mortem tyrannis: against death

Justice shall be delivered, and doom shall stalk a thousand worlds.

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Naaman and his squad

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Joab and his six brothers-in-hell

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Gehazi and six Once-Men

The final part of the Death Guard showcase, the core of the army: infantry. Three squads of seven posthuman nightmares. This the core of the accidental army - I'd always loved the old monopose plastic plague marines and after winning a couple of accidental eBay auctions.... well.

Apparently the pathway to hell has seven steps. Below the cut for more photos and conversation.

First, Naaman and his team.

Seven Death Guard

Naaman himself, the icon-bearer and the axeman are all metal models. The rest of the squad are the monopose plastics that I fell in love with as a young man. I've mostly relied on paint to distinguish them, as we'll see, but eBay lots of these figures are often missing parts, so conversions are also easy to do.

Naaman's squad are vaguely equipped to close with the enemy and then chop them in melee, but are definitely not even close to optimised for this task. Competitive modern players would laugh at this squad!

Naaman, Aspiring Champion and Sergeant

This sculpt is so cool. A broken, rotting chainsword in one hand, a broken bolter in the other, it simply oozes character without being oversculpted. The stripey paint technique I use goes beautifully with these old models. While I did this in something like February 2019, I think he might actually be better than some of the work I've done recently.

Naaman, by the way, is the name of a Biblical leper and military commander.

The backpack is modern plastic, I think from the Thousand Sons range, but once you paint it like ancient, unpainted ceramite and bones, it still fits perfectly into the Death Guard. He also has a weird daemon's eye, for a bit of fun.

The markings are old transfers. Naaman's squad mostly uses the mouth-and-tongue on one pad and a chaos star on the other, but they aren't uniform about it. This is a chaos warband, after all.

His right arm indicates that it has been a very long time since he has been home.

Icon-bearer

90s-style marines were designed to be flat for moulding purposes. Sculptors often left arms off so that modellers would add a plastic arm. This allowed for a more 3D prescence as well as reducing the prevalence of single-poses, which hurts immersion. Eventually, Games Workshop moved toward multi-pose all-or-mostly plastic kits... before moving back to monopose with the modern CAD designed plastic kits.

This fellow was one of these; all single-pose metal cast except for his left arm. I've given him a snippy claw that I bought from some bits site. I think it's from the Possessed kit, but whatever. It probably counts as two plague knives in the modern codex. Something like that.

You can also see a chaos star on his left shoulder pad here, although it's very different from Naaman's.

No tongue skull on this pre-cast pauldron, but it's still skull-y.

A 90s-period backpack (possibly even the one with which he originally came).

Another metal cast, this time without any arms at all to allow modellers any experience they wanted. Again, I bought this fellow some arms from a bits site - I think his right claws are from the same Possessed kit as his icon-bearer, while the swollen left arm wielding an axe might come from the Age of Sigmar Blightkings kit.

What did I just say about not everyone keeping to the same squad markings? What are you, lawful?

Plague Marine with plague belcher

The modern Death Guard codex includes a grotesque weapon called a Plague Belcher which has a profile very similar to a flamer. I thought it might be fun to paint a flamer as if it were made of bone and corrupted flesh. 

It doesn't completely look right (turns out that all those hard angles in a constructed weapon don't pass for an organic flesh-thing), but it's always good to experiment. It also took care of this fellow, who had lost his bolter arm at some point in the twenty years before I got hold of him.

Three Plague Marines

Old-school Plague Marines. These are effectively monopose- while the right arm with a bolter is separate, there's only so much you can do with a right-angled arm holding a gun. I mostly relied on paint to distinguish between each of these. The whole reason I got them was because I loved this extremely basic old sculpt, so I didn't want to do a lot of conversion work. Some are missing their helmet spikes or original bolters from the passage of time, but that's about it.

Note that old mate in the middle here has just murdered some hapless marine scout.

+ + +

Next up, Joab and his six poor bastards.

Seven. Always seven.

Another squad of fallen marines; corrupted by their loyalty to Moderation, laid low by their dedication to the end of tyrants.

These are vaguely anti-tank; twin meltaguns and Joab wields a powerfist.

Joab, Aspiring Champion and Sergeant

This sculpt rules. Entirely metal and monopose, but who cares. A goggled, gasmasked head. A clawed, corrupted power fist. An arm stripped of its armour. A bolter patched with wood. A fucking bandolier of shells. Shrunken heads as grenades. 12/10, would paint again.

Joab was a Biblical military officer. Solomon cursed his house with leprosy.

The backpack is another Thousand Sons pack. Painting the birds as antique bone once again grounds it in the Death Guard, though. And another yellow eye motif! I sure do like doing that, apparently.

Some details. Another old transfer on the right shoulder pad - something echoing the Eye of Horus - and a tripartite skull logo on his left. Note also that the remnants of his right arm armour is painted red.

Icon-bearer

This is the same sculpt as above. I did paint the icon differently (and notice a scrape there just as I write this. how irritating) to differentiate them, but his backpack and sword do that just as well. Both came with the model from eBay. Although I'm pretty sure the sword was intended for a Slaanesh-corrupted marine, a flayed human face fits in pretty well with chaos warriors dedicated to any form of chaos.

Some details. The sword arm actually has a bunch of cool bionic parts. I'll just count it as two plague knives in the game.

