The Beard Bunker

Ahhhh yeahhhh, my Hochland army finally has a battle standard bearer. It’s amazing how many different meanings some words have in the English language, considering that we also have more actual words than most European languages. For instance, the standard standard of my standards is one of fairly elaborate designs (see here , here and here ) but this time, I wanted to keep things simple. This is the flag of Hochland, not the quirky iconography of a specific regiment. Also, it was only after I’d started painting that it occurred to me that Hochland literally has the Swiss flag , but whatever. Cheese, chocolate and mountains are all excellent things. Now unlike most battle standard bearers, I wanted Captain Thiele here to be usable with or without the banner so that she could be used as either the army's general or its ensign. To that end, the banner simply slots into a very snug hole in the base, and can be replaced with a rock on a stick. Yes really: ...

There is a rule I try to stick to for each game that I play: no more than one scenery project, regiment project and character project can be started at any one time. This way, things get finished. For people with willpower, this rule is not very important. For idiots like me, it’s damn-near essential. This is what lies at the bottom of the slippery, slippery slope when I fail: The sheer size of the Warhammer Fortress makes the rest look irrelevant, but when you paint as slowly as I do, five concurrent character projects isn’t very clever, never mind two concurrent regiments (well ok three, technically), two monsters, some cavalry, a piece of artillery, and a fortified manor. Oh, and a genestealer. Don’t ask about the genestealer. If you’re wondering what the point of this post is, it’s this: I don’t have any pretty pictures of new shiny things to show you, because my brain has been replaced with a butterfly. But I am doing things. Fifteen things. At once. This is wha...

Since Thunder & Steel is an omnibus, this will technically be five or so mini-reviews. I could go meta, and review the omnibussyness of the omnibus, but all you need to know about it is that it’s a collection of Dan Abnett’s forays into Warhammer Fantasy. The trouble with book reviews (along with film and theatre reviews) is that they’re inevitably tinted, if not full-on coloured, by the reviewer’s personal preferences. For instance, narrative and character is more important to me than stabby-death-kill, which is why I haven’t bothered reading all that much from the Black Library. They’re good at publishing what they do, which is a head-on collision between pulp fiction and the baroque kitschosity of Games Workshop’s storyworlds, but for the most part this leaves me bored by page fifty. There are some glorious exceptions to the rule, and most of those exceptions come from the mind of Dan Abnett, which was precisely why I picked up this book – I’d read the Eisenhorn a...

Some of you may be familiar with Tabletop World , but for those of you who aren’t: they’re two dudes based in Croatia who make ridiculously detailed 28mm fantasy terrain. Behold: Le Townhouse Le Cottage Pretty, no? Here’s the other facings of the buildings:     Assembly Since these were resin pieces, I was braced for Forgeworld levels of assembly, that is to say sturm, drang, and much gnashing of teeth in pursuit of beauty. Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that these buildings require no assembly whatsoever. They come in two parts, building and roof. See? It just lifts off. The only ‘assembly’ I did was just the usual resin preparation, i.e. washing the components to get any releasing agents off the mould, and filling a couple of bubbles with green stuff. You may also be wondering what the point of having a lift-off roof might be. That, milord, would be a fully sculpted interior. Ahhhh yeahhh . Since these buildings ...

It was one of the hottest, sunniest, most beautiful days of the year. One can’t take these things for granted in Britain. The problem? Four of my oldest friends were converging on my little house for the weekend to play some wargames, and wargaming isn’t a famously outdoorsy pursuit. The solution? Take the table outside and play on the patio. We even made an awning/parasol by stringing some bedsheets off the clothesline, although gravity and our drive-by workmanship meant that it didn’t last. Sunburn and sheer relentless heat eventually forced us back inside, but the important thing was that we had very civilised fun. And which scenario should we choose to play in this glorious sunshine but something set in the dead of night, of course. I shall describe it here in the hopes that it might provide some inspiration for anyone looking to do something outside your standard garden-variety Warhammer battle. It’s pretty much impossible to tell what’s going on in...

They go up, diddy up up, they go splat, spl-a-at... I don't often share Work In Progress stuff but this has turned out great so I couldn't wait! I wanted to add a Doom Diver to the growing Gobbo horde but... I kinda like the current one but it is a whole hell of a lot of money for what it is. I set my brain to musing. Then I saw one of those clown cannons on the telly and everything swam into place. A quick search on ebay gave me some classic doom diver crew members (the one with furled wings is in the post). Add in a looted Empire mortar and some converted crew and the Doom Diver Mortar is born! This surly fellow is the loader/primer for the mortar. The mushroom stoppered jug contains the fine ground powder needed to fill the touchhole. The big ol' scoop is a powder measure for the main charge but I doubt that goblins figured out precision measurements and just ladel it in "to taste". Some of the componants are a little wonky as I've left the m...

As Jeff talked about in an earlier post on the fantastic Pirate Viking Painting ( Found Here ) some of the Beard Bunker Dwellers are going to be working on small Dark Eldar skirmish armies this year. As a result of my fairly emphatic army builds last year, my hobby has been fairly slow this year, just some sedate work on my Dark Angels. However, I've finally found me some hobby juice in the Dark Eldar project. The idea has been slowly simmering away in the back of my brain to do a Wych Cult army based around the grand gladiator arenas of Commorragh. Here are the first few models of the main Wyches unit. I've gone for an uncharacteristically bright colour scheme. For both me and the Dark Eldar bright colours are something we just don't get on with. However I wanted to, as a painter, try something outside of my normal repertoire. As for the background for the army, well these people are performers. Sure they are murderous, callous, and very dang...

Nothing gets my procrastination reflexes going like DIY, and as such, it seems a little odd that I’ll happily spend hours fitting a nice bay window onto the front of a little plastic building. There’s clearly something wrong with me. And why was I putting a different window onto the front of the Empire Chapel kit? Because the original carvings are a) too ecclesiastical for anything other than a chapel, and b) too distinctive to be adorning the front of more than one building in a scenery collection. Witness the difference:     The window itself was made by splicing together two of the tall thin windows you get in (I think) the Watchtower set. Yay razorsaw! My secondary objective was to reduce the number of skull-filled windows on the chapel kit, since I wanted this building to be more of a generic dwelling. If you’re wandering why I wanted to do that, then clearly the phrase ‘skull-filled windows’ doesn’t have quite the same effect on you as it does on some...