Haltiamieli

I suppose the minifig head is the most fitting part that they are used to printing? The downside is that with printing the part won't work very well when viewed from different directions.

Wargs! It's feeding time! There will be an exclusive set called 10237 The Tower of Orthanc. A preliminary (and heavily pixelated) picture of it was released a while ago by the same guy who leaked pictures of Palace Cinema interior. This was also backed up by GRogall. Judging by the height of around 73 centimetres (mentioned in the aforementioned picture) there will be quite a many bricks involved.

Err... that was lotta rubbish. Please don't believe a word of it, for humanity's sake.

It is probably partly due to different perceptions of minifigure design and aesthetics and partly just because of the angle of the pic, but I can understand the rejection decision rather well – because to me the figures in the picture don't appear to be just with molded instead of printed breasts (except the greyhaired one on the left and of course the one who has his back turned to the viewer), but with quite provocatively revealing clothes too. The woman on the right seems to be missing the upper half of the cups from her bra/bikini (and likewise the woman with a top beside her) and the lady in dark blue dress seems to have a very low and wide neckline.

Very well captured scene, and I too admire those statues – especially the one still standing.

Well, August/September release means that the series will be on the shelves around Christmas. January release might leak to the shelves before Christmas somewhere around the world, but it's main selling months are nevertheless January-March. Santa was similarly released in Series 8. Besides, I don't see Mrs. Claus on the list, only Grandma. And I wouldn't really count Yeti as that much "holiday themed" either.

Nope, Corsair ships from LotR have triangular sails and quite low build. That must be a prototype for an unreleased Pirate set if it's from Lego offices.

Yeah, it's not the oldest part there is, of course. But my main point was that in my view there hasn't really been a linear evolution towards bigger accessories, things "getting bigger and bigger" like you said. It depends very much from mold to mold how oversized things are compared to minifigures. Could be, though personally I think it's more probable that if they don't make a dedicated mold, they just use the typical (as far as Lego LotR is concerned) longsword and ignore the speciality of Andúril.

My second stint feeling the packages wielded Forest Maiden rather quickly. I still want another one, but that can wait. Cannot decide which is my favourite from this series, the Fortune Teller or the Forest Maiden. Both are awesome. I'm not a hundred percent sold on the latter's hairpiece, though. But the torso and dress will be very useful. Cannot have too many medieval villagers. I also got myself an Alien Avenger and the Mermaid. Avenger is rather nice even if it is just a recolour of Galaxy Patrol. I'm slightly disappointed with the Mermaid, I don't think the torso printing really works with the light shiny outlines. Have to say that Heroic Knight's (which I got earlier) vizor (and helmet) in plain bley is nice for statues, even if it looks incongruent on the figure itself compared to his metallic shield and armour.

I too dislike the most oversized Lego weapons, but not all of them are exactly new. Katana was introduced in 1998 (though personally I don't think it's really oversized, it's just a longer sword), and this monster of a sword in 1995 (I really hope the Kingdoms line was the last we will ever see of it). On the other hand recently we've got things like gladius, Sting and Heroica sword. Even the new greatsword is much smaller than the old greatsword and nicely compatible in scale with the old shortsword.

Two dragons? I'm afraid there's only one in that set. It's nice anyway, I too would like to get it as I similarly missed the Fantasy Era during my dark ages.

I suppose so. Though I think there should be at least two monks working in the church, I just haven't got more than one Gandalf yet. Luckily there's more to come. Actually that's more than I can say, I haven't really read Kalevala except parts from here and there (and I haven't read that book on Lönnrot either, it's just waiting on my bookshelf like so many other books). Well, it's rather vague or has many meanings in the Finnish mythology at large (mostly forgotten now, of course), but in Kalevala it is quite well defined as a movable mill that grinds riches (grain, gold and salt) out of nothing. Nice thing to own on these cold shores where famine was never far away.

That works quite well, I think. Some Jedi torso from SW might work for a monk clad in brown. King's torso from King's Carriage Ambush has a sort of cross on a necklace, might be usable with Judge's cape for some rich bishop or something.

In 2-3 years there may not be more Lego LotR sets at all. We may hope for a long-standing theme, but it is not wise to count on it. As such, this could very well be the first and last Rivendell set ever. It probably is, I think, unless we are so lucky that we get another big D2C set after Orthanc. Then I think Rivendell is quite possible. But it is in that set they should put all the improbable persons, like old Gloin Bilbo. Oops, sorry, no room for Gloin there either. It is actually rather debatable whether Gloin even is in The Fellowship of the Ring (the movie). We see a white-haired dwarf arriving with Gimli, and that's the guy that was chosen for the Decipher card game. But if that's Gloin, why isn't he attending the Council? Too tired after the travel, I suppose. Decipher has a tendency to just paste names of important characters that were not in the movies to background characters that were, like the Gondorian soldier they called Prince Imrahil (bah! humbug!). Funny enough, the character was originally intended to be Beregond, another important character absent from the movie, but his role was cut so much that Jackson & co. thought it would be wiser and truer to Tolkien not to call him Beregond.

Bought my first figures from this series. No luck with Forest Maiden yet, but at least I already found two Fortune Tellers. Still a bit heartbroken with how dull Heroic Knight turned out to be. I suspect I'll be fine with just one of them. Cyclops is cute and Battle Mech is cool. Judge's gavel is the best (though maybe not the most versatile) new accessory from this round, I think.

