The_Cook

I'd concur with the later analysis. If you're a minifig collector then LOTR is going to be a great theme for you, if you're a castle builder then LOTR is probably doing to be a bit of a dry patch. In the past twenty years most of us can probably point to theme that they weren't that enamoured with and you just had to sit through it until something new came out. This might just be another one of those themes for you.

The next set in a series in which I'm trying to create MOC's that look as if they could have been part of the Lego castle product lineup from the late 80's. Design I started out by revisiting one of the sets that I never had as a child, 6086 Black Knight's Castle. I'm not a fan of the raised baseplate castle but at the same time the baseplate forces them to be asymetrical which I am a fan of, it's why IMHO 6074 Castle Draco is far superior to 6080 Kings Castle. The baseplate reduces the connectability, the ability to join lots of little castles together to build one huge castle but at the same time it provides height for defensibility and it's why I use a slightly modified 6081 King's Mountain Fortress as the keep in my classic castle collection. Within 6086 it was the small half timbered building at the back right that intrigued me, it's a wonderful little design detail and breaks up what could otherwise be a very monotonous black wall. I grabbed the instructions from Peeron and started assembling that corner of the castle in LDD. Without the raised baseplate (which isn't modelled in LDD) there's a great big hole beneath the buliding; so, whilst retaining the exterior detailing of the supporting arches, I filled in the space behind with a couple of 4444 panels. Something needed to be done to support the 'escape door' so another arch and black fence to act as a grille went in beneath the steps. The 'escape door' forced me to set the continuation of the enclosing wall back from the half timbered faces which mirrored the way that the wall was playing out on the far side of the building. Image below shows the escape door end of the building with the grille below and a matching grille in the roofspace. Originally I just fronted the lower space that had been created beneath the half timbered room with a big arch. The intention was that the merchant would store his good beneath his house, coincidentally this just happens to be historically correct merchants and artisans lived above their stores and workshops. A couple of treasure chests are placed into the lower room and I'm looking at it and thinking "what's to stop them from being stolen?" Which neatly solved the problem of what's the story behind this set, the wolfpack are out to steal the merchants wealth. At 8 bricks wide but only 6 bricks high all of the brown curved doors were the wrong size and I didn't want to extend the height of the building. I could have used the Door 1 x 4 x 6 that were available at the time but I didn't want to block the view into to room, the lure of treasure for my thief. Therefore a quick re-design placed some Door 1 x 4 x 6 Barred with Stud Handle across the front of the arch. These doors are a slight anachronism since they weren't available in the late 80's but I can't see a way of neatly fitting in those awful Door Frame 2 x 6 x 7 and associated bars that did exist at the time. They shoe-horned one into 6081 but it doesn't really fit with the surrounding 6 brick high 4444 panels and feels out of place. I also considered the arched doors but these would have overlapped into the room above, all three treatments that I actively considered are shown in the picture below: Following the 6086 instructions, the upper wall continues beyond the half timbered house. On 6086 this is along the baseplate, on my design this is at the top of a section of grey enclosure wall. I match the inverted 1x2x3 slope that is supporting the battlements by mirroring it with a buttress below. The buttress helps break up what would have been a very flat wall of 4444 panels; even with the change in colour between top and bottom. Behind this upper wall a gallery is formed using wider than normal plates supported on 1x1x5 pillars. Quite by coincidence when photographing the model I discovered that the gallery marries very nicely (after the removal of the last crenelation on the top battlements) with the half timbered house at the back of 6074 Castle Draco. The photo's at the very bottom of the post illustrate the set combined with other models of the era. Originally the roof colour was red, but sitting it alongside other buildings like 6074 Castle Draco or 6067 Guarded Inn the red stood out too much, so it got changed to black. On 6086 having a black roof would have made the entire castle too dark and the red makes a nice statement, in my build where there is a significantly less black and with the solid base of old grey that it has a red roof would just be too much colour. Designs drawn up in LDD, .lxf attached to the post. Minifig selection wasn't as easy as the Maidens Tower. Ttwo guards were easy enough. The wolfpack figure is something of an anachronism as the Wolfpack line wasn't released until early 90's, but I feel that the Wolfpack steal more than the Forestmen. It was the merchant himself that presented much more of a challenge. Now, if I worked for Lego design studio I'd submit a torso design that would be sent down to the factory, turned it into screens for the printing