Dark Imperium – Praise Father Nurgle

The new Warhammer 40,000 Set Dark Imperium was released recently and I split the box with a few people, keeping two Death Guard Plague Marines, the twenty Pox Walkers and a handful of Primaris Marines for myself. For this article, I want to keep the focus on the followers of the great father Nurgle.

The Pox Walkers have their own sprue, which is included two times in the set (basically giving you two sets of 10 each) and the body of a Death Guard Plague Marine. I went with the Plague Marine 8a and 8g.

The Plague Marines are huge and have very iconic Mark III armour, corrupted by the pest infested mutations of Nurgle, with hoof like boots and bloated armour. Games Workshop did a great job on them. In the second picture you can see a comparison with a regular plastic Chaos Space Marine and the old Plague Marine by Jes Goodwin from ~1990.

As for the Pox Walkers, the chaos cultists of Nurgle, they fit well with the regular chaos cultists from the Dark Vengeance 6th Edition starter set. The Pox Walkers are way more cartoony than the regular cultists, but I think I'll take care of that with a couple of head swaps and conversions. Many of the grinning heads don't come across diabolic but more loony. That needs to be changed.

And for the Pox Walkers, the superb WilhelMiniatures Blog has a few ideas for converting them into more settled dwellers and mobs. Getting rid of the excessive horns and spikes will help them. And I'm not a huge fan of doubles, so this has a lot of potential.

Here is a small set up with two of the Putrid Blightkings, that I converted to fit into the grim dark future of 40k, on the left an Abomination with chain axe, and on the far right a Pit Slave with the Mark of Nurgle. Sigur from Battlebrush Studio already threw a bit of paint on the Nurgle part of Dark Imperium as you can see over here on Tale of Painters.

And even as Dark Imperium was just released, the reinforcement is already on its way. Two smaller gaming sets are going to be released soon, among them First Strike for roughly 20-25 GBP, adding a few more poses to both parties. The Reivers look stunning, a few more Primaris to convert, 6 new poses for the Pox Walkers and three new Death Guard Plague Marine. At that price and with that content, I'll surely give it a go.

Next up I'll cover a brief post about the Primaris Space Marines, stay tuned and how John Green loves to say - Don't forget to be awesome!