#brikwars

[arkbrik]

The first issue of FIENDS is now available for download!

FIENDS is a zine of Lego builds, stories, and whatever else people want to put in it. It features submissions from the BrikWars community but is open to anyone.

FIENDS #1 by Arkbrik

Collaborative zine of Lego and cool stuff

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

Remembering BrikWars

I was looking at the Modiphius website recently and I saw something that surprised me; a print copy of BrikWars. It was something that, as a

Hit the bricks with @sabrinatvband with a Glimpse Into The Vault at the definitely-not-a-Lego-product BRIKWARS!

[bryanharryrombough]

Lurking on twitter earlier this morning and caught the BrikWars account plugging Mobile Frame Zero :)

[blogtaculous]

I want to talk about my latest moc because this is about the only place I can post long-form content about that stuff.

In the Shadows of the Past started as another build entirely. I wanted to build a meteor crater with a series of floating islands, the idea being that the meteor was the cool, mystical, fantasy kind that sends shards of ruins floating around instead of just obliterating everything. I had a major section of the largest island built, but the plan quickly derailed as the realities of suspending it above the table became apparent.

Here we see the original concept. There was a lot I really liked. The statue on the baseplate is holding a mace that would function as the build’s macguffin, and the focal point for the planned Brikwars battle to be fought once the build was complete. I was very excited about the process, but became discouraged once I did this preliminary test. While the platform was good, and I was very pleased with some of the techniques, a few details were becoming too parts-intensive to continue.

The underside was supposed to slope downwards, but the amount of inverted slopes I would need to buy would cost a fortune, as would the transparent pieces to hold it aloft so that it would be stable.

I learned a lot from building the platform, but unfortunately I couldn’t move forward with it. The platform was a little too fragile to trust any suspension system, and taking it apart to fix that wouldn’t fix the other problems with the concept, most importantly the cost to realize it to my standards.

I simply have to highlight this section because I think it turned out really well. There would have been vegetation blocking most of the dark gray.

After disassembly I decided I wanted to keep working with the same ruins vibe, but instead of green and reddish brown I changed the palette to olive green/dark tan/reddish brown. I had to spend some time on Bricklink to make it happen, but that was a solid choice.

Here’s the first version of the layout plan. At this stage I only knew I wanted a tree to be the central focal point, but even the original function of the ruined buildings was a mystery. I blocked out some simple squares for exterior structures. On the right side you can see the start of an intended staircase toward what was to be the entrance to a grand fortress of some kind. The meandering path of bricks in the center was the start of a stagnant creek. The main gate to the courtyard itself would go in the angled section in the corner, though that was quickly abandoned as “dumb.”

The pride rock knockoff had to be finished first to establish the general height of ground level and to help scale the other build elements. It’s easily the most complicated pieces of rock work I’ve built, with studs facing all four cardinal directions in the same unit. The angle is created with technic bricks toward the rear, and kept in place with a hinge piece on the backside. The tree uses a hinge brick to attach to the rocks, which isn’t super stable but gets the job done.

After a trip to a local hobby shop to stock up on dark green bricks, I was ready to tackle the stagnant creek.

A regular brick on its side on top of studs is exactly one brick in height, allowing the rocks to sit on top of the water level with ease. Lime green was used for water vegetation to easily distinguish it from other plants and let the water really speak for itself once the rest of the build rose up to compete with it.

As the empty space starts to fill in it becomes easier to plan other features. A Tips and Bricks post about the Jordan Corner had me very excited, so I started to work on incorporating two of them into the build. I also began to conceptualize the whole of the build not as a fortress but as a monastery (or other place of worship) after doing some work mapping a monastery for a DnD game.

Skipping ahead, a little. The ground level is in and ruins are starting to rise. The foreground was planned to be far more ruined than the rest for play access, but the hints of the cloister are there. A typical monastery garden would be surrounded by structure, but I opted for a prominent gate opposite the tree for the drama of it all.

