Media - death guard - Page 1

A photo of the game board at the start of the battle. It's all ruined industrial-looking concrete buildings with rusty pipes everywhere. On the left-hand side is my terrain that has on top of the ruins and in various spots down the sides snow that's fallen and collected so it looks extra desolate. At the far-right are my converted all-women squad of six Space Marines clad in huge blood red armour, in the top-left are the six Death Guard who are all hulking and pustulant and gross in green armour, and at the bottom-left are the twelve Ratlings, who are essentially hobbits with sniper rifles.

Went over to a friend's place today for a game of three-player Kill Team, my Angels of Death versus Death Guard versus Ratlings! I would have liked to take my shiny new Wyrmblade but I haven't read the rules for them at all yet so I figured I'd stick with my trusty Space Marines (plus, fewer miniatures).

Two of us have fully-painted sets of the terrain from the Hivestorm box so we decided to break that out for a change from our standard close-quarters Gallowdark map, and we played the "loot" objective, where you once you gain control of the objective marker that's it for the turn and nobody else can take it, which added a whole extra level of tactics to everything. I ended up squeaking out a win, the final score was 6-5-4, but in part because one of the objectives at the beginning of the last turn had my leader, the Death Guard leader, and the Death Guard Icon Bearer all on it waiting to see what the outcome of the imminent fight was to determine who was going to be able to control it. Instead, one of the Ratlings snuck up and used their special ability that allows them to make mission actions (in this case looting the objective) even if the objective is contested, so that meant that neither me nor the Death Guartd could take control of it, so I activated another operative instead and stole the objective that one of the unactivated Ratlings was on! My other objective was far enough away from everyone else that they couldn't get it, so I ended up being able to get two victory points from that and I vaporised the Death Guard Icon Bearer with my leader's plasma gun. She survived the counterattack from the Death Guard leader's plasma gun thanks to some poor rolling on his part, which also meant that he was denied another two kill points, and I ended up coming out on top in terms of kills as well!

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Posted on 18 January 2026, 19:36

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. Closest to the camera are my Corsair Voidscarred (think punk/pirate space elves) in elegant fuchsia-coloured armour, and facing them on the far side of the board are the pustulant warriors of the Death Guard. There are three Plague Marines in hulking green armour with tentacles coming out of them, and six Poxwalkers which are basically zombies but with open wounds and bone spikes and tentacles.

A close-up photo of Arendra Firewinter, my Starstorm Duellist, right as she was vaporising one of the Plague Marines. She has dark skin and a bald head with a white flowing topknot, is wearing got a dark-ish teal cape that looks like it's blowing in the wind, and she's holding two elegant-looking alien pistols, one of them aimed forward and the other held pointing upright like she's just finished shooting it. Through the hatchway in front of her is one of the hulking Plague Marines holding a huge boltgun and with a demon face in his shoulderpad. Just to the left of frame you can see the Poxwalker's foot that she killed right after the Plague Marine.

I FINALLY got around to playing some single-player Kill Team! I decided to use my Corsair Voidscarred since I love the miniatures so much even though I'm pretty bad at remembering everything they can do (which I guess just means I need to play more). My Death Guard were the non-player operatives (NPOs) and I went with a mix of the light "brawler" troop type so I could have an excuse to use my Poxwalker miniatures, and the heavy "marksman" type for the Plague Marines.

It didn't actually start off super-well, I was very excited to see my Shaderunner get stuck in because she can teleport through walls, but misjudged where I could move her and keep her safe before she attacked, and she ended up getting killed by one of the Plague Marines before she did anything. 😞 I think I also need to rethink my initial deployment strategy on Into The Dark because I always end up sitting with a hatchway closed because I don't want to open it and give the enemy free reign to shoot my quite-squishy operatives, and if I was to run out my operatives would be completely murderised.

Operative of the match goes to my Starstorm Duellist Arendra Firewinter who single-handedly accounted for two of the three Plague Marines and one of the Poxwalkers. One of the Plague Marines in particular got absolutely turned into slag, he was on ten wounds and got hit with three critical successes from Arendra's fusion pistol, which meant that the Devastating 3 rule went off and immediately inflicted three damage for each crit, with no save possible, before anything else even happed. And in the same activation thanks to the Pistol Barrage ability that lets her shoot twice, once per pistol, she then turned around and killed the Poxwalker that was standing behind her with her shuriken pistol!

Overall I only lost three miniatures, the aforementioned Shaderunner along with my Way Seeker and my leader, and the win condition for this scenario was to just completely wipe out the enemy.

As I'm writing this, I realised another difficulty I have with the Voidscarred in particular is that they're very close-combat-focused because I built them all as the specialists with no regular warriors. My Fate Dealer doesn't see much action especially on Into The Dark (she did nothing whatsoever this game), and although the Kurnite Hunter finished off the remaining Plague Marine in this particular game, I'm constantly wishing that he was a regular Warrior with a shuriken rifle.

