Sandy

Heh, finally! It looks great, we make quite a crowd here. The backdrop is nice too, and certainly different from last years City-layout. Do you happen to have a larger version to better view the details on the picture?

I have already built everything I need for the next chapter, I just need to find the time to photoshoot it. Hogwarts Mafia really drained all my "LEGO-time" this summer, so QQ was on a short hiatus. But you can look forward to Chapter Five later this month, I reckon. Uh, I've read them before, I just forgot they were placed here...

Haha, you could've at least notified me the interview was up, Zeph! I didn't think of looking for it here before now. Thanks for the lovely (and beachy) presentation. And I also want to apologize Shadows for not praising him, I just wasn't in the mood for butt-kissing. Svelte, I don't actually keep my sets intact for very long, but dismantle them for pieces to use in my MOCs. So my cabinet is emptied cyclically, for example now all the Hogwarts Mafia MOCs have been taken down. Captain Becker, my taste in LEGO is versatile, I go with whatever looks good and has useful minifigs in it. Harry Potter and Castle are my two favorite themes, however. The "Imperial Armada" ship is actually this, by the way.

You might find this article over on Classic-castle.com most informative. http://www.classic-castle.com/howto/articles/brickbeastsfantasy.html

Haha, what a great mix-up! You found good equivalents to all important characters (well, except Professor McGonagall). I especially love Hedwig Deetoo. It looks like you forgot to change Draco/Tarkin's name, though. And Chewbagrid should definitely have his beard on backwards to make him more hairy.

First I cut out the figure from the original photo. Then I changed the "color balance" by pulling the "blue" and "teal" meters all the way, and "green" part way. Then I copied it into the background photo, changing the size and angle appropriately, and adjusted the opacity to about 65-75% to make the figure see-through. Finally I splashed some very opaque light blue "paint" on it to give it some glow, even though there are other tools you can use to achieve this. Hope I could help!

I apologize, I indeed did miss them. For the first question, I don't think I have a good answer, but I think it's mostly thanks to the great variety of pieces I have in my collection - quality over quantity is my collecting philosophy. Like you said, the actual builds are quite simple, but the details I put into them with the special pieces make them look more intricate. As for help in photographing, you of course should leave the buildings roofless and with just one or two walls, with possibly some archways to "peek through". Length and width don't matter much if you want close-up shots, but for big group shots you definitely need a tall and wide backdrop (that's why I used the Great Hall in most of the group scenes). Hope this helped!

I would've actually used this Mime's head instead of the female one: With white hands, of course.

My secret ingredient: blu-tack. And some photo-editing to conceal the connection.

Strictly? Yeah right. Every game I've ever participated here has had some level of metagaming. Metagaming (ie. making assumptions based on previous games, if I've understood it correctly) is actually quite a harmless phenomenon. It is however true that certain people tend to stick to certain recognizable playstyles and behave a certain way, and I see no harm in pointing out those. Likewise, there's much to be learned from past games that can be used in order to find out how the current game could work. What threw people off in Hogwarts Mafia was the fact that it really wasn't anything like the previous games. You couldn't say someone was just "a blocker" or "a protector", since they often had a few other night actions besides those as well. Besides, if Shadows gets killed because he's been a snake in previous games, it only serves him right. I was glad to see he was less of a snake in Hogwarts Mafia, but merely a worm, slowly eating his way into people's minds.

I love the backdrop in the painting, but the minifig could've been better. I don't know if all of you know this, but this painting was stolen from a museum a few years ago. I hope it will be one day recovered, since it's such an influential and striking piece of art.

The shops in Finland usually have had LEGO Advent Calendars in stock from October to December. I've always found loads of them from big stores like Anttila and Citymarket. I'm definitely getting this the first chance I get!

I know, I was shocked too, but that's what I got as a result from the drawing of lots. I assure you the process was completely random. I didn't feel it would be fair to redraw the lots just because four out of the five had been scum before. But I did plan that the majority of the Death's Hallowed would be from the faculty, to make the game more challenging. As another weird coincidence, all the faculty scums were alphabetically on the top of the characters list (Brigelda, Crudo, Eloquence, Jingle), even though I came up with their names in a random order.

I'm honestly not sure myself. I should've just left it out, but I guess I kept it because it suited your character.

Most of the Castle-theme's female torsos work for Western as well, in my opinion. Like these, for example: The Pirates offer good, if fewer, options, too: With some modding, you can get good Western torsos out of these ones from the Paradisa-theme as well: And Harry Potter-theme has these choices, if you don't mind their little eccentricity: Even the Spiderman-theme offers one good choice: Hope this helped!

