I’ve got a soft spot for Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor. Probably because his run on Doctor Who started with a couple of very strong science fiction stories – Logopolis and Castrovalva. And I think Earthshock is the definitive Cyberman story. So I started my new collection of 28mm Doctor Who miniatures with him.  It’s the first time I’ve painted a representation of celery in at that scale.

“Books! The best weapons in the world!”

The miniature was originally produced in or after 1996 by Harlequin Miniatures, and that company regenerated into Icon Miniatures and then regenerated again into Black Tree Design.  I remember buying some in the mid-1990s when the Invasion Earth game was being haphazardly stocked by the geek shop in the centre of Manchester – the Coliseum.  I’d like to collect the 1980s Games Workshop range of Doctor Who figures too, but the Harlequin ones are much more readily available and have a much bigger range of monsters and aliens to pit the Doctor against.

I really enjoyed painting his stripey trousers and cricket whites.  There’s another version of the figure actually holding the bat which I’ll treat myself to at a future point when (if) I’ve found some other cricketeer figures.  It would be the first time since being eleven-year-old nerd I would feel comfortable playing wargames on my Subbuteo Cricket pitch.

Doctor Who through Time and Space

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that this one figure can be used alongside most of my other wargames figures.  He marries historical and science fiction, and even at a pinch fantasy.  I can stick him with my ex-Citadel Normans to recreate scenes like The Time Meddler or The Real Herewad – though neither involved the Fifth Doctor.  (Perfect excuse to buy the First and Sixth Doctors as miniatures though.)

“Careful now, you’ll have someone’s eye out with that.”
The Doctor supervising some peasant archers in 1066.

Games Workshop’s early Imperial Army figures are suitably generic to stand in for future soldiers.  I can use these Warhammer 40K figures as the Guild of Adjudicators from the 28th century as seen in Cold Fusion.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only Warhammers.
The Doctor supervising the peacekeeping force in 2766.

So, what next?  The Doctor Who universe has all sorts of weird and exotic aliens.  I’m going to focus on the Fifth Doctor’s adversaries and companions next so I can play out my favourite episodes in the medium of wargames.

Years back I bought loads of ex-Citadel Wargames Foundry Normans and Vikings, with the intention of converting them as Men of Rohan to go alongside my 1980s Citadel Lord of the Rings. The project never materialised. Years later, I’ve dredged up the figures to make a historical Norman force.

I sold off the bulk of the Vikings, but kept a few to sprinkle into the force – everything kinda blends together in the Dark Ages. One of these Vikings has been repurposed as a Norman banner bearer.

The figure’s spear was replaced with a length of brass wire topped with a plastic spear point (which I later switched for a Goff Ork helmet spike). The banner is tomato purée foil cut to shape with a scalpel. To move the figure slightly away from the Viking look, he’s got a Norman kite shield. I later decided to Normanise the figure a little more by sculpting a t-bar onto his helmet. He still has the long hair and trousers that give him a hint of Scandanavia, plus I plumped for a Nordic dragon motif on his shield.

The design and colours are lifted wholesale from a Little Big Men Studios banner (sorry guys, but I’ve bought a load of your Legio X transfers recently so you’ve had some cash off me). The design seems to be a variation on William the Conqueror’s banner, so I’m unsure if they borrowed it too.   The design also pops up in Nico’s fabulous Norman army, which has inspired a lot of my own collection.

I had fun researching the shield designs – Normans give you licence to paint everyone as an individual with their own proto-heraldry and colours.  The unit champion, Lord Weuere de Hallam, has a pair of entwined griffons on his shield – a variation on the family crest.  Here you can also see the mud and blood splats applied liberally on the unit to distract from any irregularities in the sculpting, casting and painting.

The force has had several Saga outings, and I hope to grow it to a fully-painted 6-point force as soon as I can figure out how to paint horses.  Can’t have Normans without lots of horses.  I do deeply fantasise about having hundreds of troops for Warhammer 3–8E outings, but that’s at least several years off at my current painting rate.

Normans in action against James’ Viking Berserkers at the Battle of Stinke Bridge.

I entered the all Normans I’d finished as of April into the Salute 2017 painting contest.  Normally I paint miniatures specially for the contest (like these Algoryn last year), but I just took all the figures I’d got finished from my Saga force and blu-tacked them to a piece of plasticard.  To my utter surprise and delight, I won Gold in the Historical Regiment category!  I thought with them being painted to be “gaming standard” and also released in 1987 they’d be outclassed by regiments of newly-released plastics painted in NMM.  Those Perry sculpts still got it.

The Normans on the day of Salute.

I originally mixed together unarmoured archers with armoured sergeants as they were simply all the figures I had finished painting from across my Saga force, and I wanted the biggest mass of troops I could manage.  It made me uneasy blending different troop types in the same regiment, but my friend Rob reminded me that was the Warhammer mindset speaking – only able to conceive of rectangles of identically-armed troops.  In real life, Dark Age warfare was just a jumbled scrap of dudes with assortments of kit.  Reading up on the period I discovered that King Stephen had used the tactic of mixing together archers and dismounted knights at the Battle of Standard Hill in 1138, so what was initially a bulking-out cheat turned out to have good historical grounding.