Medieval Transmogrifier

Medieval Transmogrifier - LEGO MOC

Everyone needs a little change now and then...

This month's club build prompts were "Technic" and "castle" so I (as usual) combined the two. The idea was to use Technic pieces to make it look as though figures were moving from one side of a structure to another, and then apply a bit of slight-of-hand magic. Given the nature of this build, there's going to be lots of videos in this post, the better to show off both the main mechanic and how I went about constructing it.

I started, as I often do, with a sketch, first on a post-it note and then on a larger sheet of notepaper. There were two big things to figure out with this build: first, how to move the figures across the stage, and second how to hide them when not "on stage." As you can see in the bottom of the post-it note (my first scribbles on the idea), I originally wanted to use large gears...but since I wasn't about to spend $20 plus shipping on the largest gear pieces, I had to find other means to make my turntables: an octagonal plate, a NEXO KNIGHTS hexagonal plate, or a Technic rotor plate. Because my local Bricks & Minifigs store had more of this last in their bulk bins, I went with the Technic rotor plate.

It took a few tries to get a setup that was secure but also lightweight (and didn't use a ton of pieces). To lean into a medieval vibe, I used 1x4 masonry profile bricks for the figure platforms, and secured them to the rotor plates with 1x2 slopes.

Once I had two of these stacks built, I cobbled together a gear train and support: the heart of my build.

I also took this opportunity to pick the cast of characters that would be appearing on stage (top row), as well as what they'd be transforming into (bottom row):

Now that the engineering was mostly done, I had to design a set that would make it appear as though the figures were going in one side, getting changed, and coming out the other side completely different, as shown in this sketch:

Of course, there was still engineering to do, starting with securing the build on a baseplate. Since the horizontal gears meant horizontal Technic beams, I decided to go with the simplest approach and mount them horizontally to the plate. As you can see in the video here, I found that while the 2x2 tiles with Technic pins were the most straightforward, they were actually too loose and would have resulted in a build that wobbled and jiggled with every movement. The 2x2-1x2 brackets, on the other hand, provided a very stable base.

Now that I had a stable base, I needed to secure the central axle, and also begin the framework for the set dressing that would ideally hide the back half of the rotating platforms from view.

Taking inspiration from Renaissance faires, state fairs, and similar events, I decided to make the medieval version of a pop-up shop: a flat façade to hide the "transformation" and show the figures going in one way and coming out another. So I dug through my parts bin and found this lovely gateway piece from old Harry Potter sets:

A double stack of reddish brown containers made a nice heavy door behind the archway (and also provided more structural stability). Some bricks and L-brackets allowed me to throw up a wall of D&D CMF baseplates and board-printed tiles:

I used the same D&D plate + board tile approach to make the beam holding the axle tops fit visually, taking advantage of jumper plates and the pins on the back of the tiles for a bit of triangle wizardry as well.

Additional D&D plates served to block the back half of the turntables...more or less. If there were one thing that I'd improve, it would be this. The problem was making something that would hide things that also allowed the figures to move freely (as it is, there are some very close clearances). Having more uniform minifigures would make this easier, rather like those "hole in the wall" game shows, but would go against the zany cast of characters I wanted to include. Here's a side view of this setup, also showing the way I secured the crossbar to the turntable axles—namely with a plate-with-Technic-pin-hole and a variety of other plates to hold things at right angles:

Then I worked on the vertical parts of the façade, starting with the tower built up from the arch piece. a few angled bricks expanded the width to cover the middle of the mechanism, and some trans-neon green slime effect pieces slotted into Technic bricks to hint at the magic going on behind it:

Using the 1x2 brick with two holes you can see in the façade, I linked the front to the gear assembly with a 1x2 6-tall brick (the second pic has a brown baseplate instead of a grey one because I switched partway through...not wanting to have to re-cover the grey with brown to simulate dirt when I had a brown one already!).

A pair of towers hid the floating ends of the top beam, and made the whole feel like a unified structure (I soon after added SNOT brackets to affix some Viking shields so as to make the towers less plain and to draw the eye down to the ground level).

Now it was time to populate the two queues: one going in...and one coming out. I raided my minifig collection for anything that felt suitably fantasy-middle-ages-flavored, and found a good selection of transmogrification customers.

But there were also decisions to be made: should the banner behind the princess-turned-trash-monster be the green creeper one (to color match with the doorkeeper and magic effects) or the red dragon one (to contrast and draw the viewer's eye)? And what about the statue up front, should it have a spiral-effect radar dish and silver coin (to indicate magical transformation and also the price of the change), or the Train System arrow brick (showing that the transmogrification could go either way). Ultimately I decided on the red dragon banner and the Ghostbusters purple spiral, but sometimes you have to see your options "for realsies" to be able to determine what actually works.

Some greenery and a cobblestone path (with 2x2 jumper plates for the customers to stand on) fleshed out the foreground...

...and in addition to the statue and ticket-taker slime princess, I also added a vendor to sell wares to the customers after they've been through the transmogrifier: a time-traveling alien who's more than happy to take your picture—before or after you've been changed—and present it to you in a nice 2x2 format: