The Beard Bunker

Some may mock the volume of Primaris Lieutenants grunted out by Games Workshop, but variety of choice is rarely a bad thing. One might as well enjoy Marine Privilege if one can. Besides, we're still missing a Lieutenant in Gravis armour and a Lieutenant in Terminator plate,* so if there isn't a white and red helmet stripe in a pipeline somewhere, I'm Barbara Streisand. Today's particular lieutenant is my take on converting the Lieutenant with combi-weapon. The original is great, but it's also extremely specifically a Tyranid war veteran, and I wanted something that felt right in more contexts than that. Turns out, this is pretty doable with a spot of kitbashing and a small amount of sculpting. Even if you've not sculpted before it's probably doable, so today I'll quickly describe which bitz I used and how I did it. As is traditional, I'll also talk about how I've reinterpreted the datasheet lore-wise. The conversion The first order of business wa

After months of effort, Charlie has finally completed his experimental co-op mode for Warhammer 40,000 where you and a friend (or you alone) can team up to fight against a non-player-controlled swarm of Tyranids.  He has, unsurprisingly, written a lot about it recently, with many many revisions of the rules and his fortnightly development blog posts over on Goonhammer, so I have volunteered to step up and write this announcement post and save him the decidedly unsettling (if you’re British) experience of having to write about his own work without being self-deprecating. If you just want to jump straight to the finished product, jump on over to Goonhammer where he’s sharing this supplement. Otherwise read on for a somewhat less biassed view of the game.  Obviously I’m still Charlie’s friend, the supplement is stuffed full of photos of my army and I’ve been supporting the project from its inception and even painted extra models just for this.  So, you know, I don’t exactly have Swiss l

“Pack in Black”? “Pack to You”? “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Pack”?  Choose your poison I guess.  But it’s definitely more “Don’t Look Pack in Anger”, than “We Are Never Ever Getting Pack Together”.   What am I blithering on about?  Jump packs baby!  YEEEEEEAAAAAAAH!!!   (Or if you’re a Google spider indexing this page: “How to convert Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs”.) The Long Vigil Back before all this Primaris stuff brought the tacti-cool Phobos with it, the Raven Guard were all about two things, Scouts and Assault Marines.  In my Firstborn army I have a lot of both.  My very first Raven Guard unit was an Assault Marine unit. Squad Aibek.  The eagle raven eyed will notice a squad medic and technician. That’s right, I was doing it long before Charlie made it cool . Since I made the switch to Primaris, I’ve been eagerly hoping for Assault Marines and Scouts to follow suit.  I came damn close to making them myself when they brought out Assault Intercessors, but the Black Templar

I am quite reknowned for having some long term projects. Ideas that have been on the boil for a while that just need that special something to spark the mojo and get them started. Well, today I'm able to share the results of the first phase of what has been one of my oldest back-burner projects*... The Kessarine 4th Armoured Brigade: 7th Platoon, Sergeants Tavade and Prabu led by Commissar Dravland Now some of you might already be going "Armoured brigade? They look a bit squishy for that." Well quite, shush you. These fine men and women are of C Company; 1st Motor Batallion attached to the 4th Armoured Brigade for all those ticklish situations which tanks just are a bit... big to handle. They're also not the standard Cadian-pattern lads either. This is for a number of reasons, some of them now slightly outdated. See I really did not like the old plastic Cadians, for all sorts of reasons but lets just say 'shoulders' and move on. Plus I'm a real fan of th

The thing about buying the massive  Leviathan box due to a rabid desire to paint the new Terminators as quickly as humanly possible is that, having painted said slabs , one is then confronted with a bunch of other models. Honestly I started painting the Ballistus Dreadnought before it ended up lurking in the bottom of a box for years, since the armless gun box on legs look is, to me, unintentionally hilarious. As is the case with so many silly GW designs, however, I've warmed to it during the painting process. Today's post will have a few quick notes on the heraldry decisions I made, but the bulk of this short post is a short story exploring this Dreadnought's rather brutal origins. Painting For the most part this follows the normal Cobalt Scions paint scheme . I did however go slightly off the usual track as I tried out Citadel's Retributor Armour base paint. Its coverage is very impressive, so perfect for anyone wanting a very bright, saturated gold. I rather like it,

Call it the Pile Of Shame, the Cairn Of Opportunity or the Heap Of Grey, everyone in this hobby has some models they haven't yet painted and face the dilemma of wanting the new shiny thing when they haven’t finished the old shiny thing.  Today we’re going to look at how a few Bunkerites manage their backlogs. I wish  this was my full backlog... Tom I started collecting 40k as a kid, with very limited money.  It was a hard cap on how much I could buy, even when most of my birthday presents and Christmas presents were Warhammer too.  When I became an adult with lots more money to buy models and much less free time to paint them in, I ran into problems.  Especially as that was around the time of the first big Apocalypse release with big limited time good value bundles of big formations and entire armies.  I still have things on the sprue from those days.   I have a limited capacity to hobby.  If I buy stuff quicker than I can build and paint it then no matter how good my intentions, s