The Beard Bunker

Here's one way to get more of your friends into gaming with miniatures: get them hooked on RPGs first. This may well be old knowledge, but I'm new to it. Two friends, Becs and Drew, have been helping Jeff and I test our new RPG ("wait, you wrote an entire roleplaying game?" ...yes we did, check out last month's post ). Having never played an RPG before they were both soon enthralled and taking any opportunity to roleplay in any setting. This soon led to playing Inquisitor (or rather, our stripped down version of it, because the original game was ambitious yet clunky). They were enthralled by the macabre dystopian madness of the 40K mythos. Thus, when Jeff said he'd run a game of Deathwatch , they both jumped on it. Just one complication: Deathwatch uses miniatures. My latest Deathwatch mini: Brother-Sergeant Elias. More on him another time. Rather than being put off, they were keen to give it a punt. They split the cost of a Deathwatch box with Ja...

Charlie:  Despite Dungeons & Dragons being the most famousest of the RPGs, I haven't actually played it that much. Thus, when Tom offered to run an old-school D20 adventure, I duly signed up in the interests of broadening my nerd palette. We decided to play a group of total misfits, and thus there was Hadras the polite yet horrifyingly shooty warforged scout, Krog the existentialist barbarian, and Nozz the goblin shaman, who was neither polite nor an existentialist. Playing as a goblin isn't exactly an obvious choice, but it was deeply enjoyable. I spent the day expressing myself via the medium of cockney viciousness and bodily functions. Let the record state that I did at least make myself useful. Most of the time. The model I used is GW's grot shaman, and he went on a square base because I fully intend to use Nozz Brewsnik in Skazzwuzzle's goblins. I've had my eye on this little chap since he came out. The hanging animal bits, the skully...

Hi everybody! (Hi Doctor Jeff...) I have been remiss lately, it's true. My posts here have been few and far between. Truth be told, so was my personal hobby over the Christmas period. But not any more baby! I recently managed to fridge* out the last 70 goblins that were standing in the way of my original 3000 point list. Glory be, the basics are done. To celebrate this, I thought I'd have a bit of a photoshoot: *fridge(n): a beard bunker idiom for anything difficult done with great mindlessness and purpose. Just to get. It. Done. Like carrying a fridge up stairs. No I don't remember why... Now that is a heck of a lot of goblin. 220 of them to be precise and a bunch of spiders and monsters along for the ride. Now photographing this many gobbos is a real pain in the bum (more on that later) so I thought after the initial "impact" shot I'd break down the tribes. The Bitter Moons first: The Bitter Moons (named for an oriental LARP teahouse belonging ...

If there is one thing I love most about campaign gaming, it is the daft side plots that develop. The unit champions that seem to be invulnerable. The characters that don't get on and never seem to pass leadership tests while fielded together. Sometimes it's just memes and in-jokes that take on a life of their own. The Popular Goblins' Front are one of these that has not only taken on a life of their own but are actively expanding almost beyond our control: It'll never heal if you picket... This all started during a game where Charlie and I combined our respective goblin hordes: my (mostly) competent Bitter Moons and the collection of incompetence and infighting called the Bloo Moons. During deployment I assigned Joodee the Shaman to a regiment of Bloo Moons with a certain degree of trepidation. I was right to be worried. After taking the bare minimum of casualties to justify their fleeing (25% break test from shooting) they turned tail and fled. Taking my shaman...

Approximately ages ago, Cedric Sneakfoot sent the entire Bloo Moon tribe packing with a single, general-slaying shot. There was much squabbling in the wake of Big Boss Isitt’s death (by which I mean, it’s taken me ages to get around to painting a new warboss for the Night Goblin army Maisey so kindly bequeathed to me). Well that new leader has finally emerged. Smaller, more pot-bellied, and even more brain-damaged, I give you... Big Boss Skazwuzzle! What he lacks in martial prowess he more than makes up in an amazing ability to dodge the bullet. He’s a masterful delegator, buttering up his lieutenants so that, when an enemy warlord bellows a challenge, Skazwuzzle will think nothing of giving his second-in-command an encouraging nudge and a whisper of, ‘Go on you slag, you can take ’im!’ This is, the more observant Bloo Moons note, the most common way in which Skazwuzzle’s rivals meet their demise. Relative to the tiny size of this model, I spent bloody ages pai...

Greetings fellow bunker dwellers! ‘Tis I, Jeff, with a slightly different offering for you all. Today, I want to talk to you about how size matters to me. See for me, I always prefer as big as I can cram in. Huh? No, I’m talking about hordes in Warhammer. What else would I be... oh. Seriously though, I love large units in Warhammer, always have. Even in the dark days of the early nineties when a warhammer unit could be five Chaos Warriors and a “block” of fifteen Orcs looked sizeable I was never happy. These piddly small units never looked like regiments to me. They were five blokes out for a fight with a flag. The spectacle just wasn’t there. I remember, actually, the first time I saw Andy Chamber’s ancient Skaven army, all the bases done as cavern flooring rather than green sawdust, all the units dense blocks of ratmen. That, that right there, that was an army thought 10 year old me. Fast forward 24 years and I still think this. I still consider a unit of 15 to be me...

They go up, diddy up up, they go splat, spl-a-at... I don't often share Work In Progress stuff but this has turned out great so I couldn't wait! I wanted to add a Doom Diver to the growing Gobbo horde but... I kinda like the current one but it is a whole hell of a lot of money for what it is. I set my brain to musing. Then I saw one of those clown cannons on the telly and everything swam into place. A quick search on ebay gave me some classic doom diver crew members (the one with furled wings is in the post). Add in a looted Empire mortar and some converted crew and the Doom Diver Mortar is born! This surly fellow is the loader/primer for the mortar. The mushroom stoppered jug contains the fine ground powder needed to fill the touchhole. The big ol' scoop is a powder measure for the main charge but I doubt that goblins figured out precision measurements and just ladel it in "to taste". Some of the componants are a little wonky as I've left the m...

The following account is excerted from the papers of Hochland intelligence gathering reporting to Aldebrand Ludenhof, Elector of Hochland, and concern the events of June 7th of this year. As you will know my Lord, Goblin activity in Hochland is no longer confined to the Eastern reaches. There has been a troubling increase in reported attacks along the Old Forest Road. To this end Captain Oscar Brandt was dispatched to bring these filth to heel and open vital lines of communication between Fort Schippel and Bergsberg. Our assumption was that the tribes operating in this area would be the same incompetant scum seen along the Eastern Drakwald. Sadly, it seems not to have been the case. This was the last official report to come from the column: Captain Oscar Brandt "Goblins sighted, typical ignorant tactics, simply marching up the road to meet us. Am deploying column to repell. Master Von Rudinger to harry the flanks and cut off lines of retreat." A day or so later,...