The Beard Bunker

Today we are going to a look at the Tech-Priests leading the forces of Forgeworld Arakos IX First we have the Tech-Priest Dominus, Neseb 71-8:The Emotionless Analyser of the Sacred Database. Neseb is the nominal leader of the forces in the field. He is a lead from near the front type of leader. He is often found field testing new prototypes personally.

If I haven't posted any miniatures for a while it's usually because I've entered a Photoshop fugue. For the uninitiated, that's when I get wildly overexcited about digital painting and lose all concept of time, space, priorities, and non-essential bodily functions. It all started when Harvey and I were contemplating ways to create illustrations of the various planets in our growing 40K crusade setting. It feels cheap to just lift pictures of planets from other people, particularly when we'd have to provide immersion-breaking credit everywhere. We needed a way to quickly produce our own.  The answer came in the form of SpaceEngine, the ridiculous brainchild of Russian astronomer-programmer Vladimir Romanyuk. It uses a combination of real-world stellar objects and physics, combined with deterministic procedural generation, to create a simulation of the observable universe. Billions of stars, nebulae and planets to see and even land on. The infinity of the cosmos, repr...

Hopefully by now you have all read the Bunker’s plans for 2022 by now. If you haven’t, off you pop , have a read, then come back.   At some point late last year someone suggested that we as a group do the whole ‘New Year, New Army’ thing with a focus on creating crusade forces that we can play with and build up over the year. As with anything we do it was met with various degrees of enthusiasm. Ranging from Jeff and I doing serious damage to our wallets through to a few people saying that they are just going to finish up what they have already got ongoing. All reactions are perfectly valid and welcome. We are all just happy to be hobbying as a group, no matter what we are doing. In my excitement I went and ordered several boxes of Adeptus Mechanicus stuff. The Christmas battle force and the combat patrol to be specific. Along with the codex I also grabbed the Techpriest Dominus from my local store so I could get on with something whilst the iron was hot. Turns out those two sets ga...

Welcome to our (sort of) annual end of year wrap up. We'll take a look back at the previous year and then lay out our hobby plans for 2022. This time we'll be doing things a little differently as we have opened our digital doors to our ever growing hobby group. We've ask them for their view on 2021 and what schemes are being hatched, plots being thickened, and what unfoilable plans are being planned. So starting with 2021... Everyone:  Noooooope.  Now moving on to 2022, in the order that I received the responses:  Rob  "For 2022 I'm focusing on re-painting and completing older armies from my hobby history. I made a start on this last year with my Bretonnians and found it immensely satisfying to complete half-finished-then-forgotten units, to work in some of the techniques I've learned more recently, and to (try to) improve paint jobs where possible. Targets for the year are: some Imperial Guard, Man O War fleets, a few units of Dwarfs, some Blood Bowl, and some...

Since 40K's ninth edition dropped I have been yearning for a full weekend of playing Crusade games with my mates. Was it worth the wait? Yes . Just being surrounded by friends doing the hobby we love was great. I should probably caveat this post-coital hobby high as I don't want to oversell things to you,  dear reader. Is Crusade perfect? No. Is 40K perfect? No. Am I the perfect opponent? No, but thanks for asking. The thing is, I'm slowly learning to relax about, and laugh at, 40K's post-reality mechanics. Today's post is really just chronicling my first serious weekend of 40K Crusade, including one of the multiplayer Treachery and Honour missions from the Catastrophe  mission pack. Game 1: Wait, what xenos cult?? Having been tipped about the existence of a xenos cult on Andaras Prime by Drew's Farseer, I threw my challenge gauntlet at Jeff: my Cobalt Scions versus his Starborn Souls  in a 500 point exchange of strongly worded opinions. As with many 500 point ...

Phobos armour: sleeker. Sneakier. JUST AS BRIGHTLY COLOURED. The first time GW put out a unit wearing Phobos armour left me decidedly confused. The Phobos-clad Reiver squad was depicted wearing bright blue heraldry so they didn't seem like stealth troops, but were instead... terror troops? I'm sorry, aren't marines terrifying by default? It didn't help that the greaves made me think of cargo shorts and skater shoes. Those Reivers would love to help purge the galaxy of xenos, but sorry, they're too busy doing radical tricks in the nearest halfpipe. It was only when the rest of the Phobos stuff dropped that my attitude started to soften. Ohhhhh, they're stealth troops, they've just been painted in bright colours because Fl ames Orkshop. I started to imagine how these tacticool idiots would look if painted in more drab colours, and I liked what I was imagining. So much so, in fact, that I recently bought a box, built 5 Incursors (albeit without the Geordi LaCyc...

The final step of the Sector Mechanicus elements of the urban project was getting around to the cables and hand rails that attach to the sides and undersides of the walkways. Glamorous? No. Visually effective? I think so, yes. I'll confess I'm not wild about the handrail design, what with them having strong picket fence energy. I had no idea what the thought was behind them until I came to recognise that the overall approach to the Sector Mechanicus terrain is that of a nightmarish sci-fi Victorian train station. That doesn't knock me into actively loving the railings, but I can at least see the dark comedy charm, and they have grown on me since painting them because they really, really add some volume to the walkways. Here's a comparison shot: Lazy up top, bizniz on the bottom half. Adding the cables and railings really breaks up the plain silhouette of the walkways, and makes it all feel a lot more lived in. And also immediately turns the walkways into something you m...

In my ongoing mission to spruce up my 40K urban terrain, I've tarted up my Sector Mechanicus buildings. Previously  I'd just got them to a basic semi-rusty metal, claiming I'd come back and pretty them up. That was in (checks notes, groans) July 2019. Tom recently started politely pointing this out, because he is my hobby wife. A brush almost immediately appeared in my hand. I considered various colours, but ultimately yellow always felt pretty industrial to me, and gives a good bright contrast. Admittedly with the lighting in that first pic above it looks extremely bright, but it's not so intense in person. Or in the other photos, for which I'd reduced the aperture. Anyway back to painting. My worry was speed. Yellow traditionally needs a few layers, and these things are large. Given the slightly rusty and oily look of the metal, I didn't want the panels to look too pristine, which they would do with just a flat coat of paint. Instead, using a large flat brush,...