Remember that the events in the game took place twenty years after the seventh book, so Harry was 37 in Hogwarts Mafia.

I really don't think I personally will ever make another Hogwarts Mafia, since the story I wanted to tell has pretty much been told. If I get a chance to host another Mafia-game sometime, I want to try something new again. But who knows, someone else might return to the Harry Potter -theme one day. First of all, like Matn said, this was a kind of a fanfic, so I could do whatever I wanted with the NPCs. Secondly, his death wasn't about one of those "who is stronger, Superman or Batman" contests. This was the bad ending where the bad guys won, and Harry Potter - no matter how legendary he had become - was unable to stop them. To me it was only appropriate that he died so effortlessly, just like anyone of us could. Plus, he was getting old and pudgy. I even killed off Minerva McGonagall, my "alter-ego" for this game, the same way, and I've always liked her way more than Harry Potter as a character, and on the contrary I saved Hermione, who I've always felt sort of indifferent about (especially the movie portrayal of her), so this wasn't about playing favorites either. But just think what the ending would've been if I'd saved them? Or made the NPCs save Hogwarts even though the players couldn't? Would the ending have been nearly as strong or emotional then?

Yeah, just like it. I read it about a year ago as well, and I've got to say it's probably the best detective fiction novel I've ever read.

This really is a wonderful reconstruction of the upcoming set, and the fact that so many people thought it was the real deal only emphasizes how great it is. The building itself is superb, and makes me lust for the new Hogwarts even more. I have to ask you, though, why didn't you make your own Flitwick for the set, and instead included Ron and Draco? Do you have something against the teacher of Charms, huh?

I think they're perfect to portray a gothic chick, or a sort of "sci-fi witch", or a heavy metal singer like Amy Lee... It's really not hard to think of good uses for this awesome fig.

Sorry, I didn't see your question before. I'm sorry to say that the MOCs have already been dismantled. There's not much else to show than what can be seen in the photos, though. All the MOCs were just "backdrops" with no roof or even side walls in most cases. I also reused a couple of the rooms several times, just adding new furniture and decorations (eg. the DADA class, the library and the Hospital Wing were all built on the same basic structure). I had much fun building the MOCs, but I've got to admit that I've gotten enough of Hogwarts for the time being. I crave to build something else for a change!

All the people that you managed to steal items from only had one item. I would've probably drawn lots if they would've had several. I drew lots for Cuddles and the Dementors, and they all had 1/4 chance of killing someone each night unless blocked. In Cuddles' case it could target everybody except Brandon (who died as soon as he'd unleashed the monster), but the Dementors could only target innocents, so the Death's Hallowed and the impartials were safe from them. As for the subtitles, I noticed that I'd actually made them only up to Day Eleven, which would've had the subtitle of "At the Eleventh Hour". Day Ten would've had either "Power of Ten" or "And Then There Were Ten". Twelve would've probably have something to do with "midnight", I guess. Thanks for asking!

