Doctor Who and the Replacement Miniatures

Apart from his astonishing fashion sense, one of the Sixth Doctor’s quirks was to repeat words said to him, in the form of a question, at ever-increasing volume.

Thanks to whoever was picking Golden Buttons this week! We all crave the approval of our peers, and I definitely feel approved of…

We played a couple of games of Perilous Tales with the Doctor Who miniatures, and I must say we have a great time with it. The game is very simple. It’s cooperative so players team up against a predetermined villain and his minions. Player characters are either leaders or teammates; in a two player game, each player gets one of each. Characters have three stats — wounds, skill, and action points — with leaders going a bit higher than teammates. All leaders have the same stats, as do all teammates, which further simplifies things. The only customization is that each leader gets two special traits (chosen from a list in the rule book), and each teammate gets one.

The villain is chosen from a set of ten different options. Each villain has three or four minions that will appear at various points in the game, with each having a set behavior pattern (either aggressive, lurker, or pack hunter) that determines how they interact with the player characters. It takes a bit of getting used to but once you get the patterns down it feels a lot more interesting than the usual “they attack the closest enemy” rules.

The game starts with the players drawing three objectives from a deck of 14 (regular playing cards can be cross-referenced with the rule book if you don’t want to print anything out). This gives the players their goals and win conditions for the game, usually some variation on “move to the objective and pass a dice test.” Then, 8 counters numbered 1-8, randomized and placed face down at various points on the playing surface. When a player character model moves within 6 inches of one of these tokens, it is revealed. Tokens 1 through 5 are replaced by the villain or one of his minions, while 6 through 8 are perils, random events drawn from a deck of cards.

At the end of each turn, the players make a roll that will move the unrevealed tokens closer to the action, and also add to the threat level. The game ends when the threat reaches 10, giving the game a built-in countdown and motivating the players to cultivate a sense of urgency.

The game is designed with pulp horror in mind, but I didn’t have any trouble reskinning it to fit classic Doctor Who, renaming the villains and some of the character traits to make them more Who-flavored. For our first game, we played against a villain set based on the Whateleys, the family of backwoods sorcerers from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” but we changed them into the four different incarnations of the Master in a variation on the old multi-Doctor anniversary stories.

We didn’t do so well against the Four Masters, so for our second game we took it down a notch and played against The Ghast, a ghost-filled encounter — we replaced the ghosts with illusions of the Doctor’s friends and foes, cleverly allowing us to use whatever Doctor Who models we have on hand as the opposing characters.

It was great fun to get some of these Doctor Who models, many of which I’ve had for close t0 30 years, onto the tabletop in a game that actually feels like an episode of the show. Perilous Tales really distills this type of small-model-count game down to its bare essence, and makes me wonder a bit as to why other games need to be so complicated.

We will definitely be playing more Perilous Tales — the game comes with 10 villains and I’ve come up with reskins for 8 of them. However, I just scored a set of Harlequin’s old UNIT Troops, so once I get them painted we’re going to use 7TV to play out a classic Jon Pertwee episode or two. Stay tuned…

Here are the rest of the current crop of Doctor Who characters I’ve managed to find. These are all newer models from Crooked Dice — The Brigadier and Sarah Jane are replacements for the Harlequin versions, but the other three are all new. So far, the only “lost” models I haven’t been able to replace are the UNIT trooper (more on that below), and the Yeti, which I don’t seem to be able to find for love or money.

I already had a Fourth Doctor and Romana, but I really like these two sculpts. Tom Baker wore a few different variations on his “overcoat and scarf” outfit during his run, and Romana wore a different costume in every episode she was in, so I don’t think it’s a problem to have multiples.

With the Brigadier and Jo Grant here, I’ve got all of Jon Pertwee’s supporting characters and a fair number of his villains. The Third Doctor’s era is most suited to traditional skirmish gaming, as he was frequently backed up by UNIT troops and they did a lot of big action set pieces. There are plenty of options for ’70s army guys, and I’ve even got a line on a set of the actual Harlequin UNIT troops.

(Always nice to find a reference photo that shows what color the shoes are…)

And finally, Sarah Jane Smith, arguably the greatest of all the Doctor Who companions. While I love the show in all its forms (and I have a particular affection for the 1980s era), I don’t think the show was ever better than in Tom Baker’s first three seasons.

While I may still do a more skirmishy game using 7TV if I can find some suitable UNIT soldiers, I’ve done some work re-skinning Mike Hutchinson’s Perilous Tales for use as what will hopefully be a fun little cooperative game using some of these models. Hopefully I’ll get that to the table soon…

The Silurians and the Sea Devils originally appeared separately during Jon Pertwee’s run in the early ’70s, but they teamed up for a comeback during Peter Davison’s final season in 1984. Apparently I wanted these to look like aquarium decorations, so I did the bases a little differently. I think the bright pink tufts are authentic to the period, anyway.

And here’s an original Silurian from the 1970s. This is another one that I never got around to getting before now.

