Maggotkin of Nurgle

Nurgle is the Chaos God of plagues, whose power waxes strong when disease and despair ravage the Mortal Realms. Though he is a source of fear and revulsion to his enemies, Nurgle is a perversely paternal god, generous with his foul gifts and proud of his worshippers’ every disgusting achievement. His armies, both mortal and daemon, bulge with virulent boons. The twisted and disfigured, the spiteful and forsaken, the hopelessly insane – these Maggotkin spread the joyous filth and bountiful contagions, hoping to turn the whole of the Mortal Realms into a single garden of beautiful putrescence.

Beasts of Nurgle are slug-like monstrosities whose enormous bodies are weighed down with slime-slick muscle and blubber. Fanged maws yawn wide in their flesh, and an unspeakable reek wafts from their bodies – but for all their horrifying aspect, they are friendly and enthusiastic creatures. Their minds know nothing of malice or spite, and as they squirm into battle they do not seek to slaughter the enemy but to play with them. Beasts of Nurgle are always desperate for attention, and they hunt down new playmates with rambunctious glee.

The Great Unclean Ones are Nurgle’s mightiest daemons. Towering over their enemies, these living hillocks of rotting flesh lumber across the battlefield swinging their rusted weapons, vomiting streams of filth and unleashing diseased magics upon the foe. Great Unclean Ones are terrifying when roused to wrath, wading through enemy ranks, crushing foes beneath their bulk and pulping survivors with their enormous swords and flails. Some toll rusted summoning bells to draw forth fresh daemons, while others unleash terrible outbreaks of magical plague.

Gnarled and leathery like a rotted apple left too long in the sun, Horticulous Slimux is a pragmatic and humourless being with a no-nonsense approach to battle and gardening alike. Sat astride his lumbering molluscoid steed – known affectionately to Horticulous as Mulch – the Gardener ploughs ever onward, tilling the foetid soil with his Gruntleplough and casting an experienced eye over the festering flora all around him. In battle, Horticulous conjures the power of Nurgle’s garden and ushers it into reality, overrunning sites of sorcerous power with its boundless fecundity.

A Lord of Blights is a brutish figure who creates and destroys in equal measure. Swollen with muscle, he lumbers into the midst of the foe swinging his bubotic hammer in thunderous arcs. Every impact shatters bone and ruptures organs, leaving his victims lying like bruised and rotten fruit on the ground. Yet this brutality has a purpose beyond simple murder – the Lord of Blights cultivates fine crops of death’s heads that he hands out to his warriors, enabling them to fling volleys of diseased projectiles. The Lord of Blights keeps the finest specimens for himself, hanging them from his gallowrack to hurl during battle.

Hidden behind the dread mask of one of Nurgle’s executioners, the Lord of Plagues gazes impassively at the victims of the vile blessings that swathe him. Able to poison a man from a dozen paces away, he visits grim fates on those foolish enough to get close with his Plague-ridden Great Blade. His frame is a repulsive collection of rancid boils, open sores and cankerous bulges - truly, blessed by Nurgle.

Enormous, bloated warriors, festering with pustules and plague, the Putrid Blightkings are the favoured mortal servants of Nurgle. Blessed with the bite of the daemonfly, these rotting murderers lumber into battle with their tocsins tolling. Possessed of a shockingly deceptive speed, they wield scythes, mauls, axes and flails with a skill that belies their form.

The rotting bowels of the Great Unclean Ones swell with pus and contagion, and within each such swelling there grows a tiny and malevolent Daemon called a Nurgling. As the Nurgling matures it feeds upon the filth of the Great Unclean One and pops out; the very personification of a boil or pustule. Their tiny teeth are as sharp as razors, leaving festering bites upon their victims, but rarely killing them outright – although such an attack can prove the beginning of a long, disease-ridden demise.

Plaguebearers are the rank and file of Nurgle's legions. These loathsome Lesser Daemons are crafted from the blighted soul-stuff of mortals who have been slain by Nurgle's Rot. A Plaguebearer carries the marks of Nurgle's Rot through eternity. What little of its skin that can be seen beneath the discharge of innumerable sores tinged with suppurant greens and vile browns.

Putrid Blightkings that succeed in infecting 77 foes with a vile curse according to the Feast of Maggots are rewarded by becoming Pusgoyle Blightlords. Symbiotically connected to the Rot Fly that he receives, the Blightlord rarely if ever leaves its saddle. Between the powerful blows of the Blightlords themselves and the lashing limbs and biting maws of their mounts, a band of Pusgoyle Blightlords can shatter an enemy battle line in a single charge. Like a wound that admits a lethal infection, they tear open a gap for the rest of the Rotbringers to flow into and destroy the foe from the inside out.

While the jokes and songs of Plaguebearers infected by the Chortling Murrain find little purchase amidst the glum Plaguebearers, Nurgle’s other daemons find the antics of the Sloppity Bilepipers hilarious. Unfortunately for their foes, this disease is incredibly infectious, and can cause mortals to laugh until their sides literally split. Despite their roles amusing the warbands of Nurgle as they march to war, the Sloppity Bilepiper is resigned to grim fate, eventually being reshaped into a set of pestilent gutpipes for the next victim of the Chortling Murrain to take up.

Spoilpox Scriveners are responsible for ensuring that the Plaguebearers of their Tallyband do not shirk. They record the number of diseases counted by the Plaguebearers, using scritching quills made from the tail feathers of a Lord of Change, while verbally browbeating all around them. Spoilpox Scriveners are sullen and spiteful creatures, who long to catch their fellows out with a mistake – or better still, record enough wrongdoing to punish them with the dread fate of the Chortling Murrain.

A morbid set of disease-ridden triplets, held in check and balance by their opposing attitudes and desires, the brains of the Glottkin - the pragmatic Otto and devious sorcerer Ethrac - ride to battle on the shoulders of their brother Ghurk, a creature so grotesquely swollen by the blessings of Nurgle that he could flatten most enemies unfortunate enough to get in the way of his putrid advance without even noticing.

The mightiest servants of the Dark Gods are blessed with monstrous power and life unending amongst the Slaves to Darkness. Each Daemon Prince was once a devoted servant of Chaos, whose actions in life have earned him blessings beyond counting and elevation to daemonhood.

Plague-ridden, diseased and festering, Daemons of Nurgle spread terrible miasmas and rotting, fuming death across the mortal realms in the name of their benevolent god. They consider their choking plagues to be a gift from Grandfather Nurgle, and the gurgling cries of their victims are interpreted as thankful praise.