New Castle

My main long-term plan with Lego is to build a nice, minifig scale version of a castle. The castle itself is the one I designed for my MUD system (see my main Lego page for the history of this). I've got lots of pieces now, and have actually started some work. I have a very long way to go, however. One aspect of my castle will differ greatly from the castle sets that Lego puts out, and from some very nice looking castles you see on the net: I want it to make sense structurally. I don't want a shell, and I don't want to be relying on the strength of ABS plastic to hold it all up. I want the castle to make sense as a castle built of stone and timber. It should also have all interior spaces with lots of realistic decorations. I'm likely being far too ambitious - time will tell!

In the past, I've built two versions of the castle that are smaller than minifig scale, and were not in the desired colour scheme. For the first version, I barely had enough bricks of all colours to finish the castle. I have some hardcopy photographs of that version, taken by a friend, but I don't have a scanner to scan them in. I do have a digital camera, however, so I took a digital picture of one of the photographs, showing a simple front-view of that version:

Although you can't tell from this picture, even that first version of the castle had full interior structure. There were no fine details, since I hadn't yet bought any Lego castle sets to get them. However, there were lots of rooms (nearly 100), corridors, stairways, balconys, etc.

So far, on my real rebuild of the castle, I've only done a part that wasn't even included before, and that is an exterior guard barracks. It is a wooden structure, intended to be up against the curtain wall of the castle. So, the set of castle parts starts with that: