This game started to go wrong from this point forwards. I usually get my list about 75% ready the night before a game and then polish it up over lunch on the day of my game. But that didn’t happen as I was really busy through the whole day. When I did get 5 minutes just before I should have left home for the game I realised that my list was illegal, I had two Chaos Lords in the same detachment, due to the Infernal Jealousy rule this can’t be done. So there was panic trying to fix the list, in the end I took a CP penalty to take an auxiliary detachment to get the job done. But time was lost, and I was distracted and running late, so I was not in a good mind for the game that was to follow.
I have two drivers for this list. The first is that I have a set of weapons ready for my second magnetised Helbrute, this makes me want to take both of them with identical load outs. The second is my drift towards a Terminus Est Assault Force army which will mean me giving up my vehicles, so the only armour in my list will be those two Helbrutes. So my list remains very similar to the one I used against the Orks but the Deamon Engines have gone and the Helbrutes are in.
My list is tinkered with again following on from my defeat against the Thousand Sons. I intend to move towards playing a Terminus Est Assault Force (from the Warzone Charadon book), which cannot take any vehicles. So to this end I dropped the Helbrute and the Plagueburst Crawlers. I also wanted to experiment with Plague Marines, I’ve not yet used them in 9th Edition. So the Blightlord Terminators were dropped and two squads of Plague Marines brought in. The final shift was that I wanted to take away the focus from the fast moving element of my list while still retaining it, as least for now. So the Daemon Prince was dropped while keeping the Drones.
The plan was that the Drones could buzz forwards and cause trouble, they could always race back if I needed them. The rest of my army would stick together and pound their way to the central objectives.
The list was a reworking of the list that I used in my last game against the Astra Militarum. The Helbrute and the Foul Blightspawn were dropped to make room for me to double down on the fast attack and Poxwalker elements of my list. An extra Bloat-Drone was added and both Poxwalker units taken up to full size 20 model units.
The idea was that this would give me a decent fast attack component to my unit that could go and really get stuck in over on the enemy’s side of the table while also buffing my horde to give me some objective control, table control and screening.
The Game
Setup
Death Guard DeploymentThousand Sons Deployment
We rolled the Front Line Warfare mission from the Core Rulebook. This has a mission specific secondary objective, Vital Ground, that gives points for holding the objectives in the centre of the battlefield, neither of us took this.
I took the following secondary objectives:
Spread the sickness – My Poxwalkers can do this and don’t need to do things such as charge or shoot that would cancel the action.
Behind enemy lines – I planned to use my fast moving Drones and Daemon Prince to achieve this.
Assassination – There seemed to be a lot of enemy characters, this seemed look I could earn some good points here.
The Thousand Sons took the following secondary objectives:
Mutate the landscape – A psychic action similar to my spread the sickness, it can mutate objectives.
Wrath of Magnus- Kill more enemy models with psychic powers than the enemy do. This was a mistake, you are not able to pick more than one faction specific objective.
Engage on all fronts – Get into different table quarters.
I deployed in a line along the right side of the Battlefield. My plan was to use one squad of Poxwalker to spread the sickness to the objective in my deployment zone and to then go after the objective on the left in the centre. Meanwhile my melee units would push up the right flank with the fast attack units swooping ahead of them.
I enjoyed making my first magnetised Helbrute so I’m working on my second. This was the one for which I bought the extra Helbrute to cannibalise for additional parts, the remains of that one became my Wrong Trousers model.
I repeated the steps to build and then to paint it and it really was pretty simple, read those links to see how that was done. The only thing that I did differently was to add some pools of Nurgle’s Rot to the base, one of which had some skulls in. This was done in the way that I did my objective markers.
The head was a spare part from one of the Plague Marine Heroes and the icon of Nurgle was from a Plaguebearer’s standard.
One thing I did learn from doing this is that my eyes are getting worse. The severed heads that I used had bits of thread sewing up the eyes and mouth, and I really couldn’t see them to paint them. I’m looking into some kind of magnification contraption to help out here.
Plague Gardening 