Genuinely curious to see what kinds of general accoutrements people want/have been looking for. I'm talking about kits like horses, skulls, the new markets & barricades kit, etc.
Me personally, I'd like a sprue of war dogs for games like KT and trench crusade. I always sort of need them, but they're kind of annoying to track down without buying full kits. Also, as a bit of a long shot, grecoroman styled cracked/crumbling statues, for scatter terrain and kitbashing. Make them about 50/50 male/female, and you could decorate any period from roman to renaissance to fantasy, even sci-fi if you stretch it a little. Obviously not too hard to kitbash, but it'd still be nice as a more dedicated product.
Anyhow, what kinds of other products might people want to see? I have basically no clue what might be helpful for historicals and its fun to hear what kinds of weird kits are missing from the market.
(also, if there's a dedicated section for general accoutrements, sorry I'm new here and couldn't find it)
Well, the big one I have heard asks for on and off in the past is camels, dogs have been asked for as well, Asian elephants might be good too. A general wild life set or 3 for diffrent climets might be a good idea.
There are quite a few terrian kits out there already but crumbling Gercoroman statues isn't a bad idea, and no streching is needed on the SciFi side persay.
Tough question to answer. Setting agnostic arguably narrows down the possible options by a lot. In theory, an explicitly fantasy object could exist in a scifi or real world setting as part of some ancient ruin or the like, but presumably it would still be marketed as fantasy. If you're looking for a lot of ideas, then a better way to formulate the question could be "what setting-flexible kits would you like to see?". (although that doesn't convey as much specific information as the original thread title without further explanation)
I'm finding it hard to think of things I would want, that would be setting agnostic and fit on the frames that WGA makes. Something like vacuum formed craters, in the style of the old GW ones, wouldn't go amiss, for example. They could work for a lot of settings, but aren't the kind of thing WGA are equipped to manufacture at the moment.
Graveyard terrain is already a pretty well catered market, likewise water features. A sprue of small bridges/jetties perhaps? I don't know, even though that theoretically works for a lot of settings, it seems like it would be somewhat niche even for terrain.
Something like the Maelstrom's edge terrain sprue could work, but wouldn't be setting agnostic, since any architectural style or material would immediately put it into a number of settings, although there's room for flexibility there.
A frame full of battle standards, or at least the poles for them, instruments, and potentially other command options like swagger sticks and the like, could work for a number of historical and fantasy settings, plus some science fantasy, but risks not fitting the aesthetic of any models with which one may wish to use them.
I think a frame of parts representing injuries, like bandaged heads or arms in slings, would be easy to adapt to [almost] any setting, but I imagine it would have pretty limited appeal. (how many people want an army of the walking wounded, I wonder?)
@Stephen Sutton maybe "setting agnostic" isn't the right word. I more just mean kits that could work for a variety of settings, or at least wouldn't fit super neatly into any one line. Things like animals, terrain, or just general bits.
Also regarding the bandages idea: I feel like you could stretch that a bit more than you might think, to do armies of lepers, plague victims, etc. I'd definitely buy it, at least
I'd like to see some wildlife accoutrements(snakes,bears,dear,elk,moose and wolves.
These would go great with ancient and modern games.
A set of dogs. A wide range of breeds, all in one set. Chihuahua, wolfhound, labrador Shepperd, go wild!
I love this sort of thing. A couple that have occurred to me over the last couple years, often while kitbashing weird character ideas or modifying off-the-shelf plastic scale model kits:
- Vehicle greeblies, such as loose hand tools and other improvised weapons or tools, periscopes and pop-up sights, weapon mounts, doors and hatches, ammo boxes, stowage, jerry cans, fire extinguishers, winches, tires... basically stuff you can "bolt on" to a scratch-built vehicle or scale model. (There can be lots of this sort of thing out there for the scale model kit hobby, one can always loot stuff out of a scale model kit, and some of this sort of thing can be scratch-built with a little creativity, but mostly in a realistic 1/35 scale, which can work, but some sprues of ready-made bits like this in a 28mm gaming scale could have really made a few homebrew projects easier!)
- Grimdark Gothic Decorations, such as spikes, skulls, crosses, icons, candelabras, shrines, and so on, in various shapes and sizes, in a similar spirit to the Dead Animal Bits. You know that 40K gamers love this stuff for vehicles and terrain, and Trench Crusaders do too, and this stuff will fit in great with The Last War, too.
