of the character of the Master and gave advice to players of The Doctor Who Role Playing Game on how to approach the character.

The Master was originally released in tandem with CIA File Extracts, a fictional, narrative overview of the Master. However, the two books were physically distinct and had different ISBN codes.

Contents
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. The information in the player's book may or may not be accurate. As reviewer Barry Bailey noted, "the players' booklet is carefully compiled as a mixture of truth, inaccuracies, lies,damn lies and statistics." Although these two booklets 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.

Publication history
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.

Reception
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."