The Beard Bunker

Today's post is about just straight up ignoring official rules, in the right context. In this case, the rules were ignored during a GM'd 40K campaign, so no actual players were harmed by my tinkering. More on what I changed later, first: some context as to why I so enthusiastically painted up Bulbus McThew (PhD) in time for said campaign.* Some months ago, Tom came up with the idea that noted wraith-fancier Drew and my own infrastructure fetishists the Cobalt Scions should fight a four-day war against some Tyranids. GM'd 40K is something we've done before, and is, for me, the absolute Bentley of 40K playing. Louchely flicks engine grille with the seductive power of a walrus in a party hat.  Given that I already had over 3,000 points of marines ready to go, I strongly didn't need to paint anything else for my army. But the format of these narrative campaigns - where all your units get split out into battle groups in each phase of the story - means that you are rew...

Stormborne Dwarves hold steady during the Battle of the Northern Pass I returned to the Old World in April this year, starting out on a new roleplaying wargame* campaign. Now that we've been at it one evening a week for 6 months, I thought I'd give a broad update on how it’s going, and share some of the minis I’ve painted up for it. Jon and Drew are, respectively, playing a (drunken) Empire Captain and a bull-headed young Bright Wizard. Their characters, and the regiments they command, can gain or lose skills depending on how the story unfolds. The regiments can also grow or shrink in size, depending on recruitment rolls and battlefield casualties. *Explainer: what's a roleplaying wargame? Rather than a player versus player experience, a roleplaying wargame is when one player is the Game's Master (or GM), and the other player(s) function much like the players in any other roleplaying game, but where the conflict is resolved in battles rather than skirmishes. Players ha...

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...

The Northern Border Princes map: normal style Credit: Charlie/Beard Bunker. Software used: Wonderdraft Would you like a map campaign supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Battle? Set in the Border Princes? For free? Because that's what's in this post. Of course, you could probably adapt these rules to a different game system with relative ease, so if nothing else it might be a source of ideas for those of you keen to play campaigns in 40K or some other system.