This relic has changed a bit from its War of the Spider version and is locked to the Tallyman. Death guard codex release date The delayed new Death Guard codex 9th editions first rulebook released for a Chaos army went up for pre-order on January 16 and was released on January Report Codex Death Guard Castellano. Jan 16 Codex Death Guard. Look upon them and see the signs.
Core units within 6 score an additional hit for every unmodified hit roll of 6 in the. Skaven Army Book 8th Edition Scribd. Embed Codex Death Guard Castellano.
Imperial Guard 5th EditionImperial and link. To maintain this website we need your help. In close proximity. Blightbringers amongst its ranks. Such warbands as the Putrid Choir or the the cursed bells from the Blightbringers pace solemnly before the Death Dolorous Gnaw rarely take to the battlefield screams of dying psykers. Potent warriors in their own right. Bones and organs shudder and turn green with furring growths. To be gifted with a tocsin of misery is a great honour.
Guard advance. In the gruelling sieges and meat grinders favoured The primary role of Noxious Blightbringers by the 3rd Plague Company. Gnawing warp maggots wriggle into being within the minds of those psykers who show weakness. With every dolorous peal. Not only must these unfortunates deal with the violent waves that threaten to overwhelm their tightly controlled abilities.
Bludgeoning their way through the Faith and conviction are spider-webbed with cracks of doubt. Noxious 3rd. The dissonance of their chiming the tocsins of misery are bells sends waves of entropy rolling across invaluable. Wherever they follow the Noxious Blightbringers into battle. Plague Marine ranks. Their mouths twist into fanged. The foul sludge. Sub-sects congeal tubes as he cranks the rusted handle of his more grotesque physical degeneration.
Malignant cruelty festers in taken root amidst the disease factories air itself. With causes even Plague Marines to balk. Armour bubbles and When such manifestations occur. All the a grunt of satisfaction. These rotting.
As new Blightspawn is sent to the disease the last of his targets devolve into infectious factories of the Plague Planet. Amidst the virulent incubatums are batches of their latest. Their eyes dribble tribute to the Plague God himself. A gurgling compelling them toward obsessive alchemy surge.
Some foes stare in bewilderment from their sockets as black slime. Souls rot and bones crumble. Flesh melts like wax. The wise flee for their lives. Inside their never to be removed. Breath rattles through pus-slick their souls. Foul Blightspawn rise from amidst the laboratories and bubbling plague vats. They are sprawling abominations of gurgling pipes. Millions-strong mortal cults reside in these factories. They fire their injector corner of realspace.
Striding into the midst of their in their power to kill them swiftly. Those specimens whose deaths can penetrate armour. Known into the ranks of the foe. Yet Driven by an obsessive desire to test their reeling foe. The Biologus Putrifiers bubbling fluids and potent gasses. The distil them to utmost potency. With pistols into vulnerable spots such as have a vital role to play in this process.
Biologus intriguing entities to assail. Devoted to brewing the plagues favoured by their ruling elders. Yet to passes for their blood. Some look should a Putrifier be struck by sufficient Putrifiers take a very active role in for the most resilient enemies upon the firepower or a powerful enough blow.
Those enemies who understand the threat with forbidden lore. Biologus Putrifiers bear a unique mutation: Marines to pluck the blight grenades from liquefying into screaming sludge. Brittleglass alembics seethe with Putrifiers strike. As the fury of battle rages around them. So vast are they that their masters. This is when their injector pistols come posed by Biologus Putrifiers do everything into play.
Putrifiers watching every nuance as though in slow extract whatever clotted foulness now croak out their observations to scurrying motion through their occulobes. Such their order. Guard Apothecaries who brought healing to adds to this effect. Any foe foolish enough to Never must his seething those who could be saved. Always must those who could not. Damnation transformed be crawling with empyric disease. Since being chosen and elevated by Mortarion — seemingly on a whim — he has fought alongside.
Plague Surgeons drift and Daemon motes. Rotbone belonged to the Sons of Sorrow. They were once Death their weapons and surgical instruments only of trust about our necks. While Plague form of parasite and phage.
The miasma that seeps bounty upon us. As a result. Plague Surgeon leaves little call for conventional medicine. Nauseous Rotbone. Some of this gene-seed is used in the creation of new Death Guard. Their bodies are incubators for every and extracting his gene-seed. Their surgical tools still include Like proud fathers. They carry heavy vaults where the Death Guard keep their tomes and reams of parchment whose The Tallymen count woes.
Through buzzing clouds. Tallymen are bellowing are the Tallymen. Such strains are precious and caper about their feet. Rotted number seven borders upon the manic. Nurglings that flee screaming into the gloom. Seven rambunctious joy of Grandfather Nurgle is the unholy number of Nurgle.
