With the country in lockdown, many people have been stuck at home over the last few months. To beat the boredom, many of us in the hobby have used this time to catch up on our backlog of unpainted miniatures, or even to start on a new project to keep ourselves busy. Even though I haven’t had much time off as a healthcare worker, I did manage to get quite a lot of time put aside to get some painting done since for the last three months I have been living apart from my family (as a precaution in order to keep them safe from possible exposer).
Now as anyone who has been flowing our painted blog will know, I recently started work on a new army for Warhammer 40,000. As a polar opposite to my beloved Grey Knights, I decided to paint a daemon army dedication to the worship of Nurgle. Well, I say recently. In all honesty, I intended to get this army start late last year. However, after a mishap with some spray varnish (which I was sadly been unable to fix with striping the paint) I put the project on hold. But with lockdown giving me more time to paint I decided to actually put brush to model and get the army finished.
The first part of the force was going to be a battalion of lesser daemons, lead by a trio of heralds. One of the key selling points of Nurgle daemons is their incredible resilience, with a twenty+ squad of Plaguebearers been especially egregious. So, I decided a good place to start would be two maximum squads of these one-eyed* plague monsters. With the Cloud of Flies, a Daemonic Icon and Disgustingly Resilient rules, a group of Plaguebearers can pretty much guarantee holding an objective or be used to bog down an opponent’s best unit while you complete your current mission.
Some would argue that you should go with three units of thirty Plaguebearers for a battalion, but instead I prefer to fill out my remaining troops with their diminutive cousins with some minimum sized swarms of Nurglings. While not as tough as Plaguebearers, Nurglings have the benefit of been able to deploy anywhere on the board that is more than 9” away from the enemies deployment zone.
This allows them to claim objectives far quicker than my other troops, and also act as a roadblock to players wanting to try and engage my larger threats before they can get into position. Added to this the new stratagem from Engine War to replenish their losses, and the new rules for terrain in 9th edition and we have some units that could be as much of a nuisance as their larger brethren. I also decided to add some variety to these units by mixing in some old metal Nurglings and some of the spare one from the plastic sprues, giving me three units of the pesky daemons.
For my HQ’s I decided to forgo the classic move of having my army lead by a Greater Daemon or Daemon Prince and instead focus on the smaller heralds. I did this because the heralds tend to have greater synergies to help lesser daemons become more effective on the battlefield. As well as the Locus of Virulence, the generic Poxbringer gives +1 Strength to all Nurgle daemons in its bubble. Team this up with Sloppity Bilepiper Disease of Mirth ability and Spoilpox Scrivener Keep Counting! Meet your Quota! and Stern Taskmaster rules and you can create a block of Plaguebearers that is as lethal as it is tough.
The colour scheme I used for all these chappies was fairly simple, but quite effective. Firstly, I base coated all the models with a grey primer. I then dry brushed the fleshy parts of the miniatures with a mix of Dawnstone and Skeleton Horde, before adding some Corax White to the mix for another layer. I then picked out the teeth with Wraithbone and eyes with Evil Sunz Scarlet, before painting the blades Abbadon Black. I then used a medium wash brush to paint the open wounds and mouths with Blood Angel Red contrast (giving the models a look of bleeding out vital fluids) before washing the whole model with Nuln Oil.
So that makes a decent battalion to use as a start for my army, able to hold and control many objectives and even take on other units in a fight. But the question was what else I was to include in the force. The obvious choice would be to add some larger daemons, such as some Great Unclean Ones or some Daemon Princes in order to handle enemy vehicles or larger threats. However, I decided to take another route.
You see, daemons are great in combat and can be potentially effective in the psychic phase, but they are not too impressive at taking threats at a distance. This can be a real issue when you have to deal with large amounts of enemy armoured units, that can deal a lot a damage at range to our daemons even with all of their resilience. So, I decided to take another route when it came to building the army. I decided to call in some reinforcement in the form of some giant war machines of my own.
Chaos Knights (much like their loyalist kin) are able to bring a mass of firepower to bare on their enemies, reducing whole sways of your opponent’s army to dust in mere seconds. Add to this the fact that they are as tough as old boots, and you have the perfect accompany for their daemonic allies. In fact, their resilience means that opponents will often have to target a lot of resources in order to fell just one of these corrupted war engines. Resources that they won’t be using to target our daemons that are on the objectives.
Luckily, I had a small lance of knights that I had that used with my Grey Knights back before they received their new faction only rules from Ritual of the Damned. Since it was unlikely I was going to be using them as loyalists, I decided to give them a repaint and dedicate them to the dark gods. I decided to go with a undivided colour scheme, not dedicating them to any god in particular (in case I decide to build any other chaos armies in the future).
I repainted them in random patches of white and black panels, with stylised chaos star on the black panels to show their true allegiance. I then added addition chains and skulls from the classic chaos vehicle sprue to make them look more corrupted. My head canon is that these Chaos Knight are followers of the lesser deity Malal**, and are lending their support to my daemons in order to achieve their own nefarious goals. They also got some nice upgrades in Engine War, which should increase their effectiveness on the battlefield.
Chaos Daemons Battalion
HQ
Poxbringer [PL: 4]
Sloppity Bilepiper [PL: 3]
Spoilpox Scrivener [PL: 4]
TROOPS
3x Nurglings [PL: 3]
3x Nurglings [PL: 3]
3x Nurglings [PL: 3]
30x Plaguebearers [PL: 12]
30x Plaguebearers [PL: 12]
Super Heavy Detachment
LORDS OF WAR
Knight Tyrant [PL: 30]
War Dog [PL: 9]
War Dog [PL: 9]
Total: 92 Play Points
Added together this battalion and super heavy detachment brings me pretty much to 2,000 points***, and make for an interesting force that is both capable of dealing out damage and holding objective depending on the need of the mission. With the limited testing I have been able to do since getting back home I have high hopes for this build. But I’ll have to wait and see if it works in practice once I am able to get some games played back at my LGS.
Still, roughly 2,000 points painted in just under three months is pretty good going for me, and I’m happy in what I have accomplished in such a short amount of time. Usually I take far longer to even get a squad done, so the fact I am speeding up as a painter without a dip in quality is rather pleasing. I have already started on my next project, a custom Space Marine successor chapter which I have dubbed the Novacula Strixes. Their numbers are few at the moment, but with 9th edition on the way I expect they will grow to a sizable force in no time at all.
I hope you have enjoyed this look into my latest hobby project. If you have a unique and interesting army you have been working on and would like to share it with the wider community, or just want to chat or meme about 40K, then you can contact me via twitter @MTGTengu. If you have enjoyed todays article, please like and subscribe to keep up to date with all we do here at Master of Magics. You want to support the site directly; you can join our Patreon for as little as a $1 a month. Until next time though remember, “Sanity is for the weak!”
* Ok, some of them do have more than one eye.
** Yes, in my head canon he is still a Chaos God.
*** Its more like 1,950. But I’m waiting to see what the new points totals are like before adding anymore.