And finally here’s the Fifth Doctor, as played by Peter Davison. This is another Crooked Dice model — actual Doctors from the Harlequin range are very hard to find. I thought all that beige and red would look better against a green background so I used static grass instead of my classic brown dirt — since he wore a 1920s cricketer’s outfit, a lot of his publicity photos were taken out on well-trimmed lawns. Davison’s episodes were new when I was first getting into the show back in the early 1980s, so I have a special affection for his era.

That’s nine down, and all of the original Harelquin models I was able to find. I’ve got five more Who models in progress, all from Crooked Dice, and I still need to find a game to play with them. 7TV is the obvious choice, but I’ve also got my eye on Mike Hutchinson’s Perilous Tales — it’s a coop game that appears to focus on achieving objectives rather than just fighting off the bad guys, which seems a bit more on-theme to me.

Well, this project is going quicker than expected (either that, or I had more free time than usual last week).

The Master, as played by Anthony Ainley in the 1980s. He certainly loved to chew the scenery. This one isn’t a replacement, it’s one I never got around to getting and was part of a batch of Harlequin models I got from eBay.

Turlough was one of the more interesting regulars on ’80s Doctor Who, and one of the few who got his own spin-off novel, the astonishingly titled Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma. I’ve had a copy since the ’80s but I don’t think I’ve ever actually read it…

Everybody loves the tin dog, except for Tom Baker apparently. He was good friends with the actor who did the voice of K-9, but supposedly he hated working with the prop. I couldn’t find an original Harlequin K-9 so this one is from Crooked Dice — there’s not a lot of room for variation with this character, so I imagine they look pretty much the same.

That is more plaid than I ever wanted to paint. The Second Doctor is from Crooked Dice’s Temporal Travelers range, while Jamie is an original Harlequin model. You can definitely see a difference in the sculpting style, but the scale is more-or-less the same and I think they’ll play well together.

It’s one of the great injustices of the world that so few of Patrick Troughton’s episodes have survived the BBC’s short-sighted practice of erasing and re-using the master tapes rather than archive them for posterity. It’s a small consolation that Patrick returned to the show twice in the 1980s: for the 20th anniversary special and then again two years later, this time accompanied by his original companion Jamie McCrimmon, whose actor Frazer Hines hadn’t aged a day.

Since these are meant to fit in with my existing collection, I’m making an effort to base them in the same style. In fact, for the models that are on brown bases, that’s the same basing material I used on the models I did back in the 1990s. Not just the same brand, but the same bags of brown gravel and little bits of green turf. I have no memory of when or where I got it, and I don’t use it much any more, but I’ve been using that same basing material for 30 years…

I painted miniatures a bit as a teenager, but my return to the hobby happened thanks to Harlequin Miniatures and their fantastic Doctor Who range, which they released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They used to run advertisements in Doctor Who Magazine, and it was especially fun watching the ads get bigger and bigger as they added more and more models to the range.

I was buying them purely as collectibles — they had a game called Invasion Earth, but I never got around to buying the rulebook, instead I was content just to paint and display the models. I never intended to amass a complete collection either, I just placed an order every few months as new models caught my eye.

At the time, my girlfriend (now wife), my brother, and I shared a house, and we would occasionally spend an afternoon together painting Doctor Who figures. My brother didn’t really care about the figures per se, but he had fun painting with us, and the whole collection remained with me.

Fast forward to 20 years later: my brother and I now live in separate states, but he was in town for a visit and we got to talking about miniatures. He was lamenting that the Second Doctor miniature from his Time of the Daleks board game had broken, and it occurred to me that he had actually painted my Harlequin Second Doctor. I did a quick check to make sure EOE Orbis (the current iteration of Harlequin) still had them for sale on their website (they did), then offered to let him take the tiny Patrick Troughton that he’d painted all those years before.

Since my brother’s oldest son has gotten involved in miniature painting and gaming, we though it would be fun for the old man to go ahead and take all the Harlequin models he had painted home with him to show off. After all, it would be easy enough for me to order replacements, right? In fact, I placed an order with EOE Orbis that very day.

Unfortunately, EOE Orbis never sent my order or responded to any communication, so that wound up being a dead end. I wasn’t very well going to ask my brother for the miniatures back, so now I had some key Doctor Who characters that needed replacing. eBay wasn’t much help, but Crooked Dice has been doing a great looking line of Who-compatible characters, so I was able to place an order for most of the important ones: the Second and Fifth Doctor, the Brigadier, K-9, and a few others, plus some versions of characters that Harlequin never got around to.

(Note: the recent Doctor Who range from Warlord games isn’t much help here: for one, they mostly did characters from the new series, and also, their scale is around 35mm, so a little too large. I once tried using some Harlequin Ice Warriors in a game with the Warlord models, and it was pretty laughable.)

Of course, once I had them, the models sat in the pile of opportunity for several months, but I uncovered them recently and decided to give eBay another try. I found someone in the US selling several still-in-package Harlequin models, so I snapped them up. Between the Crooked Dice and new Harlequin stuff, I’ve got 14 Doctor Who miniatures to paint, and I’ve decided I want to find a game to play with them.