Kiddicraft Herocraft – Knight Outpost Building Set KC1505

Kiddicraft's Herocraft Knight Outpost is a watchtower with a lookout platform, a flag and a weapons store, plus three knight figures with individual armour, weapons and shields. Age 5+.

An outpost's job was to send a message, not to win a fight

Three knights in a tower cannot hold off an army, and were never meant to. The purpose of a watchtower was to see something coming and tell somebody, hours or days before it arrived.

Before any form of signalling at a distance, that meant a rider — and a rider crosses perhaps sixty kilometres in a day. So the warning travelled slower than the threat if the threat was mounted.

The answer was fire. Chains of hilltop beacons, each within sight of the next, could carry a single piece of information — they are coming — across a country in a matter of hours. England kept such a chain against invasion into the sixteenth century, and the system was still in place when the Armada sailed in 1588.

It had a well-known weakness: a beacon can say one thing. It cannot say how many, from which direction, or whether the watchman simply panicked. False alarms were frequent enough that the men who lit them could be punished for it.

Which is why the flag on this model is not decoration either. A visible marker told everyone within sight who held the tower — and its absence told them it had fallen.

In the Herocraft range

Set KC1501 is the Knight's Castle this outpost belongs to, and KC1504 the Orc Battering Ram coming for it. Sets KC1502 (Orc Hideout), KC1503 (Dwarven Forge) and KC1506 (Ranger's Cabin) complete the world; figure pack KC1410 adds knights.

Specifications

Figures: 3 knights · Series: Kiddicraft Herocraft · Lookout platform, flag and weapons store · Age: 5+ · Compatible with leading brick systems