LEGO City/Dungeons & Dragons MOC: Doctor & Dragon

"Doctor, can you do anything about these headaches? Rawr!"

Key MOC Specifications

Theme/Style: City/Dungeons & Dragons Mashup
Key Parts Used: 2x2x2 box with top opening
Build Goal: Local Recognized LEGO Fan Community Monthly Challenge

Every month my local Recognized LEGO Fan Community gives us two building challenge prompts; the ones for this build were: "Dragon" and "City."

MOC Building Process 

1. Idea or Prompt

I had gotten, a while back, a "visible minifigure" from AmericanBrickStore, and I'd wanted to make a suitable diorama in which to display him. Then came this build challenge, and suddenly I had my opportunity. I would combine it with the worried-looking doctor from the 2025 Q2 Build A Minifigure selection (shout out to CW Bricks Store for having great selection and attention to detail), the body from 60459 Airplane vs. Hospital Bed Race Car Pack, and the head from the dragon paladin in the 71047 Dungeons & Dragons CMF. I also wanted to test out an idea I had to use some of the several 2x2x2 box with top opening pieces (hereafter referred to as "crates") I'd collected.

2. Preliminary Sketches & “Sketch Builds”

A quick Post-It Note sketch was all I needed, especially for such a small build:

I wanted to use the crates as a combination of wainscoting and shelving, with sand green walls for contrast. A clip mounted into the wall (as I also utilized in my recent Shrek build, shown under section 4) would allow me to secure a minifigure-scale book on the shelf. I had also intended to use one of the stickered collar tiles from the 77013 Escape from the Lost Tomb set as the angle indicator for a brick-built exam table. Various other printed tiles would add to the lived-in look of the room, and a checkerboard floor would round it out.

3. Gather Parts

As you can see in the above picture, I started out by gathering up the parts I would need:

First, the minifigures
Second, the printed and stickered tiles
Third, the building materials (crates and sand green wall pieces)
Fourth, everything else (SNOT, floor tiles, etc)

One of the advantages of such a small build is that you don't need much in the way of parts; I was able to construct it using only about as many parts as would fit in one of my activity trays.  

4. Assembly Process

Because I had such a strong idea of what I wanted, and because it took into account the constraints and parts I would be working with (and because I had my parts organized—sorting out and grouping wall-color bricks, keeping printed tiles separate from plain ones, etc—in categorized storage ahead of time), this was a fast build. The walls and floor came together quickly, and I made sure to add jumper tiles for off-center placement of the minifigures.

5. Decorative Details & Final Tweaks

The exam table was really the only thing that gave me any difficulty. I found right away that any build I made with the Anubis tile would simply too big, taking up the majority of the space in the little cube. So next I tried a 2x2x2 support piece, which looked very much like the hydraulics of an adjustable examination chair, but that proved to be too tall. I put together several other models, goldilocksing myself into the smallest size I could manage:

The plate underneath the seat was necessary as an attachment point for the cone, otherwise I would have done away with it too. I also had to get rid of the suggestion of leg rests as in the black and brown versions (with an ingot piece mounted on a SNOT bracket to look like it's folded down).

6. MOC Design Considerations

There are several points that are worth keeping in mind at every step of the building process:

Color Palette Choices 

I wanted to give this a visually pleasing pre-21st-century vibe, so where a modern doctor's office would have all sterile whiteness, this more-homey location has wood-paneled walls, soothing green paint, and a checkerboard floor. It's also a little cluttered

As you can see above and in section 5, I ultimately landed on a design for the exam chair to be made of gold. My initial reasoning for this (beyond the fact that I had the parts to make it work) is that it would call out the dragon's golden head. Which it did...too much. In fact, distractingly so. By changing the gold chair for a brown one of similar build (shown in the final pictures below) I allowed it to become part of the background. Now the dragon patient's golden head is the only gold thing in the room, making it the focus.

Physical & Thematic Constraints 

Putting this in an 8x8 cube forced me to redesign the chairs several times, starting with the fact that my original idea of an angled exam table wouldn't fit at all. Then I had to make them smaller and shorter until the dragon's horns no longer bumped up against the cube's ceiling. Changing the color from gold to brown also fit with the vintage look I was going for.

Building a Story 

As I so often do, I included little details to add to the story: the Ninjago Courage Banner tile makes it look as though sudden draconic transmogrification is a known issue in this medical community—so much so that they have posters about it, the same as they would about shingles or quitting smoking—and the chalkboard tile (from the 2011 Hogwarts set 4867) with an ingot eraser does a good job of making it look like the doctor is having a tough time explaining just why his patient is having such persistent headaches (almost as though he's growing horns or something!). Including a coffee mug among the medical specimens, paired with the doctor's frazzled expression, makes it that much more humorous: is he overworked and overstressed, or just a bit scatterbrained? Then again, having a patient who's turning into a dragon would make anyone a little absentminded!

7. Final Doctor & Dragon Build Gallery

Happy building!