Painted Plague Drones (part 1)

This lot are Plague Drones, which as you probably have guessed from the ‘Plague’ in the name are part of the Nurgle contingent of my Chaos Daemon army for Warhammer 40,000. Like the rest of the Nurgle forces their main draw is being inefficient to kill with almost any weapon in the game, but this unit is slightly unusual in being quite mobile to boot. I’ve had a bit of success throwing them down the other army’s throat as soon as possible to buy a bit of time while the Plaguebearers slog across the board and clog up objectives. One almost downside to the Plague Drones is that they have several wounds. This might not seem like a problem but in an army that gets such a benefit from resilience, it seems like a waste to give the big guns on the other side of the board something to shoot at. Or, to put it another way, I love it when the giant death cannon facing me is forced to ‘waste’ it’s shot by doing nothing more than vapourising a single Plaguebearer (and sometimes not even that considering the invulnerable save and Disgustingly Resilient rule).

I’ve mixed up the two skin colours from the other Nurgle Daemons here, with the mounts in green and the riders in brown. I agonised for a while about how to do the carapace and wings and eventually decided to keep them a bit duller to better contrast with the green of the flies’ bodies. I’m still not completely happy with that look but the rest of them are pretty much right where I was aiming so I’ll consider that a good outcome. Transporting these is proving to be a bit tricky as they’re covered in spiky, sticky-out bits; luckily half the games they’ve played in have been at my house.

Next on the painting table: Swamp Horror.