Building Character: The Brick-Built Adventurers of Dungeons and Dragons

In October last year, LEGO announced a contest celebrating 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I am a fan of board games like Dixit, Mysterium, Gloom, Exploding Kittens and many more, I have never had the chance to play D&D. Of course, I've heard about it mostly from TV shows and people online, and I wanted to do something for that contest myself.

Building Character

First, I opened Google and searched for Dungeons & Dragons. I read the Wikipedia article on it and discovered that there is something called classes—character classes, to be exact—which got my attention. After that, I started searching for art based on those classes and characters; this is how the initial idea of building characters was born. The whole search took me about an hour, but one can easily get lost in the vast universe of amazing heroes and mighty monsters.

I made an initial list with 12 characters based on different classes and races. I used the infographic below to choose the most popular ones to make my future LEGO set as attractive as possible (Marketing 101, right?). In the end, I dropped four of the characters and kept the entire lineup with a total of eight (I thought that 12 characters in a single set could be too much).

Character Building

With my target characters selected it was time to get building. Last year, I came up with a character concept for one of the categories for the Brickscalibur contest, a small Viking. From this point, I started to use a “system” to build most of my small figures. This was the direction I chose for my D&D heroes.

The system was easy, making the most of every stud. The base of it all is a 1x1 brick with 4 studs on the side (aka a Travis brick). Then you add two bars with round plate on either side, topped with two round plates with open studs to finish the eyes. From there, you have the beginning of your face and can do basically whatever you want and add as many details as you need for the nose, mouth, any headgear, etc. Four of the characters in my pack included this base for the head: the Elf Ranger, Aarakocra Monk, Tiefling Sorcerer and Dwarf Cleric.

Adding Body

The body structure of the figures is somewhat the same as for the head. Depending on the body size, you might have two or three 1x1 bricks with studs on all sides. You can have them stacked with two 1x1 plates between them, or use 1x3 plates and invert one of the bricks.

Here's how the Elf looks on the inside:

Adding Character

I used a different approach to create the face of the wizard, the human and the orc. It's actually something I've used for the Hellboy character for the first of BrickNerd’s Quick Build instruction series. The main piece here is the 1x1 modified plate with light attachment.

This makes the eyes closer which makes the characters even better looking at this scale. This is probably why I think the most likable of the bunch is the wizard.

Here's how the closer eyes look on the inside of the characters:

The moustache is made with a 1x2 plate with a 1x1 tile with clip on it, connected to a white croissant and a bone.

Full disclosure: The wizard was not finished on the backside. :D That was mostly because I didn't have pieces in purple to create some sort of cape. I could've built a cape in a different color, but I thought since the photo wouldn’t see it and there was a countdown, I’d take a bit more of a lazy route…

Rounding Out the Party

For the Dragonborn Paladin, I've created a different concept for the head because the other two versions didn't look as good when I tried to build a dragon head. The base of his head is a t-bar to get eyes on either side of its head with and a 1x2 round plate and then everything else on top.

Welcome Adventurers!

So there you have it, this is how I built my eight D&D characters. You can scroll through the gallery below to see them all, and hopefully now you can see how they were created from the inside out.

If you want to start your journey into character building, I would suggest to start small. Why not even try to build a D&D character with the ideas I showed above? I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

(And a big thanks goes to Markus for suggesting I write an article about these little guys… and almost a year later, it's here!)

Let us know below in the comments - do you play board games and how you feel about custom elements made with LEGO?

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