Robotech Memories: RPG III - The Miniatures

Speaking of the RPG sessions we had. There was another cool item that JM had used during our game that Saturday afternoon and those were miniatures. We used them on this huge table sized hex map. They weren’t just any miniatures - markers for our Veritechs or the ememy Battlepods. No! These were Robotech Miniatures. Okay. They weren't really Robotech Miniatures as there was nothing like that at the time. But they were perfect little Battleloid miniatures! There was ones that looked liked RDF Destroids. One that looked like the Zentraedi Command Battle Pod. I made a comment that there wasn’t any standard Battlepods but at the time I wasn’t aware there wouldn't actually be one. Asking where he got them, JM stated he got them from M&M Hobbies over on 3rd Street. I do remember buying a few there but Greenspray Books also carried them. The miniatures were actually robots from a miniature line called Battletech from Ral Partha . It didn’t matter. The miniatures were dead on to the Robotech Mecha. Within weeks, I started painting miniatures for the first time. (I still have all of those miniatures. And I laugh at the quality of the paint jobs. No shading, nor shadowing - just flat paint, never thinned and no lining.) I bought the Ral Partha paints and tiny little paint brushes. I remember filling our living room with toxic fumes one afternoon as I tried to seal the miniatures with the spray armor coat. Later, I would figure out that it was best to do the final lacquer coat outside. I found I had a good talent and patience to paint them. I even would paint them for Rob and later do some special camouflage ones for JM. As I got more into painting the miniatures, I eventually bought them directly from Ral Partha mail order. Those days you had to write for a catalog, then send in a check with the order and the order would show up a couple weeks later. Pre-Amazon it could take a month or more to get a order of a half dozen miniatures. How would we survive today? I get an order from The War Store in about 3 days. I think some of the last ones I bought were from a new comic book store called Fantasy Five at the corner of 2^nd and Main - in the old Radio Shack location. I hoarded them as I heard they were discontinuing them because of the new Lead scares. They wouldn’t actually be discontinued for a few more years but the Lead would disappear and be replaced with some tin-like metal. I still have a half dozen still sealed in the original Ral Partha packaging. I think I will go dig the miniatures out...