Derfel Cadarn

I must say I'm really impressed at how Albion is growing. I know things are a bit slow at the moment, but it's only the start of the new year, and people often have phases of building where they build loads then stop for a few weeks, and so on. That's why the Albion build has no time limits so we can dip in and out when we feel like it. I know people are also trying to build their own towns as well, plus the main challenges, so there is lots to juggle around. Well done to everyone so far, some really great builds have been produced for this so far, with lots more to come. If we ever do fill up all the spaces, then perhaps we could look into building two smaller cities in the Enchanted Woods and Mystic Isles, each with their own unique style that's different from Albion. Thats A long way off though, so let's see how Albion turns out, so far so good!

The results will be posted soon, they have taken a while, my fault, I was late to post my scores, been very busy. However, my hectic work schedule has ended and it's back to normal for me now. I have started work on the Embassy and testing some designs for the Great Keep of Albion. I have really enjoyed watching everyone build up our land with great mocs and I also plan to build a lot of mocs for Avalonia now as well. I'm quite keen to look into the Mystic Isle area, as I think it has been untouched up to now and has a lot of potential to be a very unique area of our land, I'm thinking a haunted and mysterious vibe! This year will be a tough one in Historica, a darkness lurks on the horizon and we could be in for a rough ride. It's up to us as proud Avalonians to rise to any challenge! We have shown we are very consistent with our builds and everyone has been getting better with every build, so keep it up. The list of builds on our first page is very impressive and we certainly have the largest established land. Let's make Avalonia the Jewel of Historia!

Really amazing work Sirens! So clear and well presented(somethingthing which I really need to work on this year). Really love the bridge, great angles and well fitted into the landscape. The building is also very nicely done with a very pleasing color combination. So much to like here!

You Rock, with that rock! Nice to see you building again mate. The rock itself is very nicely done, you have made a great shape with those techniques. The building and interior have so many great details, too many to mention. Really liking this!

Excellent work de Gothia, I will check outthe thread when I get some time in the next few days. @Beerbeard, those hair pieces look great, there are deffinitly some interesting pieces and colors in those new Friends sets. @Captain Blackmoor, great pic, very inspirational and the sort of pic I like to sometimes build from. I look forward to seeing this! The realitys of life have taken over this week and I have been very busy with work and had no spare time, so I have not been able to be as active on here as I would like. I hope to get back into the swing of things at the weekend. I have been very impressesed by all the great effort you guys put into this guild last year and I've already seen a lot of you really advancing in your builds and producing some excellent builds! We shall soon be announcing the top 5 towers from each guild, as well as 5 free builds that I chose. I will get back to business at the weekend and now that I have finished the village I can start building various mocs for our guild. Thanks all, and keep up your great efforts!

Excellent work guildsmen! Ive been seeing some great mocs posted over the last few weeks I have noticed that many of you are now planning your own mini-maps for your areas of land and linking you mocs to it. This is a great idea and im pleased to see you are flushing out your own stories and legends of your areas. Its great to know that Avalonia will have many interesting areas, each with their own smaller maps and stories. Great work! The last week has been a busy time for many of us, but im hoping to get back to building when New years is over. I have updated the first page, if I have missed anything just let me know. Keep up your great work!

This is looking really good! You have done a great job creating a natural feel to the land and the details and landscaping are very nicely done. Im glad to see that my guide has given you some inspiration which you have built on and add your own touch! Well done, I look forward to seeing more of your mocs

Another great build, very nicely put together with good use of those techniques. Its great to see you are building up a back story to your characters, it helps to bring our land to life. Nice work!

