The Beard Bunker

Charlie: I've been running a campaign for Tom and Drew in which each of them plays a Space Marine officer with a strike cruiser and some escorts. Confrontations are fought in a mix of Battlefleet Gothic, Warhammer 40K, and Boarding Actions. Following on from Tom's previous post , we're now 5 months into the campaign (that's 10 sessions). When Tom and I were teenagers, my Eldar Corsair fleet single-handedly crushed his ability to enjoy Battlefleet Gothic. In today's post, we'll hear from Tom and Drew about how it's gone so far. Expect notes on the campaign format, repainting old minis, and most importantly, how Tom is finding this ancient system he remembers with such distaste?

A long time ago in a 40k edition far far away, the game was a different beast. Unlike today’s highly constrained options based entirely on what models are available from GW, and distinct datasheets for different flavours of the same thing, the game used to permit a huge amount of customisation in your units, particularly characters. This included the ability to swap out their armour. With the increased variety of armour in the modern range, that ability to have equipment lists is more appealing than ever. 3rd Edition Codex Space Marines - Image Credit: Games Workshop, used without permission for illustrative purposes only. Whilst Games Workshop has leaned into using separate datasheets to put Space Marine characters into various different armour types in their current range, there are a lot of characters and a lot of armours, so they haven’t been keeping pace with our creativity.  Conseque...

We shifted to monthly posts in October 2024 amidst what I nebulously referred to as "spectacular real life events" for a number of the Bunker's contributors. The monthly posts let the Bunker maintain a weak pulse, and gave us time to consider what to do with the site going forwards. That thought process is still ongoing, but - for now at least - things have calmed down enough that weekly posting should be manageable. Won't you tell us what happened? Sadly for the curious, I shall remain nebulous the things that happened to my fellow Bunker dwellers. It's not my news to share. For my own part, in the first half of this year, my job has some dramatic developments, then my mother in law unexpectedly died, at which point my job got even more crunchy for a few months. Happily my job's now calmed down again, and we're some months on from the death. Life is sort of normal-adjacent, albeit with heightened emotions. Thoughts on the Beard Bunker's future This we...

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...

What is an adult? Ordinarily I'd say it's a person of any age who has both empathy and responsibility. What is an old person? I'm starting to suspect it's someone for whom the passage of time has become frighteningly fast. As a child, the timescales on which adults do things seems like watching an ent moot deliberating over whether to sack Isengard. All of which is ambling its way to the conclusion that I have spent about two months making an 8-part series on producing a modular urban terrain set for Warhammer 40,000, and those two months somehow stretch from now (the end point) to May 2021 (the start). Why did it take so long? Primarily because in 2021, almost all my terrain projects were solo efforts. Since then we have learned the value of team play, and that's what finally got this large and repetitive urban project to bear concrete fruit. 6'x4' of modular paving Ooooo, paving. Mmmmmm, beige.  It feels very, very good to have got this done, since drybrus...

There are many big, difficult issues in the world. War, famine, corruption, ecological collapse, the Storm Speeder's turret design. I could go on. Today's post holds an answer to one of those issues. It's a very, very simple answer, so in the interests of not burying the lead: I plopped the Impulsor turret in the relevant hole. No conversion work is needed, you just pop it in. You don't even need glue; once the surfaces are painted, it'll hold nice and firmly. The internet has joked long and hard about poor Brother Tinnitus up there in the turret. Ironically I don't think tinnitus is his biggest problem, given that soldiers generally fire shoulder-mounted missile launchers, literally rest their cheeks on their rifles while aiming, and are generally subjected to all manner of loud noises whether or not they're manning a turret. No, Brother Tinnitus' biggest problem is knees. I doubt he has any. Presumably his role requires a double amputee, and in fairnes...

I started a new army this year, and it's definitely not a Chaos army. How could it be? They don't worship Chaos. Sure, they use Chaos, but so do some radical Inquisitors. They're not an Imperial army either; their ancestors besieged Terra beneath Perturabo's banner, before they scorned him and went off to found their own pocket empire. Ten thousand years later, their descendants know very little of the wider galaxy. The history of Horus' rebellion has long blurred into vague myths. They have endured through industry, discipline, and a proud martial tradition. Millennia of war against the encircling Orks has forged a society capable of withstanding constant strife. In today's post I'll introduce this new force, explaining the choices I've made so far, how they're painted, and broad plans for the future.

Charlie: We’ve all imagined having actual glass in the tiny plastic windows of our ruined dollhouses. What a fun idea! How utterly impractical! The idea is sensibly consigned to the most conceptual of wishlists and left there to rot next to concepts like successfully painting one’s entire backlog. But in the distant, mist-wreathed valleys of Snowdonia, there is a man - well, a collection of 52 caffeine-addled squirrels in a trench coat with the name of a man - who wanted to know: just how does one make stained glass windows for 40K ruins? That squirrel collective is the lovely Boris, one of the most far-flung members of our gaming group. At any given moment, one of the squirrels can have an idea that sets off a hyperfocus cascade. In today’s guest post, he is here to explain what he did and how he did it. We are not asking why he did it because the answer will be a sleep-deprived eye twitch and a giggle. We are simply here to enjoy and understand the fruits of his labours. Boris: ...