A Tiny New Project

While I stick closely to the core of my Nurgle Daemon lists — plaguebearers, plagueburst crawlers, foetid bloat-drones, and poxbringers — I often swap out various support pieces and leaders. One of the key pieces I go back and forth on a lot is Chaos Lord v. Chaos Sorcerer: The former offers decent accuracy buffs to all my artillery, while the latter offers a significant accuracy boost to a single model. (There's a signature Chaos Sorcerer ability called Warptime that would tilt the decision for most armies ... but I don't use it all that often: I don't run Mortarion, a giant model that really likes getting the massive movement bonus from the ability, and my daemon big bads don't need the speed since they fall from heaven like lightning ... and they're not legal targets for it anyway, natch.)

But I realized the other day that I had a hole in my collection: the palanquin-riding Chaos servants have the daemon keyword (and thus help Epidemius provide boosts to my entire army), but I didn't have a Chaos Sorcerer on Palanquin of Nurgle.

Well, Smite — the Sorcerer bread-and-butter shooting power — can kill things pretty good, and daemon killing power is what powers Epidemius. I set forth with half a dozen boxes full of bits to rectify my mistake.

Chaos sorcerer on palanquin of Nurglings. This kitbash includes: A head from the new Plague Marine kit (GW);
a torso front from the Putrid Blightkings kit (GW); a torso front from the Tyranid Ravener kit (GW); a backpack
from the Chaos Space Marines kit (GW); a bit of pipe from an unknown ork kit (GW); a drill arm from
Wyrd's rail worker (part of The Rail Crew kit); an arm from an unknown ork kit (GW); a rifle and arm from
an unknown kroot kit (GW); a power scythe from the Deathshroud Bodyguard kit (GW), and the tail of
a 3rd Edition Hive Tyrant kit (GW). There's also a classic metal Nurgling and just a smidge of a modern
plastic Nurgling (both GW) in the background.

Chaos Decimator, Part 3

I'm coming down the final stretch on my Chaos Decimator sculpting.

Decimator-in-progress. Bits catalog: GW — primaris redemptor dreadnought; putrid blightking torso;
Tyranid monstrous creature weapons; skulls kit; unknown eldar gun; Tyranid monstrous spines;
plaguebearer arm and head; PP — unknown trollblood kit.

You can see some of the progression here, with the biggest change being the putrid blightking torso hanging off the left leg. That's in the process of being converted into a grub or some other kind of disgusting Nurgle creation.

Chaos Decimator, Part 2

I've gone through a lot of tentative designs for a Chaos decimator. Most of them didn't get to the scribbling-on-a-napkin phase; others were originally slated for my hellforged contemptor (which is a whole 'nother can of beans); and a few were earnestly explored and dropped for a variety of (mostly petty) reasons.

Things I knew I wanted:

• Gross Nurgle messes. This one's a bit of a given, I guess.
• Some kind of receptacle for foul, disease-ridden liquids. (Think Mamon or the infamous Very Manly Baneblade.)
• Ridiculous, otherworldly guns that look nothing like an Imperial weapon. (I have many inappropriate feelings about the soulburner petard, which the Imperium doesn't get — the weapon clearly relies on Chaos to function, so I felt it shouldn't look like a regular Space Marine gun.)
• A disgusting daemon head.

So, I had my base — a massive Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought. I had a list of must-haves. Off to the laboratory!

An Old Plague, Part 1

Games Workshop plague marine from the Dark Imperium boxed set
and a plasma gun upgrade of unknown source.

I didn't start working on my Death Guard when I started this blog — I'd already completed a handful of units. The first to get paint, of course, were a pair of heavy-weapons-toting plague marines. There's nothing really more Death Guard than a bunch of plague marines with big guns, so that's where I went first.

It helped that Dark Imperium loose models were relatively cheap on the secondhand market and that the Easy-to-Build Death Guard Plague Marine kit wasn't a painful buy — I snagged a bunch of marines, a few foetid bloat-drones and too many poxwalkers for way less than retail.

Chaos Decimator, Part 1

A Chaos decimator is classic GW Chowss — predictably, laughably grimdark. They're the most evil, the most blasphemous, the most dangerous creations from the most mysterious Chaos cabal. The model — a Forge World resin — is also one of my least favorite models in the modern line.

Chaos Decimator. Photo taken from Forge World's website.

It's not all bad, of course. What I like: There's a real sense of movement and heft to this model. The implication of inevitability is communicated so well that the model clashes a bit with the static giant robots elsewhere in GW's line — compare to stock Imperial knights, dreadnoughts, etc.