Editing Ral Partha (section)

==== Running (into trouble) in the 90's ====

By '91, Ral Partha were rolling in it: Battletech was going wild with 100's of models, their earning potential in DnD was going through the roof due to the expansions, and even began making models for this new thing called [[Shadowrun]], taking up the prize as the only official Shadowrun model producer...ever.

However, the first thing that might've been a sign of things to come was that the man who started it all, Tom Meier, had gone from exclusive artist to freelancer, and they had to hire almost twice as much staff to make up for the amount of stuff TSR was pumping out in the 90's, which was a bit of a drain. Then came the first big hitch: their lead models. Lead had became a non-starter as a metal for modelmaking thanks to its side effects of "causing children dumb enough to stick something lead in their mouth to get nerve damage" and as a result getting legislated out of existence in a consumer market, and as a result they had to switch over to a white metal alloy they called Ralidium (which was probably just tin and Pewter mixed together), which if you're a collector, is extremely recognizable as a dating line for the company, assuming you didn't paint any of them. While it kept the courts and parents off their backs, it did mean that as a whole all of their models were now a little more expensive than they had been, and they took a bit of a financial dip for having to basically pull anything that was lead from shelves and liquidate it, which only drove up the cost of the stuff they couldn't get to into becoming collector's items in a market they had no stake in.

The biggest problem they could barely control was that by the mid-90's, the tabletops were not being run by figurines and miniatures anymore, they were being run by card games, specifically that of [[Magic: The Gathering]] and other such titles that began to creep up over and over into the game stores, and they simply didn't have an answer for something like that. The other issue they'd come up against was that they had long been overshadowed in the model-making market by the fact that models had been getting bigger and bigger from the little 15mm monopoly pieces that'd been molded back in the 70's, and while Ral Partha had a dedicated following of [[Grognard|oldfags]] they could draw upon, they had a lot of trouble initially getting back into the market outside of DnD, as their models were still tiny in comparison to what GeeDubs and other such companies were doing at the time, and the models they made to accommodate to the changing tastes of gamers just weren't cutting it, since they still had a lot of the old-school charm/aesthetic that had long gone out of style. 

But everything would be fine, so long as they kept their license to make DnD models, right?