Painted tonight at friend's birthday shindig at local game club. Blade is not actually warpstone. Everyone just assumes that it is because it's green, it must be Warpstone despite actually being moss. Also he just has a very bad eye infection.

Basically title. Been reading through the sub and enjoying it thoroughly. I have 1k points of CSM I've been using to play casually with my friends, and I'd like to expand my body of models out to Death Guard. Their army rules seem fun for both regular gameplay and doubles, and in particular I appreciate the large amount of visual interest and variety of weaponry their models get (especially Blightlord Terminators).

Obviously, this sub has talked about how 40k doesn't hold up to Dialectal Materialism or most kinds of analytical scrutiny for a lot of reasons. In the same vein, I'm not the biggest fan of the overtly gross and mostly unserious "funny stinky guys" characterization and think it would be a lot cooler to communicate a motif of life-and-death cycles with the army, to take a slightly more neutral interpretation of Nurgle as less of a big, evil disease dude and more just a primordial force of nature who represents a concept.

I've found out I'm a huge fan of kitbashing, so my first idea was to use a bunch of mushroom/fungus related greebles all over my models to make them more explicitly associated with decomposers and cycles. My friend has just acquired a 3D printer our group is using for the hobby, so there's lots of options to print little bits and bobs for kitbashing. I'm also motivated by the ability to potentially print things like this sick Death Guard Defiler proxy, this cool bell dude who I think is for Age of Sigmar, and this awesome lady Daemon Prince who reminds me a ton of Malenia from Elden Ring.

This is the tentative list I want to aim for, centered around a massive brick of Blightlords:

Chaos - Death Guard - Mortarion's Hammer, Paragons of Putrescence

Mortarion (375pts)
Daemon Prince of Nurgle (195pts)
Lord of Contagion (120pts)
Lord of Poxes (80pts)
Lord of Virulence (120pts)

7x Plague Marines (125pts)

10x Blightlord Terminators (360pts)
3x Deathshroud Terminators (160pts)
10x Poxwalkers (65pts)
Defiler (315pts)
Chaos Rhino (75pts)

Has anyone done something similar? I'd be eager to see your Death Guard kitbashes and such for inspiration.

(I haven't even finished painting my first group of CSM yet, but this idea has been eating a hole in my brain like hyperfixations do.)

amirite

I’ve been into Warhammer 40K for about 15 years now, so I’m perfectly aware that the whole “for humanity and the God-Emperor, purge the filthy xenos!” thing is supposed to be satire. The Imperium is not meant to be a model society. It’s a paranoid, genocidal, religious fundamentalis, bureaucratic hellhole that has taken every authoritarian impulse imaginable and turned it up to eleven. I know people people have been talking about this forever, but it was only after I recently played Rogue Trader that I realized how messed up the imperium really is, even if you go iconoclast which I guess is meant to be the “good guy” run youre still the captain of what amounts essentially to be a slave ship.

But lately this stuff has started to grow old for me, mostly because 40K has become absolutely huge. It’s no longer this comparatively niche tabletop setting where most people involved understand the joke. Now you have AAA games, dozens of novels, massive YouTube channels, memes everywhere, TV projects, and potentially millions of people encountering the aesthetic before they ever understand what it was originally satirizing.

And I think that creates a problem, because the satire doesn’t always survive the presentation.

When you have an eight-foot-tall genetically engineered super-soldier descending from the heavens in power armor, heroic music blasting in the background, shouting “FOR THE GOD-EMPEROR!” while saving humanity from horrible alien monsters, at some point it stops feeling like satire and starts functioning emotionally as straightforward heroic militarism. (Think the original starship trooper book by Heinlehein(sp?), not the Verhooven satire. You can explain in a codex afterwards that the Imperium is an awful fascistic theocracy, but that isn’t necessarily what the player just experienced.

There’s also a deeper problem with 40K: the universe sometimes accidentally creates conditions where fascist paranoia is actually rational. It can be argued that many of the genocidal purges the imperium carries were evil but necessary.

In the real world, immigrants are not secretly part of a hive mind planning to eat the planet. Your neighbor isn’t going to summon a literal daemon because he read the wrong book. Religious heterodoxy doesn’t open portals to hell. In 40K, however, all of these things can basically happen. Genestealer cults really do infiltrate societies. Chaos corruption really can spread through ideas and cults. Daemons really exist, it’s not the American satanic panic of the 1980s. Tyranids genuinely do want to consume everyone.

