What's next for Oathmark?

[Tim Haslam]

Those look great plus good value too!

[WuZhuiQiu]

Chariots with various options for cabs and detail could be useful - for example, as fantasy bronze age chariots with undead horses and crew, or as archaeological bronze age chariots with living horses and crew.

[Hobgoblin]

All this is based on an interview with Nick Eyrie. And yes, there was a hint about plastic ogre kit somewhere from him too.

I wonder if a way in which an ogres kit could be made more cost-effective and popular would be to make it a generic "large humanoids" kit with options for all the various Oathmark creatures of that sort: ogres, trolls, bugganes and eachies.

That might sound mad, but all those creatures seem to be about the same size, and they're all big, ugly and (presumably) hairy. The Wargames Atlantic lizardmen sprue might be instructive here, as it allows several different species to be built, simply by providing four full sets of heads.

After all, one person's troll is another's ogre, and you could probably get away with distinguishing them purely by heads and arms/weapons. There might be ambiguities that could be exploited between fur, armour and clothing - as with Tolkien's description of the trolls at the Morannon - so that a scaly body with scaly arms could be a scale-mailed body with hairy arms.

I've no idea of the economics of this, and I'm entirely willing to accept that the idea's a non-starter, but there must be something in the notion of having one kit that works for several things; GW does it a lot, for example, as do the Oathmark kits for different troop types. Given the generosity of the existing Oathmark sprues with spare parts, it doesn't seem entirely unfeasible. And I'd have thought that the market for a troll/ogre/other monster kit would be much bigger than for any of the individual species - especially as bugganes sound quite a bit like bugbears from D&D ...

[Major_Gilbear]

@ Hobgoblin:

My main concern is that all the models end up looking the same/very similar if you do multi-use kits.

It has already been pointed out by people that re-using the same heads and arms on the two Human kits released so far is a wasted opportunity to add some much-needed subtle variety.

If I collect several different forces, and those forces each have Troll/Ogre-sized units, all made from the same kit, then they're all going to quickly start feeling very "samey".

You're right that GW does/has done this in the past, and it has attracted a number of quite pointed yet very valid criticisms:

1) A big part of the cost in making a plastic mould is in the tooling. So the more stuff you put on the sprue, the more tooling required, and the higher the cost.

2) The sprues are a limited size, so the more options you add to each, the fewer complete models you will be able to make from each.

3) Taking (1) and (2) together, if you try and squeeze too many variations onto a sprue, then you end up with an expensive kit that only builds a few models.

4) As a result of (3), you now have less variety for each type of model you build, and you will need the buy the kit many times to make all the various types. This leads to a lot of models in the units looking very samey, the different units made from the kit all looking similar, and different people's armies of the same type all looking very alike. As many people enjoy and prefer better variety and some uniqueness when assembling their armies, this makes the kit a tougher sell, which in turn means it takes even longer to make a reasonable profit.

The current Oathmark kits do have some odd design choices (no musician option on any of them? repeated heads/arms between different kits of the same race? very limited/single banner top options? Cavalry mount heads not separate, so all three models look the same?) but they make a pretty reasonable compromise between offering a sensible variety of weapon options and keeping the kits at a competitive price.

So on the trolls/ogres/whatever, I would prefer the sprue has enough meaningful options that I can get at least six different-looking models from it, and have a different sprue for each type of monster. If you need more than that, then you can still kitbash/convert. Given the dearth of multipart hard styrene non-GW ogres, trolls, minotaurs, bugganes, etc, I think they'd have no trouble selling well outside of Oathmark too.

[SotF]

I saw Scruffy Crow's conversion of the Victrix chariot fro his Human army on YouTube a few days ago - I thought it was well-done, and the kit looks pretty nice actually.

Are there any suitable plastic catapult kits that could similarly be co-opted? I've had a look around the historical kits, but I've not seen anything in plastic.

While it's pre-assembled, the WizKids Deep Cuts Catapult is a rather nice thing that's rather well detailed.

I'm working on a force that's for both Oathmark and Dragon Rampant using the Reaper Anhurians, and just need to do some work with the command set to make a crew...though I've already converted several of them with the small ballistae/scorpions for another option in other games. (Take the drummer from the command set, remove the drum and drum sticks, and you can basically just position them right with the ballista turret as crew for it. I still need some more drummers there though

[Major_Gilbear]

Well, ignoring any GW kits (which are quite stylised), the ones I have found are generally quite toy-like and would need some reasonable work to make them look good for the more typical Oathmark style.

These are what I found so far:

Catapults

• Strelets set ref: A009 - Roman Catapult with crew (1:72 scale)

• Strelets set ref: A010 Shaab & Crusader Crew Medieval Catapult (1:72 scale

• Mantic Games "Undead Balefire Catapult" (1:56 scale)

Ballistae

• Warlord Games set ref: 1030000017 Imperial Roman Scorpion (supposedly 1:56 scale)

• HäT set ref: 8184 Greek Catapult (1:72 scale)

There are some others as well from Technolog, Mantic, and Cesar plastics, but they are in a scale that's hard to gauge or are very stylised.

[Chief Lackey Rich]

While it's pre-assembled, the WizKids Deep Cuts Catapult is a rather nice thing that's rather well detailed.

Seconded.  They also make several ballista variants in the Deep Cuts and Nolzur's ranges if that's any help.

[Elbows]

Yep, there are some great trebuchets, etc...the Deep Cut minis are surprisingly good - even the pre-painted ones are better than I normally expect.

[Chief Lackey Rich]

Yep, there are some great trebuchets, etc...the Deep Cut minis are surprisingly good - even the pre-painted ones are better than I normally expect.

WizKids stuff has its flaws, but they've come a long way since Mage Knight came out 20-odd years ago. 

[BZ]

Zvezda has some very nice siege machines too. They are 1/72, but they fit to 28mm well:
http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/review.aspx?id=356
https://en.zvezda.org.ru/catalog/sbornye-modeli/miniatyura/figury/Trebuchet_28894/
However, the availability may be problematic.

[SotF]

Seconded.  They also make several ballista variants in the Deep Cuts and Nolzur's ranges if that's any help.

There's the prepainted catapult and larger balista out, but I'd suggest waiting a few months, they're supposed to be coming in an unpainted version soon.

[MillsyTheScouse]

G'day All,

First post after years of lurking! Printable Scenery do a lovely catapult, trebuchet and ballistae too. I'm planning on adding the the catapult to the Human army I'm building presently.

[BZ]

Welcome here Millsy, good that You decided to step out of the shadow! 

[Porsenna]

Not sure if this is unknown around here, but on another board I post on someone had done some snooping and found art depicting Elven heavy infantry, along with orcs and goblins.







I'm particularly excited for the Orc infantry, assuming all this is real, as the bodies are gonna make great mercenary/hedge knights out on campaign. (Potentially/Hopefully)

[Ogrob]

They are real indeed, the first two are from the core rulebook and the last one is in Bane of Kings. No release dates yet on any of the kits, but they should be coming.

Not sure North Star are going to have another plastic release this year as they just released the dwarf light infantry, but hope to see the orcs soon.