Lessons from 2012 and ideas for 2013

Last year, the inhabitants of the Beard Bunker challenged themselves to produce a decent Warhammer Fantasy army in a year, and we all succeeded.  Um. Well. Some more than others.

If anyone's hobby won hard in 2012, it was Maisey's. In addition to this,
he produced a fine-looking army of Dark Angels as well. Fair play. Git.

With that in mind, this post is going to do two things:

1. To reflect on how a year-long hobby project taught me some stuff about self-motivation.

2. To give you a little taste of what to expect from the Beard Bunker in 2013.

I motivated this!

I’m not a very self-motivated person. For some reason, if given a choice between doing something constructive and having a bit of a sit, I’ll often choose the latter, despite knowing that doing stuff always makes people feel better. As such, things always get left to the last minute. Every. Damn.  Time.

The lesson: having one deadline a year away will not motivate me to do stuff right now.

The solution? Have multiple, smaller deadlines that lead up to the one big deadline that actually matters. Of course, these deadlines are just arbitrary dates on a page, so I’ll ignore them unless I incentivise them. How to incentivise them? For wargaming, nothing achieves this like an impending event. If there isn’t one, make something up. We could’ve done a gaming event where all of us participating in the campaign needed to bring 500 points, painted, to a weekend-long round robin to get a feel for our new armies. An event like that every three months, and you’ve got a much better chance of maintaining your productivity.

2013: 40K all up in this b****

A number of concepts for our 2013 project got floated about the Bunker until Maisey suggested 500-point skirmish armies for 40K. We all started thinking about how this was an opportunity to do a little smattering of those armies we liked but didn’t want to do a full-blown army for. And then, one by one, something humorous happened. Pretty much all of us said, “I might give Dark Eldar a go.”

At which point, it stopped being random skirmish armies, and started being a Kabal War. The added bonus? At the end of it, the Beard Bunker will be able to join up their cybergoth pixies to create a 2,500-point force of spankyness.

That said, a warband of sixteen-odd gothpixies isn’t exactly a year’s worth of work.

We may still do random 500-point 40K side-projects (Jeff, for example, might have plans for his rogue trader, and my eye keeps drifting in the direction of the new Tau) but one thing which I’m really excited about is Jeff’s idea of some 28mm-scale Inquisitor-style stuff.  Each player makes a warband of, say, 3-8 characters and also designs and paints up a faction of antagonists (who’d have, say, 20 goons and a few big gribblies). Jeff is already figuring out a sub-sector map for us to populate with said antagonist factions, at which point delicious narrative-heavy goodness is ours for the enjoying. I’ll be using Inquisitor Drake, Jeff has his Inquisitor, and so on.

Inquisitor Drake's warband

Since I’ve mostly got my Inq28 warband mostly sorted, I might even finish the goon squad in time!

We’ve yet to set any deadlines on these, and it’s possible that some of us might not get involved in all three projects (500pt armies/Kabal War/Inq28), but there you have it. Which of these projects would get your hobby juices flowing the most? And whilst I’m at it, what sort of articles would you like to see from us this year? If you have thoughts on the matter, tell us in the comments!

~Charlie