Ben Counter

From Jervis, to Ben, to Ward.

Not to be confused with the device used for keeping track of Bens.

Ben Counter is a novelist for the Black Library and winner of a Golden Demon award.

Some of his books are filled with fail, other Awesome. Of particular note is his series of novels about the Grey Knights.

According to regulars at his FLHS, he spends a disproportionate amount of time torturing himself for the fact he might be writing fluff violations he isn't aware of.

In fact, games get interrupted by sudden bouts of angst along the lines of "Wait a minute! You mean your forces can do <something I didn't know about and fluff for which I may have unwittingly transgressed in my book>?"

Those that would admit to using 1d4chan wonder if there might some award named after him, which would represent everything that Matt Ward does not. (The TG Award for Adequacy?)

(If anyone's reading this, maybe they can come up with something suitable; we'll run up a real physical trophy, present it to him out of gratitude, and we can thereafter award it to other people in the community who actually care about the game and the game world.)

It's worth noting that not only is his Grey Knights series FAR more definitive in how the Knights operate than the codex written by Ward, but he's also done a really fantastic job of making daemons sound genuinely horrifying to deal with. Also of note is his book Battle of the Abyss, the best things in it (and arguably the only good things in it) is the unbelievably poetic description of the Warp, it also pulls a Graham McNeill with its portrayal of the Ultramarines. Also includes probably the last in-canon good-guys the World Eaters and the one Thousand Son. Wait, arent TS still the good guys? BLAM!

He's notable for having close to no understanding of thermodynamics, or basic physics at all. If you happen to be a geek, please, restrain yourself from reading his books, least you want to hurt your face with facepalms after reading time after time about ridiculous things, like a non-compressed liquid hydrogen burning in an oxygen atmosphere, or things getting instantly frozen in a vacuum of space.

He is not Sandy Mitchell.