The pictured flower bushes would end up cut, as would the monster skeleton. I puzzled over how to include the mace, still intending to have a Brikwars battle, but that meant it needed to be in a central location. At this stage I wanted the ruins to be the result of a huge monster rampage, and the blow that killed it would have come from the mace. For mystical reasons, the mace was to be abandoned in the monster and remained there even when only the bones remained. The skeleton would also be a fun reason to include other colors, so I was going to cover it in vines and flowers, the result of its magic blood seeping into the ground.

I even built a skeleton, based on a Komodo Dragon, but it was huge and impractical, and the suspension of disbelief necessary to believe this beast not only lived, but was able to move around the courtyard at all was too much.

This looks like a huge jump in progress, and it was, but it took place in about two days. My kids were off with grandma and my wife was working out of town, so I had the rare opportunity to hit the build hard. I wanted every structure to feel overgrown, so naturally one of the Jordan Corners had to have a whole tree taking it over. I wanted the area above the cloister to be taller, but it was becoming impractical so I cut it off with a roof that was designed on the fly but looks really good.

This stage also included a new problem: the ruined wall technique I used had a definite backside. The masonry elements look different and there are headlight bricks on their sides, which looks awkward from behind. If I used this for the church itself the interior would look wonky. Plus, a structure of this size would look silly with such a thin wall. The easy solution would be to just double the width, but those headlight bricks don’t allow for that.

The solution was to make the wall three studs wide, with the center stud providing the space for the headlight elements and giving depth to the windows.

Here is that principle in action.

You can see the skeleton concept didn’t entirely go away. I opted for just one half of some mystery beast, surrounded by exotic flowers fed by ancient, magic blood. The angle for each rib is provided by a lever, which isn’t that sturdy but does well enough that I didn’t want to look for another solution.

The windows are fences, stacked on their sides. Originally I wanted to use transparent plates for stained-glass, but it looked awkward from the inside so I abandoned that idea.

I expanded the roof used above the cloisters for the church, a time consuming and fragile process. The hinge bricks at the base are punching far above their weight with how far the roof extends away from them, so they are braced by the interior wall. It was not easy to accomplish this and I probably should have looked for another solution but this was about the time when I was ready to be done. When I started I decided that I would see the build to the end and wouldn’t compromise for the sake of time. This philosophy was tested as I ran count of parts for the church several times, and was getting a little tired of the same techniques.

Here’s the completed build, because I’ve almost hit the 10 image app limit and I don’t want to post in parts.

The open corner was to encourage tactical movement by Brikwars players, so the church entrance wouldn’t be a bottleneck.

The main window was a real struggle. Initially I wanted it to be intact, but I’m glad I didn’t do that. The infrastructure is pretty fragile, mostly because I foolishly didn’t even start until the walls were finished and couldn’t be dissembled to make installation easier.

The main church towers take inspiration from Notre Dame, because of course they do. I had sketches and tablescraps for more complicated architecture, but economic considerations changed all that. Besides, the simpler look is much better than other versions I considered.

Last is the church interior.

The foreground pillars are cut off for play access. Initially I had twice as many pillars, but it was crowded as hell. I didn’t truss the pillars and the roof because it didn’t seem necessary, and the awkward proportions would have been ridiculous. You can see the church is cut off past halfway, and I didn’t want to figure out the math for how much of each truss to include.

The collapsed roof portion on the ground initially had a bunch of skeletons, but it was too busy so I took them out.

One of my favorite details is actually the ruined door. 2014 era reddish brown was extremely brittle, for some reason, and it breaks easily. The bedrock of my terrain technique is the 6x6 plate with supports on the edges or corners. I pushed one such plate down and it just shattered. The larger broken piece now serves as the hanging, rotted door to the long-empty church.

Thanks for reading. It’s nice to get some of this written down. I opted not to get super granular about techniques and parts because I don’t want to take new detail photos. Most of these have been posted to my Lego Instagram @dienekes.hobby. Anyway, have good day.

