The Beard Bunker

 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 are fine too). Codex Astartes

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

People love the matched play missions, and I'm happy for them. Lots of variety, lots of numbers going up, lots of game balance levers for the designers to pull, and lots of randomness so that your games have great variety. People also love Crusade missions. Lots of ways to follow the narrative progress of your army, lots of ways to earn rewards you can use to smack your opponent right in the beans. I did plenty of this in 40K's previous edition, and wrote about doing so on this very site. And yet today's post is about why, after over twenty games of the current edition of 40K, I'm still playing the intro mission Only War. When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write a celebration of the narrative flexibility of simplicity, but it soon became an exploration of the way Games Workshop's game design style has resulted in my ignoring more and more of their rules, and even whole game systems. A good chunk of this avoidance is down to my finite brain capacit

Finishing stuff feels great. Completed vacuuming is infinitely better than vacuuming-in-progress, and despite the existence of the word 'gooning' (don't Google that at work) I'm not convinced it's something anyone enjoys. The wargaming hobby is built on the joy of finishing stuff. Finish building the thing, finish painting it, finish your kill team, your boarding patrol, your 1,000 point army. Given the varied nature of the tasks required to bring an army to the tabletop, most of us have some aspects that are joyless chores to be struggled through (for me it's cleaning mould lines) and that struggle makes completion taste all the sweeter . This nudges many of us towards a task list mindset, enjoying the feeling of nearing completion as units get marked green in the progress tracker and we close in on that most classic of numbers: 2,000 points. So recently, when I felt a random urge to paint some Imperial Guard, I thought: at last! I can finish off the last of my

Four years have passed since we first created the Eridani Sector setting for our games in the Warhammer 40K setting. It's serving us well, and in that time we've played multiple campaigns and events, but we also identified a problem: with a sandbox this big, you can end up getting pulled in lots of directions, and gaming weekends can become a bit unfocussed. Furthermore, if you have to come up with a reason why you and your opponent's armies are fighting in any given system every time you play, that narrative legwork can feel a bit laborious, particularly when you just want to play a knockabout game of 40K without thinking about it too hard, and still want that feeling of the battle contributing to a wider narrative. Our answer to this is creating some active warzones in the Eridani Sector, where longer wars are being fought across a system or small group of systems. Players in our group can still fight battles anywhere in the sector, but if their armies fit the sides prese

Greetings, fellow fans of evil teleport-capable slabs of excessive violence. I bring to you our preferred vehicle for such things... an upsettingly large amount of Word Bearers Terminators: Nothing like a freshly defiled church to whet the appetite for a bit of the ol' ultraviolence Yep! As is often my wont, I decided not to do things by halves, no mucking around with a compact, bijou support unit of termies, ohhhhh no. Big ol' brick of 10. As party favours go, that and a pair of Obliterators really make a spicy deep strike offering. They had their maiden run this weekend having been finished at pretty much the 11th hour and were a distressingly destructive presence all round. The dark gods are thoroughly delighted with my offering. First squad, the up close and personal one, very fond of flames I should caution you all, I ought to come with a warning label that reads "will wax rhapsodic about terminators with little provocation". I've always loved them, even whe

Herein lies the first part of my ongoing project to build (and paint I guess) a Thunderhawk.  I have previously posted about the motivations for taking on such a crazy project , so this is just the ongoing project diary. Day 1 Thunderhawk arrived!  I went through the box and got a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of stuff, but I’ll just have to grind through.   Day 2 Started clipping out and cleaning bits whilst listening to podcasts. Day 3 Got the laser done and lay it out on my desk.  This thing is big.  Starting to worry a little that the Thunderhawk is maybe a bit bigger than I anticipated.   Days 4-7 Periodically clipped and cleaned the smaller parts in fits and bursts whilst listening to podcasts, but spent way too much time distracted playing Factorio instead.  The factory must grow. Day 8 Finally got the Dremel out for the big bits.  I got everything set up but realised that even though the sun was still up and the weather was fine it was probably getting a bit late for maki