The Beard Bunker

In recent times two things have happened. Firstly, but chronologically second, we have gained a new codex for the Thousand Sons. The codex is actually quite good. Positives include more wounds for your Arcana Astartes and the daemon engines gaining some extra shooty points. Negatives include no actual daemons in the book and you can no longer take hordes of minions. Which to me is a downside as I liked the image of a powerful sorcerer kicking about a mass of expendable underlings towards the enemy. Also gone are the stratagems that allow you to mutate models into daemons or spawn. Do not despair, this is now part of the crusade rules. In fairness I think this is probably a good thing, partly because it probably takes longer than a single game turn to mutate, partly it is also fairer for those of us who don't have the spare models kicking about to spontaneously drop in a Daemon Prince because of a lucky roll. Other things include a whole load of new rules for Cabbalistic Rituals, In

Back in November I made a Firestrike Servo-turret. So far it has mostly been nuked off the table by opponents realising it has a lot of firepower and not a lot of wounds. Naturally my response to this ineffectiveness is to double down on the stupid and add another. Since this is part of the same unit as the first turret, I wanted it to be automated, imagining it would be slaved to the techmarine running the battery. This required a little conversion work: slicing off the seat, various cables, and handles. There was only a little green stuff needed to fill a hole where the seat protruded from the main chassis. I tried to convey a few things in the painting. Where the manned turret has a decorative silver skull, the one on this turret is an actual servo-skull. Possibly the most heavily armed and armoured servo skull in the Imperial arsenal? At any rate, another fine entry in the long list of "heavily armoured Imperial things extremely vulnerable to headshots." I also changed

Since UK restrictions eased I've been playing a lot of 40K, and this has had the UNSURPRISING YET DELICIOUS effect of making me want to paint more Space Marines, despite earlier declaring I was done with them. The army's core of 3x5 Intercessors always felt a bit thin, so my first port of call was to bulk out Squad Tyvus with another five dudes. The thing about Intercessors, though, is that beyond the sergeant and the giddy excitement of a few auxiliary grenade launchers, there's no variety in these modern squads. At least, not in the rules. I've always maintained you don't need rules to add flavour, so I'm practicing what I preach and have added a couple of specialists to the unit. They might not have any in-game effects, but I always thought the Helix Adept in the infiltrator units was a very cool idea, and this is just an iteration on that, with both Helix and Tech adepts present in Sergeant Tyvus' squad. To mark them out, I gave them a special pauldron a

  Welcome, today we are going to be rebasing my entire Ogre army. The current basing is inconsistent across units. This is completely my own fault. The original basing I did in the dark days before I put any effort into basing whatsoever. Some of the units still had this original scheme, others had various different schemes but I couldn't settle on a single one. I settled in and did some research into an effective but low effort basing for them. Before I could get into the new scheme I had to remove the previous basing. Fortunately PVA can be reactivated by soaking it in water. Acrylic paints are unaffected by water which is great as I marinated my Ogres in a baking tray for roughly 60 minutes.   Once properly soaked you can see the PVA turn white again. This means it is ready to be removed.   Removal was nice and easy. First step is to simply scrape away the old static grass and tufts and what-have-yous. I used an old, blunt hobby blade and carefully just scraped it away trying

The impending release of Codex: Orks for 9th edition 40K is stirring the long-dormant bit of me that enjoys painting ramshackle vehicles, but it's not a foregone conclusion. If the new Codex is overpowered it'll dent my enthusiasm. As GW's Community team tease details from the new book, I find myself growing concerned. In today's short post, then, I'm going to talk about whether or not that concern is sensible, and what to do if we get a bad case of Codex power creep. The first thing that really got my attention was the announcement that basic orks would henceforth be Toughness 5. Any seasoned player of 40K probably understands what a big difference that is. Suddenly, a Space Marine with a boltgun will have just as much a chance of causing a wound as a veteran Guardsman with a lasgun. From an immersion perspective, that feels off, and like it risks making basic workhorse units weirdly ineffective against massed infantry. On the one hand, I tell myself not to worry.

The the last log entry I was umming and erring about the colour scheme for the Sanctum Administratus. In this week's log, which should probably be titled "things I managed to do in between long stretches of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition ," I've painted a second intact building segment. In and of itself that isn't exactly newsworthy, so I'll go the extra mile and provide the step-by-step paint recipes. Am I 100% sold on this scheme? No. It simultaneously needs more and less detail, and by the measure of my usual terrain painting, it's not that quick either. So why am I giving you a recipe for it? Well, largely, in case there are individual elements of it that you like, and want to steal. Rattle Cans I spray primed with Mechanicus Standard Grey, then did a patchy semi-zenithal spray of Zandri Dust. This is going to get mostly hidden by the basecoat stage, but serves to provide some subliminal tonal variation that doesn't show up much in the photos and h

Well bugger me if painting the Sanctum Administratus kit hasn't given me an existential crisis. I've now finished one of the intact building halves, and have been second-guessing myself all the way through. Normally with terrain I'd say you want to avoid picking out too many of the details, since painting them would a) take ages and b) create a lot of visual noise for your armies to disappear into, rather than being a pleasing backdrop. With the Sector Imperialis stuff you can get away with that minimalist approach, but I'm not convinced that minimalism works on the altogether more industrial (and pithily named) Battlezone Manufactorum: Sanctum Administratus. I've followed through on the test panel I did in the last post , hoping to create something that could work as either dilapidated Imperial infrastructure or pure underhive despair. Here's how it turned out: Somehow this looks simultaneously too pristine and too old and busted, and takes a long time to do re