machines and I'd have a couple of hundred my new torso's at the flick of a switch. As I don't work for the Lego design studio I'm stuck trawling through Bricklink looking for a more torso that could be used to create my Merchant minifig. I'm looking for something that still looks medieval but has a richer feel than the belt and pouch peasants that were the standard civilian minifig's in the castle range until the advent of the recent Kingdoms range. After perusing through a couple of hundred torso designs I decided that one of the Prince Of Persia torso's was nearest to my requirements. A copy of 7570 The Ostrich Race is duly sourced. I'm sure the Ostriches will eventually come in handy to create a Kings Menagerie at some point, I just need a bear and elephant to accompany them. Alternate hair as well as yellow hands and heads came from Bricklink. After trying a couple out, I finally settle on a bearded face, light gray legs and brown hair. Analysis For those that haven't seen my earlier posting on The Maidens Tower the criteria that I'm working to are similar to those that the actual Lego designers would work to. Story - Each set needs to have the ability to have it's own story constructed around it. Playability - Sets need to be playable. To a certain extent this can trump reality, rooms that hands can put minifigs in are more important than accurate scale and/or making sure that every room has a door and that therer are stairs to reach the battlements. Little minds (or big ones for that matter) quickly fill in the irrelevant blanks to get on with important tasks of rescuing maidens, slaying dragons or stealing treasure. Build-ability - Sets need to be build-able. If I can't provide sensible instructions for my creations then they can't be built. As a rule of thumb I should probably be looking at one instruction step for every 15 bricks in the creation. Therefore a 300 brick model would have at most 20 instruction steps. Cost - All Lego sets are built to a budget. My Own Creations should try to fit the price bands that TLG aims for. As a rule of thumb the total cost of parts on BrickLink based on the BrickLink average should be the same as current sets cost. It's not an accurate measure, scarcity of parts on BrickLink pushes the price up, whereas the cost to TLG to produce a brick isn't constrained by it's rarity. Consistency - The creations should be of a design that makes them consistent with sets released in the mid to late 80's, the Lion and Black Falcon era's. Story: With the inclusion of the barred doors to protect the treasure room and the thieving Wolfpack minifig there's a definitely story arc that can be played out, namely stealing the treasure. Playability: Getting fingers into the lower chamber is a bit fiddly and there's an attic space that is also a bit inaccessible, but everything else is easy to get to. Perhaps some additional props would make it more enjoyable, a grappling hook for the wolfpack thief would allow him to scale the walls. At the time of photographing I hadn't added it, but the wolfpack thief should have one of the usual baskets on his back for carrying away the plundered loot. Build-ability: LDD in it's infinite wisdom created a set of instructions the build the building downwards from the roof gables. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with those instructions and had to create sensible instructions in LeoCAD that built from the baseplate up. Nothing to complex or strenuous about the build, all done within 20 steps. The roof assembly is a little fiddly but it's not that complex compared to some of the more modern techniques that are now prevalent. The LDD file attached should anyone want to recreate it. Cost: The Merchants House comes in at 204 pieces raw, approx. 240 once Minifigs and accessories have been included. It's 1986 equivalent would be the 6067 Guarded Inn, the nearest modern equivalent would be 7188 King's Carriage Ambush with an RRP of £36. It should be noted that although the Kings Carriage Ambush has a piece count of 286 the modern build techniques used tend to favour lots of smaller pieces rather than the use of large panels that was predominant in the late 80's so the big pieces used in the Merchants House balance out the larger number of pieces in the Kings Carriage Ambush. Consistency: I think it fits in well between my Maidens Tower and Castle Draco, hopefully that can be seen from the photo's. I don't have a large enough piece of white to sit the Fortified Inn alongside them but it should also match up. Conclusion I'm very happy with the design overall. Whilst in many respects it's just a big long bit of wall there's enough variation in depth , height and colour to stop it being monotonous. It has some storyline to it and it fits that unwritten criteria of being compatible with the rest of my late 80's castle collection. Ideally the barred doors would be dk-grey or black, unfortunately all I had available was bley and my budget can't stretch to sourcing the bars in dk-grey at the moment. Trying to put together a custom minifig was enjoyable but the Minifig collectors are pushing the cost of spare parts up compared with the cost of new or used bricks. I'll have to keep custom minifigs to a minimum in my builds, but then that's a rule that the Lego designers probably have to live with as well. Again please judge it against the boundaries that I've set for myself and would have been applied to retail sets of the era, rather than the insanely intricate detailing that you'll find in this forum's moc's. MerchantsHouse.lxf

