The Beard Bunker

The Beard Bunker is all about narrative wargaming.  But the games we play ourselves are not the only source of 40k narrative, GW has been making major bank from our collective narrative thirst for decades in the from of Black Library publishing.  That said, and don’t tell my teenage self this, but a lot of what they publish isn’t actually that good.  I think my teenage self and people like me are pretty much their core audience, nerds with more enthusiasm than taste.  A lot of what BL publish can be summed up as “Bolter Porn”, i.e. exciting descriptions of battles and gunfire and big damn heroes gurning and killing aliens.  Unfortunately it is, in my opinion, not actually all that interesting.  Once you’ve read a few you’ve read them all. Contrawise, BL do have some extremely good authors working for them, as well as some decently mediocre, and have published some really excellent books.  The problem of course is always sorting the wheat from the chaff...

When Krug was a young ork, a runtherd took him into Mek City to see the Goff Parade. He said, "Krug, when you grow up, will you be a really fighty Goff boy, a killer of our foes?" Krug said, "Yeah course." "Good lad." 'Parade' was doing some heavy lifting, as words go. Mostly it was a bunch of Stormboy yoofs marching down the road in lines in their silly polished boots, with onlooking orks lobbing stuff at them to see how distractible they were. But the best bit of the whole thing, as far as young Krug was concerned, was the energy of so many orks in one place. He'd come out of the ground way out beyond Vulcha Cliffs. There weren't a whole lot of ladz out that way. Being here, in the city, filled him with something. Something that needed to get out. And it did. Legend has it that Krug spontaneously vomited so much green energy out of his mouth that it torched a whole mob of Stormboyz, which inevitably prompted their mates to come over with ...

One wouldn't expect the coming of the apocalypse to be something that could just pass you by, but judging by the swift disappearance of 2019's ruleset for Warhammer 40,000 Apocalypse , that's exactly what happened. A number of reasons naturally suggest themselves, and it's not without its issues, but having now played a handful of Apocalypse games I can tell you this much: my fellow players and I are having a lot of fun. What is Apocalypse? It's a ruleset for fighting bigger battles on bigger tables with your 40K minis. You can make bigger armies by forming into teams, or by painting a ton of little dudes yourself. Or both. There's a fairly solid overview on Goonhammer from when it came out. Is it even possible to get a copy? What do I need? The rules We've found it's still pretty easy to get your hands on a copy of the full set on eBay. The set includes a rulebook, command asset cards, gaming tokens, and all the dice you need to play. The tokens and co...

Populating an army with characters who have names and personalities really brings miniature battles to life for me. But five years into using my Cobalt Scions Space Marines on the regular, it was starting to strain credulity that none of those characters had popped their clogs. Reasons not to kill off characters I will always be reluctant to kill off characters who have faces. I'd have to remove the head and paint a new face if I wanted to keep using the mini. I'm really proud of some of those faces. Then there's the characters, like First Sergeant Tyvus, who are helmeted but have their names lovingly painted onto their armour. Plus of course there's a question of how many emotionally distinct characters I can write for the same group of marines, and every time someone dies, I have to come up with something new. Now that there's a sergeant for all ten squads of the Third Company, plus all the command staff, there's a lot of individuals running around. Side note:...

Never is the distinction between painting for realism and painting for the tabletop more obvious than when it's time to paint some camouflage. Miniatures need to be readable from four feet away; relatively speaking that's like a commando trying to sneak up on someone in Elton John's iconic ensembles. Since we want our tiny tacticool terrors to look like they're ready to do the right kind of slaying, this means painting something that yearns to be camo, but isn't. I knew this to be true when I started painting three Eliminators for my Cobalt Scions. This didn't stop me screwing it up. I thought I was being clever. It seemed like a good idea to take the official camo scheme on the Eliminators, with all their sharp angles, but just change the colours to vaguely match my basing scheme, so browns and greens and greys. The original scheme. Copyright Games Workshop; used for illustrative purposes only to show the kind of shapes I used. This of course has been executed ...