Friendship is Universal – A Visitors Cast for 7TV

At the recent 7TV campaign day I fielded my Visitors cast from V.  You know V, the one about the fascist space lizards who came in peace but really just wanted to eat us (and as many rodents as they could get their hands on).  Oh yeah and I’m not referring to the 21st Century remake (which frighteningly is around ten years old now).

 

 

I’ve had some figures painted up for a while.  Prior to the release of the excellent miniatures early this year by Crooked Dice, I had previously painted up some of the alternatives released a few years back by Nexus Miniatures (now YFT Design Studio) as well as doing some conversions.  In addition I’d also found some excellent close matches in the Inspectors set from Heresy Miniatures.

Nexus Miniatures ‘Uni-tech’ Troopers

More Nexus ‘Visitors’

Heresy Miniatures ‘Inspectors’ – painted as Visitor technicians

I’m a big fan of V and quite rightly the original mini series is held in high regard, as is the slightly more action packed sequel, The Final Battle.  However I personally have a soft spot for the really quite terrible TV series that followed.

Some of the cast of the 1984 TV series

Possibly because this was my first exposure to the series as a teenager when Sky repeated it in the UK in the early nineties.  While (I think) the series starts off well with the whole concept of Los Angeles as an open city after the second alien invasion it quickly goes downhill and degenerates into ‘space Dynasty’ by the end.  For me the ‘jumping the shark’ moment was the exit of (the frankly excellent in anything) Michael Ironside from the main cast; for others I suspect this downward spiral came much earlier.

I’d previously done some conversions using the 7TV Minion miniatures and alien heads

Anyhow, the point of this is that when considering a cast for my alien visitors I have included possibly an unexpected bias to some of those characters from the TV series.

Crooked Dice Alien Invaders

I based these guys using left over bases from the old Sedition Wars game

My approach has been to base these on the base 7TV second edition profiles rather than use the alien cards from the recent Apocalypse edition of the game.  Following the (not too subtle) allegory of the rise of Nazism that the original mini-series followed I felt that using base profiles such as ‘Despotic Dictator’ and the various types of ‘Minion’ was a better fit.

The excellent recent releases from Crooked Dice

Supreme Commander John

Fifth Columnist Martin

Barbara

The one profile that has proven tricky to get right is the iconic Visitor shock trooper.  I based these guys originally on ‘Minions’ but once the advanced alien weaponry was added they felt overpowered for the number of ratings they cost.  In the end I have aligned these more with the X-Commando profile from the Department X programme guide.

Visitor Shock Trooper

These guys proved challenging to build a profile for

I roughly followed the guidelines for modifying profiles which you will find in the Producers Guide of the second edition rules.  In many cases this was just a case of changing the names of existing special abilities to make then fit thematically.  One good example being Diana’s ‘Conversion Process’ which is simply ‘Alien Duplicate’ from the Otherworldy Invader renamed.

Diana

Keep your rodents out of sight

I created all the card layouts using the 7TV Casting Agency online app, and the profiles are stored in various formats in the 7TV Productions Facebook group (where I will place any updates).  However they are also presented in full below.

Feel free to download and utilise in your own Machiavellian plans for world domination and inter-species dining.

Oh and remember, ‘Friendship is Universal’.