The Beard Bunker

A disturbingly long time ago, I was very excited to finally be owning an army I had wanted since I was ten years old . The full story of my adoration of this army is contained in that link so feel free to join me in misty eyed reminiscence, but suffice to say, I owned damn near the entire third company of the Blood Angels. Then something both wonderous and terrible happened: Primaris. The new primaris marines were so gorgeous . The sculpts were great, the scale was finally correct, everything was great... except that my firstborn lads looked like children next to them. And at the time? There wasn't a "primaris army", it was more like auxilliaries. Not enough to excite me. Plus, y'know, I'd painted a 100+ Bangles... that's a lot of Bangles... So I resigned myself to my beautiful boys being a relic of the past and got on with other projects.  [Cue Galadriel voice] But then time passed, and Primaris got more and more units and felt more and more like a real army....

As Charlie mentioned in October , 2024 has not been a great year for many at the Beard Bunker.  Nevertheless, hobby sure has hobbied, maybe less hobby for some of us than previous years, but as is our increasingly consistent tradition , we’ll take a whizz around the Bunkerites and have a look back at their year in nerdivision, and their aspirations for 2025.

After an unexpected interlude, here are the continuing adventures of building a Thunderhawk Gunship.  For further context please see previous articles in this series .  

 For the first of the Beard Bunker’s temporarily monthly offerings, I thought I’d write about something dear to my hobbyist’s heart: The Imperial Guard. Specifically my Imperial Guard collection, the 31st Nightfall Ranger Regiment. This is the first of a double-bill of posts, with this one talking about the Imperial Guard as a narrative army and my collection as it currently stands, and the next post exploring homebrew rules in the world of modern 40k. Men of Nightfall... Do you want to live forever? Why I Love Them Ah, the Guard. There is nothing quite like the mental image of a band of poorly equipped and under-appreciated human grunts going up against alien monstrosities, posthuman demigods and nightmarish hordes of daemons. The Imperial Guard channel that “indomitable human spirit” flavour which pairs so deliciously with the relentlessly bleak grimdark of Warhammer 40,000. They’re a whole army of underdogs and that’s what I love them for. I’ve had a number of Imperial Guard arm...

I am here today on behalf the management* to make an announcement to all Beard Bunker readers, and instead of burying the lead, I've put it in the title. Regrettably, for while, we are going to have to switch from weekly posts to monthly . What? Why?! A number of us are currently undergoing spectacular real life events, and the other half are stretched in other ways. In such times, one has to prioritise. The Beard Bunker has, mostly, been putting out a weekly post for twelve years . That's a fact we're very proud of (let us not mention the stunning Warhams Drought of 2015-2016). We'd like to keep doing that, but events have grabbed us by the short'n'curlies and have started singing that System of a Down song about pogo sticks. If the Beard Bunker were a money-earning website, maybe that would necessitate different priorities, since we'd owe paying customers more content, but it's something we do for fun. How long will you be posting monthly instead of we...

Who's got John Williams on in the background? Just me? Fast terrain projects seem to be becoming a bit of a specialty of ours. About a year ago, Charlie, Drew and I went in for a pair of boxes of boarding action terrain and painted it as a team . It was a success and renewed my own enthusiasm for terrain projects. I previously completed a very rustic non-imperial human settlement we lovingly dubbed Shit Town , but was annoyed at how interactive the terrain set wasn’t: while it was effective at blocking lines of sight, looking thematic and framing a board of miniatures well, the buildings were essentially impassable obstacles that models could not easily interact with, due to being closed off with awkward domed roofs. A normal response might have been to not sweat it, to enjoy the terrain I had, and to consider a future project in vein other than outer-rim settlement. Nonsense. The Necromunda team are putting out some absolutely glorious terrain, and one set we had all admired at di...

 A lot of people have been posting about heraldry this week in the Raven Guard subreddit , because they’ve just booted up Space Marine 2, have fallen in love with the greatest Chapter in the Imperium, but are (very understandably) confused about how our heraldry should work.  I’ve responded to a few, but I thought it would be good to have the whole thing explained as briefly as possible in one place that can be linked to.  There is no one simple answer.  There are three official sources of info, and then guesswork.  As briefly as possible, I will explain those sources and then you can make your own mind up. My beautiful sneaky boy. That said, the Raven Guard specifically have a huge caveat GW keeps repeating: “they change their markings regularly to confuse the enemy”.  Take that for whatever it’s worth, I think it mostly confuses us fans, but it basically means whatever you do is fine (and conveniently also means the many mistakes GW have themselves made a...