Reviews: Traitor Legions - The Death Guard

Last on the list for Traitor Legion review is the Death Guard

Content sourced via the Combat Phase podcast and SpikeyBits

The Death Guard

The Death Guard are one of the Traitor Legions of Chaos Space Marines. They worship and devote themselves exclusively to the Chaos God Nurgle and as a result of his mutational "gifts" they have become Plague Marines; Astartes who are eternally rotting away within their Power Armour and infected with every known form of disease and decay but who are immune to all pain or minor injury. When the XIVth Legion was first raised on Terra by the Emperor, its Astartes were known as the Dusk Raiders. After the XIVth Legion was reunited with its Primarch Mortarion on the world of Barbarus, he renamed the Legion the Death Guard.

What makes a Death Guard Detachment?

To be a Death Guard detachment, much like what we saw in the Wrath of Magnus there are a number of restrictions:

• The army can have none of the Chaos Space Marine unique characters with the exception of Typhus.
• All models who can purchase a Mark of Nurgle or Daemon of Nurgle must do so.
• No model can come with or purchase a Mark of Chaos a Mark of Chaos or Daemon of Chaos other than Nurgle.
• All models that can purchase Veterans of the Long war (VotLW) must do so, but for free.

So what do I get for being a Death Duard Detachment?

If your detachment is a Death Guard detachment then you get the following special rules:

• Gift of Nurgle: Units with VotLW gain Fearless and Feel No Pain, but have a -1 to Initiative (this does not affet Typhus of Plague Marines).
• Inexorable Advance: Models with VotLW gain Relentless
• Lords of Plague Host: Plague Marines gain the Troops battle role

Death Guard Warlord Traits

1. Warlord gains Feel No Pain
2. Warlord gains It Will Not Die
3. Warlord gains +1 W
4. Warlord gains Eternal warrior
5. Warlord has their Poison weapons improved by 1
6. Units within 7" gain Contagion

Death Guard Relics

• Puscleaver (10 Points): Poison 2+ Melee Weapon
• Plague Skill Glothia (15 Points): Once per game, Range 8", S1, AP–, Assault 1, Poison 2+ , Large Blast
• Pandemic Staff (30 Points): Poison 2+ Staff with dual profiles:
• Ranged: Template, S1, Ap5, assault 1, Poison 2+
• Melee: S+2, AP4, Melee, Concussive, Poison 2+
• Dolorus Knell (25 Points): Start of any friendly fight sub phase give units fear or give a model fear.
• This sounds a little off, for 25 points I would expect more from this. Giving a single unit Fear is not worth 25 points, not by a long shot.
• Poxwalker Hive (20 Points): at the start of each turn, pick a friendly Cultist unit within 7". They can't run or shoot for the remainder of the game but have Fell No Pain and Fearless, in addition they immediately recover D3 Cultists from earlier in the game.
• Kind of a mini Typhus ability, turning Cultists into zombies.
• Plaguebringer (35 Points): AP3, Poison 4+, Deamon Weapon
• I am a fan of Daemon Weapons on the most part, and being not only Poison 4+ but AP3 at Initiative, this is a reletavily solid relic.

Death Guard Formation Based Detachment (FBD)

• Disgustingly Resilient: re-roll Fell No Pain rolls of a 1
• Cloud of Flies: Ranged hits from more than 18" away grant you the Stealth rule for resolving the attack.

Core Choices:

• Chaos Warband: As per Traitor's Hate
• Plague Colony: 
• Typhus
• 3-7 plague marines
• Units gain Fear and enemy units within 7" reduce their Initaitve and Weapon Skill by 1 during the fight phase. If there are 7 plague marines in the unit, then also -1 from the enemy's Toughness

Command Choices:

• Lord of Legion: 1 of the following; Chaos Lord, Sorcerer, Dark Apostle or Daemon Prince

Auxiliary Choices: 

• Lost and Damned: As per Traitor's Hate
• Helforged Wrack: As per Traitor's Hate
• Daemon Engine: As per Traitor's Hate
• Heldrake Terror: As per Traitor's Hate
• Cult of Destruction: As per Traitor's Hate
• Fist of the Gods: As per Traitor's Hate
• Raptor Talon: As per Traitor's Hate
• Terminator Annihilation Force: As per Traitor's Hate
• Spawn: As per Traitor's Hate

Read more...

40k Editorial: The Tragedy of the Traitors - Part 1

The Tragedy of the Traitors

Part 1

Dear reader, it’s my unfortunate duty to inform you that you’ve been deceived. The servants of the Imperium would like you to live in a world in which the Traitor Primarchs and their Legions are a gang of moustache-twirling evil doers, who dove headlong into their heresy with reckless abandon and villainous glee.

This is a lie. This is the first of a series of three articles where I’m going to attempt to convince you that the nine Legions now declared Excommunicatus Traitorus are in fact the tragic victims of the Horus Heresy: some of circumstance, others of their Father’s mistakes, but certainly victims all.

