Black as shadow and dread, the Fell Beasts were monstrous, winged creatures summoned from the depths of nightmare. Towering and serpentine, with leathery wings like tattered sails stretched across the wind, they carried the Ringwraiths—Nazgûl—across the skies in eternal pursuit of the One Ring. Their flesh was cold and slick, featherless and sinewy like some ancient, corrupted dragon.

These harbingers of doom glided silently at first, unnoticed until their bone-chilling screeches split the sky, shattering the resolve of even the bravest warriors. Cities fell quiet beneath their shadows, hope withering wherever they flew. The mere sight of them overhead—unnatural, relentless—was enough to drain courage and summon fear. Not just beasts of burden, but extensions of the Nazgûl’s will, they hunted with purpose, haunting the skies like death given wings.

Upon seeing the official Fell Beast Gift-with-purchase set (Set #: 40693), this was a creature I wanted to rectify in design. The iconic face and helmet with eye slits nestled above that toothy grin is something I desperately wanted to capture in it's design.

The teeth were captured using a tan bevel gear on either sides of the mouth, leaving just enough of a gap for a tongue to connect back behind the jaw into a series of bar attachment points. Shaping the head assembly needed to keep the design small as the body itself is much longer like the shape of a basilisk. To scale, a minifigure can straddle the neck just above the shoulders, and since minifigure legs rotate in one axis, I interpreted this as setting the base for the neck that is should be just slightly wider than a minifig; a 3 stud width for the neck to get a half-stud beneath either side of the figure. This informed more decision making leading through the design of the body, and tapering out to an equally slender tail.

With the wing print being very limited due to only appearing in this GWP set, these were prints I desperately wanted to incorporate into the wing designs. The difficulty comes with the attachment points being designed to stretch over ball joints. Despite it being a strong connection, the slenderness of the wing is immediately lost with now seeing a series of spheres sitting over the wing. To rectify this I use the 1x1 round tile with bar in the center (part ID: 20482) upside down and connecting into either an axle or bar hole, the profile could be slightly reduced down. With the upper side of the wings being more slender, it was time to focus on the bottom of the wings while giving an arched profile and added flexibility to their design while keeping the plastic wing prints pulled tight across them.

For this design, I choose to use a series of ratchet elements that had a bar hole with the center of some to provide rigidity to the wing along with above attachment points for the plastic to stay pinned. As the wings get further from the body, the larger ratchet joints are replaced with bar elements and connections. This design choice not only adds flexibility to this Fell Beast MOC's wings, it also allows them to be held in a static arched position as they would when flapping through the air.