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I suspect that there used to be a market for unpainted D&D minis because WoTC sold painted miniatures for use in D&D battles. You could pick up some hard-to-find monsters as unpainted pieces from the D&D Adventure System games and save some money. Now that D&D 5 is on the horizon, folks are less interested in investing in D&D until they see what the new system will look like. Painters like me are not what's driving the market, so supply dries up. Also, these games have been discontinued for quite a while (almost a decade for WoW?) and spare parts don't last forever. So, I'm taking stock of what I've got and where I can go from here.
Moving away from board games, there are lines of stand-alone miniatures for painting. Mostly these are metal figures, which are a lead alloy and I don't want them in the house (S1 and D1 probably wouldn't chew on them, but D2 and D3 might and I wouldn't put it past S1 to try). There is a new line of plastic miniatures called Reaper Bones. I like the look of these, and the scale + detail is about right. They are for sale at the main website, but are a little hard to get. The company just finished a Kickstarter campaign to fund these, and they are busy getting the figures out to the campaign sponsors before they start selling any. Eventually I will probably buy some of these, but I prefer to focus on the D&D pieces because I can also use them in my games.
Speaking of KickStarter, I did invest in a new project called Cthulhu Wars, a Cthulhu miniature game. There will definitely be enough pieces to paint and I forsee it being my main project after the D&D figures. I'll be blogging more about Cthulhu Wars in the near future.