The Beard Bunker

When the plastic steam tank came out, I didn't much care for it. The details, particularly the decorations on the hull, are over-chunky and just look plastic as hell. It's a fun (if complex) unit in the game, but my dislike of the the kit with all the bells and whistles meant that I never really looked at the kit again. Original chunky bits ahoy! Credit: Games Workshop. Used for illustrative purposes only. Several years later, my friend John T burned out on a big Empire project and just straight up handed me a huuuuge pile of Empire kits, including a steam tank. He's a generous man. I think that was probably over a decade ago now, but every now and then I delve into the Cairn of Imperial Opportunity and pull a treat out. Now once you've got a mini, you start thinking about how to use it. The thing about this kit is that, as with so many GW kits, if you just don't glue half of it on it looks better. To my eyes, at least. While I'm still not sold on the chunky fil...

Birds of prey have complicated plumage, and that's why I've had an unpainted griffon in my cabinet for more years than I care to remember. At last, I found a solution: take it on a family holiday to Wales, where it's the only miniature I own for hundreds of miles. My family may have been politely baffled, but it got the job done. Crucially, I made the decision early on to just relax about the painting standard. To get each feather painted to a high standard would break the average human brain, which is why even the 'Eavy Metal team never bother to paint realistic markings, and why as their griffons always look subtly wrong to me. I decided I'd rather have looser, sloppier brush work in exchange for real markings. Choosing the right plumage The official Empire Griffon kit is very clearly an eagle, but my griffon is a hand-me-down from Maisey, a remnant of his abortive Wissenland project. This griffon is from 8th edition's  Island of Blood starter set, and it'...

Painting regiments for Warhammer Fantasy Battle is quite a commitment. Consequently, when playing a narrative campaign in which there are multiple regiments running around the campaign map, it's impractical to paint a whole block of 20-35 miniatures for every regiment in the story. So I cheat. How? By painting extra command groups to swap in to a regiment. I've now done this twice: for my handgunners (now either the Schillings or the Powderkegs) and, as of this week, my greatswords. Drew and I (and even Jon, a bit!) gathered around a painting table to add not just the command group, but another 8 regular lads to bump the unit up to 28. Regiment: The Count's Own Captain Rike Ludenhof is the daughter and heir of Count Aldebrand Ludenhof. After returning to Hochland after graduating from the University of Altdorf, she founded the Count’s Own since she felt an Elector Count should have a proper bodyguard, and that said bodyguard would need to get some battlefield experience if ...

Stormborne Dwarves hold steady during the Battle of the Northern Pass I returned to the Old World in April this year, starting out on a new roleplaying wargame* campaign. Now that we've been at it one evening a week for 6 months, I thought I'd give a broad update on how it’s going, and share some of the minis I’ve painted up for it. Jon and Drew are, respectively, playing a (drunken) Empire Captain and a bull-headed young Bright Wizard. Their characters, and the regiments they command, can gain or lose skills depending on how the story unfolds. The regiments can also grow or shrink in size, depending on recruitment rolls and battlefield casualties. *Explainer: what's a roleplaying wargame? Rather than a player versus player experience, a roleplaying wargame is when one player is the Game's Master (or GM), and the other player(s) function much like the players in any other roleplaying game, but where the conflict is resolved in battles rather than skirmishes. Players ha...

 By Taal, it's like slipping on an old boot. I haven't painted an Empire mini in just over three years, and it was an absolute pleasure. I'm still painting orks for my own 40K army, of course, but I just started running a Fantasy roleplaying wargame campaign for Jon and Drew. Jon's not into painting, so he picked a mini - the old Forgeworld unit champion for the Nuln Ironsides - and I painted him, under strict instructions that said champion should be ginger AF. Where the BFG campaign I ran for him was like Hornblower in space, this is Sharpe in fantasy. Except that Sergeant Albrecht lacks Dick Sharpe's charm, and is in fact a sot. Will he clean up is act? Or drunkenly fail upward? Or die ignominiously? The future knows. Along for the ride is Drew's wizard, just two weeks past her graduation from the Bright College and full of all the optimism of youth. In their first scrape, a policing action against a gaggle of goblins, she triggered the ambush too early, and ...

There are times when you have the very, very best intentions but get sidetracked. My Empire have very much fitted into this catagory. Way back in 2015 I started this army. Five flamin' years ago. I got a couple of units painted (more on them later) and then got somewhat Dwarf distracted... Well, all that is over now. Averland rides to war and we ride with them!

The magnificently bearded bastards populating this post were actually painted back in January, which means I finished three Empire units in the same month. Ooosh. These guys represent one of my most epic procrastinatory fails; I built them, thought about painting them, remembered how long it took me to paint the other cavalry in my Empire army, and then stuck them in the box of unpainted shame. For seven years. Well there comes a time when one simply has to sack up and throw some paint at the problem, and since I didn't want to spend ages on the project I decided to see how much of it I could do with drybrushing. The answer: quite a lot. I figured bay horses would take best to this treatment, with only the white bits needing to be wet-brushed. The outriders' capes were also fair game; the metal was similarly quick as it just got a layer of Army Painter Gunmetal followed by Nuln Oil Gloss. The whole unit got knocked out in... I forget how long exactly, but it was an ...

General Rikarht von Hess  and the Weissguard Greatswords peer over the battlements at Volgin's approaching siege towers. Today's post is a (very) short story from the World that Was if you're an Age of Sigmar player, or the World that Still Is if you're that way inclined. It's set during an event that we actually played through years ago in the Hochland campaign... not that it's necessary to know the context for the story to make sense. Enjoy! * * * The Greatest Achievement of Jonas Ostkamp When the recruiting sergeant had told Jonas Ostkamp about the armour, pay and food given to those who served in the Weissguard Greatswords, the concept of standing one's ground under any circumstance had been abstract, and the hunger had been very real. Now it was the other way round. Fort Schippel, the Empire’s last bastion in Eastern Hochland, was surrounded by a throng of Norsemen. Attempts to destroy their siege towers had failed. There wa...

We've begun a new year, and what better time than this arbitrary milestone to turn over a new motivational leaf and  do some exercise clear more hobby backlog? Every time I post pictures of some newly-finished Fantasy minis, I feel the need to justify the square bases. This is clearly a self-imposed need brought on by years of staying current with GW's games; it's not like the Warhammer Community team send ninjas to round off my bases in the night and torch the movement trays. That'd be uncharacteristically aggressive of them. Today's helping of square bases provides further reinforcements for my Empire collection . As usual, I've attempted to distract from the very basic techniques used on the troops themselves with an ambitious banner. (Hints on doing your own can be found here .) Of course in order to figure out what to paint on the banner, I had to figure out who these guys are. On maps of Hochland, there is a military base right in the middle o...

We here at the Beard Bunker have a habit of getting a little carried away sometimes. None more so than myself. During one of our role play sessions we ended up creating a town militia in order to fight off some gribbles and to protect the good people of Ferlangen. I got it in to my head to then go on a create an Empire army based on that session. So I hear by present the Ostland State Militia. The force was mostly made up of bunch of models from my first abortive attempts to get into the Empire plus a couple of extra characters I picked based roughly on our role play characters. The exception is the captain, who was an existing model I picked up because I liked the feathers. Captain Wilhelm Holtz. A man of much beard and even more feathers. He is straight forward honest type. A little too fond of Dwaven ale but he's pretty handy with a hammer. The rest of the characters in the army are analogues of our role play characters. Our band consisted of a warrior priest, a f...