The Beard Bunker

Roads present terrain makers with a series of challenges and compromises. In today's post, I'm going to talk about how I made some road sections for my ongoing modular 40K cityfight board, and which compromises I made. Regular readers may feel like it's been a while since I last produced any of the board sections for this project, and they'd be right - to the tune of several years! This is a project I'm getting back into after resolving my indecision over how to paint the Sanctum Administratus . But at last, I've got something I always felt was lacking from my terrain collection ever since I got into wargaming in the 90s: roads. They're boring, they're ubiquitous, and you really feel the lack of them. At last, roads.

Just a quick post this week, and this is largely a public service announcement for budding Space Marine commanders suffering from indecision.  In brief, the Gladiator tank can be built to swap between all loadouts without magnets. I can’t claim credit for working this out myself, there are lots of other posts about this floating around the internet, but when I shared mine with fellow bunkerites none of them knew about it so we felt it was worth passing the word along.   The key is to not glue in the base plates of the turret or the side sponsons.  Once they are undercoated, the paint will fill that gap nicely and the friction will hold them in place.  It’s as simple as that.  The Valiant and Reaper sponson options are simply not glued onto the peg, and again once sprayed friction will hold it in place whilst still allowing you to pull it apart. The one option you can’t swap without using magnets is the storm bolter or grenades on the Lancer/Impulsor sponson...

This brief post is about how to get a Whirlwind that looks at home in an army of Primaris Space Marines.  I'm not the first person to do this, but I am now a person who's done it, so here you are. The Whirlwind tank has had a long career in the Space Marines range, and while its effectiveness has varied over the last 30+ years, I've always liked the idea of an elite infantry army being supported by self-propelled light artillery. It fills a niche in the roster that no other Astartes unit quite fulfills. Besides, I'm playing Space Romans. Having a space catapult is a good addition to the Bit. Hoverwind? No. Hmm. Flywind? No. Wait... Floaty McFloatface? While I love the Rhino chassis, it doesn't make much sense to use a tracked vehicle when all my other tanks are grav tanks able to handle any terrain. Enter the Gladiator chassis. With a pair of storm bolters on the sponsons, you don't even have to fudge legal weapon options. Better yet, the Primaris range's tu...

As I settle in to write yet another “Tom doesn’t like GW’s design so he fixes it” I feel I have to point out that I really do like most of the new Primaris range.  The core armour designs are excellent and the vehicles are (mostly) great.  They just occasionally have a tendency to stick something pretty derpy on top of that excellent core, and I feel the urge to replace it with something less dumb. Image Credit: Games Workshop, used without permission for illustrative purposes only. Inceptors were some of the very earliest of these derpy designs.  Modelling them in a more upright pose certainly helps with the “floating baby” look, but those stupidly large pistols…  I just can’t get past them.  They’re so massively front heavy, and why a pair of jumbo pistols instead of a sensible weapon?  So I just ignored them. But they kept niggling at me, because they’re a very cool concept that is extremely on-brand for Raven Guard.  A highly mobile jump pack unit ...

Today's short post is an ode to the advanced headswap. I've just finished off a Primaris Psyker for the mechanised Guard army I painted back in 8th edition, because sometimes you just fancy a palette cleanser. There were however two issues with using the stock kit. For one, I'm not a huge fan of the default head and collar, even if I recognise that shying away from Imperial weirdness is an act of cowardice. Secondly, both Jeff and Tom have already painted the same mini for their armies, and I didn't like the idea of having triplets running around. I'm a special snowflake, and so are my tiny plastic people. Enter a spare head from Statuesque Miniatures, some pinning, and some green stuff. I took a deep breath and snipped off the collar. No going back now.  Pinning the head in place and sculpting a neck, the next move was to smooth over the damage to the cuirass and then get a collar and hair bun in place, since the head's original ponytail didn't feel right. ...

They come with chainaxe, they come with bolters, they come with faith and with their neverborn allies, and now, the biggest assholes in all the galaxy [citation needed] come with far too many spaceships. Yep! It's time that the Word Bearers took to the stars. Being the narrative obsessives that we are, the Beard Bunker crew really, really like a lot of the "auxilliary" games to 40k. We like being able to play out all the story aspects, defending planets, establishing air superiority (if only Chaos had made it to Aeronautica Imperialis before it's demise, if only...), all that stuff we love. Were I a betting man, I'd put money on the most beloved auxilliary game being Battlefleet Gothic. The late lamented game of spaceship combat. Fortunately for us, even in these days of long gone miniatures, the rise of 3d printing and some seriously talented digital sculptors (in this case, the excellent ItalianMoose) give us the chance to continue playing this essential narra...

Look, things just get out of hand sometimes, you know? It was never my intention to collect an entire company, these things just happen.  I was talking to Charlie recently about his long-term goals for his incredibly beautifully painted Cobalt Scions .  Initially he’d planned it to be a small self-contained force as a focussed project, given that he has painted every model to a high character-worthy standards; however as it had kept on growing and he kept on enjoying it he eventually set his sights on a full battle company. For my part I told him that I had no specific intentions of completing a battle company, I was just collecting.  I don’t number my squads anyway, so I really had no sense of how they fitted into the company structure, but given enough time I figured I’d probably get there eventually anyway.  Afterall, I am putting vastly less effort into painting than he is, and my much lower standards mean I can comfortably knock out a unit in a quarter of the ti...

Greetings fellow pals of the Primordial Annihilator! It's been a hot minute since any of the glorious sons of Lorgar have graced the august pixels of this digital journal. I'd kinda fallen off the Chaos wagon a bit; painting four thousand points of the nutcases will do that. But having finished the first phase of the Kessarine I was getting the urge to evil again... and what better evil than giant metal dinosaurs filled with the animating spirit of daemonkind? Since minute one of collecting Word Bearers I knew that I wanted absolute stacks of daemonstuff in the army. After all, we're not even "Chaos is a tool for use" types, we're "Chaos is our bestest friend" types. With a Venomcrawler and sort of a Defiler under my belt it was time to tackle some of the bigger beasts. I knew I wanted one of each of the Maulerfiend and Forgefiend so took the perhaps rash decision to paint 'em as a pair. I'm honestly impressed by how different they've...