Derfel Cadarn

It can be, my point is that the crystal part is the main part, so I was saying that you should all make that part the most stand out part. The challenge description stated that you need to build a scene depicting the crystal being discovered in a hidden place guarded by something. Some people are choosing to do it by way of a few different scenes which is fine, just remember that the most important scene is the place where the crystal is hidden and it's guardian. I'm just advising people not to spend weeks on a house where their adventurer lives and then spend only a couple of hours on the crystal scene.

I word of advice to those choosing to build various scenes for challenge 3. Don't go to over the top on different builds as the main scene should be the temple/tomb or whatever you choose where the crystal rests and its guardian. This is the main scene of what the challenge is about, so remember that. If you are building different scenes, remember to post them all in ONE thread, as they will be judged as one and voted for as one.

Nice ship, reminds me a lot of a ship by Perfectionist, I see he has been an influence. The stern looks very nice and the color scheme works rather well. Great effort I look forward to seeing your next ship

Thanks for your comments, I hope to try and build more different things like this.

Beautiful build Beerbeard you created a very recognizable style with you particular use of plants and landscaping. Very vibrant and really feels like a celebration is under way. I really love all the many great details you have crammed into this. Your another builder who is going to have a great selection of mocs to view in the index. Good work in building up your land, keep it up!!

A big welcome to our newest members, good to see you settling in and working on your ideas I really like the logo guys my only small concern was that it is too green, maybe change the color of the lettering so it stands out more and doesn't get lost into the background. I look forward to seeing the new version of the map. Just a reminder to Jason that my tower of Sorviodunum is located in the isle of Ynys Wydryn. I have some more mocs on the way that are based in the Mystic Isles. There will soon be more small in-guild challenges on there way with some prizes. I am looking at getting some parts packages together with lots of useful parts for moccing. These should make some handy prizes I have an announcement regarding the scoring for the latest challenge. We will be scoring all your entries as usual so we can award the points to each guild, BUT, to win the big prize of The Kingdoms Joust, there will be a public vote like other EB competitions. So everyone will have 5 points which they can vote and distribute among the entries they like and the person with the highest votes will win. So if you want to win The Joust, it's not about impressing the guild leaders, you'll have to impress everyone I think this is a much fairer way of doing things for prizes. So it will run like any other normal competition here on EB. Good luck guildsmen!

Join Avalonia then!

Dr. Come - because I wasn't paying attention to the sentence I was writing and well... the Dr. Came

That's a great building! You have certainly improved. Nice to see that you have attempted a more difficult shape then a standard square. Tackling angles in building is a good way to improve and find out what works and what doesn't. This is a great effort and has many nice details. Well done on the roof work. Keep up this good work

Ahh mushrooms, Happy days these look really great and stand out well. It's always good to see people coming up with new plant additions. You know I'm expecting a good fun scene with these from you now! I'm sure somewhere in Avalonia there is a guy growing and selling these...for medicinal purposes of course Avalonia will be riding into battle totally wasted now

The story is very good and the horse is stunning. I'm becoming a big fan of these type of mocs after seeing the great work of Siercon & Coral. Really great work on the horse and it's surroundings, it looks spot on. I look forward to seeing what you come up with in round 3! Great work!

Looking good de Gothia! Nice to see you continue to try out interiors It has a great look and feel to it, the busy scene round the tables is nice as well as the arches and fireplace. The floor does work, but I think it's become a standard of interior scenes to have tiled patterned floors. If you do not have enough tiles you can also use a snot technique. The table takes up most of the floor, so you could do a nice pattern around the outside with just some gray tiles in te middle where the table goes. That's a small nit pick though and this is a great all round moc!

I do understand many of the problems people face here. Time is a big factor. I would love to comment on every moc, but it takes an awful lot of time to closely look through every moc so I can give a good comment. I think time is a big factor for many here, as I myself am currently in a very busy period at work, and the only free time I have has gone on building. A lot of people are the same. Most of us have come down to just commenting on our guilds mocs, but even this can be time consuming, especially in this guild where there is large amount of great mocs posted. Some members here do have quite a bit of free time and so they are the ones who regularly comment on many mocs. It's not that we don't like your mocs Mr Beard, infact I do rate you as a great builder who is improving with every build. If I have the time I will always comment. But like Z has said, you are a very outspoken guy and some members can get put off by that. When the Guilds were first set up, it was Mitgardia that had most people worried as they had a great selection of builders. Avalonia had many builders that I didn't know and were new, but as it turned out they have turned into a great bunch of builders who have produced some seriously good stuff. When a challenge comes up I know that this guild has plenty of members who are more than a match for the bet of the other guilds. Some people may have mentioned that My builds have helped out are guild a lot, but that's not the case. I built a entry for the Embassy challenge, but it was left out of the judging and wasn't entered. So you guys don't need my help, you one that round yourselves with a bunch of great entry's. So you guys rock hard! I know there is always improvement to be had in the guilds. When we set this up, we wereso eager to get it up and running that we didn't think in advance over a few things. So naturally, things are getting sorted and more efficient as we go along. I know some of you are not happy with the judging. Its four people with different opinions and different things they look for. It works, but I have often thought about public voting. The problem is, every moc from every guild has to be scored. So doing a public vote is difficult, as how can we depend on every member voting? Plus what about the mocs that arn't voted for? How would they be scored then? So a panel of four judges is the best idea as we all put the time in to score every single moc. However, I understand you guys all want and need to know what's what with how we score your builds. I will publish all your embassy scores tomorrow, and when challenge 3 is over, I will publish those. You can then all see how you scored in each department so you know where you need to improve. In the mean time, there's plenty of time to build for the latest challenge and there's a great prize up for grabs. I'd be very pleased if one of you guys takes that prize!! Everyone here has been improving with every build, look at the index and see for yourselves. We can all work together on making this guild run better, so keep posting your ideas. There's lots we can do to make our guild stand out. A really great fantasy style Avalonia banner would be good, something I can put at the top of the front page and use for a flickr group.

