The Beard Bunker

There came a point - somewhere aroundabout the fourth Empire Battle Wizard - that I realised I was committed to producing one wizard for each of the eight lores of magic. To that end, the fourth wizard to get a spot in the cabinet is Ruprecht Grunwald of the Jade College: He’s hairy, he knows no bathing habits, and he uses dried plants to fix most problems, but if you called him a tree-hugging hippy he’d... he’d... ok he’d just shrug his acquiescence and offer you a puff on the Happy Pipe.* The prospect of being able to use any of the eight lores in a game is enticing, but to be honest, the main draw is getting to paint eight very different characters. One generic entry in the heroes section of an army list can spawn so much variety. This old Radagast model is quite chunky compared to the other models in GW’s Lord of the Rings range, so it fits perfectly among Warhammer models. He’d probably work just as well as an Amber wizard, but I have other plans for t...

Greetings fellow bunker dwellers! ‘Tis I, Jeff, with a slightly different offering for you all. Today, I want to talk to you about how size matters to me. See for me, I always prefer as big as I can cram in. Huh? No, I’m talking about hordes in Warhammer. What else would I be... oh. Seriously though, I love large units in Warhammer, always have. Even in the dark days of the early nineties when a warhammer unit could be five Chaos Warriors and a “block” of fifteen Orcs looked sizeable I was never happy. These piddly small units never looked like regiments to me. They were five blokes out for a fight with a flag. The spectacle just wasn’t there. I remember, actually, the first time I saw Andy Chamber’s ancient Skaven army, all the bases done as cavern flooring rather than green sawdust, all the units dense blocks of ratmen. That, that right there, that was an army thought 10 year old me. Fast forward 24 years and I still think this. I still consider a unit of 15 to be me...

Hi Bunkerers and Bunkerettes, With the announcement of the new Space Marine codex I got a little bit excited about doing a new army. Now that my Dark Angels are up to about 2.5k I was feeling the green fatigue and was looking for something new. I decided, as with most things we do here at the Beard Bunker, to start with building a theme, a concept and a style. After a few discussions and changes of mind I came up with something, and it's slightly different to my normal thing. For a start there isn't going to be any tanks what so ever. Blasphemy I hear you cry. Well, be patient little Beardlings and all will be clarified. How? Well I shamelessly stole a concept from a Mister Mike Fogg, and wrote an Index Astartes. So, without further ado, I present the Sons of Rhea (pronounced Re-aah).                                 ...

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...