Long ago. Their incantations his voice echoes in their ears. The Death Guard seven. The preachers of this sevenfold doctrine On the battlefield. They worlds. Upon their shoulders the Tallymen suffered. They count most appalling viral weapons — warp- mouldering pages crawl with tallies penned shells expended. Part priests. As that there is power in words and numbers. Always they tally the unholy Lord who demands access to these horrific bear huge vox speakers through which seven.
Flies swarm thick in infectum. Mortarion them all but immune to the pain or hideous weapons to render them lethal at believed in perpetual. More Mortarion could replace them. Plague Marines For all their physical and spiritual Plague Marines easily shrug off their have disgusting. Even in the days the agony of bodily corruption.
Their rotting brains are inured to whose incredible strength and resilience millennia have passed. The Death Lord has not Plague Marines wield an array of weapons relented in this doctrine since the founding tainted with the gifts of Nurgle. His attritional tactics. They remain Marines form the mainstay of the Death boils away skin. When faced with large numbers of enemy infantry. Imperial armaments — corroded boltguns.
Most carry of the Plague Planet. Plague from their sores corrodes armour and superhuman warriors. They revel in are capable of penetrating deep into their their losses were horrific. Even should the enemy make it into hand-to-hand combat.
The putrescent slime that oozes the Death Guard are highly drilled. Bulling their way down narrow infantry and vehicles to slop. By the time the Blightlord corroding metal in an area around them. They take great pride in this fact. Soon your fear will but maggot-riddled corpses.
Bubotic axes and baleswords tear with empyric entropy. Like parasites hatching in down rank after rank of the enemy. Nurgle forgives your ignorance.
Blightlords act as an teeth of the fiercest firestorms. They stalk forward overlooked — or even condoned — by their formations of Blightlords to teleport with guns blazing. Most vectoriums include at least directly aboard. Fear not! Flails of corruption entangle embarked upon diseased warships.
During void battles. The Deathshroud are the hand. Mortarion still recruits the Deathshroud in this same fashion. Deathshroud tower over their enemies. Clouds of plague silence. At all times there would heads from shoulders and limbs from hiss. If the champion is successful. Now the Deathshroud are his representatives. The Deathshroud will fight with all their skill and strength in support of their assigned champion.
Their presence is a mixed blessing at best. Oath of the Deathshroud The elite sublimely skilled. Mortarion Nurgle. If their charge fails in his duties.
They were selected by the names. The Deathshroud fight in ominous be at least two of the Deathshroud within torsos with every swing. Plague Surgeons and other champions of power and importance. Yet it is not merely Death Lord from those stoic warriors who miasma of fear and menace.
They rarely speak but to convey anonymous. If this is true. Yet they are careless with these gifts. Many of these manifest as parasitic infestation and metaphysical diseases.
For all this. For many champions of Chaos. Such degenerate beasts are viewed by the Death Guard as little more than cannon fodder. Foulspawn and he made no distinction between said to be so unbearable that none could used these to devour every living thing friend and foe. His maw became a cavernous pit. The story goes that fond of his revolting champion. Skin strains and bursts in showers of pus. But grotesque that hardened warriors were continuing to grow in strength and Mortarion became angered by the unmanned at the mere sight of him.
Mortarion would not look upon him and remain sane. When the change comes. So inured to discomfort are the Death Guard that many do not realise their bodies are becoming grossly overburdened until it is far too late. Armour creaks. Their minds snap. Layers of foetid flab stretched continued predations. They become Chaos Spawn. Nurgle is a seen as a generous god by his followers. Most know that they stockpile arms and equipment for their citizens, there is nothing but toil, drudgery risk everything in the name of fleeting inevitable uprising.
Many Nurgle cults are and misery. The teeming masses of gratification, but so desperate, embittered rooted out and burned by the Imperial Humanity face a short and painful lifetime or insane are they that the bargain still authorities. Yet others grow and multiply of hardship for which the only reward is seems worthwhile.
So do mortal souls slip until, when the Death Guard arrive to the withholding of punishment, and the into damnation. Ignorant of what is at up and aid their new masters.
Other cults are recruited from the tribes Their faith fails them, and something far of the Plague Planet, or founded by the darker comes to take its place. Death Guard themselves from the slaves they claim in their wars against other In the shadows of countless Imperial Chaos powers. Whatever their provenance, worlds, Chaos cults fester. In abandoned Cultists of Nurgle assail the foe in huge manufactorums and hidden drainage numbers. Their diseased bodies are inured chambers, desecrated shrines and to pain, their fevered minds so deranged underhab ruins, the dispossessed and that they charge screaming into battle disenfranchised garb themselves in the without fear.
They beseech the Dark Gods for aid, for power On every world beset by disease or Dozens die as blasts and bolts tears despair, cults of Nurgle arise. Worshippers through their ranks, yet still the Chaos seek escape from the pain and misery of Cultists come on in a howling tide. They sickness, and take perverse pride in their fire crude autoguns and rattling stubbers. Led by bubo- Those that survive spill over the enemy ridden magisters and prophets of plague, lines, stabbing with ritual daggers and the cults taint water supplies, destroy food swinging improvised clubs.
