The Beard Bunker

Greetings my friends! Yes, it is time to stir sacrificial blood into the lubricating oil, carve runes of desecration into gear trains and generally get up to no good with mechanisms. Because it's time to introduce the Warpsmith of the Graven Star. Bathusa Gallek, Magos of the Dark Mechanicum: "Um, Jeff?" You might be thinking, "That isn't a Chaos Marine buddy, you alright?". Well, ok, yes, it isn't technically a Chaos Marine, but he's standing in for one. I've loved this Tech-priest Manipulus since he first rocked up in Kill Team. Always wanted to find a use for him, and frankly, he's always looked a bit... dodgey to me. Not entirely a good guy. So when I was starting to muse about Warpsmiths and not feeling that the GDub's official one was terribly Word Bearers friendly, the Manipulus reared his weird looking head again and asked "what about me boss?". Couldn't say no really. For the lore reasons for his inclusion we shal

Greetings fellow seekers after forbidden knowledge! It's Word Bearer O'Clock once again on the ol' Beard Bunker (no rest for the wicked and all that). I've been painting more lads - yes I need more, shush you - steadily over the past few months but haven't been doing much in the way of photography. Well that changes today. We open our account with another fine mob of very dedicated lads and lasses: It is a well documented truth that I have something of a Necromunda fixation. I adore the game and the world and to be perfectly honest want to paint literally everything produced for it. That having been said... as I already own an Imperial Guard Platoon's worth of Orlocks, 20 Goliaths and have designs on more... I am looking for other ways to use the models so my collection doesn't become ridiculous. To this end I recruited the ever-so-devout Cawdor cultists, ahem, gangers, to be my seventh cultist unit. The irony that the style of the very devoted in the Imp

This is going to be one of those posts which is really four separate posts too small to exist on their own: How to quickly add a background image to your mini photos without having to have a physical background. Hint: it's technically similar to how they shot The Mandalorian  but infinitely cheaper and with almost no skill. Things I learned while kitbashing regular Intercessors with Assault Intercessors. Some notes on my latest attempt at a middle eastern skin tone. A short story about how Sergeant Oreas Cassander earned his thunder hammer. Adding background images to your photos This is comically simple: load a suitable image on your PC's monitor, put some scenery and your dudes in front of your PC monitor, and take a photo. Bonus points if you do a better job than me of matching the lighting levels of the minis versus the monitor. This essentially gives you infinite backgrounds, and in retrospect I've no idea why I didn't think of this sooner. Particularly given that

I did it, I totally finished these buildings before getting distracted by Dark Angels (Honest). I'm still waiting for the vehicles to arrive, once they do I'll do a proper 15mm photo shoot with the infantry and tanks etc, but for now here is the scenery.  Step One: Undercoat. This was done with some cheap brown Plasticoat. I picked brown as it provides a good base colour for most of the following steps and means I can skip a step. Step Two: Basecoat/Dry Brush Walls. Before slapping paint on to the exterior walls I did a little bit of research and found a wall paint colour chart, in French, from 1930. Basically struck research gold. I can't share it as I don't know who the image belongs to but a little dig around on should bring it up. The walls got a heavy drybrush. Neatness not required.  Step Three: Dry Brush Walls. Again, this time with a mix of the base colour and white. This was applied with downward strokes only over the top half/third of the building. This should

 I've been getting an itch. A tiny tiny itch. We've been looking at doing some historical WW2 gaming in 15mm with more emphasis on vehicles and vehicle manovers. Due to the current logisical whoopies that is the British postal system the vehicle models have been delayed. What did arrive was a whole load of MDF buildings in 1/100 or 15mm scale.  These came from TTCombat and I managed to get 15 of them for around the same price as a slightly excitable takeaway. I decided that I was going to go for the ruined buildings because I think it'll look more interesting and will be fun to play over.  The buildings are nice, but straight out of the box they lack a certain something something. So I set about making them a little less clean and tidy. In today's post I'm going to go through the modelling steps and once I've painted them I'll go through the painting steps. What I am going to show you can be applied to any setting and any building. Just simply adjust the st

Back in September 2020 I made an automated campaign roster for 40K's new Crusade mode. It's a Google sheet formatted for ease of use on smartphones (for obvious practical reasons). It's since become one of the Bunker's most read posts, and thousands of people have apparently started using this thing. This was very much a pleasant surprise, with very kind shout outs in both the Independent Characters Podcast and the 40K Badcast  as well as some top-notch signal boosting from the  Goonhammer  Goons. The main benefit of so many people checking it out is that some of them have sent in extremely useful feedback, and so I've just finished implementing a bunch of improvements. Credit in particular goes to the extremely helpful Jonathan ( @jjarcher89  on Instagram). Click the image below to head to the original post , and scroll down to the bottom of the post to see the changelog for version 1_3 to see if it's of interest to you and your wee crusading dudes.

Warhammer 40K's eighth edition ushered in a new era of streamlined core mechanics. It also gave us a baffling profusion of unit-specific special rules, stratagems, faction rules, sub-faction rules, and frequent updates. Ninth edition has added to that with the awesome Crusade mode, and while I welcome it, there’s now a lot to keep track of. In many ways I think this is the best 40k has ever been, but it also feels like the most complex, and the most overwhelming.  Illustration taken from Optimal Governance for the Dutiful Oppressor  by F. Altmann et al, p.4024 Analysis paralysis graph adapted from  here . There are a few ways of handling this. One could just use a simpler ruleset such as Grimdark Future, or to use house rules to cut out elements of the game you’re not keen on. For this article, though, I’m going to proceed on the assumption that you want to play the official rules, but would like that experience to be less cluttered. You don't have to keep up with everything T

Right then, if you are here there's a fair bet that you are someone who prefers the narrative side of gaming.  As such, I have no idea whether this post will be of any interest to you whatsoever or whether you'll just find it trite and boring, tough. I want to talk a little about background. This post was going to be all about the characters in my Necron army but I have spent a whole day trying to write something for them, and many weeks with this post sat in draft thinking about it and I've come to a conclusion. I hate writing characters. If you want a world, a system, a biome, fauna, flora, geology, astronomy, physics, technology, a civilisation (preferably fallen), then I will write you that over and over again, I love it. Most if not all of the background that I love, and my thoughts about armies, forces, chapters, and everything else revolves almost completely around the worlds, systems, and civilisations that birth them.  I think absolutely nothing about the character

Greetings, Bunker dwellers! As we pop corks and douse the dumpster fire of 2020 in the champagne of optomism we felt it was time to look at our Year In Hobby. Because let's face it, while 2020 has been awful for gaming and socialising it has been something of a perfect opportunity for hardcore hobbying.  2021 Official motto: "At least it isn't 2020"