Hey there, Just messing around with a a little character to sit on my Lego desk. I havn't really tryed anything like this before, as I usually just build castle The main challenge here was to build a small pumpkin using only parts from my very limited orange supply. I could have just ordered everything I needed from Bricklink, but then there would be no challenge! Thats why its a mixture of orange and trans-orange. I think it kind of worked He was happy standing on my desk for all of half an hour until the cat gave him the paw!!! Thanks for viewing DC

Greetings guildsmen! Firstly, sorry to hear that some of you have had losses recently, i can imagine its been a rough time, very sorry to hear it. As you guys know, the latest challenge is underway and we have a great prize on offer in The Kingdom's Joust set. Some of you have mentioned building a few scenes separately. This is fine, but they need to be posted together in one thread, as they will be judged as a whole. It's time for some input from you guys. Avalonia has grown into a great guild an we have IMO some of the very best castle builders. What I would like to know is how we could improve our guild and make it even better. If any of you have any interesting ideas of things you would like to do or add to make our guild a better place than feel free to share your ideas. Are there any systems you would like to see put in place? Would anyone like to have special jobs to help the guild run better? Any suggestions and ideas just let me know.

Beautiful shot Angeli!!!!

It can be difficult when photographing large mocs, as its often hard to see the details at first glance. Take my recent village for example, the final main pic didnt look as good as the close up shots, you really couldn't appreciate the details untill you looked at the other shots. I used to build large mocs quite a lot when I started out as I thought you needed to build big to make an impact. I think the trick is with large mocs is to create something that really doesn't look like Lego, so that people are naturally drawn to it to see what it really is. I think you have some great creative fantasy mocs, in fact, you have your own niche and style that is instantly recognizable and deffinitly blog worthy. Being blogged is always nice, and naturally people want to get blogged on TBB as its the best and most well known blog that everyone checks. The problem lies in the fact that there are so many great mocs uploaded every day that only a few can be blogged. These are the ones that are unique and really stand out. Weather it be a great new technique or a good use of a rare color, or a moc that is just simply outstanding. Current popular trends are also good points that can get you blogged. For example, when I built my Skyrim moc, it had a new round tower technique and it was based on a very popular game, so it was a good moc for them to blog as it would attract attention, it also was picked up by quite a few Gamer blogs who normally wouldn't blog Lego, but because it was Skyrim it appealed to people. Obviously TBB can't only post castle mocs, they have to blog all themes of Lego, so this means that it can be even harder to get a castle moc featured as there are so many. It does help to be a member of a lot of groups on Flickr, and also have a lot of contacts who are bloggers. That way, your moc will be seen by someone if you add pictures to as many groups as possible. I think you could try doing a smaller build and really go for a detailed scene that really jumps out at people. I have been lucky to be blogged quite a few times by TBB, mainly due to the fact that I put out a lot of mocs and I am quite well known as a castle builder, so naturally If I do something that really stands out, it gets picked up on. I think the only reason that they blogged my Nocturnus moc is simply because it had that turquoise roof which was different and made the moc stand out. If I had just had a normal brown roof it probably wouldn't have been blogged. So really its a case of constantly building and getting your work out there, you will eventually build a moc that just 'nails' it and you will get blogged. Don't get caught up with deliberatly 'trying' to get blogged, thats not what buildings about, plus bugging them to blog you won't do you any favours. Just keep doing what you are doing and keep putting your mocs out there as much as you can. Make sure you add mocs to as many groups as you can and build up your contacts on flickr too. There are hundreds of builders who have built fantasic mocs on Flickr and mocpages, but just havn't been noticed because they are not really pushing there mocs out to a wider audience. Don't be detered just because you havn't been blogged, you have some great builds and like I said, keep building and putting your stuff out there and you will be picked up on

Had to be the biggest - I didn't intend for mine to be the biggest...it just turned out that way!