[jet-iii]

Space Dragon of War! An expansion of an older build. The dragon now has reigns, a proper seat, a tail gun, and a jet scooter. Because why not..? #legodragon #legospace #spacedragon #brikwars #rocketrider #legocastle #classiclegodragon #frightknights #moc #legominifigure #legowars #cyberdragon #colorcoordinated #teamred #rakdos https://www.instagram.com/p/CbISLcNrzAZ/?utm_medium=tumblr

[blogtaculous]

All right, let’s talk about Amidst the Ashes.

My latest completed moc was inspired by the period of time when I was playing Dying Light 2 and the first trailer for 28 Years Later dropped. I was nearly finished with a very different project at the time and I cut it off early so I could start on this one.

I love working on ruins. Dark tan/olive green go so well together and it was really fun to work on modern ruins. It builds off my previous experience and parts collection after doing castle ruins, so it went up really fast.

The main building is inspired pretty heavily by the Colorado Springs city hall. The interior is entirely unfurnished and absent decoration for practical reasons.

The cool custom tiles are from eclipsegrafx.

The green pool on the left is Dew, which is the Brikwars equivalent of Spice from Dune. There’s actually so much crazy Brikwars jargon to begin to explain all of this but I’ll do my best. A splinter force of my main faction, Skion, is studying the life span of fleebnorks, a space scorpion organism that feeds on electricity (among other things). These studies are conducted because Skion itself was nearly consumed by a swarm of fleebnorks. They have modified these fleebnorks to be able to assimilate minifigures (as zombies) as an experiment to spread the swarm throughout the Brikverse to completely destroy their galactic enemies. Fleebnorks, given enough time, will turn a planet’s biosphere into a Dew Swamp that produces Mtn Dew, a valuable starship fuel. It also grows the classic Lego crystal structure, which is pictured here much larger.

Anyway, the apocalypse has come for Ynidon Prime.

I was inspired by The Last of Us also, but not the games as much as the Lego builds depicting it. The colors and techniques to create overgrown buildings were used heavily.

This build also took inspiration from true life ruins, such as Berlin 1945, Ukraine, and Gaza. Concrete and stone break in a unique way and I’ve tried to capture that in this build. The “organic” way that it breaks even when reinforced by rebar is tough to do in Lego, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. I had some moments of quiet crisis as I researched these areas because it felt very exploitative.

It’s one thing to be inspired by fictional apocalypses. Fallout isn’t real. Nobody was really harmed in Dying Light because it’s all 1s and 0s. But people in Berlin, Ukraine, and Palestine suffered. They suffer still. They starved and hurt and died. It felt like I was using those moments to create something a little too silly. This is a Lego build for a Brikwars battle. It didn’t feel quite right. I’ve moved away from these real world events as inspiration because, even if it isn’t truly bad it didn’t feel like I should be doing it.

The next chapter of this Brikwars story is in preproduction while I run a battle here. I wasn’t planning on doing that but I’ve really come to love the survivor characters I made and I want them to return. You can find the battle report on the Brikwars forums, and some highlights have been posted to my TikTok account @ dienekes.lego.

[blogtaculous]

[gaykarstaagforever]

I wanted to see if anyone is using Lego minifigs to play 40k.

Short answer: only secretly, between friends, because a lot of 40k nerds are some of the worst people on Earth and will throw a tantrum that they spent time and money making these little color-coded armies and you didn't.

Who would have guessed that the Venn Diagram overlap between model kit nerds and tabletop gaming nerds would include some of the most obnoxious humorless dickheads on the planet? I mean, besides anyone who knows anything about nerds.

Get mad. If I don't care about pissing off the worst D&D nerds, I don't care about pissing off you.

But someone designed a system called BrikWars to do tactical tabletop with minifigs, and it is apparently lighter in tone and goes out of its way to poke fun at 40k and other systems.

BrikWars - Wikipedia

Looks like fun.

Now I post this, looking forward to all the hate I'm going to get from people who confuse rigidly following rules and gatekeeping with fun.

(This isn't an anti-40k thing. I like it and I understand that the models are important. I'm merely suggesting maybe not being giant toddlers about it all the time is also important. I'm not saying you and your $35,000 army should be forced to play against a guy armed with Ninjago KOs in a tournament.)

(...Though I'd much rather watch that.)