The Beard Bunker

After months of preparation, the new Battlefleet Gothic campaign is underway! Andy and Jon have begun their exploration of the Scyrian Expanse, an uncharted sub-sector at the edge of the Achernar Sector  (that's the sector we Bunker dwellers made up as a backdrop for most of our games/stories, like the Daniverse or the Calixis Sector ... feel free to suggest an appropriately irreverent name in the comments section). As with other recent campaigns, we're keeping track of everything using a wiki. As they explore strange new worlds and stranger civilisations, or boldly go where no rogue trader has gone before, new entries will appear on the sub-sector wiki page . Below is a star chart of the Expanse. Most sub-sectors only have ten(ish) useful star systems in them, so you can infer from this map that space is big, and it's up to the players to find the good stuff. Jon is playing Captain Laius Ortano, the commodore of the Imperial Navy flotilla. Andy is playing...

Greetings Bunker Dwellers! Unless you have been living under a rock, blindfolded, with noise cancelling headphones and singing an old timey sea shanty, you will have noticed that a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 is upon us! With it has come something of an upswing in enthusiasm for the bolter-flavoured version of Warhammer among our little band. You see, the previous edition of 40k, (while I am sure was fine for many, if not most) had for one reason or another all but killed 40k as a game among us Beard Bunker-ers, it just wasn't an enjoyable experience for us. The more we heard about the new version, the more excited we became and now... it's here! Knowing that I was going to be looking back at some older projects with a view to sprucing them up and getting them all new-40k-ified, it suddenly struck me that some of them are of sufficient vintage that I haven't really shown them here practically at all. As a result I have resolved to reintroduce some older-but-still-good...

There are some skills that can never be perfected, only improved. Among these is the skill of running a narrative game. I ’ ve been at it for decades now, probably since before I could spell the word narrative (nailed it last Tuesday) and certainly before I learned ‘ denouement ’ (which I learned by googling it just now; totally thought I could spell it, but auto-correct showed me otherwise). To cut the B allistic S kill : I make no claim to being a master. With that out of the way … Last October I finished a long-running Battlefleet Gothic campaign, and two Beard Bunker readers (MajorTheRed and Malcus the Defiler) asked to know more about how I prepared it. Hopefully by answering that question, this post will prove useful reading for budding GMs curious about running their own narrative campaigns, as opposed to the matched play that so often dominates wargaming. Urr nurr! Spehs urks! Is rusty trubbles. Thing number one: what ’ s the conflict? All stories need c...

It can't have escaped anyone's attention by now that the new edition of 40k is nigh. This is rather exciting news and the steady drip of information coming out each day is only causing further excitement. So in order to avoid the hobby equivalent of blue balls we have all found ourselves getting stuck into some painting to satisfy that particular itch. I've got stuck into more of the Thousands Sons models. The Scarab Occult Terminators are now done, in the same method as the  Rubric Marines                                            The other main troops unit was a blob of Tzaangors, which are Tzeentch tainted beastmen. These are painted a little bit different to the Thousand Son legionnaires. The metal work is intended to look much newer, but keeping the same red touches to tie them in.  So with these I've nearly finished all t...

For many years now I've been feeling that 40K needed a major overhaul. The last few editions didn't go far enough for me, but as yet almost everything I've read about the new edition is encouraging, and thus my ancient love of 40K is stirring. Stirring like a kraken from the depths of my loins . Now I'm faced with a conundrum. Clearly this excitement demands that some stuff gets painted and, come release day, some 40K must be played. But there are two armies I could go for: my fledgling mechanised guard, or more speed freeks. I love both armies dearly and I'm too slow for both. Ultimately it'll probably be orks but I do love me some guard, so before diving into painting more kustom trukks, I made a point of at least finishing the platoon I started waaaay back in 2014. It's not that I'm a slow painter, it's that the river of 40K love really did run that dry. Let's face it, these guardsmen (and women, all two of them... good luck s...

Today I would like to talk. About how Project Get Things Finished is going. About why I have butterfly brain. About how I react to creative urges when there is no outlet, or direction to them. Also about what I want from the hobby. Firstly, Project Get Things Finished. This is actually going well so far in the sense that things are getting finished. I can say that so far this year I have ticked the boxes on a Frost Grave warband, and the board and scenery for Frost Grave. I've finished off the few Tabletop world buildings that were sat ready and waiting for the love. Whilst we're talking about scenery I've also got a usable amount of scenery for my desert board as well as starting to clearing out of the backlog of my industrial scenery which should be all done this month. As for models, well we have finished off the Ogre Scrap Launcher that I never got around to, a bunch of German Veterans for Bolt Action, as well as a fairly large pile of Thousand Sons. Oh, and the Stor...

This post is a bit of a two for one special offer this week. Firstly we have a rather large selection of photos of my finished desert board including a few with the 8th Army boys from before. The second part is a step by step of how I made the trees/scatter pieces for said board. If you want to get straight to the step by step feel free to just skip to the end. So here come the pictures. The buildings I got from  Timeline Miniatures  and the earthworks I picked up from  Red Dragon Gaming . The trees/scatter were scratch built as I'll show below. Tree Scatter Tutorial Now for the tutorial/explanation for the scatter pieces. I do have to state right out the gate that I've not really done anything like this before and I was kinda making it up as I went. Which, seeing how they turned out, is probably the best bit of advice I can share from this. Just give it a go and see what happens, even if it goes a little wrong it can always be ...