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Posted on 7 September 2025, 16:45

In the office for Kill Team tonight, my Plague Marines versus the Ork Wrecka Krew, and despite a decent start it ended up completely falling over in a heap and we called it at the start of turn 3 when the score was 7-3 to the Orks and I was going to be completely unable to score anything more. 😞 I think I need to go back to my Angels of Death, I just cannot for the life of me keep everything they can do in my head and I'm constantly forgetting their rules. The Angels of Death are more self-contained, where each individual operative doesn't need to interact too much with the others.

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Posted on 7 July 2025, 17:53

A photo of a sheep standing behind a waist-high chain link fence nomming on some grass.

In the office today for after-work Kill Team! On the way to the train station this morning the sheep were out having a good nom and I said hello and they all stared blankly at me haha.

The Kill Team game itself was Plague Marines versus Angels of Death, I've really struggled to figure out how the Plague Marines were meant to be played and had a REALLY frustrating game week before last where I conceded before the end of turn 2. This game was the complete opposite of that, the final score was 11-3 and I wiped out every single enemy operative and lost none in return!

I can't claim too much credit though because my friend who was playing against me had read the Plague Marines rules and gotten a sense of how they worked, and kept reminding me of stuff and making suggestions. He's generally played a lot more Kill Team than I have so has the concepts and tricks down a lot better too, and plus he deliberately took a fairly melee-focused roster which meant that with my Contagion strategic ploy he was always at -1 to hit, which it turns out is surprisingly powerful. He also had a couple of terrible rolls, like rolling five dice for one of his nasty melee warriors and four of them being failures. 😬

Still, I'm feeling a bit better about them, I just need to play them more, though I also need to figure out some method of organising myself so I don't keep doing things like forgetting strategic ploys that I've paid command points for.

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Posted on 5 May 2025, 20:20

A photo of the start of a game of Kill Team. The terrain is all ramshackle and looks like it belongs in a junkyard, closest to the camera are the six hulking and pustulant warriors of the Death Guard clan in large green armour, and then on the other side looking almost the complete opposite are ten warriors of the insect-like Vespid Stingwings who have been painted in yellow and have big blue insect wings.

A nighttime photo taken from the 30th floor of our office building, looking not quite directly downwards. There is a tall building directly opposite and some shorter buildings on either side, and you can see the streets quite far below. Most of the windows are lit up, and the train tracks going along George St are visible at the left.

I was in the office today for some after-work Kill Team, took my Plague Marines for their first spin versus the Vespid Stingwings!

It started out well, but I realised that I actually only had two operatives that had unrestricted range weapons (the Malignant Plaguecaster and the Bombardier), and I think I got a bit greedy with them and they were the first two operatives I lost. After that I couldn't recover because all the stuff I needed to shoot at was out of range, and I'd taken the Fighter who has NO ranged weapon at all. He killed one Stingwing and then got pulped. The Heavy Gunner with the Plague Spewer was nasty, but again lacked range, and even the Icon Bearer only had a bolt pistol with an 8" range (in the previous edition he had a boltgun). It also wasn't helped by the fact that the Stingwings' neutron weapons hit HARD. I don't think I used any of the strategic or firefight ploys either, I need to go back and have a better read. We called the game before the end of the second turn, and the Stingwings were already ahead 4-3 and I had only a single guy left.

The Death Guard were still pretty neat though, the Poison token rules are cool and I'm keen to try them again. I ALSO need to paint up my own Stingwings and get them into the rotation because those models are just fantastic-looking. And afterwards, the room in the office that all the Kill Team terrain is stored in had its lights off when we put everything away after the game, which made for an excellent nighttime cityscape shot.

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Posted on 3 March 2025, 20:48

A photo of two disgusting Plague Marine miniatures, their armour is painted a khaki green and the trim has been done in a bronze colour. The one on the left is holding a gnarled staff up in one hand and has his other hand out in front of him casting some foul cloud of magic, and the one on the right is mid-stride and has what looks like a huge flamethrower slung under one arm. Both of them are in green pox-ridden Space Marine armour, with tentacles and pustules everywhere, and the one on the left with the staff has a huge mouth with massive teeth in the stomach of his armour, and some sort of fleshy/tentacley guts coming out of it.

And that's my two Plague Marines finished! I'm very pleased with how the plague cloud thing that the Malignant Plaguecaster is blowing came out, and it's not super-obvious in the photo but I painted all the tentacles and the guts on the Plaguecaster with gloss varnish so it looks all wet and extra gross.

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Posted on 2 March 2025, 14:59

Well, it might not be fast (I have way too many hobbies competing for way too little time), but I'm finally making some progress on my Plague Marines! As with almost all of Games Workshop's miniatures, the further along with painting I get, the more of the little details I notice (and in this case those details are all gross, haha).

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Posted on 20 January 2025, 21:29

A photo of two disgusting Plague Marine miniatures, both just undercoated. The one on the left is mid-stride and has what looks like a huge flamethrower slung under one arm, and the one on the right is holding a gnarled staff up in one hand and has his other hand out in front of him casting some foul cloud of magic. Both of them are in pox-ridden Space Marine armour, with tentacles and pustules everywhere, and the one on the right with the staff has a huge mouth with massive teeth in the stomach of his armour.