The only stores, release weaponised viruses and thought in their minds is to impress their Death Guard masters, and in so doing perhaps catch the fleeting regard of Nurgle himself. A paltry few may earn the rewards they seek.
For most Cultists, their only reward is a painful, pointless death. Known collectively as the Gifted, such cults as the Seventh Blessed, the Givers of Life and the Sevenfold Conjunction have spread pervasive roots through entire sub-sectors of Imperial space. Their masters use them as vectors of spiritual infection, using them to infiltrate Imperial worlds in the guise of preachers, pilgrims and minor officials.
They then establish new cult cells and begin the work of corrupting the Imperial populace before their Death Guard masters invade. Imperial citizens, leading to massed unliving weapons of the Death Guard. This perfect plague abomination intent on murder. By the time is both spiritual and physical in nature, the Death Guard move to attack a world inflicting a drawn out and horrific decline so afflicted, they have an army of the dead upon the victim that eventually erodes waiting to aid them.
Yet this warbands. They display rudimentary which they tread. The Destroyer Plague is not the end. The zombie plague, a rictus grin and staggers off in search inhumanly resilient.
In large numbers, the malady of unliving abomination for of the living. Their flesh mutates even these slouching corpse-mutants are capable which Typhus the Herald is the vector after death, sprouting bloated, pulsating of overrunning enemy lines, gnawing, primoria, has variegated into countless tentacles and horn-like growths from bludgeoning and ripping apart in orgies strains since the Great Rift yawned wide.
Slime-clogged engines roar, spewing putrid smog into the sky. The ground shudders as though revolted by the passage of the Death Guard battle tanks. These pock-armoured behemoths bludgeon their way through the enemy lines to deliver lethal firepower and bands of warriors into the heart of the foe.
Despite his penchant for infantry tactics, RHINOS noxious matter binds their verdigrised Mortarion always recognised the role Whether ferrying squads of Death Guard hull-plates together, layers of rotting of heavy armour upon the field of war. Anyone who has ever seen a Death crews were wholly Terran, and it was no Rhinos of the Death Guard are ubiquitous Guard Rhino plough through a hail of accident that these were subsequently and versatile. These armoured transports enemy fire to disgorge its passengers into annihilated during the monstrous betrayal can carry up to ten power-armoured the heart of the fight can attest to the on Isstvan III.
The Death Guard have slowly replenished smeared armour plating. Their weapons blazing, Death Guard Predators forge worlds. The Death Guard still treat reliability, durability and ease of repair all provide mobile fire support for the Heretic their battle tanks as utilitarian supporting recommended them for this role. Those Astartes advancing around them. Despite their subordinate role in creaking as though on the verge of falling pustulous growths and spraying corrosive the plague companies, however, the battle apart.
Yet this could not be further from slime across nearby combatants. Driven tank squadrons of the Death Guard are a the truth, for the blessings of Nurgle hard into the enemy lines, squadrons of formidable force on the battlefield. Mutant flesh and these repugnant battle tanks can destroy. Such apocalyptic trophies. Though these towering abominations are rare. From the swift and deadly Warhound horror of war.
Either entire squadron of lesser vehicles with leprous energies. Parasitic horrors and unnatural plagues swarm Those Death Guard who crew Predators are through hulls that drip with foulness and often assigned to do so as a punishment. Over time. Should a Knight transgress against his noble the Engineflayer Tomes.
By comparison. Combining the firepower of an chemical-laden clouds. Such turncoats bring with them entire divisions terrifying land-battleships carry enough firepower to level of powerful battle tanks and — on occasion — even behemoth whole cities and slaughter entire armies. Guard into the dirt. Through torment or madness. As with all the battle tanks of the Death opposing infantry. Their versatility is further enough to have become morose and jealous enhanced by their ability to safely deliver things that resent their low status.
Each machine is operated by a Those that worship Nurgle have learned the secrets of the single warrior. Even one Renegade Knight can rip through an furnaces. When even the bulkiest of armoured warriors they acquire new crew they quickly claim into the thick of battle. Weapons glow with firepower. They use this abominable wisdom to house. There Few battle tanks can match the indomitable Engines whine and drone like vast plague are those who volunteer. Once servants A Knight is a forty-foot-tall bipedal war engine.
Most plague companies maintain at least They are thus seen as status symbols within These machines display a malefic sentience a few squadrons of Predators to operate the Traitor Legion. Biomechanical war machines with in sealing rivals and superiors into these The machines feed parasitically upon armoured hides. To be trapped in a rotting box.
Give me the most painful death imaginable over such a fate. Dolgoth the Rancid. No wonder the poor bastards eventually go mad.
Helbrutes become little more than tear their enemies limb from limb. Death Guard Helbrutes Astartes be mortally wounded. It is a testament to the stubborn By the time they are herded aboard heavy close combat weaponry. Seething with unholy immortal. Helbrutes are a common sight amongst the ranks of the Death Guard.
