LEGO Dungeons & Dragons behind-the-scenes: Tasha the Witch Queen and the Lady of Pain
Go behind the scenes with two of LEGO 71047 Dungeons & Dragons’ fiercest female characters in our deep dive with the LEGO designers responsible for the latest series of Collectible Minifigures.
Ahead of the release of 71047 Dungeons & Dragons earlier this month, Brick Fanatics caught up with LEGO Minifigures Creative Lead Esa Petteri Nousiainen and LEGO graphic designer Tore Magelund Harmark-Alexandersen to find out just how they brought these iconic fantasy characters to life. Part three of our series focuses on two of the leading ladies in this selection, Tasha the Witch Queen and the Lady of Pain.
Learn everything you need to know about the designs of these two minifigures below. If you’ve yet to get your hands on them, you can bypass the Collectible Minifigures’ blind boxes using Brick Search’s minifigure scanner to pick them out (and any of the other 10 in this line-up).
Tasha the Witch Queen
Where some 71047 Dungeons & Dragons characters take inspiration from multiple sources and cobble them together into a minifigure representative of a class, race or villain, Tasha the Witch Queen has what Esa calls ‘the clearest reference’ of any one character in this series.
“There was a book released in 2020 called Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything,” he explains. “This is basically that book’s cover more or less, down to the outfit, hair, book and – of course – the Cauldron of Everything, with a flame representing the magic.”
A side-by-side comparison shows the clear parallels between source material and minifigure, right down to tiny details like the pitchfork-style car under Tasha’s right eye. “That was something that we noticed in lots of the references,” Esa says. “We don’t really know how she got it, but that was very specific on all of the references which she saw from Tasha.”
(For context, the scar – in-universe – is a sort of birthmark or branding that Tasha was given as the adoptive daughter of Baba Yaga, a real character in D&D based on the mythical figure.)
That attention to detail carries through to the printing all across Tasha. “She’s known for her hideous laughter,” Tore explains. “So on the back of her head, she’s laughing hysterically. And she has a lot of belts, including on her arms. A colleague, who’s a huge Castle fan, was like, ‘Oh, I love those arms. I can use those.’ I think even the named characters have good elements for Castle fans.”
Tasha is another 71047 Dungeons & Dragons minifigure that requires no new elements, but instead makes shrewd use of existing pieces in fresh colours, such as the witch’s hat-and-hair combo originally developed for VIDIYO and introduced in 21341 Disney Hocus Pocus: The Sanderson Sisters’ Cottage – a decision that was never in question to the team. “If we had had to redesign [the hat], we would probably have done it the same way for this character,” Tore says. “So it would have made no sense.”
“[Speaking] to the nature of LEGO, we always look into what elements we have available,” Esa adds. “And if we can do something with the existing elements in the perfect way, then of course we use those.”
Tasha’s accessories include a spellbook with printed 1×2 tile insert, and a cauldron with a pink flame. Both were obvious candidates given the character’s reference material, but the execution of the spellbook in particular required careful consideration from Tore.
“There’s a spell page with a laughing face, and it’s the exact same style of execution of the spellbook pages from [21348 Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale], so that there’s a continuation,” he says. “We talked to one of the designers that worked on that – I was trying to mimic the writing on the bottom of the page, but I couldn’t mimic that handwriting style, so I asked her to do it for this one as well so that it was completely consistent.”
“There’s this round shape between the text and the laughter image, which is an icon representing the school of magic, or the type of spell,” Esa adds. “This hideous laughter spell is an actual icon from D&D, and it’s actually a functional text, like the spells in the Red Dragon’s Tale set. You just take the name of the spell in English and then you translate it into this.”
The parallels between LEGO and the source material continue on the front cover of Tasha’s spellbook, which features five circles with incredibly intricate emblems inside each one. “One of them is the same as on the cube carried by the Lady of Pain,” Tore points out, before Esa adds: “We’re using that symbolism wherever we can and it fits, so there are these Easter eggs that D&D fans can notice.”
“This is also from the artwork of the book cover you mentioned,” Tore says. “We’ve followed that as much as possible.”
“The book cover is based on the book cover that you can see on a book cover,” Esa laughs.
