Before we start, you might remember that a big part of the inspiration for this project was Colin Brockhurst’s Day of Doctor Who, a collection of highly detailed historically accurate faux-ephemera related to a fictional fifth anniversary special. Well, he’s done it again with Changing the Face of Doctor Who. While I’ve contented myself with two (and a bit) alternative Doctors [spoiler mode=inline ](FOR NOW)[/spoiler], he’s gone ahead and dimensionally transposed eight of them, positing a universe where the eight classic Doctors were played by Geoffrey Bayldon, BRIAN BLESSED, Ron Moody, Graham Crowden, Richard Griffiths, Richard O’Brien, Ken Campbell and Rik Mayall. My set arrived on an otherwise terrible Wednesday, and as with the Day of Doctor Who, they’re absolutely lovely and the attention to detail is amazing. Check them out.
Cribbed, once again, from the TARDIS Data Core. Text below the fold.
Vampires were parasitic, long-lived creatures who inhabited countless worlds across the universe and beyond. They descended from the Great Vampires and reproduced by infecting other life forms. They subsisted on blood.
Following the destruction of Gallifrey at the end of The Great Time War, the Vampire Lords were among the powers that sought to become the New Lords of Time. (TV: Lords of Blood)
According to the data bank of K9 Mark II, accounts about the vampires came from at least 19 different inhabited planets. (TV: State of Decay)
Biology
Characteristics
The Vampire Lords are not a single species, but rather chimeric hybrids of the Great Vampires with various lesser races. As such, the traits of individual vampires could be highly variable. The vampires encountered by the Fourth Doctor in E-Space, for instance, had pale skin and fangs, and aged rapidly to the point of death when their creator, the King Vampire, was destroyed. (TV: State of Decay) To be infected, an individual had to be repeatedly fed upon. Those infected had only a small chance of living through the mutation process. They became stronger and developed a sensitivity to light, mild hydrophobia and an allergy to the allyl component in garlic. Their mutated selves developed a hunger for protein and so they compensated for this by drinking blood. (PROSE: Blood Harvest)
They preferred the blood of the living to that of the dead (TV: State of Decay), and could not survive solely on animal blood without lapsing into a fugue. They had a highly advanced cardiovascular system and fast recuperative powers, so small wounds healed nearly immediately. A significant blow had to be made to kill one, such as puncturing the heart or decapitation. While Vampires found all direct sunlight unpleasant, only the light of their home world was fatal to them. (TV: Human Nature)
Due to genetic engineering performed by Rassilon during the Vampire War, Vampires lack the Rassilon Imprimatur necessary to access the more advanced forms of time travel used by both the Time Lords and other higher races. (TV: Lords of Blood) They are limited instead to only the crudest forms of time travel, and even these are highly damaging to their physiology, such that a Vampire Lord must feed extensively on native beings within a few minutes of arrival in a time period, or they will lapse into a deathlike state. (TV: Blood of the Damned)