The Beard Bunker

  The Holy Book Games Workshop released Inquisitor in 2001 and it blew my nerdy teenage mind.  I engaged with it like I never had any game before, and it has fundamentally defined me as a hobbyist going forwards.  Everything I do in the hobby now is rooted in Inquisitor.  But as games go it was, objectively, quite bad. The Scale Titans? They're just like anything else. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. 54mm be real big, yo. The thing that most obviously makes Inquisitor stand out amongst GW’s games is the scale.  Uniquely the models were in 54mm, pretty much double the scale of most other games.  GW has gone smaller plenty of times, with Epic, Man’O’War, Battlefleet Gothic and more recently Aeronautica Imperialis, but this is the only game where they went bigger instead. This of course meant we had no suitable scenery to play on.  We improvised as best we could, and built a few bits of scenery that could work in 28mm and 54mm, but mostly I rem...

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...

As many of you might be aware, in addition to wargamers, most of us here at the Bunker are also keen roleplayers. Two of us (Charlie and Jeff) seem unhealthily keen as, well, we've made an entire roleplaying game! With the help of over twenty playtesters and big chunks of free time over the last four years, it's finally ready. It's called The Ministry of Extramundane Affairs , and the pre-release version can be downloaded, for free, at our new website: TwoBeard Games . Carry on reading this post to find out some basics about the setting, the rules, and just what we mean by 'pre-release version.' The setting In Ministry  you play a field officer working for the secret government department policing Great Britain's shadow society of paranormal inhabitants. Unbeknownst to the public, every fairy tale, myth, legend, nightmare and half-remembered old wives' tale is real. Just in case that wasn't enough to keep you busy, the story is set in 1941: right...

As regular Bunker Dwellers will know, Maisey has been organising a Frostgrave campaign for a little while. We've done some testing, figured out warbands and got to painting. To my considerable surprise, I've come in last in the "race" to finish warbands. But finished I am! Sort of, nearly, you'll understand later... Thar they blows! A mean band of na'er-do-wells ready to take to the streets of the frozen city in search of riches and hidden knowledge that man was not meant to wot of. Mercifully no-one ever bothers to say what women may not wot of so my wizard is golden as far as the forbidden knowledge is concerned. Speaking of which... Meet Freyja Seshat, Elven (mostly) Summoner and five times winner of Head Covering Monthly's : Least Likely To Wear A Hat award. I had wanted an excuse to paint Hasslefree's lovely Semira Marise model for ages, with Frostgrave, I had the perfect opportunity. I knew the rest of the warband would be in practical,...

Aside from shooting stuff in the face with my shiny rusty new second hand ork fleet, I've primarily been preparing for a few role playing games. Specifically, I'm running a one-day Inquisitor scenario in the next few weeks. I say 'Inquisitor'... that's not technically true, in that we're not playing a narrative skirmish wargame. It's more like the 40K roleplaying game  Dark Heresy , in that the gamers are each playing an agent in the employ of an Imperial Inquisitor , but then... it's not Dark Heresy because whilst its production values and content are excellent, I find the game mechanics long-winded. Instead, we're using 20Eight (i.e. the barebones game engine I've been working on for the last year or so). I'm excited to use it in a futuristic context to see how well it holds up. We've hitherto played plenty of fantasy, and that's been great, but fantasy doesn't have guns, spaceships, and them funny-looking spehs ayliurr...

Arr, gather round, ye Beardlings! Here be the third part of the Beard Bunker’s campaign coverage, and now that we’ve shown you the armies  and explained the background, style, and characters of the campaign , we’ll be starting the story. The first campaign game that we played was a roleplaying session, and served to set up the political landscape and several of the characters’ relationships for the rest of the story. If you’re thinking of starting your own narrative campaign, I can’t recommend this step highly enough. You don’t necessarily need to do it in RPG mode; it could just as well be a conversation. The main thing is that a setting and characters aren’t a narrative, they’re ingredients for a narrative. Stories are made by people changing each other and the world around them, be it with big sticks or fabulous cooking. Finally, a reminder: the campaign’s set after the established fluff of the Warhammer World. It’s our own private storyworld. Where the GW studio has t...