User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-6032121-20200606195541

This is a very strong case — and one I've wanted to make for a long time. User:197.86.143.126 may be a new and as-yet-nameless user, but if it should sway anyone in the following debate — not that it should — I stand by everything they have said, although perhaps I would have structured my opening post a little differently.

In fact, I think the case is even slightly stronger than the OP makes it out to be. Not only does  Exodus not say that the War Chief is not the Master, but it does the exact opposite, in positing that the War Chief manages to regenerate after one more War Lord-related adventure, being briefly seen to emerge as a "dark, satanically handsome man". A younger form of Roger Delgado's incarnation, one wonders?

Now, it's obviously quite a vague description, too vague to be evidence on its own. But it certainly sounds more like Delgado than it sounds like the NOTVALID War Chief regeneration featured in FASA's 1985 Doctor Who and the Legions of Death. The Virgin books weren't shy about referencing info from the FASA games, and yet they specifically overwrote the "War Chief is not the Master" story from Doctor Who and the Legions of Death to feature the War Chief regenerating into a markedly Master-like form and getting away.

On the other hand, to play Devil's advocate, there is one other source suggesting the War Chief and the Master are distinct individuals: A Brief History of Time Lords, which accounts for the War Chief's experience in front of the Untempered Schism separately from those of the Master. However, the novel is presented as an in-universe history book, and is sometimes uncertain on certain points, some of which (like the circumstances of his escape from the Eye of Harmony) already have to do with the Master. We can source "One Time Lord historian, writing long after the Time War, believed that the War Chief and the Master were distinct individuals" to the novel, but not necessarily "According to one account, the War Chief and the Master were distinct individuals".

…

I don't have much more to add right at this moment, though I could think of something else later. An important point about implementation is that there's an ongoing proposal to once again have separate pages about incarnations of the Master. If it goes through (and it looks like it will), that would certainly make it a lot easier to implement the in-universe acknowledgement of the War Chief as the Master.