The backpack is a metal piece that I don't see around very often. I suspect it's both rare and old, probably from the late 80s. It's one of those fun, weird old casts that don't make any sense until you drench the whole thing in a thin wash and then just get started. I've gone with lots of organic colours and bones because, you know. Bones.

Plague Marine with meltagun

A monopose metal cast. I really like this cast - as much as I love multipose kits, it can mean that guns never quite sit correctly against the chest, while this guy feels exactly right. This was before I decided that melta weapons are partly constructed of ceramics, so the muzzle is speckled with rust. If I did him now, I'd paint it as bruised bone.

Rear shot to show off the regular chaos backpack and some of the other details. He has a regular frag grenade, unlike his sergeant's shrunken-head blight grenades.

This is a metal-body-with-no-arms sculpt. I hacked together some arms out of my bits box. They don't quite gel properly, which gives him an awkward, my-body-doesn't-fit-right look that is totally apt for a chaos marine. Not everyone gets cool mutations, guys.

This meltagun does feature a ceramic muzzle. It might be the first one I did that way.

The Imperial Fist head at his feet was because my regular opponent had vague plans for an Imperial Fist project, but he's since decided not to do that. Maybe I should repaint the head to match his Ultramarines or Dark Angels.

Another three marines. Note that the fellow in the middle has a boltgun (and arm!) which originally came from the plastic World Eaters kit from the same period. It amused me to paint it white and blue.

+ + +

Finally, we have Gehazi.

Sacred numbers are important

The names of Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Gehazi and his six brothers have echoed for ten thousand years, a rallying call against tyranny and hypocrisy. How far they have come, and how far still to go.

This squad are a little closer to a useful loadout: just two plasma guns. Everyone else is just bolters and self-loathing.

Gehazi is another Biblical leper, this time a ranking servant of Elijah who used his position for personal gain and was cursed with the disease.

Gehazi, Sergeant and Aspiring Champion

Another monopose sculpt. This one is cleaner and more straightforward, but was oddly tricky to paint - belly took some careful planning to get right, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Note too the little yellow wire. That was fun.

I'm even more pleased with the backpack, which is a Rogue Trader-era plastic chaos marine pack. I went with a bruised, corrupted flesh look. I think the pinks are a pleasing contrast to the off-creams and greens of Gehazi's armour.

Some detail from above, which also shows that Gehazi's squad has retained their Tactical Squad vertical arrow. Is it ironic, meant to mock the orthodoxy of their enemies, or is it genuine nostalgia, akin to the patterning on his armour which calls back to his days as a Dusk Raider? What a good question.

Gehazi's squad also have bronze trimming on their pauldrons, like my 30K Death Guard...

Plague Marine with bolter

Another metal monopose sculpt. I love how these sculpts have rebuilt their bolters with wooden scraps. It's such a delightful detail. 

I'd almost run out of Chaos backpacks by the time I got to this squad, so each of them has a different backpack. This sculpt has a generic Mark VII backpack. Its smaller and more compact, fitting in with the sculpt's pose and size. It adds to the sense that he's small and self-contained, against some of his more elaborate and flamboyant brothers.

Another monopose sculpt. This one has a wooden plasma gun. Phenomenal.

His right pauldron bears three skulls (sculpted on), but the left is the Tactical arrow. To keep the 'skull' theme but to match the Tactical arrow, the rest of the squad has the 'elite skull' from one of the generic loyalist marine transfer sheets. These are the sorts of details I enjoy in this hobby.

I'm not sure what his backpack is from. It looks like a modern Plague Marine kit, with that bronzed detail in the centre, but I don't remember. Possibly I bought it from a bits shop.

This is a metal-body-with-no-arms, like the second meltagunner above. His plasma gun is from the Mark IV plastic kits, which is why it looks so clean (except for the rust I painted). The casing looks like it was done with Contrast paints, but I did these before getting any, so I must have either edge highlighted like mad or just glazed back on over white. I wish I could remember, as it looks pretty good.

The backpack is another Thousand Sons backpack. I wanted it to look like the daemonic hands were holding rotten, poisonous fruit. That didn't quite work, but it still looks great, so whatever. The effect is from several layers of Nurgle's Rot paint over... something. I forget.

Ooh, another shrunken head blight grenade. Delicious.

The last three of the plastic Death Guard. The one on the left has a 3rd edition-era bolter and a replacement arm. The newer bolter results in the proportions being a bit weird, but not so weird that you notice from three feet away.

As you can see, only one of these has retained his original backpack. The one on the right has a Mark III backpack from the plastic kit. The middle backpack comes from the Forgeworld Horus Heresy range - I believe from a rocket launcher kit. Both kits work well on plague marines and are great fun to paint all mucky.

'Death Guard', John Blanche
(c) Games Workshop, date unknown
Used without permission

That's it for now! I'm not sure what's next for the project. I'm considering some Terminators and/or a melee squad. I might use a combination of the cool new sculpts and the Blightkings from Age of Sigmar. I'm also keen on some Daemon Princes as the army badly needs some actual teeth. Maybe more vehicles? Vehicles aren't as scary when painting them Nurgle-style, as I can weather, rust, or rot away any mistakes.... and I have always loved the idea of Defilers...

Decisions to be made.