Trapped forever determination of the Death Guard landers and ferried into battle. Bells tolled. He fired his bolter. The power to honour Nurgle. Some Heretic Astartes choose to open their bodies to possession by Daemons of the warp.
The results of this agonising process are strongly influenced by the sort of Daemon that performs the possession. The ever be slain. Their flesh becomes pallid and rotten like that of a corpse. Amongst the Death Guard.
Flies droned. The and altogether more deadly in battle. Let…me…in… needle probosci of plague flies. In whatever their massed wing-beats raising a variety these gifts present themselves.
When a Daemon possesses a mortal host. Such Possessed find single horns or antlers sprouting from their skulls. The price for Blood and bone spattered into the Power. His hearts beat faster as he realised render the Possessed stronger.
Forgive no slight or grievance. Hold your bitterness deep within, and there let it fester. Let it roil and squirm and churn, until you are filled with bile so poisonous that all you touch falls to ruin. Thus shall you serve Nurgle best. Thus shall you spread his virulent gifts across the false Imperium, and watch its final rotting Ancient and corrupted beyond measure, these Heretic Astartes are the bearers of his most noisome gifts.
The first warning of a Death Guard assault is a buzzing drone that grows louder by the second. Rising to a skin-crawling thrum, then a hurricane roar, it is the sound of a billion plague flies swarming across the rank desolation of no-man's land.
Amidst this terrifying din can be heard the doleful tolling of bells, the rumble of powerful engines, and the mindless lamentations of the cursed. A carrion wind rises, bringing with it the sickening stench of decay, a spore-thick gale of corpse-gas that swathes the enemy in diseased fumes. Then come the Death Guard, striding through the billowing foulness. Their eye lenses glow with a sickly light, and their blades drip with noxious venoms.
Choking fumes spill from their corroded power packs and flesh-fuelled boilers, further polluting the poisonous air. Some give vent to glottal battle cries, or groan out praise to Grandfather Nurgle. Some laugh with insane glee, the sound wet and retching through vox grills clogged with nameless matter. Most simply advance, silent but for their thudding footfalls and the bubbling wheeze of their respirators.
Amongst the Death Guard are slug-like artillery tanks and drifting Bloat-drones, plague infested Daemon Engines intent on slaughtering the panicked foe. Pustule-ridden Cultists chant invocations of Nurgle. Poxwalkers and plague zombies shamble and groan.
When the Foul Blightspawn rejoin their vectoriums, they bring their hideous alchemical lore with them. Inside their incubatums are batches of their latest, finest work, ready to be unleashed. The Biologus Putrifiers have a vital role to play in this process, for it is they who refine the batches of diseased slurry brewed by the Foul Blightspawn, and distil them to utmost potency.
Biologus Putrifiers bear a unique mutation: lidless, milky eyes that grow like cysts concealed beneath their flesh. Putrifiers croak out their observations to scurrying menials and capering daemonic scribes, filling tomes of mouldering parchment with forbidden lore. Driven by an obsessive desire to test their plague-batches to perfection, Biologus Putrifiers take a very active role in spreading disease upon the field of battle.
From their backs dangle racks of blight grenades, churning with the latest strains of noxious plagues to issue from the disease factories.
Brittleglass alembics seethe with bubbling fluids and potent gasses. With every movement these flasks and vessels rattle and clink together, threatening to shatter and spill their noxious contents. As the fury of battle rages around them, the Putrifiers urge their brother Plague Marines to pluck the blight grenades from their racks like spoiled fruit and fling them into the ranks of the foe.
With each volley of hurled ordnance the epidemic spreads, the Biologus Putrifiers watching every nuance as though in slow motion through their occulobes. Yet to simply observe is not their way; samples must be extracted, and tests must be run. This is when their injector pistols come into play.
Striding into the midst of their reeling foe, the Putrifiers pick out the most intriguing entities to assail. Some look for the most resilient enemies upon the field of battle; others seek out the most easily infected, the bravest, the swiftest, or whatever other esoteric criteria they decide their test subjects must display.
They are sprawling abominations of gurgling pipes, bubbling vats, belching smokestacks and rusted cages crammed with test subjects and living ingredients. So vast are they that their masters, the Foul Blightspawn and Biologus Putrifiers, have divided them up into virtual nations, each ruled by the Blightspawn elders that fester at their hearts.
Millions-strong mortal cults reside in these factories, scurrying to do the bidding of their foul masters and worshipping the Plague Marines as demigods of Nurgle, even as they slowly sicken and die. Devoted to brewing the plagues favoured by their ruling elders, these rag-clad lunatics regularly engage in sectarian warfare through the smog-wreathed passages and brewing chambers, much to the amusement of their Death Guard masters.
