The Beard Bunker

Today’s post is about iteration, how satisfying it can be to watch skills improve over time, and grav tanks. We here at the Craftworld Eldar Appreciation Society love grav tanks, yes we do. It’s been thrown about in our little gaming group from time to time that I have a type when it comes to my hobby. I like my characters a little villainous (or if they’re straight up heroes, a little dumb), and I paint a lot of black-and-off-white. Over the years I’ve done black stormtroopers with white lights, white harlequins with black underclothes, black templars, and a whole craftworld eldar army in Ulthwe colours. That last one is the important one for this post, because I’ve actually worked on 3 Ulthwe armies so far. Sort of. I’ve spent my last year or so, on and off, revisiting my eldar army. It started with a rebasing, given I’d begun the army (6 years or so ago) with the fastest basing I could think of: Crackle paint, rocks, and not much else. This changed, partly to reflect the army’s lore...

A brainwashed fearless uber-warrior is not, in general, a promising starting point for a compelling character. Anyone trying to come up with their own Space Marine characters is therefore immediately confronted with pitfalls, and it's all to easy to end up with quite bland or samey characters. Even official characters like Marneus Calgar don't have a personality to speak of (winning is not a personality). In today's post, then, I'm going to talk about some of the things I consider when adding a new character to my Cobalt Scions, a task that grows harder as I add more and more while trying to keep each one distinct. I'll leave you to judge how successful I've been. How Fearless is a Space Marine? Let's start with the titular claim about Space Marines: that they Know No Fear. This is a good line, of course, and we know that they're indoctrinated to endure horrors far beyond that which a baseline human could handle, but it's easy to take an overly rigid...

Drew's Kroot post is a tough act to follow, so rather than trying to beat her, I'm radiating strong sh*tpost energy. That's right, I'm here to tell you I have painted  yet more Space Marines . This post has nothing to offer you other than some pictures of some newly painted dudes, me squeeing about how close I am to completing a full Battle Company, and perhaps least uninterestingly, an answer to the most vexing Cobalt Scions heraldry question: why do some of these idiots get a circle on the Chapter badge, and some don't? Vital content . As you will have intuited from the image above, the miniatures in question are five of the artists formerly known as Assault Marines, and now known as Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs ,   in a change described as 'pithy.' I have nothing useful to say about them, because Tom already wrote an excellent post about the kit and his conversion of it, in Baby Got Pack . Given how detailed regular Intercessors are, I didn't...

Surprise, dear readers: It’s not Tom! Hey, I’m Drew: serial bit adder, highjacker of formats, and purveyor of a new army.   We are Kroot! Why Kroot?  I had been working on my previous army (Craftworld Aeldari) for around two years. It was my first ever army and I had scorned the plastic-y advances of all other factions to concentrate on it, leaving me feeling pretty burnt out: A change seemed like exactly the thing I needed. It was roughly about this time, like the meet-cutes (meat-kroots?) of old, that the kroot expansion to the Tau was announced. 

The paint had barely dried on the Modular Urban Board Project before the terrain team here at the Beard Bunker, my buddies, my good time pals, the crew of Deep Space Nein , had booked some weekends in the diary. For why? Bloody big buildings, that's why. Making the multistorey Sanctum Administratus ruins told us how much we liked tall things. Tom sold me on the concept of a giant archway, and I had an as-yet unsatisfied yen for buildings connected by walkways. And so we got together and spent an unbelievable amount of time cleaning mould lines off Sector Imperialis ruins. Games Workshop put the kits on Made To Order over Christmas 2024, and we... indulged. To the tune of some hundreds of pounds. "Two of everything" was I think where we landed, at an eye-watering £443. But, once you split that four ways, what you're really asking is "would I like to spend years fighting battles over some extremely cool buildings for £100?" to which, obviously, our answer was...

 A long gap since my last update; as alluded to, life has been complex.  But progress has occasionally continued on the Thunderhawk project, and we are now getting excitingly close to completion.  At the end of my previous update , I had the insides painted and the wings glued on.   Draw the rest of the owl What can I say?  Then I glued everything else on.  Well, I guess I can say a bit more than that.  I started by gluing everything on underneath, if I had started on the top I’d have broken bits when I turned it over.  The feet went on as predicted, having previously drilled and set the pins, and as predicted getting the diagonal supporting in afterwards was fiddly but doable with tweezers.  They seem solidly sturdy. For the most part I just glued things on with glue as they weren’t structural and had decent contact areas, but I pinned the hinge pieces on the strike wings as I predicted friction might otherwise force those apart, and I ...

For the last year or so, we've been conducting an experiment: to what extent is it useful to have an ongoing warzone that enables an easy narrative context for games without having to come up with a whole new situation every time? We've had a persistent region of space for years, with all our campaigns becoming part of the region's history. That's nothing new, and it's still something that we keep track of on our campaign wiki. A specific warzone, however, is a long-running war between specific factions, enabling more focussed storytelling. You can read about the initial concept in this post from July last year . As such I'm not going to re-explain the concept, but instead talk about how it's going, both in terms of enjoyment and the emergent narrative. How well is the system working? The initial battles went very well for the Imperium, which gave us some concern that one side might run away with it, making the whole thing feel a bit futile. However, the rub...

A simple little guide for taking relatively good quality photos of your minis with minimal effort and resources.  This isn’t a guide for photography experts, it’s for anyone and everyone using only things you already have in your home (eat your heart out Blue Peter). Things you will need: A few sheets of plain paper Your model painting lamp A moderately decent phone or digital camera A computer Why? Why bother to take photos?  Well, we all live online these days and sharing photos with your friends (and/or followers?) is a great little source of micro-endorphins, and the desire for those is a great motivator to get models finished.  Personally I’m not on Instagram or whatever, so I just share photos with my friends on WhatsApp. Model backdrop First thing to set up it your backdrop.  I use a few sheets of plain white printer paper (multiple sheets because one sheet is a little too transparent).  Plain black paper is often better, depending on the colours of the m...

They say a balanced game is good for both competitive and narrative players. This is true, conceptually, but as with all things it depends on the execution. With frequent balance updates, Games Workshop’s design studio have achieved an incredibly tight win/loss ratio across Warhammer 40,000's many factions. Moreover they have been tweaking individual units that see too much or too little time on the table. It’s an incredible effort entirely alien to the 40K of yesteryear, and in general I think it's great. Unfortunately win/loss rates and the frequency with which certain units appear in tournament lists are an incomplete picture. There’s no avoiding the fact that almost all the available data comes from the tournament circuit, so Games Workshop are in a tricky position, but I think one of the most consistent areas where I find myself disagreeing with their approach to balancing the game is when something is balanced at the expense of immersion. Take Space Marine Intercessors. ...

We have a guest post for you today from Pete, one of our group's newest nerds. He first featured in our 2024 roundup , and has since been hard at work bringing his Blood Angels up to 1,000 fully armed and operational points. Since his army looks repugnantly good for his first foray into painting miniatures, I asked him if he'd be up for sharing his progress here on the Bunker, and to my delight, he agreed! Over to Pete. There’s a moment in every hobbyist’s journey when the pile of plastic stops looking like a mountain to climb and starts looking like, well, an army. For me, that moment came as I finally hit 1,000 points of Blood Angels, led by Captain Matthias Virelan of the Blood Angels 2nd Company, and wondering how on Terra I’d actually managed to get there.  It didn’t happen in a burst of hobby productivity or a caffeine-fueled painting weekend (friends know caffeine and I are not on speaking terms). It happened slowly, glacially even, over countless ‘just one more highligh...