The Beard Bunker

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House Rules for 40K

40K's ninth edition is probably the best one yet, but has that stopped us wanting to tweak a few things? Obviously not . Admittedly there's not much we've changed, yet, but still it made sense to have everything in one place where our group could find it and make suggestions. Of course this raises the question as to when one should have a house rule, and when one should just calm down and follow the rules. If you find yourself writing a giant list of amendments, one has to start wondering if one is even playing the right game. There's alternatives out there, foremost among which is the well-regarded Grimdark Future . To my mind, house rules are there for when any of the following are happening: Something is confusing. The rules are causing units to not work like they ought to. The rules are getting in the way of you doing something that is both fair and thematic. Post-game sequence for Crusade games Now that occasional Beard Bunker guest writer Tom has played a fair fe

Two Shades of Black

With our Deathwatch session coming up I've painted up another marine, this time for Jon (he's a keen gamer but isn't into the hobby side of things). He was built and painted according to Jon's choices, from the big honkin' Infernus heavy bolter to the choice of heraldry, face and skin tone. Since every other player has made and painted their own guy, the paint styles across the squad vary hugely. As such, I took the opportunity to try painting the black armour in a different style to my own marine (featured last week ). Today's post then is a sort of compare and contrast. I'm not sure that I prefer one or the other; apples and oranges, innit. That said, one is definitely faster. Or rather: less slow. Neither of these marines are of the "bang it out in an afternoon" variety. When you only have to paint two dudes it's a chance to put some extra love into it. Let's start by explaining what the differences are in the black armour of the two min

Characterisation Creation for Deathwatch Marines

It's easy to fall into a trap when creating a Space Marine. Fear is the baby, and every other human emotion besides rage is the bathwater. Legions of blandly angry bald dudes populate the fanficosphere and, dare I say it, a certain percentage of the Black Library. If they're not angry, they're stoic. That's usually even more boring. Obviously if I objected to the presence of rage and stoicism in my fiction I wouldn't be a 40K fan, but there's limits. Today, then, I seek to do my part by providing a series of prompts to help anyone trying to write a Space Marine character, be it to lead their army in a 40K Crusade or for a roleplay scenario. It's specifically written for creating Deathwatch characters, but honestly it'll work fine for pretty much any loyalist marine, and in a pinch, spiky marines too. Side note: I wrote this guide for our gaming group to create their Deathwatch roleplay characters. I won't share the rules themselves, since they're

Napoleonics: A French Brigade

Not a massive amount to say this week, so I've taken a lot of photos instead. I've managed to find a bit of time off work and threw myself into finishing off my Napoleonics to-do pile. In a week I chunked through two half finished light infantry units, and a full battalion of line. This brings me up to having the bare minimum for playing some Black Powder! Yes, Black Powder, and Napoleonics in general is massive in scale and the forces used where huge. Which looks amazing on the tabletop but is a daunting task to paint. To add a little perspective what I have here is an Infantry brigade of four battalions + command. It also has an attached artillery battery and some Hussars (for giggles). This amounts to about 250pts. To quote the Black Powder rulebook "in a typical encounter battle, we’ll have three players on each side with each player controlling a brigade. A brigade might typically be four infantry battalions, a gun, and two cavalry regiments together with a comma

Revengers re-assemble!

The boys in blue and heretics in red have been doing far too much of the heavy lifting here of late. It seemed time for some Necrons to show their faces. There won't be the tips or guidance that Jeff or Charlie can offer, merely a showcase of (almost) all of my shiny metal boyz. Leading my force are a bevvy of various nobles, front-right is my Overlord, centre his Warden, and front-left a supporting Lord. There's also another Lord hiding on the right. Behind them are the two shards of the C'Tan the Ikarrans once controlled and aim to recover (I've rebased them to match the Void Dragon I hope to get in the future, and had some fun trying to make the Nightbringer look like the very ground is recoiling from him as he passes). The final Lord in the army is the Skorpekh Lord and his destroyer minions. New Indomitus additions, these have changed the way the Necrons play quite considerably, giving them far more punch in combat. You can also see the Canoptek Spyder and my

Getting more efficient at painting blue power armour

In over 20 years of painting miniatures, I've only just realised this Cobalt Scions army is the first time I've ever painted an army in which every model is fully edge highlighted. Plenty of characters and warbands got highlights over the years, but mostly I've used faster methods for the bulk of an army. Drybrushing, dirt washes, that sort of thing. Doing highlights across the whole army has revealed that I'd never really refined my highlighting method. I hadn't needed to, just doing one character here and there. Two and a half thousand points into the project, I've unsurprisingly learned quite a bit, and over the course of the project I've more or less halved the time it takes me to paint these guys. Today then I'm going to provide some updates to the (still mostly true) guide to highlighting blue power armour I wrote in June 2020 . I figured this stuff out while preparing for a game against Tom and Andy's combined Necrons (an educational thrashing