Out of the dark And so I surface from another Dark Age relapse. I blame the missus, she bought me 8053 Mobile Crane for my Birthday and I spent two enjoyable evenings slowly building it up. It triggered something in me; Suddenly I had a hankering for castles. As a child I had a fairly mixed collection of Lego, lots of Technic, some City, quite a bit of a Space and I most certainly recall having 6080 King's Castle. Strangely I don't recall having much more than 6080, although I do recall visiting friends and re-building their siege engines for them. I my adult life I've developed more of an interest in medieval buildings and the construction techniques utilised within them so there was a natural urge to gravitate back towards castles. However, without a stack of bricks to play with (8053 provides a particularly unsuitable set of parts for building castles!), I'm left with little to do but trawling the net for ideas and firing up Lego Digital Designer that I'd recently found. Classic Castle Coming out of a dark age is a strange sensation. My memories, my thoughts about building castles are still stuck in the late 80's, but the world has moved on. Bley is new grey, there are BRUPs and LURPs and entire empires of Knights that I don't even recognise have risen and fallen with the passage of time. I spent a week tracking prices on eBay then put in sensible bids on a 6074 Castle Draco and a 6067 Guarded Inn. There's probably deep subconscious meaning to these purchases because they're sets that I don't recall having as a child. With age and hindsight I can now see that they are also some of the nicest classic castle sets that were produced. One thing that I liked about the early castle sets was how you could join all the bits together to make a bigger castle, or even a whole town or village encompassed by a wall. When Castle Draco and the Guarded Inn arrive I gleeful assemble them, like the excitable 10year old that I no longer am, only to find to my annoyance that I can't connect the two together and still make a complete enclosure. This is mildly frustrating but as a grown adult I will not throw a small tantrum; I will attempt to resolve the situation in a calm and considered way, which obviously means I need to buy more Lego! It's here that I take pause. I could easily go out and source something to bridge the gap, a 6061 Siege Tower or a 6062 Battering Ram with their articulated wall sections would start to fill the gap, although I can already see that individually neither of them on their own would be enough to properly complete the enclosure. What's needed is something of my own construction. I can build something that will fill the gap, or I could see if someone else has built something suitable and shamelessly copy what they've done. So I type Classic Lego Castle into Google and end up-on the Classic Castle forums. I'm shocked and saddened but at the same time utterly in awe, all within the space of about 5 minutes. The creations are beautiful, undoubtedly works of art in their own right, but they weren't what I'd call Classic Castle. They weren't creations that would fit seamlessly with the Lego castles that I loved from my youth; None of them would really clip in alongside my Guarded Inn. There is no right, there is no wrong, there's just what I want. What I want are pieces that I can slot in alongside my classic sets, just because nobody else is doing that sort of thing doesn't mean I can't... Rationale What I want is my own creations that will fit alongside the classic castle sets. Therefore I need to work to the same sort of rules that the Lego designers would have worked to. There's an article on Classic Castle that relates to what the designers went through in 2007 to create the relaunch of the modern Caste line. Story - Each set needs to have the ability to have it's own story constructed around it Playability - Sets need to be playable. To a certain extent this can trump reality, rooms that hands can put minifigs in are more important than accurate scale and/or making sure that every room has a door and that therer are stairs to reach the battlements. Little minds (or big ones for that matter) quickly fill in the irrelevant blanks to get on with important tasks of rescuing maidens, slaying dragons or stealing treasure. Build-ability - Sets need to be build-able. If I can't provide sensible instructions for my creations then they can't be built. As a rule of thumb I should probably be looking at one instruction step for every 15 bricks in the creation. Therefore a 300 brick model would have at most 20 instruction steps. Cost - All Lego sets are built to a budget. My Own Creations should try to fit the price bands that TLG aims for. As a rule of thumb the total cost of parts on BrickLink based on the BrickLink average should be the same as current sets cost. It's not an accurate measure, scarcity of parts on BrickLink pushes the price up, whereas the cost to TLG to produce a brick isn't constrained by it's rarity. Consistency - The creations should be of a design that makes them consistent with sets released in the mid to late 80's, the Lion and Black Falcon era's. There's one final rule that I'm constrained by that the Lego designers aren't necessarily constrained by; I can only use available pieces in available colours. One