Custom Poxwalkers – First Ten

I’ve already got, and painted, just over forty Poxwalkers.  And, as I’ve said here, I think that they’re a great unit for the Death Guard.  So I wanted to add some more to my army, but I didn’t want to just buy multiple boxes of the easy build ones or hunt out the sprue from Dark Imperium on eBay.  I also wanted a project that would stretch my hobby skills a little bit further.  So I reached a conclusion that I wanted to convert something else into some Poxwalkers.  But what should I convert?  And then the thought occurred to me, Cadians!  I’ve played Cadian Shock a fair few times and my Poxwalkers have seen a lot of action against him.  So it seems like a fun project to simulate a few of the casualties from his Cadian Infantry that had risen again as Poxwalkers.

The Plan.

I think that I had seen photos online where people had taken skulls from the GW box of skulls and mounted them onto Astra Militarum bodies.  So this would be my starting point, and it would also be the first step in me trying to make sure that my resulting unit was visually different from regular Cadian troopers.  I then had to think about what else would mark out Poxwalkers, and that would be tentacles and spiky bone growths.  So I would raid my bit box to see what I could salvage and then I would also experiment with some green stuff.

Initial Assembly.

Psychic Awakening – Engine War – A Nurgle Review

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, the Chaos Factions (Knights and Daemons) are very much the supporting actors in this book.  The Adeptus Mechanicus and Imperial Knights both get 14 new stratagems and some other nice things to play with.  Chaos Knights get one stratagem per house and Deamons get four stratagems per God.  Chaos quite simply doesn’t get as many new tools as the Imperium forces do.  But what about the ones that we do get, are they any good?

More Nurglings

I painted up another unit of three Nurglings.  Who knows how they’re going to work in 9th Edition but they’ve lovely fun models so I’m not going to regret this.

Assembled & basing applied

First wash

Complete

Painting a Plagueburst Crawler with an airbrush

I wrote up an article giving my thoughts about Plagueburst Crawlers a little while ago.  I came to the conclusion that they’re really good units for the Death Guard.  That I didn’t have a third on in my collection was more down to it being an obvious choice, and therefore a bit of a boring decision.  Lockdown changed that.  My build queue was empty and I wanted to buy whatever I could from my local game store to support them a little bit.  So a third Plagueburst Crawler was purchased as it was, other than a Myphitic Blight Hauler, the only Death Guard thing that they had.  However to mix things up a bit I decided from the outset that I would use an airbrush on this one.

Death Guard Tactics – Poxwalkers

This is another of the units that you get in the Dark Imperium boxset.  So they’ve been a regular part of my army ever since I got back into 40k.

How do I use them?

I think that there are two main ways you can use Poxwalkers, defensively and aggressively.

Death Guard Tactics – Foetid Bloat Drone

This is one of the models that came in the Dark Imperium boxset, so it was one of my first Death Guard units, and I still think they’re great and continue to use them.

Plaguespitters, fleshmower or heavy blight launcher?

Saint vs Daemon Engine

An objective given to the Orks.

Struggling for an objective.

I have three Foetid Bloat Drones, one with each of the weapon types.

Painting better smoke

One thing that a fair few of the Death Guard miniatures have is smoke/vapour coming off of them.  I’ve gone through a number of attempts to paint this and have never been particularly happy with it.

First attempt

Second attempt

Third attempt

My first receipe used some very old blue paint that I then washed and dry brushed, and it’s OK, but it’s not great.

More Chaos Cultists!

Things have been quiet recently.  We’ve had illness in the family that meant we had to go into isolation, then I fell ill and then we entered a national lockdown.  So there’s no 40k gaming going on.  I also had a bit of a modelling crisis.  I managed to miss one order deadline from my local game shop and after getting my order in on time for the next one the order was paused due to Games Workshop going on lockdown.  So I had no models in my Death Guard or Nurgle build queue.  Luckily Cadian Shock stepped in and passed me eight Cultists, quite what he was doing with Cultists and why he hung on to two of them is a matter of some concern.

So I have eight Cultists to paint.  I already have thirty of the loveable scamps and have posted before about painting the final ten of those.  I wanted these eight to fix in alongside my others so I painted them in the same way.  This means.

• I paint them quickly, there’s not a whole lot of detail added.
• I add a coloured tag to them, this helps on the tabletop but is also a bit of fluff as I imagine Cultist uprisings would use some kind of ID tag so as to be able to identify themselves.
• I paint one chap, the squad leader, with a Death Guard style shoulder pad.  I imagine hime as being a bit closer to the Death Guard that they fight with.

So here we go, eight new Cultists ready to fight for Grandfather Nurgle once things return to normal.

The whole squad

The leader with his shoulder pad

And now my Death Guard and Nurgle build queue is once again empty.  I do however have a lot of other modelling and gaming distractions to keep me busy, so I’m genuinely fortunate.

Winged Daemon Prince of Nurgle

I already had a couple of Daemon Princes.  The first was the Nurgle Daemon Prince  model, this is a nice looking model but it didn’t have wings and didn’t have the double claw weapons which I usually take.  Those things bothered me.  So I then picked up a regular Daemon Prince, this had the wings and the double claws but didn’t look particularly “Nurgle”.  So I’ve been intending for a while to do a kit bash and build a full on winged Daemon Prince of Nurgle.  I mentioned this in my local game store one night and one of the other gamers strolled off, bought a Daemon Prince off the shelf and gave me the wings then and there.  He wanted the Prince for his own project but didn’t need the wings.  So, it was settled, I was going to do this.

Helbrute first, much too large.

Death Guard Tactics – Chaos Lord

How do I use it?

This unit is the cheapest HQ option for the Death Guard, so one use is for it to fill out the HQ slots of a battalion.  However it’s main use is because it offers a re-roll for hit rolls of 1 for Death Guard units within 6″.  So you might, for example, have it hanging back with some Dreadnoughts (the Hellforged Contemptor hits on a 2+, re-rolling 1s is wonderful).  Another really good use is to back up Plague Marines equipped with Plague Marines, it gives a bit of safety for when they’re overcharging their fire.   The Chaos Lord is infantry so can move through ruins and keep up with the whatever infantry he might be accompanying.

Should he be the Warlord?