The Beard Bunker

I started a new army this year, and it's definitely not a Chaos army. How could it be? They don't worship Chaos. Sure, they use Chaos, but so do some radical Inquisitors. They're not an Imperial army either; their ancestors besieged Terra beneath Perturabo's banner, before they scorned him and went off to found their own pocket empire. Ten thousand years later, their descendants know very little of the wider galaxy. The history of Horus' rebellion has long blurred into vague myths. They have endured through industry, discipline, and a proud martial tradition. Millennia of war against the encircling Orks has forged a society capable of withstanding constant strife. In today's post I'll introduce this new force, explaining the choices I've made so far, how they're painted, and broad plans for the future.

Charlie: We’ve all imagined having actual glass in the tiny plastic windows of our ruined dollhouses. What a fun idea! How utterly impractical! The idea is sensibly consigned to the most conceptual of wishlists and left there to rot next to concepts like successfully painting one’s entire backlog. But in the distant, mist-wreathed valleys of Snowdonia, there is a man - well, a collection of 52 caffeine-addled squirrels in a trench coat with the name of a man - who wanted to know: just how does one make stained glass windows for 40K ruins? That squirrel collective is the lovely Boris, one of the most far-flung members of our gaming group. At any given moment, one of the squirrels can have an idea that sets off a hyperfocus cascade. In today’s guest post, he is here to explain what he did and how he did it. We are not asking why he did it because the answer will be a sleep-deprived eye twitch and a giggle. We are simply here to enjoy and understand the fruits of his labours. Boris: ...

Way back when in 1999, Games Workshop dropped Battlefleet Gothic on my tender teenage self.  I’d come to the hobby just too late to get into Epic, and didn’t know anyone playing Necromunda, so it was my first 40k spinoff.  I got pretty excited, started collecting two different fleets, joined the most epic narrative campaign of anything I’d ever played, and burned out on it so hard I’ve never touched it since. Whilst the reasoning is complex and nuanced the biggest factor was fighting Eldar.  They could dash forwards, blast you to smithereens, then retreat back out of gun range all in one turn, whilst everyone else was ponderously gliding about trying get enemies into their side arcs. They were fragile, so mistakes could be punished, but in the hands of a skilled opponent (which mine was) they were murderous.  I don’t think I won a single game against them.  Over the course of a long campaign I tried everything I could imagine, every tactic, every manoeuvre, and ...

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...