The Beard Bunker

If you're going to create your own sector of Imperial space to situate your games of Warhammer 40K ( and in 2020 we did ), it follows that you would want to fight some one-off battles in it, as well as short campaigns, and some all-out wars. Following on from the Word Bearers' raid on the Lachesis system (which we played through in 2022 and  wrote up on Goonhammer ), everyone's favourite Chaos-worshipping gits finally invaded the system in July of 2024, when we added a persistent warzone . We then caught up with happenings in that warzone in October . This last January, the war ended over one final weekend of butchery. Today's post consolidates all 18 months of the campaign's narrative, followed by my reflections on how well the campaign structure worked. An Overview of the Lachesian War The extract below is the first chapter of The Lachesian War: its Causes, Occurrences and Consequences by Diokles Adrastos, Chief Librarian of the Cobalt Scions. Before I embark upon...

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?

 For the first of the Beard Bunker’s temporarily monthly offerings, I thought I’d write about something dear to my hobbyist’s heart: The Imperial Guard. Specifically my Imperial Guard collection, the 31st Nightfall Ranger Regiment. This is the first of a double-bill of posts, with this one talking about the Imperial Guard as a narrative army and my collection as it currently stands, and the next post exploring homebrew rules in the world of modern 40k. Men of Nightfall... Do you want to live forever? Why I Love Them Ah, the Guard. There is nothing quite like the mental image of a band of poorly equipped and under-appreciated human grunts going up against alien monstrosities, posthuman demigods and nightmarish hordes of daemons. The Imperial Guard channel that “indomitable human spirit” flavour which pairs so deliciously with the relentlessly bleak grimdark of Warhammer 40,000. They’re a whole army of underdogs and that’s what I love them for. I’ve had a number of Imperial Guard arm...

Four years have passed since we first created the Eridani Sector setting for our games in the Warhammer 40K setting. It's serving us well, and in that time we've played multiple campaigns and events, but we also identified a problem: with a sandbox this big, you can end up getting pulled in lots of directions, and gaming weekends can become a bit unfocussed. Furthermore, if you have to come up with a reason why you and your opponent's armies are fighting in any given system every time you play, that narrative legwork can feel a bit laborious, particularly when you just want to play a knockabout game of 40K without thinking about it too hard, and still want that feeling of the battle contributing to a wider narrative. Our answer to this is creating some active warzones in the Eridani Sector, where longer wars are being fought across a system or small group of systems. Players in our group can still fight battles anywhere in the sector, but if their armies fit the sides prese...

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...

  This post is more a public service announcement than an article, but since I've poured a lot of love and effort into the subject of this announcement, and since I'm not taking up our regular Monday slot with it, I figure the world will cope. Just about. Back in October, Jeff finally brought his Word Bearers up to Oxford, and we spent a week enacting an orgy of miniature violence known as the Raid on Lachesis . A self-contained week-long 40K Crusade campaign with a big ol' campaign map, a lot of narrative, angry marines, and a whole bunch of truly heroic Imperial Guard. This post, then, serves purely to direct those of you who enjoy this sort of thing over to Goonhammer. It's split into five parts, because we did not skimp, and this way it's easier for you to savour it over multiple sittings. Part 1 : rules, maps, artwork, lore. Part 2 : The players that fought in the campaign, and their armies. Part 3 : The beginning, in which there are Imperial heroics. Part 4 : ...

With the news that Jeff's coming up to Oxford in October,  and  that he's finally bringing his Word Bearers to battle, we decided a week-long campaign was in order. Everyone's now desperately preparing things. Most of them are preparing miniatures like normal hobbyists, whereas I, dear reader, have been doing nothing but Photoshop for the better part of a week. My poor eyes.