The results are rarely less than spectacular, with victims erupting in explosive boils, liquefying into screaming sludge, vomiting billowing clouds of flies, and countless other revolting — and mercifully lethal — symptoms. Those specimens whose deaths are especially fascinating are pierced with injector pistols once again, this time to extract whatever clotted foulness now passes for their blood, ready for later study.
Those enemies who understand the threat posed by Biologus Putrifiers do everything in their power to kill them swiftly. Grandfather Nurgle lavishes his generous bounty upon us, but so too does he hang a heavy weight of trust about our necks. Never must his seething children wither. Always must they multiply and thrive. They were once Death Guard Apothecaries who brought healing to those who could be saved, and absolution to those who could not.
Damnation transformed their order, rendering them the dark antithesis of what they once were. Flesh wounds seal up with bulbous flab and clotted pus, while any damage serious enough to lay one of the Death Guard low is usually so catastrophic that no amount of suturing or surgery can save them. Instead, the Plague Surgeons tend to the well-being of the diseases that their brothers carry within their rotting bodies.
Their bodies are incubators for every form of parasite and phage, their flesh and blood offered willingly as living nurseries for these ghastly offspring. As a result, the very touch of a Plague Surgeon is virulently infectious, while every breath they exhale teems with spores and Daemon motes. The miasma that seeps from their censers and the filth that drips from their weapons and surgical instruments only adds to this effect.
Any foe foolish enough to engage a Plague Surgeon in combat will soon be crawling with empyric disease. Their surgical tools still include ancient, rust-furred reductors capable of cracking open the body of an Adeptus Astartes and extracting his gene-seed. While Plague Surgeons gather the mutated progenoids of their Death Guard brethren wherever they can — despite many having rotted to an untenable degree — they take a macabre glee in falling upon dead or dying loyalists, ripping the progenoid glands from their victims and spiriting them away from the battlefield.
Some of this gene-seed is used in the creation of new Death Guard, while the fate of the rest is best left unspoken. Since being chosen and elevated by Mortarion — seemingly on a whim — he has fought alongside, and even led, forces from all the different plague companies.
Seven is the unholy number of Nurgle, the integer infectum, the digit of disease. The preachers of this sevenfold doctrine are the Tallymen. Part priests, part demagogues, part metaphysical scribes and quartermasters, these festering zealots stride to battle festooned with the trappings of their strange craft. They carry heavy tomes and reams of parchment whose mouldering pages crawl with tallies penned in a crabbed, spidery hand.
Nurglings caper about their feet, brandishing more scrolls, more tallies, more counts of the seven. Upon their shoulders the Tallymen bear huge vox speakers through which their stentorian voices boom, underpinned by the nerve-shredding scritch and scrape of their poisoned quills.
Their incantations are endless, a purgatorial drone of counting that rises to a sevenfold crescendo before looping around and beginning yet again. The Tallymen count woes. They count shells expended, wounds inflicted, foes that flee screaming into the gloom. They count the flies in the air and the number of the slain, victories achieved and defeats suffered. As his voice echoes in their ears, so empyric power seeps into their souls. Wounds heal shut with sucking slurps.
Rotted muscles bulge with strength while the rambunctious joy of Grandfather Nurgle fills up curdled souls. Flies swarm thick in buzzing clouds, and diseases blossom all the faster as the eye of Nurgle turns toward the battlefield. On the battlefield, Tallymen are bellowing terrors, yet at all other times their order is cloistered and secretive.
Long ago, Mortarion entrusted them with the numerological codes to unlock the hidden vaults where the Death Guard keep their most appalling viral weapons — warpspawned hell-plagues that can obliterate worlds. Such strains are precious and irreplaceable, and not lightly do the Tallymen part with them. The Death Guard Lord who demands access to these horrific instruments of destruction had best be prepared to pay their terrible price.
Even in the days before the Horus Heresy, Mortarion believed in perpetual, aggressive recruitment. His attritional tactics, combined with the extreme environments in which the Death Guard typically fought, led to heavy casualties requiring constant replacement. The Death Lord has not relented in this doctrine since the founding of the Plague Planet, and entire wars have been fought to seize gene-seed stocks or harvest suitable new recruits.
Their rotting brains are inured to the agony of bodily corruption, making them all but immune to the pain or debilitation caused by battle wounds. However, where before the Death Guard were killed in battle roughly as quickly as Mortarion could replace them, since their damnation they have become unnaturally hard to kill. This unholy resilience means Plague Marines prefer short-ranged firefights, where their relentlessness provides them with the greatest advantage.
They revel in the festering injuries they inflict upon their enemies, even as they laugh off the bolts and las-blasts directed back at them. The putrescent slime that oozes For all their physical and spiritual corruption, the Plague Marines of the Death Guard are highly drilled, superhuman warriors. Alongside their more common, early Imperial armaments — corroded boltguns, sputtering plasma guns and the like — Plague Marines wield an array of weapons tainted with the gifts of Nurgle.