Hi there I have covered the techniques for building these houses earlier in the guide, so I will not show a step by step for the remaining houses as they can all be built in the same way. For this Blacksmith, you can see that it is merely a standard cottage with an outside chimney and overhanging roof on the side to create the Blacksmith's workplace. As you can see, the sloping roof is just some large plates attached to some 1x2 hinge plates that are built into the wall of the building. The chimney is all built with the 1x1 round plate technique and I have added a few 'flame' pieces in the chimney for effect. In these pictures, you can see the start of a shop. As you can see, it is all built the same way as the other houses, the only difference being the stands and display shelves of the shop. These are just some plates with tiles on and the shelves are built using log effect bricks with jumper plates used to attach the potions and cups. The toothplates are attached to a long plate which is connected to a 1x1 brick with a stud. The toothplates are used to create the effect of colored pelmets. In the next picture you can see the completed house. Once the actual 'shop' section is built in place, the rest is pretty much a case of building an ordinary house around it. One thing to note here is that I have used the CM Series 4 Musketeer legs as eaves. Mini-fig legs make great eaves due to thier shape, plus there are lots of colors and interesting designs of mini-fig legs that add a great effect. I chose the Musketeer legs for this reason, as they have a brown triangle print on them that gives a nice subtle effect. Next we have to place the house roughly in posistion on the moc. Then once you are happy with the placement of the house, attach a jumper plate to a corner of the house which acts as an anchor point. Then its a case of finding the right placement of a jumper plate at the opposite corner of the house, so that the house can connect to both. You don't have to use jumper plates to set houses at an angle though. You can also attach a 2x2 turntable plate underneath the center of your house which allows it to turn to any angle you want it. Either way you chose, you must fill in the rest of the area underneath the house with tiles so its all sitting level. In this next picture, I have placed the tiles underneath the rest of the house, but have also started to place them in front of the house as well. I use dark gray tiles arround the front of the house as they form part of the street/paths. The rest of the house is sitting on brown and green tiles which tone in with the rest of the landscape. Next I have started to fill in around the dark gray tiles with brown plates. We have to imagine that originally the whole center of the village was once all stone streets, but over time and busy use, the stones have broken and have been overgrown and churned up with mud. Now we need to build the village Well, which we use to make a center feature. Round structures can be trick to make with 1x1 round plates, but this way works very well. This is built by using 8 1x2 dark gray hinge plates, four at the top and for at the bottom. In between we place some walls of 1x1 round plates. Make sure that the hinges at the bottom are attached to overlap the way that the top hinges are attached. All shown in the picture below. Next, once you are happy with the placement of your Well, you can attach a 1x2 plate at the bottom of one of the hinges for it to sit on and hold it in place, then fill the rest of the area with tiles like in the picture below. Note how I have again loosly broken the tiles up as they go further outwards. As you can see in the next picture, I have added more brown plates in and around the tiles, leaving a few tiles dotted about to show where parts of the main path used to be. Now we need to fill in those gaps that are left between the walls of 1x1 rounds. This is where all those old broken parts of Lego come in. After many years of collecting Lego and buying bulk lots on Ebay, its not uncommon to end up with broken Lego pieces over the years, particularly weapons. In this case, I have a bag of spears, axes, lances and other pieces that are all broken. Rather than throw them away, you can get a pair of clippers and cut them to an exact size. This is what I have done here. As you can see in this next picture, I have placed the broken parts in the gaps, then placed a thin Lego black rubber band around the whole Well which holds them all in place. The rubber band tones in well and the the broken parts really round off the structure and give it a pleasing round look. I have then added some dark gray tiles on top and also two jumper plates oppisite each other. Next I have placed two 1x1 round cones on the jumper plates and then placed two brown 'turning levers'(not sure what the piece is called) into the top of each one. I have also added a few dark trans blue tiles in the bottom of the Well. Finally, I have used some brown string to tie a bucket onto a 1x6 brown pole which slots in between both levers for the finished effect. In the next picture you can see the whole effect of the tiles and brown plates which show how the streetslpaths have been broken and covered by mud over time. You can also add other colors like dark tan, tan and sand green for other effects such as hay and moss. Its entirely up to you. I have also added a few sections of stone wall to give some rough outline of the main entrance to the village. In this next picture you can see how the use of the different buildings can help to give some depth to your village. The tower in particular helps to give a sense of depth as it is standing high up in the back ground. Its always a good idea to view you village from different close up angles to see how everything looks and to see if there are any areas that feel they are 'missing' something. An odd empty area in the backgound can often be easily cured with a nice big tree on a mound or another house if you have enough space. Now we can build another rocky area at the back. We can place another house on top of this, as it helps to have background buildings slighty higher then the front buildings to give a better overall effect. Like before, we use slope pieces to roughly mark out the rocky area. Then keep building them up and place green and brown plates here and there to give more variation and texture. Once this is done, we can then lay some tiles in place which is where the building will sit. Note the two jumper plates which are used to connect two of the corners of the building so it can sit at an angle. Then we can place the building in place. Now we can use brown plates to create the rest of the muddy trackways and add green plates built up at various levels around the trackways. When laying plates for landscaping it is always vital that you never create any sections that look oddly square. We need to try to make things look as natural as we can. Once that is done, we can then add some foliage for that overgrown counrtyside look and also add a few small fences. These are built with string and telescope pieces as shown earlier in the guide. Note that I have also built up the black border/base of the moc. From this next picture you will see an overview of the village. Note the placements of the houses. When building a village it is always best to place the houses in a way that gives a god front display. In this case, the corner with the shop and Well is the lowest point and the moc builds up in height from behind, giving a great view from the front which shows some depth. So then we have our completed village. You can then use various photo programs such as Photoshop to add backgounds and enhance your final display. Here are a few examples. Special thanks to 'I Scream Clone' for putting these togther. Now, that might be the end of the village, but there is a lot which I left out and havn't covered yet. When I started this guide, I had planned to build a village twice this size with a lot more variation in the buildings, plus many other small details. I realised that it would be far easier if I covered these things in seperate chapters without worrying about fitting them into the village. So now that the village is complete, I can now go more in-depth with other aspects of medieval building. The guide will now basically be a 'Guide For Medieval Building' in general. There are lots of stuff to cover and I will now be able to show some more step by step sections of various large buildings! So stay tuned and check for updates, as I hope to update this guide when ever I can with a new section on building medieval scenes and buildings. For the next chapter I will give a brief over view on 'creating your own style' and how I developed my moc building, from my very first moc, to this latest one. Thanks for reading DC