caveat being that I'm limited by my Consistency rule that I've mentioned above: Whilst I might be able to use the latest purple, pink and tan colours as highlights, Bley isn't going to mix too well with the classic sets. I approach this from the other direction, let's build something and hope I can retrofit a story to it. I still don't have any bricks to play with so all this happens within LDD whilst I catch the tube to work. I need a right angled piece of wall to complete my castle, so in go a couple of grey castle panels. to create a right angled wall. The intricate MOC'ers are probably already scoffing, 4444 castle panels! Who uses panels in the modern word, we've got SNOT. They intricate MOC'ers are right, but they are also wrong. In order to fulfill the Consistency criteria I need to use panels, but underlying that are also the Buildability and Cost criteria, which both drove the Lego designers to adopt panels in the first place. There's as much plastic in one 4444 panel as there is in three and a half 1x4 bricks and the panel covers twenty six 1x1 bricks worth of area whereas the 1x4's would cover only fourteen 1x1 bricks worth of area. More bulk for little weight and it's weight of plastic that is one of the primary drivers for Lego's costs. However a right angled wall on it's own fails the Story criteria, any story in a right angled wall is pure contrivance and children would much rather an obvious story to play with. So I add a tower. Does a tower give me a starting point for a story? Well things happen in and around towers; they can be used to imprison people, they can be used for defence. I decide to pursue the first story arc, I'll imprison someone in the tower! Who? Well the obvious person to imprison is a princess, they always seem to get locked in towers. The LDD selection of Minifigs is limited. The convention I've decided to adopt is to put minifigs into my LDD designs as "ghosts", ie all white. When I get to building them out of real bricks I'll select some appropriate Minifigs from what I have available. I assemble an all-white lady to go into my tower. Consistency; It's going to be sat alongside a Guarded Inn and the yellow half-timbered tower of Castle Draco. I want it to match these so I use the red half timbered corner pieces utilised in the Guarded Inn to create the tower and stick a tall pointy roof similar to that of Castle Draco on-top. For stability I rebuild the base with buttresses. The final LDD design is this and the .lxf file is attached to this posting if anyone wants to look at it in detail. Analysis Build-ability; the LDD instructions are awful, they seem to insist on starting at the middle and working outwards. I start again in LeoCAD in order to create some sensible instructions. Proof of the pudding is in using them to build the model and with the bricks sourced it goes together without any problems. Structurally it's quite stable and holds together well. When I accidentally knocked it off my desk it separated into two sections, the tower room and the wall, but those to sections remained intact. Playability; the tower room needs to be large enough for little hands to get the minifig inside and the tower needs to be stable enough that it won't fall over or collapse as a standalone model. It's a little fiddly to get the minifig into and out of the tower room, one re-design might be to create a removable roof to allow better access? With the princess now in the tower I need someone to guard her, so a knight goes onto the battlements. To complete the story-arc I need someone to rescue the princess, so onto a horse goes a heroic prince (alright, so he's all-white because of LDD's limitations, but it'll come right when I build it for real!). I build out the interior with a chair and dressing table. I also rebuild one wall to give a more solid appearance to the tower without detracting too much from being able to get minifigs in and out. Cost; at 178 pieces raw, approx. 200 once Minifigs and accessories have been included. It's 1986 equivalent would be 6061 Siege Tower, the modern equivalent would be 7948 Outpost Attack with an RRP of £21. Whilst a Bricklink inventory gives a measure of how much it costs to build now, it isn't a good reference of what it would have cost then because the red half timbered corners have an inflated cost due to their scarcity, additionally old-grey in good condition is becoming increasingly scare to find in any quantity. The set has a story arc, rescuing the princess. Would this story arc appeal to 6 year old boys more than siege engines? Probably a little too girly for their taste, but rescuing princesses is part of the medieval mythos and has been touched on by Lego as 7947 Prison Tower Rescue. Build-ability, it's build-able within 20 simple instruction steps. Consistency, it fits in nicely alongside Castle Draco and the Guarded Inn, one finale image shows the view from the window through towards the half timbered tower of Castle Draco and the corner of what will probably be the subject of my next posting... Conclusion Whilst it might not be the most elaborate of MOC's, it fits the boundaries that I tried to set for myself and should be judged against those rather than the insanely intricate detailing that you'll probably find in the adjacent posts. MaidensTower.lxf

Is there really enough spring in the two tubes to actually run the mechanics? If so then it's really quite a clever design.