Right, that's the two Plague Marines that I need to make a squad for the new edition of Kill Team ready for painting! The one on the left with the Plague Spewer is actually a conversion I kitbashed but never painted back when the previous 2021 edition of Kill Team came out, and the Malignant Plaguecaster on the right is even older than that: he dates from the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Imperium box that I bought back in 2018 or so.

I don't technically have a WYSIWYG Plague Champion to use as my leader because my Champion that has a plasma pistol has a powerfist instead of a plague sword. I'm going to use the old Noxious Blightbringer model that's also from the Dark Imperium because because he does have a plasma pistol and is holding a bell in his other hand, rather than having a specific weapon that someone might be confused by, plus it's just an AWESOME model and I've never had a chance to use it. He's on a 40mm base rather than 32mm but I can't be bothered trying to rebase him because he's already fully painted, and we just play casually anyway.

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Posted on 24 December 2024, 22:11

A closeup of my Death Guard Fighter, who is wearing hulking green armour with a HUGE toothed mouth in his chest armour going across his whole abdomen and chest and wielding two plague knives, facing off against one of the xenomorph "Warriors", which is down on four legs and looks like it's about to pounce. To the side is a smaller xenomorph more upright behind a set of ammo crates.

A close-up of a Space Marine aiming his boltgun (complete with a 3D-printed muzzle flash weapon effect) at one of the Tyranid Warriors, while a second one lurks just around the corner behind him.

We had our rematch of the Death Guard vs. Tyranids vs. Strike Force Justinian tonight, and because tomorrow is a public holiday we all stayed slightly later and managed to finish the whole game, AND I won 8-7-4! 🎉 (We did slightly fuck up one rule up about injuries and so my Heavy Gunner did better in close combat versus the Space Marine leader than he should have, and ended up killing the leader.) Instead of ten Genestealers, my friend playing the Tyranids took three Tyranid Warriors instead and used, uh... some different type of Aliens miniature for them that looked very cool.

The Death Guard felt extremely thematic, it was just a slow, steady, plodding advance across the battlefield, and they were hard enough to kill that they were difficult to dislodge from the objectives once they were on them. My plasma gunner was my MVP, he only shot three times but each one was a killing shot, taking out two Space Marines and a Genestealer. I also took the dual-plague-knives Fighter for the first time and he did okay, but he definitely served well as an extra close-combat threat beyond just my leader. The Disgustingly Resilient rolls were a lot swingier this game than usual, I either did fantastically well (my Plasma Gunner took nine damage from the Space Marine sniper and would have died but ended up rolling so well he only took four, and subsequently ended up vaporising the sniper in his own activation), or really badly (my Fighter took something like ten damage in his first melee combat and saved NONE of it), with nothing in between.

As with the first game, we had a couple of very cool cinematic moments, my Fighter facing off against one of the Warriors and a Genestealer, and one of the Space Marines shooting at another of the Warriors while one lurked behind him ready to pounce.

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Posted on 31 March 2024, 23:45

A photo of a Plague Marine from Warhammer 40,000. He's in huge khaki green standard-issue huge Space Marine armour with bronze-coloured edging in places, but because he's one of Nurgle's chosen he's all corrupted and mutated: there's a GIANT mouth with huge teeth right across the entirety of the chest and abdomen of his armour with a metal pipe coming from his shoulder and going into the side of the mouth, and the two very large knives (honestly, they're more like short swords) he's wielding have skin-coloured spines growing out of them in places.

A photo of three Plague Marines in a line. They're all in the same general khaki green armour, but the one on the left is fairly dull-looking without too much highlighting since it was my old regular-paints painting technique where the highlighting was done with drybrushing. The one in the middle has come out a brighter green because the underlying primed colour is brighter and also it's the newer "Militarum Green" Contrast paint so the primed colour has a lot more effect on the finished product. And finally we have the one in the previous photo with the two knives that has much more emphasised shadows and much punchier highlights thanks to the zenithal highlight and manual highlighting.

After our last game of Kill Team I figured I should probably paint up my Plague Marine who has the double plague knives because he's a beast in close combat and against Genestealers my ranged Marines weren't super-useful. I re-primed him using a zenithal highlight and got him fully painted this weekend, and am very happy with how he came out! There's zero drybrushing except on the sand on the base, it's entirely Contrast paints and manual highlighting.

I also realised that I've been painting Plague Marines long enough that I have essentially the three stages of evolution of my painting technique. On the left in the second photo is one of my first Plague Marines from nearly six years ago now, using regular paints which looks fine but takes so long. In the middle is my second batch from eighteen months ago where I was using Contrast paints to greatly speed things up, but still had a plain white undercoat and the highlighting was still done by way of drybrushing. And on the right is this latest guy, with the full zenithal undercoat and manual highlighting!

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Posted on 11 February 2024, 21:49