I love using minis for combat, and I love the old Ral Partha/current Iron Wind Metal minis. Unfortunately, I'm a horrible artist. I do not have a steady enough hand to paint minis and don't have any friends who do anymore unfortunately. However, due to the popularity of collectible miniature games, there's a plethora of awesome pre-painted minis out there available cheap from online and local stores as singles. Some of them require slight modification to make fit a similar scale, but they work well.

Photos of my current SR minis

A description of all the minis and their original source is below.


My reviews so far of the various games:

D&D minis: Great for critters and some good Physical Adept and other magical options, poor for pretty much anything else.

Star Wars Minis: Great for the cheesy late 80s cyberpunk vibe from 1st/2nd Ed, lots of the best looking minis are aliens that don't have a Shadowrun race equivilent though.

MageKnight: A few good options here and there, but requires modification that ruins the mini for the original purpose as the bases are too large for a 1" square/hex map. If you pry the base off the minis though, they fit pretty well.

World of Warcraft Minis: Nothing really seemed to fit Shadowrun to me...too much anime-style fantasy designs.

Heroscape: The bases are just a BIT bigger than a 1" square/hex, but not by enough to matter too much. And there are a LOT of good Shadowrun designs here.

Mechwarrior: Drones only pretty much.

Dreamblade: There's some good minis, esp. for the more esoteric Shadowrun stuff...but it's a LOT of effort since the bases are WAAAY too big. The minis are actually two bases - one for the actual figure and a second with all the data. If you can pry the mini base off the stat base, they can work but it took me about 45 minutes each to do it without ruining the figure's base.

Monsterpocalypse: No idea about the scale, but there's some good designs here.

So, does anyone else have any suggestions for sources of pre-painted minis ready to use out of the box?

While the bases may be a little larger than what you want, the various HeroClix miniatures are a pretty good, cheap source, of modern day/near-future minis. I'd recommend looking into bystanders, grunts and other cyberpunky figures from sets like Arkham Asylum, BPRD, Origin, Ultimates, Universe, XPlosion, and Infinity Challenge.

You can pop the big bases off with a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease.

AT 43 is a pretty good line for prepainted. The Red Block, U.N.A., and Oni armies, a lot of the character figs in particular.

http://games.rackham-e.com/en/at-43/oni

Fantasy Flight Games makes some board games with decent pre-painted figs. Picked one up that was WW2 Allied versus magic-wielding Nazi with a cyborg to boot.

Well, if you don't mind going with a little bit of drybrushing, I can recommend the Vindicare Assassin from Warhammer 40k for any sniper in Light Milspec or Camosuit.

Chronoscape makes a bunch of SR-esque minis, with plenty of models that could pass as corpsec or runners. Like a dwarf with a minigun. Yeah, I made a character for that one.

I'd suggest em4 prepainted miniatures.

Not cheap, but pretty close to SR (although there's a lack of non-human characters, something you'll find to be an issue with any line).

A friend of mine actually runs that company...didn't even know he made half of my boardgame shelf until after I'd known him for 3 or 4 years. That was a pretty cool surprise.

A lot of those minis work well, but they still feel "bland" because as well-sculpted as they are, they're still monochrome and are in dire need of a paintjob. I did, however, just pick up the Halo Interactive Strategy Game dirt cheap on Amazon and, while the figures are that same monochrome, the set pieces are awesome. It's basically a bunch of plastic tiles with a 1" sale square grid. That plus some cheapo props from model railroading (I believe H0 and 00 scales are perfect for RPG mini scales, but I'm sure someone will correct me) make for a really great modular way to throw together a urban/sci-fi map in 3D with elevations.

Actually the figures for the boardgame I was referring to are pre-painted fairly nicely and there are even single figure "boosters" for the game.

Do you happen to know the specific game in question? Going to bug my buddy and see if he has any minis that didn't make the cut for the general public I could buy off him cheap.

Tannhäuser.

I'd like to bring up heroclix again. Alot of the low-level thugs can fit well along with a few supervillains. they're also very easy to convert to fit into 1" squares, just cut the small black base off of the wider click base and glue it to a smaller disk or a penny.

Not sure if they come prepainted or not, but Privateer Press has some pretty nice Steampunkish figs for their Warmachine and Hordes games. Hordes would work well for paracritters and Horrors and some of the Warmachine figs would look pretty regular in an SR setting despite their steampunk style. But like I said, not sure they come prepainted or not.

My LGS carries Warmachine. None of the ones they carry are pre-painted.

Seeing as how a lot of places bill it as a replacement for Warhammer, I didn't figure that they would be painted, but I wasn't sure...

Even so, unpainted minis shouldn't be discarded as viable options for use in SR. All it takes is a bit more time but with patience they can usually look better than the prepainted ones...

If you go the unpainted fig route, I'd like to point out where I get alot of my favorite minis from, and that's Reaper Miniature's Chronoscope line: http://www.reapermini.com/Miniatures/chronoscope/

I'd also like to point out that the Army Painter System supposedly is a good way of painting models fast. Never tried it though. (and don't have a website link for the goop)