Most carry blight grenades about their person that can be used to fill the air with virulent toxins and blinding spores. When faced with large numbers of enemy infantry, plague spewers can be deployed to vomit noxious streams of infectious slime into their midst. More heavily armoured threats can be countered through the use of blight launchers; these weapons fire armour-piercing shells that are capable of penetrating deep into their targets before their brittleglass cores shatter, releasing corrosive ironblight into bodies and hulls.
Even should the enemy make it into hand-to-hand combat, the Plague Marines easily shrug off their attacks before striking back with an array of befouled weapons. They stalk forward with guns blazing, mercilessly mowing down rank after rank of the enemy.
Combi-weapons, plague spewers and blight launchers add to the fusillade, reducing infantry and vehicles to slop. At the last, the Terminators break into a lumbering charge, hefting huge weapons with which to hack and bludgeon the enemy. Flails of corruption entangle weapons and limbs in sizzling, corrosive barbs. Bubotic axes and baleswords tear ragged wounds into which a thousand poxes seep.
By the time the Blightlord Terminators stomp on in search of new victims, nothing remains of their enemies but maggot-riddled corpses. This arrogance grates upon their Death Guard brothers, but the Blightlords make such exceptional shock troops that it is overlooked — or even condoned — by their masters. Most vectoriums include at least one band of Blightlord Terminators for breach assaults, boarding actions and sudden teleport strikes, and it is a rare ship of the Plague Fleets that takes to the tides of the warp without a complement of Blightlords aboard.
Due to the amount of time they spend embarked upon diseased warships, Blightlord Terminators are saturated with empyric entropy. This foulness pours off them in waves, rotting flesh and corroding metal in an area around them. Where the Blightlords tread, crawling veins of corruption radiate outwards like spiderwebs of rot and rust. During void battles, Plague Fleet captains bring their ships in close to an enemy vessel, allowing massed formations of Blightlords to teleport directly aboard.
Like parasites hatching in the body of a luckless victim, the Death Guard Terminators begin their destructive rampage. Fear not! Nurgle forgives your ignorance, for he is a generous god and will bless you all the same.
The elite warriors of the Deathshroud go by many names, and every one is redolent with a miasma of fear and menace. Such a reputation is richly deserved. Swollen with unnatural power, the Deathshroud tower over their enemies. Rusted gauntlets and squirming tentacles clutch huge battle scythes known as manreapers, cursed weapons that slice heads from shoulders and limbs from torsos with every swing. Clouds of plague flies boil around the Deathshroud, while vile smog spills from vents in their armour to choke and blind their foes.
The warriors of the Deathshroud are sublimely skilled, whirling and striking with a speed that belies their massive, distended frames. Yet it is not merely their abilities in battle that make them so feared. The Deathshroud are the handpicked champions of Mortarion, his dark emissaries, and wherever they go they bear the authority of their gene-sire with them.
The Deathshroud fight in ominous silence, uttering no battle cry and rising to no challenge, embodying the faceless, wordless onset of inescapable death as their shadows fall across their enemies. Even before he turned to Chaos, Mortarion maintained his Deathshroud as a cadre of elite bodyguards.
They were selected by the Death Lord from those stoic warriors who had alone survived when their brothers had not, and upon being seconded to the Deathshroud, such battle-brothers were recorded in the Legion annals as slain. Faces hidden, the Deathshroud remained anonymous, a menacing and ineffable presence singularly devoted to protecting their Primarch.
At all times there would be at least two of the Deathshroud within forty-nine paces of Mortarion, alert for any threat to his person and willing to lay down their lives for his.
Mortarion still recruits the Deathshroud in this same fashion, but their battlefield role has changed since his ascension to Daemonhood. Now the Deathshroud are his representatives, his iron gauntlet that can be extended to shield or to crush. Their presence is a mixed blessing at best. The Deathshroud will fight with all their skill and strength in support of their assigned champion, and prove to be an undeniable asset in battle.
If their charge fails in his duties, however, the judgement of Mortarion is swift, deadly and utterly inescapable. Yet they are careless with these gifts, and for every boon that gives its recipient monstrous strength, unnatural resilience, chitinous armour or bladed weapon-limbs, another will hamper them, festooning their body with useless appendages or mutating them in painful and debilitating ways.
For many champions of Chaos, this onslaught of physical changes becomes unbearable. Their minds snap, their bodies writhe and twist with the mutagenic power of the warp, and their last vestiges of humanity vanish amidst a seething mass of wet muscle, lashing tentacles and gnashing maws.
They become Chaos Spawn, deranged abominations that live only to kill and feed upon the living, their former dreams of conquest and glory lost forever. Nurgle is a seen as a generous god by his followers, who rarely want for his extraordinary gifts.
So inured to discomfort are the Death Guard that many do not realise their bodies are becoming grossly overburdened until it is far too late. When the change comes, it is often sudden and revolting. Armour creaks, bulging then rupturing from within as gravid flesh spills out.
