MY WOLFPACK CASTLE BY THE SEA

Brickshelf folder for all the pictures for this effort

Here's the Lugnet thread where I introduced it.

The Castle (a work in progress)

I am working on a new castle. It will be a Wolfpack castle nestled on a clifside by the sea. A large sea cave will have a dock area and an underground stream, with stairs leading up to the castle. A steep road will hug the side of the cliff to provide a land entry. A bridge leads from the base of the road across a river to the future site of a town.

The base is set up to separate into four sections. The river and bridge is one section, the front cliff face is two, and the rest of the castle will be on the largest section. The sections are laid out something like this:

+-------+-------+---------------+ | | | | +---+-------+---+ | GREEN | BLUE | TAN | | | | | | |(river)| | |TAN| BLUE |TAN| | | | | | |(river)| | +-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | TAN | BLUE | TAN | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (sea cave) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +---+-------+---+ | | | | | | | | | | | BLUE | | | | | | | +-------+-------+-------+-------+ | | +---------------+ +---------------+ | | | | | | | | | BLUE | | BLUE | | | | (cliff face) | | (cliff face) | | | | | | | | | +---------------+ +---------------+ +-------+-------+

© Copyright 2000, Frank Filz
This picture shows what a project looks like while it's actually being worked on. I don't have very much table space, so bags of bricks just get put anywhere there is space for them.

I hope I have enough bricks, though one of the purposes of this castle is to use up some of my BURPS (I've got a copier paper box almost full of dark grey BURPS, and then the gery BURPS fill the box cover, and there is a small bag of other colored BURPS).

The sea cave is going to be about 4 BURPs tall (about 25 bricks). The castle basement will be just above that, so the castle gate will be more than 30 bricks off the ground. It will be tall enough for small ships like 6057 or 6277 to enter (in fact, I'm going to make two 6277 style ships for the Wolfpack, I need to talk to Sheree Rosenkrantz about making some Wolfpack sails for me).

I've got the road complete all the way up to the entrance to the sea cave (at 22 bricks high). The road is pretty steep, being made of x3 low slopes). I've finished off the small room off to the right of the sea cave entrance. Because of what I will be building on top of it, I had to make a pull out section of wall to allow access to it.

One thing I haven't totally decided is how I am going to support the castle over the sea cave. Except for the fact that I want to have an elevator shaft in the middle, I thought about using the 44x44 base from a Scala house. I might still figure out a way to use the 22x44 piece. I may also just make a 2 or 3 brick thick sandwich of 12x24 superbricks.

I just built a temporary mock up of the cliff face to the left of the sea cave entrance. Because of space limitations, I'm going to have to work hard to disguise the regularity of the BURPs.

© Copyright 2000, Frank Filz
Here you can see the left hand portion of the cliff face. If you compare this to the previous picture, you will see that I made the cliff area on the river section thicker so it doesn't pull apart when you pull the river off.

© Copyright 2000, Frank Filz
Here's a close up of the entrance to the small room off the sea cave. You can see the battlement for the balcony which overlooks the sea cave. The cart driver can be seen above the cliff wall (the cart is still on the bridge).

© Copyright 2000, Frank Filz
A bird's eye view (well, a bird with x-ray vision :-). You can see that I started working on the stairs up to the main castle from the sea cave. Originally they were going to wrap around the back of the castle. I will be replacing them with a spiral staircase.

The People

Ok, I decided to take a break from massive earth moving, and work up some characters, here they have all posed for the artist (who is sitting on a flying carpet off the cliff face...):

From left to right, top row:

Karl Gundersson, commander of the , Vulf's brother
Vulf Gundersson, leader of the pack, the eldest.
Chandruth Firemaster, one of the best fire magicians in the North. One of Chandruth's accomplishments are the firecasters the Pack's ship's are armed with. Note the use of a spider cape reversed (the spider is pretty well hidden). Note that Chandruth's seamstress has monogrammed the inside of his cape...
Dirk Vulfson, Vulf's 13 year old son, Dirk is a crackshot with bow, and carry's a Black Radly (which is not in the picture - extra credit for catching the reference).

From left to right, bottom row:

Helga Kendriksdottir, Vulf's wife. She's also a mean archer.
Kyla Vulfsdottir, Vulf and Helga's 19 year old daughter, she is captain of The Red Vulf, one of the two ships Vulf's pack commands.
Jorek Gundersson, the youngest brother, captain of The Black Vulf, the other ship under Vulf's forces. Jorek was seriously injured, and lost many of his crew, when The Black Vulf was attacked by a sea dragon. Jorek singlehandledly dispatched the dragon.
Princess Dorianna. I'm not sure which faction she belongs to, but as I was putting minifigs together, I remembered I wanted to try out the Belville crown on indian hair (it has a pin on the bottom).

I should have used a grey backrgound for better viewing. Here's some better pictures:

The Ships

Comments to ffilz@mindspring.com

Page last updated September 29, 2000

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