@Beerbeard, looking good, I like the different colored buildings, a nice change from the usual color builds we get here. Looking forward to seeing you Wizard scene. Well once this challenge is complete, then we will continue the story on saying that the Crystal has been found from each realm. We won't pick on a specific person and say they found it. So it will be left open so that everyone can feel that they found the Crystal. But no-one will ever know who really found it Thats the way will will run with it. We do have to change the challenge like this every now and then, otherwise it will get stale if we kept saying ' build a farm' or 'build a castle' etc.

The mocs will still exist, In everyones mind you will have each found the Crystal. When we continue the story on we will just say that the Crystal has been found in each realm, we won't pick a specific person and say they found it. It will be remembered that all in Historica went looking for the Crystal, but the High King decided to keep it a secret about who really found it, to protect them from a possible evil backlash. So don't worry, your moc will be the main version of how the Crystal was found, and everyone elses moc will also be as well. If you get what im saying We have to occasionally change the type of challenges, as otherwise it would get very dull if every challenge was 'build a farm', 'build a castle', 'build a cottage' etc.

Yes those ideas could work, the story line we have currently started is going to be like a complete story, in that it will have an end and then we will move on to a new story. So they will all be chapters in Historica's history. Like you say, in time it will become Legend and will be talked about by Historica's children's children's children etc. But don't forget that these four crystals are just the key that will unlock the shrine which holds Historica's first and most revered treasure. This will be the symbol of Historica, as we wanted something that could be a recognizable symbol for the GOH project. So we can create a cool GOH logo that features this. A bit like how The legend of Zelda has the Tri-force, or the Arthur Legend has the Holy Grail etc. Maybe once the first form of GOH has run its course, then maybe we can have a change around set 100 years later where there are knew rulers and kings. Then we can bring up these old legends and the new leaders and people will speak and tell the tales of the mighty Dex Flagg, Artorious etc. Who knows, but it maybe good to change leaders every year. This would allow new people to be leaders and members can try out different guilds. But I have been thinking about maybe having a 5th and 6th guild, I'm thinking definitely a water guild who live in underwater temples (think a sort of cross between Greek and Atlantis), and maybe a sky/top of the world, maybe who live at the top of the highest mountain or a supernatural guild who are all ghosts/the undead, something unique like that. They are ideas that I played about with originally. So who knows. I expect that after a year will will probably have a member change, where members can switch guilds if they wish and try building in another guild. I think this could benefit the lands as the there will be a bit of everyone's style when you look at the buildings in each land. It would be a shame to scrap the lands we have all been building up as we already have four lands that really feel alive in their own style when you look at all the mocs. So yes, maybe some new guilds down the line to add to the mix. But thats for the future, for now, we have a pretty interesting story unfolding! Btw, did anyone notice the name of the historian in the story?

Thanks for the comments guys. You have to remember he is only young, 25, so he isn't scarred and grizzled. Don't be fooled, this guy is a wild youngster who knows how to lead, fight and party hard! On a battlefield he's a badass! Build a wizard moc, a his enchanted domain etc, and you can have your title Yes that is de Gothia. Yours was the only sig fig I had made up and I was rushed to get this moc finished in time so I didn't have time to build everyone elses. However I plan to build more rooms like this as I am building Artorious's main living quarters, so I plan to feature everyone's figs.

Hey guys, just adding this here so it can be indexed. It was built as a scene for the lead up to challenge 3. As you have probably noticed, I am not one who builds interiors, but that is something I hope to work on this year, so this was an enjoyable challenge. I am always trying to improve and want to try new things, which is why I have been avoiding my 1x1 round technique this year, I have used it many times and I will use it again, but at the moment I am enjoying trying out different approaches. The first attempt at a throne room ended up looking more like the inside of a cottage, due to the fact that I thought there should be lots of timber sections. But then I realized that Avalonia's great hall's in Albion would also be mighty stone structures as well, so I changed it and this is what it became. At least it looks like its in a great hall now. The dragon heads and scaled necks that surround the throne were added in last, as I felt I needed something that symbolized Avalonia's connection to dragon's and the 'Dragon Flight'. Thats all the pics I took, but I hope to build more rooms from Artorious's Great hall's. Thanks for viewing. DC

Great little moc I like the rock face and the cart on the rails is nicely done. Great scene

Of course you can use your own sigfig. Like I said, its each your own interpretation of how the crystal is found. Once they round is over we will then continue the story saying that the four crystals have all been found, and so move forward with the story. You might use your own sigfig and have him as the one finding the crystal, someone else might also use their sigfig as the character who finds the crystal and so might someone else and so on. It doesn't really matter, just that each member has a go at building the scene with the discovery of your guilds crystal.