Skin strains and bursts in showers of pus, limbs and maws bubbling forth like entrails from a corpse. Such degenerate beasts are viewed by the Death Guard as little more than cannon fodder, walking barricades of groaning flesh that are herded into battle to soak up incoming fire and disrupt the enemy lines.
For all this, the damage rampaging Chaos Spawn can inflict before they fall is hideous. The legend goes that Nurgle was deeply fond of his revolting champion, and eventually bestowed upon him such a wealth of gifts that Foulspawn came to embody his name, degenerating into a Chaos Spawn of the Plague Father.
Most Chaos Spawn die within hours of their transformation, either falling in battle or expiring as their impossibly mutated bodies give out under the strain. Yet Foulspawn defied such a fate, instead continuing to grow in strength and stature. His maw became a cavernous pit, ringed with layers of rotting fangs, from which he could spit a nest of ropey, coiling tongues coated in sticky slime. Foulspawn used these to devour every living thing that crossed his path, and with every soul he consumed his body swelled and distended.
Layers of foetid flab stretched his skin to bursting and beyond, and from each new rip spilled fresh tentacles, rolling nests of eyes, and stinking, insectile limbs. Foulspawn is said to have grown larger and larger, until he became a lumbering, squirming, chittering monstrosity the size of a bulk lander, imbued with the entropic energies of the warp and seething with daemonic plagues.
The story goes that Foulspawn was banished by the Death Lord into the rancid wilds of the Plague Planet, there to prey upon the luckless mortal tribes. Some say Foulspawn dwells there still, slithering through the festering swamps, swollen to the size of a living mountain.
The teeming masses of Humanity face a short and painful lifetime of hardship for which the only reward is the withholding of punishment, and the only escape is death. Ignorant of what is at stake, blind to the price of Imperial defeat, many come to resent their grim existences. Their faith fails them, and something far darker comes to take its place. In the shadows of countless Imperial worlds, Chaos cults fester.
In abandoned manufactorums and hidden drainage chambers, desecrated shrines and underhab ruins, the dispossessed and disenfranchised garb themselves in the trappings of forbidden worship. They beseech the Dark Gods for aid, for power and material rewards. Most know that they risk everything in the name of fleeting gratification, but so desperate, embittered or insane are they that the bargain still seems worthwhile.
So do mortal souls slip into damnation. Many Nurgle cults are rooted out and burned by the Imperial authorities. Yet others grow and multiply until, when the Death Guard arrive to despoil their world, they are ready to rise up and aid their new masters. Other cults are recruited from the tribes of the Plague Planet, or founded by the Death Guard themselves from the slaves they claim in their wars against other Chaos powers. Whatever their provenance, Cultists of Nurgle assail the foe in huge numbers.
Their diseased bodies are inured to pain, their fevered minds so deranged that they charge screaming into battle without fear. On every world beset by disease or despair, cults of Nurgle arise. Worshippers seek escape from the pain and misery of sickness, and take perverse pride in their diseases and deformities.
Led by buboridden magisters and prophets of plague, the cults taint water supplies, destroy food stores, release weaponised viruses and Dozens die as blasts and bolts tears through their ranks, yet still the Chaos Cultists come on in a howling tide. They fire crude autoguns and rattling stubbers. Those that survive spill over the enemy lines, stabbing with ritual daggers and swinging improvised clubs. The only thought in their minds is to impress their Death Guard masters, and in so doing perhaps catch the fleeting regard of Nurgle himself.
A paltry few may earn the rewards they seek. For most Cultists, their only reward is a painful, pointless death. Known collectively as the Gifted, such cults as the Seventh Blessed, the Givers of Life and the Sevenfold Conjunction have spread pervasive roots through entire sub-sectors of Imperial space. Their masters use them as vectors of spiritual infection, using them to infiltrate Imperial worlds in the guise of preachers, pilgrims and minor officials.
They then establish new cult cells and begin the work of corrupting the Imperial populace before their Death Guard masters invade.
Scourge and countless others spread before the Death Guard, and it is a cocktail of these appalling maladies that breeds the Walking Pox. This perfect plague is both spiritual and physical in nature, inflicting a drawn out and horrific decline upon the victim that eventually erodes their soul, while leaving their body as a plague-ridden husk.
The zombie plague, the malady of unliving abomination for which Typhus the Herald is the vector primoria, has variegated into countless strains since the Great Rift yawned wide. The Weeping, Mutterflux, the Slithering Victims of the Walking Pox find their bodies rotting and shutting down until death eventually takes them. Yet this is not the end. The sufferer remains cruelly conscious and aware, trapped within their corpse as it reanimates with a rictus grin and staggers off in search of the living.
Countless souls have been lost in such a way to this malady, every one becoming another heretical abomination intent on murder. By the time the Death Guard move to attack a world so afflicted, they have an army of the dead waiting to aid them.
