The Beard Bunker

After an unexpected interlude, here are the continuing adventures of building a Thunderhawk Gunship.  For further context please see previous articles in this series .  

 For the first of the Beard Bunker’s temporarily monthly offerings, I thought I’d write about something dear to my hobbyist’s heart: The Imperial Guard. Specifically my Imperial Guard collection, the 31st Nightfall Ranger Regiment. This is the first of a double-bill of posts, with this one talking about the Imperial Guard as a narrative army and my collection as it currently stands, and the next post exploring homebrew rules in the world of modern 40k. Men of Nightfall... Do you want to live forever? Why I Love Them Ah, the Guard. There is nothing quite like the mental image of a band of poorly equipped and under-appreciated human grunts going up against alien monstrosities, posthuman demigods and nightmarish hordes of daemons. The Imperial Guard channel that “indomitable human spirit” flavour which pairs so deliciously with the relentlessly bleak grimdark of Warhammer 40,000. They’re a whole army of underdogs and that’s what I love them for. I’ve had a number of Imperial Guard arm...

I am here today on behalf the management* to make an announcement to all Beard Bunker readers, and instead of burying the lead, I've put it in the title. Regrettably, for while, we are going to have to switch from weekly posts to monthly . What? Why?! A number of us are currently undergoing spectacular real life events, and the other half are stretched in other ways. In such times, one has to prioritise. The Beard Bunker has, mostly, been putting out a weekly post for twelve years . That's a fact we're very proud of (let us not mention the stunning Warhams Drought of 2015-2016). We'd like to keep doing that, but events have grabbed us by the short'n'curlies and have started singing that System of a Down song about pogo sticks. If the Beard Bunker were a money-earning website, maybe that would necessitate different priorities, since we'd owe paying customers more content, but it's something we do for fun. How long will you be posting monthly instead of we...

Who's got John Williams on in the background? Just me? Fast terrain projects seem to be becoming a bit of a specialty of ours. About a year ago, Charlie, Drew and I went in for a pair of boxes of boarding action terrain and painted it as a team . It was a success and renewed my own enthusiasm for terrain projects. I previously completed a very rustic non-imperial human settlement we lovingly dubbed Shit Town , but was annoyed at how interactive the terrain set wasn’t: while it was effective at blocking lines of sight, looking thematic and framing a board of miniatures well, the buildings were essentially impassable obstacles that models could not easily interact with, due to being closed off with awkward domed roofs. A normal response might have been to not sweat it, to enjoy the terrain I had, and to consider a future project in vein other than outer-rim settlement. Nonsense. The Necromunda team are putting out some absolutely glorious terrain, and one set we had all admired at di...

 A lot of people have been posting about heraldry this week in the Raven Guard subreddit , because they’ve just booted up Space Marine 2, have fallen in love with the greatest Chapter in the Imperium, but are (very understandably) confused about how our heraldry should work.  I’ve responded to a few, but I thought it would be good to have the whole thing explained as briefly as possible in one place that can be linked to.  There is no one simple answer.  There are three official sources of info, and then guesswork.  As briefly as possible, I will explain those sources and then you can make your own mind up. My beautiful sneaky boy. That said, the Raven Guard specifically have a huge caveat GW keeps repeating: “they change their markings regularly to confuse the enemy”.  Take that for whatever it’s worth, I think it mostly confuses us fans, but it basically means whatever you do is fine (and conveniently also means the many mistakes GW have themselves made a...

Humies have a sayin': home is where da art iz. Dey're right, coz if yoo don't paint yor favourite glyphs all over your home, how will anyone know it's yors? Today's post is all about painting your own tetanus shacks for your orks, and doing it quickly. I've been using the fundaments of this technique for over 15 years, but recently iterated on it by adding a mix of rattle cans to the preparatory process for even greater speed and, I think, an improvement in quality. The result is a giant pile of old rusty metal with a few pops of colour. Harvey and I painted a full set of the Kill Team: Octarius terrain in an evening, for a total of about 6-8 man hours. Priming This wants to be in a dark brown. My preference is Colour Forge's Hyrax Brown. Rattle rattle spurt spurt Here's where you want variety, at least an orange and then a mid-brown (i.e. not too dark or light, but... mid). Orange: Colour Forge's Convict Orange Mid-brown: I used Citadel's old M...