Foreword

Before I begin with the first three Legions, I’d like to offer a brief comment on the contrast the Loyalists provide here. Of the nine Primarchs who would stay loyal to the Emperor, eight were adopted into lives of camaraderie, love or power. Whilst none of their lives was without warfare or difficulty, they were surrounded by those who cared for them. Only Ferrus Manus spent his formative years alone. Is it any wonder he was so ill-adjusted that he would charge headlong into the Traitors at the Dropsite Massacre out of blind fury? This is my first point: the upbringings of the loyalist Primarchs were by and large experiences that shaped their psyches in constructive ways, teaching empathy and honour.

Not so for those Primarchs I’ll be examining today:

Konrad Curze - The Night Haunter

Konrad didn’t fall on an idyllic world like Macragge, nor was he shown the love of a family like Vulkan had received. Quite the opposite, he found himself on Nostramo, a world pitched in eternal darkness, and quite alone. Where other Primarchs grew up learning that when humanity stood together, it could accomplish great things, Konrad looked upon the people of his world, and saw instead a society that had brought out the very worst in human nature. The strong survived, and the populace lived in fear. Not fear of rampaging xenos or mutants, but simply fear of each other. On a world like this, can we really blame Curze for the sort of man he would become? He never had a role model like the Khan’s father or the Order on Caliban. Indeed, he essentially had no relationships with anyone until the Emperor arrived to welcome him into the Imperium.

I suggest that Konrad is simply a product of the circumstances he found himself in, and became the Night Haunter not because of some character flaw, but because it was inevitable that such a depraved world would produce a depraved Primarch. Coupled with the harrowing visions of his psychic “gift” these experiences moulded Konrad into a paranoid killer, and in the end it is these experiences that make Konrad the unfortunate victim of Nostramo and its inhabitants. Indeed, Nostramo was the also the prime source of intake for the Night Lords legion, and as such only provided the same dilemma that Konrad faced in his youth: in an environment where people only responded to fear, how else was he to lead? His sense of clothing, both for himself and the Astartes under his command, for what they had to become to eke out an existence on Nostramo, serves only to reinforce the tragedy of Curze's life.

Mortarion - The Death Lord

Mortarion’s childhood wasn’t the lonely affair of Curze, but would nonetheless scar him. He landed on Barbarus where he was adopted by one of the powerful necromantic warlords of that world. However his ‘father’ was not a statesman or honourable warrior. He was a despot who harvested the peasants of the lower valleys, reanimated them and forged their flesh into freakish abominations for his own internecine wars between the other lords of Barbarus. Whilst Mortarion was offered education and relative comfort, what sort of teaching would we expect this child to receive? His adoptive father’s actions show us exactly what value he places on others: they are tools, mere raw ingredients to further his own aims.

What reason do we have to think Mortarion wouldn’t be reshaped, at least psychologically, into a tool for these conflicts? Does a tool need empathy? What about honour? It stands to reason that Mortarion’s later callous disregard for mortal humans at his command, as well as those Terran-born Death Guard legionaries who cared for them, was bred not in the days leading up to the Heresy, but in his adolescence.

Unlike Konrad, Mortarion may have had the chance to excise this old self from his life. In his final days on Barbarus, Mortarion was leading the strongest of the peasants in a revolution against these warlords, and stood against his adoptive father, beginning to lose consciousness from the noxious fumes that surrounded him. Whether Mortarion could have slain him and exorcised this part of his life, we’ll never know, because the Emperor intervened and killed him. It is in this way that the dark side of the Death Lord would never truly die, and would fuel his betrayal of the Emperor and his Crusade. Like Konrad, I suggest it’s hardly Mortarion’s fault that he grew up on such a hellish world, and was educated and moulded by a moral monster. I mourn for the man Mortarion could have been if he was born with Macragge’s silver spoon in his mouth.

Alpharius Omegon - The Hydra

Very little is known of Alpharius’ early years. Like everything else concerning him and his legion, it’s likely this ambiguity and confusion has been engineered deliberately to make fighting them even harder. That said, I feel like “Nobody knows…” would be a cop-out for an article like this, so we’re going to have to settle for the apocryphal tales and rumours that surround these times. One such story insists that Alpharius never actually left Terra when the Primarchs were scattered, and spent his youth in the tutelage of the Emperor himself in secret. I’m prepared to discount this story, essentially because it doesn’t stand to reason that the Big E would keep a Primarch under wraps. In a climate where the Great Crusade was just beginning, and 19 Primarchs had been lost, potentially forever, Alpharius would have been a shining light to lead the Crusade. No, I think the more likely tale is the version of events where as a youth he was abducted by the hideous xenos race of the Slaugh. They kept him as a kind of pet, torturing him and twisting his mind with acts of cruelty. 

Like his brothers discussed here, it’s impossible that this sort of experience would leave a man, even transhuman one, completely unscarred. His sense of honour, or connection with other people, may well have been compromised to such an extent that the choice to engage in the Heresy in the way he did, was inevitable. Theirs is also a palpable sense that his decision to cavort with the shadowy xenos Cabal may be a strange version of Stockholm syndrome; is it any wonder he found it so easy to betray his own kind, when he spent so long as one of the others?

Next time, I’d like to explore the three Primarchs who are best described as the sad victims of the Emperor’s utter inhumanity…

Read more...