The Beard Bunker

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start when trying to make narrative campaigns happen, but today’s post will walk you through the Beard Bunker’s most recent campaign weekend, and honestly the process couldn’t have been simpler. In summary, it went like this: I met this guy RJ in a previous weekend campaign ( part 1 , part 2 ) put together by Bristol Tom, whose beautiful Ynnari army is incidentally featured in this month's White Dwarf (issue 514). I liked the cut of RJ's jib, so under the misapprehension that he'd now moved to Bristol as advertised, I invite him for a day’s gaming. RJ tells me he’s still in Fife. We proceed anyway, but make it a weekend. I ask him what he’ll bring. He tells me necrons. I ask the other necron appreciators in our group if they’re down. They are. I rummage around our wiki for worlds that’d suit a necron raid, and find the under-utilised blackstone mines of IOL-804 . I fill out the background a little, take the same illustration I already us...

Since I moved house four years ago and seriously re-engaged in this old hobby of ours I have collected six different armies (starting back in 2019 with Da Ork Airforce ).  And by “collected” I mean I have at least two thousand points of reasonably balanced models fully painted to a decent standard.  And by “six” I mean six armies of soup, spanning ten different sub-factions.   I did not set out to do this.  This was a mistake.  I neither condone nor recommend this behaviour.  But if you are thinking of starting a new army as a small side project, you might want to read on… The Aquisition Phalanx in most of its glory. Why Seriously though, why a new army, and why this army?  Like all good stories, this is a love story.  I read The Infinite and the Divine and fell deeply in love with Trazyn the Infinite.  In my defence, I started playing 40k a long time ago when there was a lot more overt humour in it, so I’ve never taken it too seriously....

The boys in blue and heretics in red have been doing far too much of the heavy lifting here of late.  It seemed time for some Necrons to show their faces. There won't be the tips or guidance that Jeff or Charlie can offer, merely a showcase of (almost) all of my shiny metal boyz. Leading my force are a bevvy of various nobles, front-right is my Overlord, centre his Warden, and front-left a supporting Lord.  There's also another Lord hiding on the right.  Behind them are the two shards of the C'Tan the Ikarrans once controlled and aim to recover (I've rebased them to match the Void Dragon I hope to get in the future, and had some fun trying to make the Nightbringer look like the very ground is recoiling from him as he passes). The final Lord in the army is the Skorpekh Lord and his destroyer minions.  New Indomitus additions, these have changed the way the Necrons play quite considerably, giving them far more punch in combat.  You can also see the Canoptek Spyder...

Right then, if you are here there's a fair bet that you are someone who prefers the narrative side of gaming.  As such, I have no idea whether this post will be of any interest to you whatsoever or whether you'll just find it trite and boring, tough. I want to talk a little about background. This post was going to be all about the characters in my Necron army but I have spent a whole day trying to write something for them, and many weeks with this post sat in draft thinking about it and I've come to a conclusion. I hate writing characters. If you want a world, a system, a biome, fauna, flora, geology, astronomy, physics, technology, a civilisation (preferably fallen), then I will write you that over and over again, I love it. Most if not all of the background that I love, and my thoughts about armies, forces, chapters, and everything else revolves almost completely around the worlds, systems, and civilisations that birth them.  I think absolutely nothing about the character...

More additions for my Ikarran Necrons today.  This time around it is the turn of the various flavours of Necron that have succumbed during the long aeons of hibernation. So, to continue the telling of the origins of the Ikarrans and in order of age of the models: The Flesh Harvest Infected by some virus, these units now seek to recover all they lost through transference, thinking that if they can harvest sufficient biological matter from their victims they will somehow transform back into their previous selves.  A true terror to their foe, they inhabit pockets of a nether dimension and phase onto the battlefield where they are least expected. These are the old metal sculpts of the Flayed Ones, and they are absolutely fantastic, if horrifying.  It's not until you get really close that you see how the flesh is sculpted as if stretched over the skeletal frame underneath, and the way it hangs over the faces with the odd eye peering through is deeply disturbing (the close up p...

Today's instalment for the growing Ikarran dynasty are the Canoptek constructs, mindless automata whose sole purpose is the maintenance and protection of the "true" Necrontyr and their homeworlds.  By their very definition, these units can be a little dry or bland for the more narrative kind of experience I like, so with my apologies to fiction writers everywhere I plan to include a snippet of colour text that has been knocking around in my head that helps me bring them to life.  If nothing else, it'll give you all an insight into how I imagine these delightfully spooky constructs would act. First up are the Cryptothralls, or murder-barrels as I like to think of them (left and right, I'll cover the central Cryptek in a later post).  With their backwards angled blades, and extremely hunched poses these are glorious models.  The centralised glowing power orb (not really visible in the image below sadly) is a new feature that seems to be a common theme in the Canopte...

Allow me to indroduce the Ikarran Dynasty, my fledgling Crusade force which will combine my old Necron army from days-of-yore, and all the lovely newness of 9th Edition.  For anyone who wishes to get ahead of the posts, a lot of the flavour text you'll read here can be found on the Cetus wiki . The names the Ikarran Necrontyr used for the worlds of the Eridani Sector have been lost in time. Needless to say, both Eridani and Achenar Sector were once part of their dominion. In an age when dinosaurs still roamed Terra, and humanity's ancestors were but tiny vermin desperately trying to avoid becoming the next meal, the Ikarran dynasty was at its peak. Victors of sorts of the War in Heaven, and vanquishers of the C'Tan, they along with the other dynasties were masters of the Galaxy. Seeing little more to achieve, they realised their lives would no longer have purpose. Withdrawing to their birth worlds, they erected defences as they went so that they could remain undisturbed unt...

Charlie:  Some time ago, I secretly acquired and painted some Necrons for the BFG/RPG hybrid story I'm playing with Jon and Andy . Jon isn't very familiar with 40K lore, which means he gets to discover Necrons much like the rest of us did when they first started appearing in 40K: one horrifying detail at a time. Andy, conversely, is extremely familiar with 40K lore, and thus when they discovered some seemingly inert metal pyramids in SCY-076 , an uninhabited system in the Scyrian Expanse , his face expressed the dread of a man who knows what's coming. Small yet potent, much like my first girlfriend Andy and Jon are both new to the game of  Battlefleet Gothic , and thus could not possibly have anticipated was just how ludicrous the Necrons are on the table. They're not unbeatable, but they're certainly not easy to deal with. Worse, they behave completely differently to every other faction Andy and Jon have encountered so far. I'll spare you all...