- Monster, Robot, and Alien Head Sets. The Digital Atlantic alien head set is a blast for turning almost any figure into an alien or other monster for pulp, sci-fi and fantasy subjects alike, and the zombies add some heads that can be used for undead and mutants, while Stargrave kits supply even more options, but I just wish there was more variety in the monsters I could make, and more copies per set to build armies with. Aliens are a nice start, but fantasy-style stuff, pulp/gothic horrors (like vampires, psycho clowns, and bogeymen), robots/cyborgs, and even anthopomorphic characters like cat, wolf, or ape people can really come in handy for a variety of genres: you can populate anything from a Star Wars hive of scum and villainy to a fantasy army of beastmen and other monsters to some unique pulp horrors with that sort of thing....
- Tools and other gimmicks, genre-agnostic, such as hands/arms holding phones and tablets, flashlights, radios, books, scanners, scopes, bags and briefcases, holy symbols, crystal balls, hand tools, improvised weapons, wrist computers and communicators.... (Wargames Atlantic has been including a lot more of this sort of thing in recent kits, I'm very glad to see it! I love this stuff, it's great for making specialists, leaders, role-playing game characters, eccentric monsters, NPCs....)
- Battlefield Accessories, "Legos" style for do-it-yourself building projects, vaguely like this vintage scale modeling kit but more leave-it-to-the-modeler than by-the-numbers - with frameworks, platforms, planks, ladders, walls, and such that can be assembled into towers, walls, shacks, or whatever:
Maybe a single kit for a variety of stuff, or maybe a series of kits like a "woodcraft" set of the sort in the image above suitable for most historical and fantasy purposes, a set of metalwork items like diamond-plate platforms, steel ladders, metal barricades and tank obstacles, and stuff like that for sci-fi and modern subjects, and a set of concrete and stone items like walls, pillboxes, and statues and such...? Buy multiple sets to build something big, combine different types of sets to build something complicated like a building or fort, etc....
- Dungeon Vermin. Games Workshop once made a long out-of-print boxed set of this sort of thing for use in Advanced HeroQuest or something: a hard-plastic kit that included a fistful of giant spiders, giant rats, giant bats, wolves, and that sort of thing. A bit like the dog and camel sets, and the random wild animals someone mentioned above, I think that boxed sets of simple, common "dungeon" fodder are perennially useful for fantasy gamers in particular. (One such box dedicated to a mix of war dogs, working dogs, and wolves will surely be almost as useful for a subset of historical gamers as for fantasy gamers, given that even large, vicious fantasy dire wolves can do double-duty as really, really big dogs! Meanwhile, a box of roughly one-square-inch spiders, scorpions, centipedes, rats, bats, slimes, and such will cover a lot of ground.
- Weird World War Conversion Sprue follow-ups: I really got a kick out of the Weird World War sprues that came with The Last War, but really wish there had been a lot more stuff on them - the weird gas mask and monster heads, and trench weapon arms are great stuff, and I adore the giant maggot-monstes (see the Vermin entry above!) Though these aren't precisely "genre agnostic", some themed conversion sprue head-and-arm-and-ccessory possibilities I couldn't resist: Weird World War (part two - more gothic monster heads, weird gas masks, exotic weapons, eccentric gear and greeblies, and monsters), Pulp Horror (see the Digital Atlantic Cthulhu Cult and exorcist Priest sets for some options - gothic monster heads, tentacles, exorcist bibles and crosses, necronomicons, sacrificial daggers...), Cyberpunk (mohawks and goggles/shades, cyberdeck computers and drone remotes, drones, cyborg arms and heads, samurai swords and sci-fi weapons...), Weird Western (cowboy and assorted other hats, steampunk gizmos, dynamite sticks, tomahawks and bowie knives, whiskey bottles, rattlesnakes...) Such themes, I thhink, will surely mix-and-match brilliantly with the upcoming survivors and other pulp sets, and probably the zombies set too, not to mention the Partisans and WWI historicals, or in the case of sci-fi conversion bits the Cannon Fodder and Ooh-rah!
Im lacking on modern fantasy quality plastic kits.
Not the 70's goblins, chainmail dwarves, and scantily clad elves.
I also think a woodcraft kit would be a pretty good idea. A couple of wooden platform squares, railings/ladders and a number of single planks of wood in various lengths would be pretty helpful for howdahs, towers or fighting platforms or all sorts of basing situations where some quality plastic wood effects are needed and you don't have to trust to some carved balsa wood.
You could do a regular scale one with clean lines and scaled well for historicals and then a more comically scaled scrap version for the various goblin / orc / ogre contraptions that hobbyists need to make for chariots or for howdahs on monsters. Could throw in some lengths of rope or chain on the sprue for modelling of harness or guidelines or something.
Good lord, I'd go batshit for a woodcraft kit. Sprue and popsicle sticks can only go so far! Could be part of a boxed game, too, like with the market/barricade kit.