Well, I have finished the village. But the guide is not over. Originally I had planned to build something twice the size of this, but building huge projects can become tiresome and tedious. Whenever I build something large I always seem to lose interest after a while, due to the fact that I always seem to get really good ideas for other mocs while im building, and so I get bored and want to build the other ideas instead. So I stopped at this size and everything that I didn't cover, I will now do so as individual builds here and there. This basically means that my Guide will no longer be just a village guide, but a Guide for everything medieval. So there will be more interesting sections of Medieval moccing added to the guide next year. In the mean time, I present Durnovaria. A peacful country village, located not too far from Albion in Avalonia. Enjoy The pictures are not the best quality, unfortunatly the weather here in the UK is dark and gloomy and not much good natural light. Thanks to ISC for editing the backgrounds:thumbup:

A very excellent and original farm! I love the whole foliage look to it, with the grass roof and plants. The forestman hats is such a great touch, I may have to borrow that one day. Great work Sir

Nice work, like Mikey says, it has a very 'classic' Lego feel to it, with some nice modern techniques and detail. A fine creation for your growing land.

This is a great building Rolli. I really like the look of this one, it has a very original and interesting look to it. Great work on all the lovely details. Another excellent addition to Albion! Well done

Durnovaria. For mighty Avalonia! I will post all the pics and a propper thread for this later tonight. I am creating a Flickr group for Avalonia, as the other groups all have there own.

Greetings Guildsmen! Sorry I have been a bit inactive the last few days, busy life schedule. I will be updating a lot of things later on today. All the other guild leaders have chosen their top 5 towers, only I remain, its very difficult, so many great towers!!! Do not worry if your tower is not in the top 5, every month we are allowed to pick 5 'free' builds that are also allowed to be put forward and earn us points. But you have all built loads of excellent free build mocs as well, just as difficult to pick 5 of those! So thanks for making my job even harder I think the embassy challenge is an interesting one, and Im looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Remember, this build will be in one of the other lands, so make a strong Avalonia statement!!! I will update all your recent builds later today. Great work as always guildsmen!

I don't know whats in my head, let alone anyone else We all have busy lives, but that's the way it goes. I should have had my village finished ages ago, but then Skyrim came along, and then Xmas and all the family events that go with it. But that's not a bad thing, as I often suffer a burnout from to much constant Lego building and I lose focus and the mocs can suffer in quality from that. Still, it's Xmas in the next few days, so I expect myself and most of you will be having a break from building, although I think there's a few sets coming my way for Xmas So like Z said, there is plenty of time and we are now at a posistion where we are set on our course in the Guild and we can just build when we can. We have built an excellent foundation in Avalonia, you only need to look at the list of our mocs in the first page to see the huge amount of quality builds we have produced! You have all really stepped up to the challenge and should be proud of your efforts. We can enter the new year on top of our game! I will not add any more new guild challenges for a good while now, so that just leaves the new Embassy challenge. Everything else like Albion and your individual areas have no time constraights, so you can build them whenever you can. We have a great guild, great members, strong builders and we have gotten on with everything without a fuss. So thankyou all, and let's hope we finish the year on a high and win the first challenge!

