The Beard Bunker

This is one of those titles that really only makes sense to the initiated. If you don't know what a 'soup' army is, it's where your Warhammer army combines forces from multiple factions, e.g. an army that contains Sisters of Battle, Imperial Guard and Skitarii. Soup is great from a lore perspective, but presents obvious game balance conundrums, not least of which because it's only really the Imperial, Chaos and (to a lesser extent) Eldar than benefit from it. You know that thing where infantry advance behind tanks? Worse, thanks the rules in 40K's 8th edition, it was a way for competitive players to farm Command Points by taking token detachments of cheap forces, giving rise to phrases like the "loyal 32" (a token battalion consisting of 3 Imperial Guard squads with a couple of jobsworth officers whose only job was to stand around scratching their arses and, when asked, passing command points to a surly Space Marine). This in turn has led some people o...

Greetings fellow devotees of the Plague Father, even as I become more immune to our bloated lord's latest and most irritating creation I nonetheless serve him. By painting some of his most devoted servants, the Plague Marines of the corrupted Astartes. These are powerfully hard to photograph well... Yes, the latest "God Squad" of the Graven Star chapter of Word Bearers are complete and ready to share their special presents with you all! First, lets have a little natter about the Plague Marines kit and what I did with it. Once I realised how I was going to incorporate the various elite squads into the army I knew I wanted to use the Plague Marine kit to represent the Grandfather's chosen. Trouble is, the Plague Marines are... how can I put this politely... a little cartoony in places? Having a good hard stare at the sprue pictures I figured I could "dial them back down to 11" and make it so that they looked like they fitted in with the more restrained normal ...

I was fine with my long-serving plain grey urban board. Sure, it had absolutely no features or texture to it, but it was fine. But then I made the ruined chapel with a fully scenic base, and it served to emphasise how comically minimalist the board was. A big grey plain of meh. On top of that, in building said chapel, I'd really enjoyed working on the kit. The new Sanctum Administratus kit is very much in the same vein, and I started to have ideas... ones I couldn't ignore, as it turns out. I wanted more visual interest on the ground, I wanted large modular buildings, and I wanted a lot of primer spray. My wallet beheld my ambition, and it knew fear. Some of the new and highly exciting beige paving slabs in action. I'm sure you'll agree that nothing says 'backdrop for ultraviolence' like beige paving slabs. As pictured above, I now have enough for a Kill Team board. There's... quite a long way to go before a full 40K layout. This is a big project, so to st...

Greetings one and all. A long time ago, in a blog far, far away (hence the odd watermarks), I was having one of my maintenance days and wisely decided to take some pictures. Thus allowing me to share my tips for protecting one of the most expensive consumables we use. Brushes. Eight years later, we figured it was time to revisit this topic and update it for our older and wiser selves. Same brush, top and bottom, one of my old ratty ones to show just how effective it is. So in true infomercial style: do your brushes look like this? Good paint brushes are really quite expensive, each of my lovely, lovely Series 7 brushes (more on brush choice later) costs a minimum of £10. If you abuse them you'll buy them again, and again, and again. Care for them a bit and they'll last you a fair while. No brush lasts forever, (I describe them as consumables for a reason) most of us downgrade from 'A'-grade to 'B' when they lose the fine point. B-graders are for base coating an...

Throw horns Chaos fans! It's time for the second best* battlefield band in the 41st millenium. They come, heralded by the screaming of infernal chords, the Noise Marines of Slaanesh! Yep! I wanted some "god squads" among my pantheistic Word Bearers. More about that later. For now, lets talk about the models. These are the Forgeworld Kakaphoni from the Heresy line. They've been a bit modified with chaos backpacks and the occasional shoulder pad but essentially "as sold". I just love the look of their sonic blasters much more than the old metal upgrade set. That having been said... you'll notice a metal blastmaster (unnacountably absent from the Forgeworld set) among the weapons. Mercifully it fits very nicely on to the new marines and makes a lovely companion to the sonic blaster design. I knew I wanted to use the disturbing doom siren head and backpack on the champion (makes up a nice Slaaneshi six see) and was perusing the wargear options and saw that ...

 Welcome, fellow devotee of the Dark Gods! I've got quite a large project for you today, however, to quote Gimli "It still only counts as one"... Yep! It's Daemon Engine O'Clock again! Now, the genesis of this model needs a little explanation so bear with me... Long ago (seriously, like 9 years ago) Charlie and I were running an Inquisitor campaign for some of our friends. We needed a finale and decided to scare them. Perhaps to death. We bought a pair of Soulgrinders and painted them in secret - in Slaanesh purple - to have burst from the ground. Let me tell you, even at 54mm scale these things got a reaction [evil chuckle]. Mine then sat on my shelf and became roughly 70% dust. Fast forward to 2021. My Word Bearers are primarily an infantry based army. In the lore they prefer that and, bluntly, I'd already painted a huge Blood Angels force that contained a lot of vehicles. Didn't fancy doing that again. So I figured that just having all of the availa...

This will be the final entry on my Ultramarines Successors, at least for the time being. Today's post will go over the conversion of Lieutenant Amulius (the modelling process, not the religious experience), then the painting, then a brief bit of lore on him, and finally some thoughts and photos on the army as a whole.

A Space Marine Battle Pile is a bit like a sumo wrestler in a room full of cats. He's big, and he's dangerous, but he's not going to control the room. Since I have spent the last year and a half lovingly creating just such a battle pile, I felt perhaps it was time to branch out into the mystical world of things that can move more than ten inches a turn. To that end: an Impulsor. Besides offering some pictures of said floating pickup truck, today's post will offer some notes on the simple methods I used to do the scratched leather seating and the display screens. Why no gun on top? I find painting this consistent level of detail quite arduous, so the way I've kept myself sane without compromising on paint quality is to paint the minimum amount of stuff needed to put a new unit down on the tabletop. I can always paint alternate weapon options later. To give myself maximum options further down the line, I actually purchased the Gladiator kit and used it to build an Imp...