What happened? On January 1st, 2010*, Harold Saxon, the current Prime Minister of England, revealed himself to be the Master, a time-traveling, dashing and rather evil alien. He did this onboard the spacecraft Valiant, where he and the president of the United States had gone to greet the Toclafane,, a new alien race of tiny metal balls with child-like voices. On camera, in front of the entire world, the Toclafane killed the President by producing large metal spikes from their tiny ball bodies. Then, on the Master's orders, they followed up by killing 1/10th of the population.
The rest of humankind was loaded up and shuffled off to build gigantic missile and rocket factories and following that, gigantic rockets and missiles. The Toclafane stand guard over them, killing any humans who dare to defy the Master. The Master rules from the spaceship Valiant, posting occasional public entries and blaring his news to the world. Or sometimes, just his music.
*all dates completely and totally made up.
Wait, but, if there were superheroes, why didn't they stop it? The short reason: It's a plot device.
The long reason: Well, there are basically two. The Toclafane are pretty hardcore even against your average superhero. They absorb damage, they're ridiculously fast and they have sharp metal spikes. The most important part is that they /absorb damage/. They all have individual forcefields and therefore, even your average superhuman is going to have trouble. That doesn't mean they're impossible to kill, but it should be considered extremely difficult.
The other reason is that extremely powerful superhumans like Superman or the Authority are considered to have been 'taken out of the game', either crippled (Kyrptonite Toclafane, anyone?) or simply not in this universe. Please take this into consideration if you want to introduce one of these characters into the game. While they're more than welcome, you will need a reason why they aren't out there destroying everything. And rifts in the universe are possible, so if you would prefer that your character stepped through from his universe to this one, that's a possibility.
What if I don't know anything about Dr. Who?
That's fine. Consider Dr. Who to be the backstory to a wacky, fun-filled time full of superheroes trying to fight back against a world full of deadly metal balls. Please, please don't let that discourage you from joining the RP.