Thank you for the compliments, all of you. The truth is that I would not have been so dedicated to this game if you guys hadn't made it all worthwhile. As for the planning, I had ample time since I pitched this game about a year ago, and only got around to hosting it this June. I had all the night actions and characters ready, and my fellow Fellows helped me tweak the balance into place. I'd like to share with you some of the choices I made for this game for future's sake. I don't want all subsequent Mafia-games to try to imitate Hogwarts Mafia, since the original format is far less complex and risky, but I'd like to give the future hosts something to think about when they plan for their games. Characters & Roles As you might have noticed, I took an unconventional route of creating characters with specific roles, instead of randomly drawing roles for the characters. That made them more deep and personified, with their background stories linking to their abilities, but it was also very risky, because in this game you could actually deduce somebody's role from their looks (eg. the teacher of Divination really was the investigator, the janitor could open locks etc.). I had the advantage that most veteran players had already been used to characters and roles having nothing to do with each other in past Mafia-games, so I wasn't too worried. It was fun to watch people's line of thoughts when it came to roles, like when someone suggested that maybe the Death's Hallowed consisted of one person from each house, or that Slytherin students were more likely to be scum (even though none of them were). I deliberately made most of the Death's Hallowed belong to the faculty for several reasons: to get experienced scums, to make more sense to the background story, and just to throw you guys off. The faculty members had more powerful night actions (and more of them, too) than the students, since I didn't want to overwhelm the newer players I chose to play the student characters. That's also why I restricted Valerie's conversion skill so that it could only be used on other students. I also wanted to test if Mafia-games would work with the whopping amount of 24 players, and even though there were two replacements during the process, I think it worked out quite fine. Adding the NPCs, the pictures were sometimes quite crowded, though. There was also an equal amount of male and female characters in the game, which is something I can recommend to all future hosts if only your minifig collection allows it. Night Actions & Inheritance I have to say, balancing out the night actions really was the hardest part of the planning, since I couldn't know for sure if they were balanced enough until I saw how they were used in the game. There certainly were some totally useless actions (like the Rictusempra tickling spell that even I couldn't figure out what it would do), and many good actions were lost before they could be used because the character was killed or voted out (like the Unleash Monster skill that only introduced us to Cuddles, but could've potentially give us a whole army of different monsters). Then there was the case of the ghost investigator. I knew I wanted a ghost into the game since they were such a prominent part of Hogwarts in the HP-books, and I also needed to give the innocents a fighting chance in case their only investigator was killed off early (even though there were also Veritaserums, Crucio-spells, Foe-glasses and Spectrespecs that all had an investigatory function in the game). I admit that if iamded hadn't blurted out his role after becoming a ghost, the scums would've had a much harder time trying to stay hidden, and even though they knew of iamded's role, they still had to block him every night. That's why I balanced the odds by removing the Dementor's 1/4 chance to kill someone each night (I was also confused as to why two of the four people who had the Expecto Patronum spell never used it). As far the inheritance of night actions went, early on I decided that only the Avada Kedavra -spell would be inherited within the Death's Hallowed should the original killer be out of the game. But there were many important items I wanted to keep in play, so I made the rule that the Avada Kedavra killer would get all the items his victim's possessed, while those who would be voted would get their most important items passed on to a character from the same alliance and House as them (or in faculty's case to one of their colleagues). That's why Angela's items were given to Xander, Bulltoad's to Loki etc. Winning Criteria Since there was some confusion to this, I have to make clear that all impartials had the same criteria of winning: they had to be alive when either side won. All the talk about Brandon having to kill everybody or Nene having to kill Jolie was made up by the players themselves. Also, there was a secret, admittedly a very difficult way for the innocents to win the whole game. They would have to get Jolie to steal the Sealed Box from Brigelda Hearth, know that Bulltoad had the Sealed Chest, make Oraman (or someone else with the same spell) to open both "sealed" items with Alohomora to reveal the Basilisk's Fang and the horcrux Grimoire, and use the fang to destroy the book, and the Death's Hallowed would instantly lose no matter how many of them were left. So all these skills had a purpose, I just wanted to test if any of you could figure them out. It turned out you couldn't. But I liked the idea that there would be an optional, unconventional way to win a Mafia-game. This is also something future hosts can take into consideration, I think. -------- If you have any more questions about this game, please let me know.

Thank you for reviewing this set, it's truly an outstanding one that caters the needs of all Castle-fans. As a fan of minifigs, I have to comment on the few mistakes you made in the descriptions. First of all, the royal woman is supposed to be a queen, not a princess (she's older and has a throne, after all). Secondly, your "page" is either a prince or a lord, why else would he be wearing those royal robes? Also, you called one of the soldiers a "crownie", and the wizard's head is a Kingdoms-exclusive that he shares with the Lion Knight's king (the white-bearded Viking head is similar, but different). Now that I got that out of my chest, I have to say that aside from those mistakes, your review was thorough and versatile, so great job!

Thanks for the compliments, Jimbee! I can post everybody's list of actions tomorrow, now I need to get to sleep. You can of course share everything I PM'ed to you during the game now that it's over. Here's a list of all the 49 different items, skills and spells (I just remembered writing it down once): 1. Alohomora 2. Amortentia 3. Anti-Magic 4. Avada Kedavra 5. Basilisk’s Fang 6. Bezoar 7. Brew Potion 8. Broomstick 9. Clumsiness 10. Confundo 11. Convert 12. Crucio 13. Disapparition 14. Elf Magic 15. Expecto Patronum 16. Expelliarmus 17. Felix Felicis 18. Foe-glass 19. Full Moon 20. Grimoire 21. Grow Mandrake 22. Haze 23. Imperio 24. Invisibility Cloak 25. Learn Spell 26. Legilimens 27. Lingering Spirit 28. Mandrake 29. Phoenix Plume 30. Petrificus Totalus 31. Poison 32. Polyjuice 33. Protego 34. Rictusempra 35. Scarf 36. Sealed Box 37. Sealed Chest 38. Sectumsempra 39. Spectrespecs 40. Spellbook 41. Steal Item 42. Stupefy 43. Sword of Gryffindor 44. Tampered Foe-glass 45. Teach Spell 46. Time-Turner 47. Unleash Dementor 48. Unleash Monster 49. Veritaserum Remember that several roles shared most of the spells and some of the items. As for their effects, you'll just have to wait and see...