The Beard Bunker

Quoth an anonymous comment left on the blog nine days ago: “The K’Daai Destroyer looks amazing! Do you have some better pics of the guy?” The model he’s talking about is the monster that scared the general of my Middenheim army off the table in turn one of the Bunker’s first ever battle report . Ask, and you shall receive: John converted and painted this pretty little princess for his Chaos Dwarf army, and in classic John fashion, he called it Mary, after his grandmother (“she didn’t put up with any crap”). The model is essentially a kitbash of the plastic Balrog and the Balewind Vortex (one of the arcane fulcrums in the Warhammer scenery range). It’s been said that John’s not afraid to go off-piste now and again. Other examples (of which I’m lacking photos) include Stompy the Treeman, who was made of about five citadel trees and like four kilos of greenstuff (slight exaggeration) and Precious, the Brettonian Drag-Damsel whose haircut, in the tradition of all t...

Good whatever time of the day it is when you read this to you! Fellow Bunkerer Em and I have been taking our relationship to a new level and have been experimenting together. Pushing out into pastures new and trying out things neither of us have considered before. We want to share with you what we have been getting up to. We've been playing some Bolt Action by Warlord Games. Normally we're strictly into Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy by Games Workshop. We've both been very happy with these games and have many memorable memories collecting and playing them. Both get the creative juices flowing by giving us a massive world/galaxy in which to indulge our every sordid whim. Between them they cover our need for shooty space alien death explosions and brave undead knights saving hairy monsters from ravenous damsels. So you might be asking why have we branched out into historical wargaming? This would be a fair question. Let's give a couple of reasons why we are giv...

We recently had a gaming weekend here in the Beard Bunker, during which I ran two scenarios for our Fantasy campaign. I’ll do a proper story update some time when I have more pretty pictures to accompany the text, but that’s not why I’m here today. Instead, I’m going to talk about something which, had I done it, probably would have been totally sweet . Why didn’t I do it? Because I had a lapse in concentration at a crucial moment. Gutted. But first, here: have a random thing I used to upset Hafnir Stormbourne . GRIBBLES! This fella is Gulavhar from GW’s LOTR range; he was used as the thing that lurked in the depths below Karak Hoch. It was a spin on the ol’ Dwarfs vs. Balrog concept, the spin being that this guy can string a sentence together, and had an agenda beyond ‘BURN IT WITH FIRE.’ I spent hours and hours filing, scraping, cleaning, sculpting over the joins in the metal components, pinning the wings, and converting the base to blend the rock stack into the ground ...

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...