The Beard Bunker

With our Deathwatch session coming up I've painted up another marine, this time for Jon (he's a keen gamer but isn't into the hobby side of things). He was built and painted according to Jon's choices, from the big honkin' Infernus heavy bolter to the choice of heraldry, face and skin tone. Since every other player has made and painted their own guy, the paint styles across the squad vary hugely. As such, I took the opportunity to try painting the black armour in a different style to my own marine (featured last week ). Today's post then is a sort of compare and contrast. I'm not sure that I prefer one or the other; apples and oranges, innit. That said, one is definitely faster. Or rather: less slow. Neither of these marines are of the "bang it out in an afternoon" variety. When you only have to paint two dudes it's a chance to put some extra love into it. Let's start by explaining what the differences are in the black armour of the two min...

It's easy to fall into a trap when creating a Space Marine. Fear is the baby, and every other human emotion besides rage is the bathwater. Legions of blandly angry bald dudes populate the fanficosphere and, dare I say it, a certain percentage of the Black Library. If they're not angry, they're stoic. That's usually even more boring. Obviously if I objected to the presence of rage and stoicism in my fiction I wouldn't be a 40K fan, but there's limits. Today, then, I seek to do my part by providing a series of prompts to help anyone trying to write a Space Marine character, be it to lead their army in a 40K Crusade or for a roleplay scenario. It's specifically written for creating Deathwatch characters, but honestly it'll work fine for pretty much any loyalist marine, and in a pinch, spiky marines too. Side note: I wrote this guide for our gaming group to create their Deathwatch roleplay characters. I won't share the rules themselves, since they're...

After a few games of Kill Team, I decided that life would be a lot quicker and easier if I had all the information I needed for my team on one piece of paper. All their weapons, stat lines, specialisms, tactics, faction special rules, everything. Turns out it's very doable. In today's post, I'm going to share the template document along with my own custom sheets for you to download and alter to suit your team. It's relatively basic - just a Word document - but hopefully it'll be of some use. It's certainly sped up my playing speed, as I haven't played this game enough to just remember everything. I'll also include pictures of my three Kill Teams, with a brief overview of their background. Before I dive in, I must give thanks to Jeff. Whilst we were preparing to run a Kill Team campaign (sadly put off due to scheduling conflicts) he made a Word document formatted to replicate 6 of the generic team member cards you get in the game. It was this origin...

Here's one way to get more of your friends into gaming with miniatures: get them hooked on RPGs first. This may well be old knowledge, but I'm new to it. Two friends, Becs and Drew, have been helping Jeff and I test our new RPG ("wait, you wrote an entire roleplaying game?" ...yes we did, check out last month's post ). Having never played an RPG before they were both soon enthralled and taking any opportunity to roleplay in any setting. This soon led to playing Inquisitor (or rather, our stripped down version of it, because the original game was ambitious yet clunky). They were enthralled by the macabre dystopian madness of the 40K mythos. Thus, when Jeff said he'd run a game of Deathwatch , they both jumped on it. Just one complication: Deathwatch uses miniatures. My latest Deathwatch mini: Brother-Sergeant Elias. More on him another time. Rather than being put off, they were keen to give it a punt. They split the cost of a Deathwatch box with Ja...

Having recently written the Astartes Librarian rules for our in-house (or in-bunker) Deathwatch ruleset, I was so taken with space wizards and Dewey decimals that I picked up a brush and painted the last of the unpainted dudes in the Deathwatch cabinet shelf. With the exception of the halberd this is the Jensus Natorian model as it comes (I've never been a fan of the swirly designs on librarians' force weapons, so swapped it out). If the weapon and ethnicity swap wasn't a giveaway, he won't be Jensus Natorian in our own games of Deathwatch . Jon heard about how librarians work in our rules and was immediately down for playing him in November for our third mission ( read about the last one here if you want a random spurt of space marines wrecking face ). Jon named him Tymon (pronounced Tay-mon) Ausonius. That's all there is of his character so far; Tymon Ausonius, Blood Ravens Codicier. The painting process was fun. Dark skin helped offset his ...

To make up for having three of my Deathwatch dudes just having some flavour of basic bolter, here's a terminator with ALL THE GUNS. This way I'm not getting gypped by power levels. The rationale behind this one man Swiss Army is that he's a walking support unit who can get into spaces the team's gunship can't. The model Conversion work was extremely minimal; I took the arm from the Salamanders terminator in Deathwatch: Overkill  and added it to a normal terminator, then added a cyclone missile launcher because... well honestly the prospect of some long range anti-tank was what motivated the inclusion of a terminator in the first place. The storm bolter, meltagun and power fist are all just happy gun confetti. The only other piece of conversion was the addition of a wire leading from the missile rack into the carapace, because... wires. It wasn't immediately obvious to me how having a meltagun attached to one's power fist would enable the continu...

Today we have a kitbash of the Ortan Cassius model from Deathwatch: Overkill to turn him into a captain for my fledgling Deathwatch Kill Team . If memory serves, the head is one from the tactical squad box (if not, lemme know in the comments and I'll edit this!) and the sword is from the Grey Knights set. That technically makes it a force sword, but zog it, I like the look of it and fundamentally it's a sword with a techy bit to tell people to expect power-stabbing. Other than that, conversion work was pretty minimal. I considered removing the purity tassles, but they're integral to other elements of the sculpt like the chain holding the book, so instead I altered the character concept slightly to explain his proliferation of devotionals and oaths of moment. There are a few elements of the paint job which didn't go as planned, most brutal of which was his left eye. Ye gods. Painting 28mm eyes scares me at the best of times; I can barely see what I'm doing, but...

One of my current motivational techniques is to have all my assembled models on display in my cabinets, even if they aren't finished. This makes the unpainted ones stick out like sore thumbs, and shame does the rest of the work. Thus, shame has pushed me to complete the first usable squad for my small Deathwatch collection. I think of these space bros as recent acquisitions but as we all know, time accelerates with age. When I happened across the photo below, the SD card told me it was taken over two years ago. Gods dammit. At this rate, when I'm eighty, I'll be referring to President Donny 'Fart Horn' Trumples as "that guy who was in office the other month." Dear gods, please let that not be literally true when I'm 80. He'd only have to change the US presidential term limit and drink so much Diet Coke that he discovers its hidden embalming effects to prolong his existence. Right, back to the 41st Millennium. At least that's comparat...

Charlie: This is the final post about the Deathwatch scenario I GMd recently. This time I’m going over the scenario concept itself, accompanied with in-fiction snippets and photos from the day. The concept is simple enough that you could probably adapt it for a themed 40k skirmish; we were playing it as an RPG using our in-house ruleset. The first thing the players got was the briefing. This came weeks before the mission itself, so they had time to choose their marine’s gear (and make a model if necessary; Andy rather wisely magnetised his marine’s arms so that he could swap out the weapons in future scenarios). This is going to be a hefty post with a fair few photos and fat chunks of screed, so if you're down for that, hit the jump.