Well the winter is when I do most of my moccing. During the summer I am usually out either with my family and friends or fishing. I do a lot of fishing during the summer months, matches etc. Due to my love of fishing I decided to make a huge Koi pond in my garden, and from that I started getting into some gardening. So these winter months I spend a lot of time building and it works well with my family. Plus I've been with my missus for long enough now that we've said all there is to say between us

I understand your reasons Beerbeard, I too have a 1 year old boy, bills and my metal band that take a lot of my time. But don't worry too much, as the Guild project will run for a good year, so there is plenty of time to build whatever you wish. You don't have to take part in the main challenges if you don't want to. You can alway just concentrate on free builds for the guild, as they also earn our guild points. So don't feel presured to build, just do what you can when you want. We have a good 2 months to complete the next challenge, which I think is a great one. Time to build in another land. A mighty feasting hall in the snow of Mitgardia? Or a an outpost in the desert? What ever who wish. The main thing is that we Avalonians go and build an impressive embassy in the other lands, let's make a nice big statement of authourity on their land! I think I'm going to try and enter this one as I'm desperate to build a snow scene after countless hours of playing skyrim!!

Lovely work mate! This looks like the perfect Avalonia tower, strong stone walls, a wooden roof and set in a lush countryside. The corners on the tower are nicely done and the different textures on the walls are a nice detail. I really like the stripe of Avalonia greens going round the middle, this really is a great touch. I think the wooden section at the top is done well, I do think you could try placing a row of 1x1 rounds in the gap at the top of the wooden roof, to give it a more complete look, but its not a major issue. Really great work, I look forward to seeing your next builds

This is yet another awesome build from you! A really great addition to Albion with such a quaint cosy look. I really like the forge, you did a good job there with the roof and chimney. Lots of great details all over and a nice little staircase too. Love it

This just amuses me! The sets are as expected. Every time a new license theme is announced people always have absurdly high expectations and then as soon as the first pics are shown they all moan that it's not all that. Really? Come on, what were you expecting. You only have to look at the POTC line to get an idea of how these sets were going to turn out. To be honest, I don't see what the big complaint is. We already have all the pieces we need to create Middle Earth, there are plenty of excellent LOTR mocs out there that proove that. BUT, we don't have the official LOTR figures. Well, we do now. I expect the figures will be as nice as the POTC ones, which were excellent IMO. So this theme will provide us with very usefull figures, shields, weapons and some new pieces. That's all we need anyway, so what is there to complain about? Im glad Lego has done this theme for those reasons I stated, so I am more than happy with these sets. Next year I am going to build Middle Earth, as highly detailed as I can, and I'm going to do it all with the pieces we already have, except now I have the bonus of nice official figs etc. So it's all good!!! How many of you are really going to use the sets as the actual scenes themselves? Very few, as most will raid them for pieces and figs and then make there own. So does it really matter that the sets arnt huge exact representations of the films! You don't need Lego to build Middle Earth for you, the fun is doing it yourself! So yeah, I'm happy with this theme and will enjoy the new Parts and figs. With or without this theme, LOTR is still buildable anyway.

well i would be lying if I said that I didn't know LOTR was coming, but I was trying to play it down. It's all about nice surprises!

Excellent work on the towers everyone! I think we have made a strong statement with our builds. Avalonia is strong and ready to tackle any challenge thrown at us! For those that don't know, entry to join Avalonia is now closed for a while. This is due to the fact that we have a lot more members than the other guilds and we would like to even it out. When the other guilds have caught up with our numbers than Avalonia will be re-opened again. For the mean time, this will give us a chance to all settle and continue flushing out our land. Mostly everyone has chosen and named their own area of land, I think there is only a few left who hasn't. So once they have, we can get a new updated map and not have to worry about any new members adding lands for the moment. I can not tell you what the next challenge is yet, but it will be very interesting to see what you come up with for it! Other good news, Durnovaria nears completion and will soon be up and ready for trading. Here's a few shots of recent progress: Keep up the great work everybody, ad be prepared for whats to come!!!

Another great addition to Albion! Lots to like here, with many details and a nice busy feel. I won't mention the points that others have said, but I would suggest maybe you could have a go at doing some gables for the ends of your roof, they really smarten up the effect better than the blocky steps of roof bricks. You are coming along really well, producing some very high quality mocs for Avalonia. Keep it up,your final task title may soon be on its way at this rate

I am really impressed by the quality of the Watchtowers you have produced. So many great mocs! We will soon be finding out how many points they have earned us, then the top 5 will go up against the other guilds entries. I have been busy building the village these last two days, so havn't had much time to write anything. Its a busy period of the year for most people, so I expect the thread to be a little quiet over Xmas. However, its going to be all systems go after Xmas, we have only just started and there is lots in store!