No no! I'm not Norwegian, you know. Nor am I Siercon and Coral (though when it comes to building skills and resources, I wish I was). Good eyes. That's actually "Lönnrot ja Kalevala", a book about Lönnrot and the making of Kalevala. Kalevala itself is on an upper shelf outside the picture.

Ah. That was actually in the Kingdoms Chess set, where some people got this new design instead of the old one which was printed on the front cover etc. The old shortsword has never appeared in the CMF series, though Series 9 Heroic Knight does indeed wield the new one.

Why not? They are wrong pieces, even if the difference in the actual pieces is quite small indeed. If the pictures Smokebelch linked above are truthful and not somehow faked it is quite obvious that Bjarke Lykke Madsen and other Lego designers who contributed for this set did not mean for it to use the old arches. With them the window doesn't work as it should. It looks bad. On the other hand with the right arches it looks awesome (even if it still rattles a little). In a way it could be said that it's actually quite respectful towards the designers to want the set as they intended and not to settle with the result of some unfortunate error somewhere in the production. Everyone is of course free to be happy with what they get, and it's perfectly alright too. I certainly didn't complain when I got one extra Uruk-Hai sword in my Helm's Deep, even if it is not as the designers intended. Remains to be seen whether I feel the need to contact Lego if my Bag End (which I'll hopefully acquire some day) has the wrong arches. Depends on how bad it looks in person. That was the katana piece with differently shaped guard, I suppose? In that case, the change didn't change the functionality of the sword (well, there's probably an AFOL somewhere in the world who was mightily bugged by the change, because of some ingenious NPU that only worked with the old design). It's quite a different case.

Ever since I started to build my own humble Lego village, it was obvious that sooner or later I need to add a church into the mix. It's such an integral part of stereotypical medieval life (unless you are doing a fantasy scenario). And as they won't release any official Lego church in the foreseeable future, it was necessary to design one myself. I wanted a rather dark and imposing, slightly gothic building, so about two years ago I began collecting dark bley pieces and other parts I thought I might need. Finally, on a random night last September, I started to build and in the morning I had a rough model ready, just missing a lot of roof pieces and a few other parts. It was much smaller than I had initially planned, but still easily the biggest thing I've made out of Lego. After that night the church has mostly just sat on my shelf collecting dust, until I finally managed to bricklink the last parts it needed a while ago. Apart from finishing the roof I did quite a lot of renevations, and now I think the building is more or less finished. For time being. Some day I'm gonna elongate the building with one pair of additional windows... and a few brick bricks here and there might look nice. I have yet to acquire any in dark bley. On to the pictures: For the bell in the top of the tower, I used a silver-coloured Belville basket. The chain is for "ringing" it, even if they are actually just hanging there next to each other with no real mechanism: Below is a small storage room. Though I have to question whether it's wise to store glass bottles on a narrow shelf just under the bell? Part of the front of the tower is hinged so that you can access the room below, which is a study with a chest for church treasures and a writing desk (but wait, there's actually no window in this room... oops). You can also see the end of the chain mentioned above. From the study minifigs can walk through the door to the balcony above the main hall. I didn't manage to take a good picture of the balcony, only this dark one with half the roof still intact. What you can see better than the balcony is one of the two candeliers that light the hall. So what about the actual hall? Maybe we should first peek in from the direction that the minifigs use, the main doors. Actually the view is a bit different than it should be for minifigs, but I hope it is not too obvious why. This is the view from the opposite direction, with the back wall removed. Apparently some think that the sermon is rather dull. Now the insides with the balcony and both parts of the roof removed. Here's the pulpit and the altar by themselves. I'm rather pleased with how the pulpit turned out. First time I used this technique for spiral stairs. In the beginning I used a much simpler stone platform, but was never really satisfied with it. Under the baptismal font and the pulpit, both removable of course, are the resting places of a Black Falcon king and his loyal knight. This picture was taken right after the first all-nighter building session and much that you see has changed since then, but the graves themselves have stayed the same. I'm also building terrain around the church, but it's only halfway ready and I have just one picture which doesn't show much. Also, as you can see, this picture is quite old. The tower roof is still missing six corner slopes and the tower itself is around 4 bricks shorter, with no removable top.

Hedgehog set also seems to have two smaller leaf pieces in dark red. It seems TLC is finally starting to give us more options in leaf colours, which is awesome.

It remains to be seen how the designers have tackled the issue, but personally I believe it shouldn't be too hard to design the tower in (more or less) minifig scale and still retain the iconic dimensions well enough for the collectors who want displayability, even if it is "just" 72 cm tall. It would still be absurdly tall, for an official Lego set. I would imagine that only a very nitpicky person would look at it and comment that the stairs and doors appear much too big for the scale. Even Jackson himself, after all, threw the real height of the tower out of the window when it suited him cinematically (though admittedly that bothers me every time I watch the extended RotK).

Great update! The wagon looks even better than before. I'd give you another vote of support if I could.

I tried this and it seems there's not enough grip with normal-length connector pin, either the stick or the spear is very close to loose. 1,5 pin works well, but as you said it's an eyesore.

Motayan also leaked us the first pictures of the insides of 10232 Palace Cinema, so it seems quite inevitable that his info on Orthanc D2C set is right too. Yay!

Indeed. Otherwise I'm quite liking what I see, but that emblem... why, oh why? If they wanted to use a bright and childish design (understandable considering the age group they are aiming at), they could have at least given us a new one to dislike? But maybe the design is slightly different? On principe a lion's head is not a bad motif, if done better than last time. If not, I just hope the good guys won't sport the emblem on their torsos. As such only shields and bardings would be unusable.