The Beard Bunker

So, I mean, hobby progress: I have just wildly increased my Raven Guard tankage by adding two Repulsors to my army, one regular and one spicy.   But that’s not specifically what I brought you here to talk about today.  Let's talk about the downsides of modernisation away from brass. So a little known fact about brass is that it’s naturally antibacterial, so all the old brass doorknobs we used to have were actually really good at preventing the spread of disease…  hang on, sorry, wrong brass rant.  I’m trying to talk about etched brass.   Foregworld etched brass Not-Forgeworld etched brass Back when GW leaned more heavily into non-plastic products and also customisation and conversion was a bigger part of the hobby, Forgeworld used to produce these lovely sheets of acid etched brass that you could cut out and stick on whatever.  Ideally suited for flat surfaces, although depending on the shape sometimes you could also bend them onto e.g. shoulder p...

People have mocked James and his Workshop for producing a surfeit of Space Marine Lieutenants, but I for one was extremely pleased both by the addition of lieutenants, and by the various kits they put out for them. Obviously even the official releases weren't sufficient to cover all the theoretical options, hence our post in August containing, among other thicc characters, rules for Lieutenants in Gravis Armour . The point is, having more options on which kit to buy is pure upside, as far as I'm concerned. As the Cobalt Scions' Third Company nears completion, I have added their second Lieutenant using the modular plastic kit, since Astartes Companies all have two Lieutenants. I have previously produced two other Lieutenants for this army: the Third Company's Antigonus Nerva  in 2021 (where I laughably said I'd completed the army) and the Tenth Company's Andrus Varro  (a conversion of the Lieutenant with combi-weapon to be less Tyraniddy). I wanted to try and con...

Today’s post is about iteration, how satisfying it can be to watch skills improve over time, and grav tanks. We here at the Craftworld Eldar Appreciation Society love grav tanks, yes we do. It’s been thrown about in our little gaming group from time to time that I have a type when it comes to my hobby. I like my characters a little villainous (or if they’re straight up heroes, a little dumb), and I paint a lot of black-and-off-white. Over the years I’ve done black stormtroopers with white lights, white harlequins with black underclothes, black templars, and a whole craftworld eldar army in Ulthwe colours. That last one is the important one for this post, because I’ve actually worked on 3 Ulthwe armies so far. Sort of. I’ve spent my last year or so, on and off, revisiting my eldar army. It started with a rebasing, given I’d begun the army (6 years or so ago) with the fastest basing I could think of: Crackle paint, rocks, and not much else. This changed, partly to reflect the army’s lore...

A brainwashed fearless uber-warrior is not, in general, a promising starting point for a compelling character. Anyone trying to come up with their own Space Marine characters is therefore immediately confronted with pitfalls, and it's all to easy to end up with quite bland or samey characters. Even official characters like Marneus Calgar don't have a personality to speak of (winning is not a personality). In today's post, then, I'm going to talk about some of the things I consider when adding a new character to my Cobalt Scions, a task that grows harder as I add more and more while trying to keep each one distinct. I'll leave you to judge how successful I've been. How Fearless is a Space Marine? Let's start with the titular claim about Space Marines: that they Know No Fear. This is a good line, of course, and we know that they're indoctrinated to endure horrors far beyond that which a baseline human could handle, but it's easy to take an overly rigid...

Drew's Kroot post is a tough act to follow, so rather than trying to beat her, I'm radiating strong sh*tpost energy. That's right, I'm here to tell you I have painted  yet more Space Marines . This post has nothing to offer you other than some pictures of some newly painted dudes, me squeeing about how close I am to completing a full Battle Company, and perhaps least uninterestingly, an answer to the most vexing Cobalt Scions heraldry question: why do some of these idiots get a circle on the Chapter badge, and some don't? Vital content . As you will have intuited from the image above, the miniatures in question are five of the artists formerly known as Assault Marines, and now known as Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs ,   in a change described as 'pithy.' I have nothing useful to say about them, because Tom already wrote an excellent post about the kit and his conversion of it, in Baby Got Pack . Given how detailed regular Intercessors are, I didn't...

Surprise, dear readers: It’s not Tom! Hey, I’m Drew: serial bit adder, highjacker of formats, and purveyor of a new army.   We are Kroot! Why Kroot?  I had been working on my previous army (Craftworld Aeldari) for around two years. It was my first ever army and I had scorned the plastic-y advances of all other factions to concentrate on it, leaving me feeling pretty burnt out: A change seemed like exactly the thing I needed. It was roughly about this time, like the meet-cutes (meat-kroots?) of old, that the kroot expansion to the Tau was announced. 

The paint had barely dried on the Modular Urban Board Project before the terrain team here at the Beard Bunker, my buddies, my good time pals, the crew of Deep Space Nein , had booked some weekends in the diary. For why? Bloody big buildings, that's why. Making the multistorey Sanctum Administratus ruins told us how much we liked tall things. Tom sold me on the concept of a giant archway, and I had an as-yet unsatisfied yen for buildings connected by walkways. And so we got together and spent an unbelievable amount of time cleaning mould lines off Sector Imperialis ruins. Games Workshop put the kits on Made To Order over Christmas 2024, and we... indulged. To the tune of some hundreds of pounds. "Two of everything" was I think where we landed, at an eye-watering £443. But, once you split that four ways, what you're really asking is "would I like to spend years fighting battles over some extremely cool buildings for £100?" to which, obviously, our answer was...