The Beard Bunker

Regular readers may recall that all the gaming we Bunker dwellers do in the 40K mythos is set in a lovingly crafted region of space we refer to as the Achernar Sector. Every campaign, and sometimes individual games, leave their mark on the setting and help it grow. There was just one problem. A setting initially designed for roleplaying as Inquisition agents (the Cetus sub-sector) and contemplative space exploration (the Scyrian Expanse) doesn't lend itself to big, sweeping wars of the sort one would, on occasion, like to fight. Even fighting big wars in the other two sub-sectors in Achernar would have had too drastic an effect, so we ended up limiting our campaigns to single system affairs, and that's not ideal. One's own setting shouldn't feel constraining. I am not a subtle creature, and thus my solution wasn't subtle either: create a whole new sector of space next to the current one, with the explicit intention of making it suitable for bigger, explodier wars. T...

Today I have the unenviable task of writing the first post after Mark's posthumous blog , so I'll open by saying the response to it from the community, both on social media and in our own comments section, has been overwhelming. It was linked to by all sorts of people, including  Aaron Dembski-Bowden and, in a touching move that resulted in one of the Beard Bunker crew quietly sobbing on a bus, the post was featured as one of the Elite Choices in Episode 196 of the Independent Characters podcast . As a long time listener to the ICs, hearing the guys talk about what Mark had to say was a trip, and an affirming one at that. Between that lovely tribute and the many other comments we got, there are two possibilities: one, that it was a funny, informative and moving collection of thoughts, or two, that people love a joke at Coldplay's expense. Either way, it's given us some comfort. Thanks once again to everyone who dropped by. We got to thinking about what on Earth o...

Being a suggestible person, particularly where Photoshop projects are concerned, I was recently goaded into making a map of the Beard Bunker's own fictional playpen, the Achernar Sector. Today's post is about why and how I made it. If nothing else, it's a visual summing up of the crazy amounts of detail we've put into our little corner of the 41st Millennium. Click this link for the interactive version You what mate? Interactive? Indeed. Once my Photoshop fugue dissipated, I sent the map to Tom (who suggested it in the first place because he needs to visualise something to think clearly about it... like me, but moreso). He dove into the noosphere with wild abandon and stuffed his mechandendrites in all the fun places. When he emerged, he had assigned links to coordinates on the map, such that if you click any of the names in the image, they'll take you to the relevant page on the campaign wiki, and because at this point Tom was entirely out of...