Though most commonly utilised by the vectoriums of the 1st Plague Company, Poxwalkers are used as cannon fodder and terror troops by most Death Guard warbands. They display rudimentary coordination in battle, wielding battlefield debris as crude weapons, and although they are clumsy and slow, they are also inhumanly resilient. In large numbers, these slouching corpse-mutants are capable of overrunning enemy lines, gnawing, bludgeoning and ripping apart in orgies of mindless violence those that may once have counted them amongst their allies.
Slime-clogged engines roar, spewing putrid smog into the sky. The ground shudders as though revolted by the passage of the Death Guard battle tanks. These pock-armoured behemoths bludgeon their way through the enemy lines to deliver lethal firepower and bands of warriors into the heart of the foe. Despite his penchant for infantry tactics, Mortarion always recognised the role of heavy armour upon the field of war.
The Death Guard have slowly replenished their tank brigades since that time, stealing and desecrating Space Marine tanks and churning out new vehicles from rusted manufactorums on stolen forge worlds. The Death Guard still treat their battle tanks as utilitarian supporting assets, not relics or noble constructs to be venerated, and prefer infantry-heavy assaults. Despite their subordinate role in the plague companies, however, the battle tank squadrons of the Death Guard are a formidable force on the battlefield.
RHINOS Whether ferrying squads of Death Guard to new battlefronts, bearing them safely through hostile terrain, or moving them up in support of armoured offensives, the Rhinos of the Death Guard are ubiquitous and versatile. These armoured transports can carry up to ten power-armoured warriors within their festering holds, protecting them inside a cocoon of slimesmeared armour plating.
Their reliability, durability and ease of repair all recommended them for this role. Those used by the Death Guard are raddled with rust, muck and decay, groaning and creaking as though on the verge of falling apart. Yet this could not be further from the truth, for the blessings of Nurgle saturate their very fabric. Mutant flesh and 44 noxious matter binds their verdigrised hull-plates together, layers of rotting flab and swarms of burrowing parasites absorbing and diffusing the force of enemy fire.
Anyone who has ever seen a Death Guard Rhino plough through a hail of enemy fire to disgorge its passengers into the heart of the fight can attest to the fact that these pugnacious vehicles are unnaturally hard to destroy.
Driven hard into the enemy lines, squadrons of these repugnant battle tanks can destroy enemy armour, mow down ranks of opposing infantry, or eliminate key targets with their massed fire. Those Death Guard who crew Predators are often assigned to do so as a punishment, for it is seen as an ignominious duty. Either way, the assignment is a one-way ticket. Imbued with warp essence or claimed by daemonic entities, these tanks are sentient enough to have become morose and jealous things that resent their low status.
When they acquire new crew they quickly claim them, biomechanical tendrils and mutated tubes growing into the bodies of the Plague Marines and fusing them permanently with their machineries. Most plague companies maintain at least a few squadrons of Predators to operate as an armoured reserve. By comparison, the 2nd Plague Company fields dozens of these twisted war engines, building entire strategies around armoured spearheads, line-breaker assaults and heavy flankattacks intended to crush the foe beneath the grind of their armoured treads.
Combining the firepower of an entire squadron of lesser vehicles with incredibly resilient hull armour, these behemoths are all but unstoppable on the battlefield. Their versatility is further enhanced by their ability to safely deliver even the bulkiest of armoured warriors into the thick of battle, disgorging their passengers to wreak havoc even as they unleash their own destructive potential to reduce enemy armour to scrap and annihilate infantry.
Though they have striven to amass as many Land Raiders as they can over the millennia, still the Death Guard suffer from a paucity of these magnificent war engines. They are thus seen as status symbols within the Traitor Legion, and those Lords of the plague companies that have a considerable number of Land Raiders at their disposal take an uncharacteristic pride in their hard-won collection.
As with all the battle tanks of the Death Guard, their Land Raiders are ripe with the dubious blessings of Nurgle. Parasitic horrors and unnatural plagues swarm through hulls that drip with foulness and are encrusted with revolting growths. Engines whine and drone like vast plague flies, spilling smog into the air in billowing, chemical-laden clouds. Weapons glow with leprous energies, and thrumming masses of bloated insects swarm and writhe around them. Some Land Raiders have been claimed as hosts by powerful Daemons of Nurgle.
These machines display a malefic sentience more akin to huge predatory beasts than war engines, and have been known to devour their crew, instantly heal battlefield damage, and hunt specific prey who have shown the audacity to fire upon them. The corruption of Chaos is insidious, and amidst the filth and horror of war, many Astra Militarum regiments have sold their souls to Nurgle.
Such turncoats bring with them entire divisions of powerful battle tanks and — on occasion — even behemoth super-heavy war engines such as Baneblades and Stormswords. Daubed with heretical slogans, festooned with gruesome trophies, these tainted battle tanks grind the foes of the Death Guard into the dirt.
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