Here is the second build John and I have finished in our Elves series.
The LCE team sent us a bunch of Elves sets and we will be making at least one more scene taking inspiration from the Elves theme.

Compared to our Elves Forest Fortress, we took more creative liberties here which opened up some fun possibilities while trying to maintain a similar style to the official Magic Rescue from the Goblin Village set.

So let's jump right into the design process!


The first major decision was whether to have a full base for the model, or just little landscape sections around each house.
We chose to go with a full base which gives a more MOC-like look to the scene. Some small baseplates laid out under the irregular base give additional stability and then we put down two layers of reddish brown wedge plates around the borders.

I knew I wanted to have a reddish brown path, but wasn't sure exactly where it would go in the scene. So instead of using a filler color on the second plate layer I used all reddish brown.

While actual Elves sets usually use green plates for grass, with lime green elements occasionally added on top, we chose to go with solid lime green to give a strong fantasy vibe.
Behind the goblin you can see my first catapult prototype.

I liked the idea of low stone foundations under each building, and used a variety of masonry bricks, SNOT plates and tiles, and round plates to give a rough texture.
Yellowish green is always the primary wall color for goblin structures, so that was an easy design decision to make.

With one house started, we next laid out the other two by experimenting with the catapult play function until we found what was the proper distance to have between them.
A net folded over on itself gave a soft cushion to catch the hurled cupcakes.

And once we knew roughly where each house would be it was a simple matter to add a winding path and fill in lime green plates in the other areas.
In the official set 1x1 and 2x2 round tiles are used in front of each doorway so we repeated that pattern for the path.

The door and fireplace on the right hand building are both very similar to designs in the set. The goblin houses tend to have lots of neat additions and roof lines which led us to include a small roofed porch area on the left house.

Since we now had the catching net in place we could add the large carnivorous plants the goblins use the cupcake catapult to feed from a safe distance.

The last building is owned by a gardener goblin who is fond of those dangerous plants. So you can spot many of them at various spots inside and outside the house. One is even growing out the top of the chimney!

Purple roofs are another signature part of goblin architecture. We didn't have enough purple plates to use those for all the roofs, so we used reddish brown plates topped with mainly 1x2 tiles in purple.

The left most house is the only building with a second story, and it also has a small balcony overlooking the front door.

I had several ideas for how to handle the roof of the center building. The first being this stacked roofline setup.

Next I tried a balcony instead of the lower roof, but had trouble getting a railing design I liked. And then I realized we wouldn't have enough yellowish green bricks to build the second story walls anyway.

So I finally settled on a tower addition peeking out of the roof that uses a nifty conical roof design John came up with.

With the exteriors about done it was time to build some interiors! Since they're not overly large it didn't take long to fill them with some fun furniture.

Then I went back through and finished texturing the roofs making sure to include splashes of color matching the door color of each building. Which is another design motif taken directly from the goblin sets.
Plenty of trees with dark blue trunks and magenta leaves also needed to be added. Unlike the official set, we chose to have the red horns attached to the leaves hang down instead of pointing up.

I ended up switching the larger trees from the front area to behind the houses to give a clearer view of buildings in the overview shot.

Various goblins going about their business along with some small mushrooms, crystals, and animals finished the model:

See high resolution images on Flickr, all the detail shots on Brickbuilt, and a video of the catapult function on Youtube.

Thanks for reading, and just let us know if you have any questions or comments about the model!