Good review, it's caused me to rethink the series a bit but I still consider it to be all baseplates and BURPs, although I'll admit to having picked up a Majisto's Magical Workshop. The point about re-purposing many of the Majisto minifigs into peasants is interesting. Whilst they haven't changed the design significantly TLG have changed where the printing on the Magician minifig goes. Majisto has a belt and pouch printed onto the torso whilst the magician from 2010 Kingdoms advent calendar has the belt and pouch printed onto the legs.

The line won't flop, there's too much marketing behind The Hobbit movie for any associated merchandising to flop. You only have to see the apoplectic fits that people are getting into on the forums to know that it will do well. With two movies behind it parents will buy sets for their children, which is the market that TLG aim to capture. With two movies being released it's unlikely that we'll see a return to non-licensed castle theme for some years. When we do it's unlikely to be existing factions but entirely new ones that TLG dream up. SW keeps going as a theme because George Lucas is continually releasing new intellectual property around the franchise, ie. Clone Wars, which keeps it in the forefront of kids minds who pester their parents who buy Lego to keep them quiet. Harry Potter could have wave after wave because the movies kept coming out, now that they're done we'll probably see this line fade away within 12 months. Indianna Jones and PoTC both caught the last of 4 movies, if they'd been on-board (pun intended) by the 2nd movie then there would have many more waves of releases than there were, as it was they did a bit from the previous movies in the first wave and the current movies in the second wave. My suspicion being that the Lego Designers don't get to see the movie significantly earlier than the rest of us therefore they can't finalise the sets until the movie has been released. LOTR will keep going as long as the movies are in the cinemas then it will tail off. For non-licensed castle fans the doomsday scenario would be a kids cartoon of the Simarillion that rolls on for years and keeps the theme alive, flip-side is that for LOTR fans that would be perfect and would allow them to bulk out their hobbit armies. (If it comes to mass combat in the historic forums I'm backing the Black Falcon's they'll beat the Hobbits hands down! Yellow smiley faces and dark grey swords beat fleshy shortness anyday ;-) )

I don't mean to rain on anyones parade but the amount of hypebole associated with the LOTR announcement is getting silly. Just because posable legs have been done with a bear it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be done with a horse. It all comes down to the budget that the designers have available to them, it doesn't necessarily stand to reason that they'll develop new moulds for horses. My suspicion is that a large proportion of their budget will have been spent on the minifigs given the sizeable variety of them in the LOTR theme. Studying the leaked photo's fairly carefully shows nothing new in the construction of the sets, someone counting the bricks could easily assemble them if they tried hard enough. Most of discussions on the forums are pure speculation based on the computer generated posters (or computer manipulated photo's) that Lego have released, naybe some of the minifigs will come with new props but, again, just because it's in some computer generated image doesn't mean it will be available in ABS. A little calm would be appreciated in the non-LOTR threads. Back on topic, I managed to pick up a MVR half price in my local North West London toyshop, which restores some of the karma for having to pay slightly over the RRP for an MVR, a Tower Rescue and some Blacksmiths Attacks a fortnight ago as the obvious stockists dried up. They have a reasonable stock of Carriage Rescues and Blacksmith Attacks at RRP which I might have to go back for at some point. I also notice that on S@H if you enter 10193 into search bar it still save MMV is in stock (UK at least), I wonder if this is because there is a different end-of-line mechanism for the exclusive sets of which MMV is.

Like ihira I've just come out of a fairly prolonged dark period. If I total up what I've spent on old sets in the past few months and extrapolate that out to a whole year, factor in the exchange rate and $15,000 isn't too far of the mark. I've since told myself I really must slow down, but there's this urge to accumulate as much old grey as possible before it's all gone. The advantage of being an AFOL is that you have the money to do that sort of thing, this disadvantage of being an AFOL is the complaints for the other-half...