LEGO says some stories from 10332 Medieval Town Square have been ‘saved for another set’

10332 Medieval Town Square’s designer says he couldn’t fit everything he wanted into the new LEGO Icons set – but some of the stories he came up with have been ‘saved for another set’.

From the cat chasing around the pot of cream to the ongoing saga of the goat and its fluctuating value, 10332 Medieval Town Square is a LEGO set driven by storytelling. Each of its eight minifigures has its own place in the scene, whether it’s the kid looking after the cheese factory while his parents are off buying a cow or the Wolfpack member thieving coins from the village’s inhabitants.

Those were all very deliberate choices on the part of lead designer Henrik Rubin Saaby, who was the driving force behind developing the stories for 10332 Medieval Town Square. In fact, the characters actually informed some of the wider decisions for what the set might include in the interiors of its buildings – but that’s not necessarily how all LEGO sets are conceived.

“It depends on the designer,” Henrik tells Brick Fanatics. “For my sake, I really like to give the characters some personality, some small background stories. It also made it easier to fill the houses with stuff. What do they need to get? What are they doing? What are they working with? What kind of character are they? So for me, it's important that they have a background story.”

That process also allowed Henrik to tool around with the particular identities of each of the minifigures in 10332 Medieval Town Square. Once he had the rooms of each of the buildings established, he popped the minifigures into each of them and determined their characteristics from there – often playing with stereotypes along the way.

“I knew that I had seven to eight characters in this set,” he explains. “And I lined them up: [this one] should be an innkeeper, or whatever story that you have. It should be a woman or a man, a boy or a girl. I started out by actually putting them into the houses and then going okay, this should be where they do the tapestry, and then this guy is the tapestry maker.

“She’s the woodworker,” he adds, pointing to one of the female minifigures, “and he’s doing the tapestry – in the medieval days it would be the opposite; she would be the one making tapestry and he would be the woodworker. There’s a little bit of humour in it that he's the tapestry maker and she’s the tough one making all the woods and shields and so on.”

Playing around with conventions is part and parcel of the LEGO Group’s modern-day historical sets, but it was really only the tip of the iceberg as far as what Henrik wanted to pack into 10332 Medieval Town Square.

“I would love to have more characters in there as well but there's a limit on what we can do,” he says. “There's also some stories I would have liked to have told in this in this set, but they have been saved for another set.”

It’s not clear whether Henrik is talking about a specific set or just a hypothetical Castle-themed model that might one day follow, and of course he was no more forthcoming than that tantalising hint. But it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine that 10332 Medieval Town Square won’t be the LEGO Icons theme’s final foray into this particular well of nostalgia.

10332 Medieval Town Square launches March 1 for LEGO Insiders members (and March 4 for everyone else) for £199.99 / $229.99 / €229.99. Its companion piece 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle is available now at LEGO.com and in LEGO Stores.

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