Plaguebearers

Plaguebearers from Games Workshop, with no significant alterations. Metal and plastic multipart kits shown.

I love plaguebearers, and I've loved them since the first time I can recall seeing them in the late '90s — after the release of their second set of sculpts. While I probably adore the current incarnation of Nurglings more (of course, I'm no savage), there's no other model in the GW range (or any range, really) that has consistently delighted me as much as plaguebearers.

An aside: Nurglings are now pretty well-established as miniature copies of Nurgle, but they varied widely for most of Warhammer's life. This can be seen most readily in the kit for elder plaguebearer Epidemius, released in 2008 as part of the final wave of metal Chaos Daemons — that model has dozens of Nurglings on it, including two prominent (and very strange!) ones. The most unusual is the slug Nurgling (you can see it under his right foot). Since then, however, all the Nurglings have followed the template of the 6th Edition kit — wide grins, chubby bodies, small limbs, horns, etc. The only exception that I'm aware of: The new Felthius kit also has a slug Nurgling!

Plaguebearers haven't changed much over the 25ish years they've been produced by Games Workshop. They've always been sickly and featured distended bellies and horns (generally just a horn, singular) on their heads. Most also sport a single eye. As a result, if you liked the first release in 1991, then odds are that you've liked most of their incarnations since. My favorites are the 2007 metals that came out for 4th or 5th Edition, but, as you can see from the picture above, they blend well enough with the plastic multiparts (2012). (That's a good thing, too, because there's only eight or so metal sculpts, and it'd take some serious modeling work to make them look different.)

Poxbringer test-paint model. No modifications,
produced by Games Workshop.

But, before I touched any of these guys with some color, I wanted to know where I might be going with my palette. I used classic Nurgle colors to throw together a test paint on a Poxbringer (a bigger, meaner plaguebearer) and thought it was nice .... but a little lacking in the pizzazz. The greens looked alright, and they made the pinks pop, but it wasn't something I wanted across an entire unit.

So, how am I going to paint these?

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I'm a) easily bored and b) suspiciously ambitious. The end result is, of course, that I won't paint 30 dudes (the size of a fully loaded plaguebearer unit) if they have to be painted the same way, but I'll spend hours making sure things look within, say, 90% of where I imagined them (making allowances for my skills, obviously). Thirty green dudes? It just won't happen. Enter Blightwar.

Blightwar is a boxed set for Age of Sigmar (Warhammer 40k's non-sci-fi sister game). Blightwar added a disk to track a change-of-the-seasons mechanic for Nurgle's daemons. That summer-spring-fall-winter cycle struck me as just the way to tackle this painting conundrum: I won't do 30 dudes, but I'll do 4 cycles of 10(ish) dudes. Yes, I know the math doesn't add up. Hold with me.

In addition to the 30 dudes in my plaguebearer unit, I've got plenty of specialized plaguebearers: musicians, standard bearers, and elite leaders called plagueridden. Additionally, I'll have multiple Heralds of Nurgle, like the Poxbringer above. Sure, 30 doesn't nicely divide into four parts, but it does nicely divide into three parts, and  the command structure can become the fourth part.

So, in that spirit, I decided on four paint schemes: brown-orange for summer, brown-red for autumn, white-purple for winter, and green for spring. The elites would get spring colors, while the mooks would get the other seasons. The goal here was to separate out the green models very, very distinctly as special figures; green is complementary to red, so by infusing a lot of red in the rank-and-file, I'd make the green stand out. (If you don't have a color wheel on hand, here's the Wiki article on complementary colors and why they're important. Long story short: a splash of green really pops against red and reddish colors.)

So in addition to the 30 grunts, I've got some command guys. First, there's the support of the Icon of Chaos bearer and the musician:

Games Workshop models; multipart plastic on the left,
and metal musician on the right.

The Great Unclean One in the background is unrelated; please disregard her. Please also disregard the lone human hair draped across the icon. It's all unrelated. I mean, generally speaking, everything's unrelated. Just focus on the little monsters.

I ended up seeking out the 2007 plaguebearer command models specifically for this musician; I'm fine with the new standard bearer, but the new musician (not pictured, natch) is terrible. It has a flute and it looks like a refugee from an H.P. Lovecraft story about the moon; it's just laughably bad, and it's one of the few true swings-and-a-miss from the current multipart plastic kits.

Games Workshop models. Metal on the right, with multipart plastic on the left;
the frill comes from a Games Workshop Helbrute.

And these are plagueridden, the leaders of plageubearer packs. I'm torn here; I took the time to add some spare bits to the multipart plastic on the left, including sculpting putty to smooth out the joints, but the metal on the right is just so wonderfully silly and oh-so Warhammer. Currently, I only need one of these guys, but ... if I find some 25 or so plastic/metal plaguebearers for cheap (particularly the 1991 run from 2nd Edition), I'll probably just use two packs, as plaguebearers are quite decent. Failing that, I'll end up just using whichever one I fancy most at the moment.