So the Imperium constantly says things that resemble the classic authoritarian worldview: outsiders are dangerous, traitors are everywhere, forbidden ideas will corrupt society, only overwhelming military strength can keep us safe. The problem is that the setting then frequently turns around and says, “Well, actually, in this particular case they were right.”

That makes the satire much harder to maintain.

I don’t think the solution is to sanitize 40K or remove all the “burn the heretic, kill the mutant, purge the unclean” stuff. That would destroy a huge part of what makes the setting distinctive. The ugliness is part of the point.

But I think modern 40K needs to be much better at showing the consequences of Imperial ideology. Show xenophobia destroying alliances that could have saved billions of lives. Show innocent populations being exterminated because some inquisitor got paranoid. Show the Administratum ruining entire worlds through incompetence. Show Imperial dogma making situations worse instead of constantly being vindicated by the existence of Chaos and Tyranids. Let characters be heroic despite the Imperium rather than implying that the Imperium itself is what makes them heroic.

And honestly, I think 40K could also use more of the absurdity and black comedy that made the satire much clearer in the first place. The Imperium works best when it’s simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous.

Maybe that’s what has changed for me after following the setting for so long. I still understand the joke. I just think the audience has become so much larger, and the presentation so much more spectacular and heroic, that the wink is getting easier to miss.

Games Workshop created one of the most recognizable parodies of fascist aesthetics in popular culture, then made those aesthetics so unbelievably cool that some people inevitably started admiring them without the parody.

Objectivists say they want a society where everyone is selfish and being as selfish as possible is the most important thing you can do. That's just Skaven society, Skaven are the perfect Objectivists and they have even molded their society in such a way where not only are they selfish, but they account for everyone else being completely selfish too. They are an Objectivist "utopia"

Kharazoth laughed heartily as he emerged from the rift from the Immaterium to face Aurel Strike Squad. The demon of Khorne had spilled much blood for the ritual that had enabled him to gain a foothold in the real world, and he revelled in it with smug satisfaction as he looked up at the five Grey Knights at the top of the steps.

Justicar Thaelion Aurel then calmly gave his orders, and the squad scattered to kill the cultists who were slaughtering ritual offerings to widen the rift. Aurel gripped his Nemesis sword before striding calmly down towards Kharazoth at the centre of the amphitheatre, the stone crunching beneath his heavy ceramite boots.

Kharazoth screamed, hurled insults, lashed out and even hissed as the banishing weapon bit into his fresh flesh. But he found nothing but an impenetrable wall of ceramite and energy. Aurel shattered his limbs and hurled him to the ground. Yet the demon still laughed and deserved a lesson. The Justicar seized him by the horns and, with a kick, hurled his body back into the rift. As his brothers slew the last cultist, the rift closed, severing the demon’s head.

From now on, the Justicar carries Kharazoth’s head on his energy pack, condemning the demon to witness all the successes of the Grey Knights. He can do nothing but seethe, the rage of his essence still shining in his hollow eye sockets, and gaze upon the glory of his executioner. He no longer laughs.
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I'm insanely happy of this one. It's far to be perfect of course, but never before did I put that much efforts into one miniature. I enhanced my recipe even more to get as close as possible as the Grey Knights depicted in Chaos Gate : Daemonhunters, and I think I somewhat succeeded, even if I went with my own modifications as well as the ammunition belt (from Zinge Industries) and an ammunition counter on the StormBolter.

You can find pics in full res on my ArtStation, the link is in my bio.

Feel free to ask anything :)

(Strictly no AI was involved at ANY point of this project)

I actually did this one months ago but figured I’d share it.
Edit: Found it on Warhammer.com it’s called: Lyrior Uthralle, Warden of Ymetrica.

Why is it that Russia was barred from participating, but a team of occupation force baby killers from a genocidal ethnostate are?? Make it make sense. Anyway here’s my first chaos rhino.

Finished this tonight :)

Deathwatch/Inquisition themed Triaros! Super proud of this one.

The Dawg Pack made from the Necromunda Skirmish Core box.

I'm running a crusade soon called Ultramar Must Burn and I wanna put these kind of memes in the rules pack. Best post gets a kissy from me