The Lady of Pain
While Tasha gets away with reusing existing elements, that was never on the cards for the Lady of Pain. This complex and mysterious character is central to D&D’s Adventures in the Multiverse campaign, and getting her striking headpiece right was core to making this minifigure effective. But that meant contending with what would be one of the pointiest LEGO pieces in recent memory.
“It was a challenge, definitely,” Esa says. “In this case, the decision we had to make is that it’s a soft element, so it’s not a hard element. But it’s also not super soft; it doesn’t just flop around and it still keeps its shape. We are able to do these kind of shapes – the question comes down to the material.”
That softer plastic pops up now and again in LEGO minifigures, especially for Star Wars’ more delicate designs, but this is the only instance of it being used in 71047 Dungeons & Dragons. And it contributes to the Lady of Pain’s status as one of the series’ most multifaceted characters, both through materials – she also has a new textile cape – and prints.
“We saw a lot of different references for her,” says Tore. “We compiled them and found what we saw as the essence or the perceived reality version of her. And I remember struggling at one point, and Esa – also being an artist – took out his iPad and just drew on top of my Illustrator drawing, and hatched out basically the layout of what it looks like now.”
“The key thing that we found together there was this layered [approach],” Esa adds. “The images you see of her, she’s floating, and there’s loads of textile and fabric floating around her everywhere. That contributed to this cape, which has these strips, giving this very airy and flowy feeling. And then with the decoration, we wanted to get the same thing – these layers where you start with dark red, and then this new [reddish orange], and then to the standard orange.”
“If she hadn’t had that beautiful, colourful orange, we would have had to somehow put it in the line-up anyway,” Tore says. “Realism shouldn’t be equal to a doll – it is a toy. But I think it’s a very cool character. I hadn’t seen her before. We mostly played [D&D] with house rules, so my knowledge is not that deep!”
With all eyes on that extravagant headgear and custom cape, the Lady of Pain’s accessories are minimal. One is just a simple transparent 2×2 round brick – included to ‘emphasise the fact that she is big and intimidating and always depicted as floating’, according to Esa – and her Cubic Gate, a powerful item that can transport those who use it to a different plane of existence. It’s represented here by a 1×1 plate and tile stacked on top of one another.
“We decorated the tile with one of the icons, Arborea, which is one of the dimensions from D&D lore,” Esa explains. “That’s where my knowledge ends, but it’s something for the hardcore D&D fans to notice, and others just to admire.”
“When you think of a concept of a 1×1 plate and a 1×1 tile put together, how is that going to look like a die?” Tore says. “But with that little decoration, I think it really worked. Another thing to notice is that we weren’t cheap by not including a decorated head under the helmet – it’s simply because, as we understood, she isn’t really a person, but the embodiment of dimensions.
“So there’s a black head underneath with no print, because any other colour would start to ask questions to what she is, whereas black is clearly nothingness.”
“Her true identity is rooted in mystery in many ways,” Esa adds. “We wanted to keep that.”
71047 Dungeons & Dragons is available in stores now. Don’t forget to download Brick Search before you go shopping so you can scan to find specific characters, including Tasha the Witch Queen and the Lady of Pain. Click here to find out more about Brick Search’s minifigure scanner, and check out the rest of our deep dives into the D&D minifigures with the designers (so far) below.
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Interesting that they claim to have copied the Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything cover version of Tasha “Down to the hair” when…her hair on that cover, as it has distinctly been for years in depictions of her, is *black*. It’s unusual for her to have hair curlier than a slight wave too, but that can be attributed to the reused hair/hat piece. There exists some scant depictions of her that came out after the Tasha’s Cauldron book where her hair appears more brown or reddish, but they’re clearly misreadings of the cover’s lighting. It’s only in her Magic the Gathering card where she has a different design – one that matches the mini’s bright red curly hair. Odd that they’d use her Magic design when the minifigures are part of the 50 Years of DnD celebration.
Interesting that they claim to have copied the Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything cover version of Tasha “Down to the hair” when…her hair on that cover, as it has distinctly been for years in depictions of her, is straight and black. There exists some scant depictions of her that came out after the Tasha’s Cauldron book where her hair appears more brown or reddish, but they’re clearly misreadings of the cover’s lighting. It’s only in her Magic the Gathering card where she has a different design – one that matches the mini’s bright red curly hair. Odd that they’d use her Magic design when the minifigures are part of the 50 Years of DnD celebration.