Incorporating Death Guard and Gellerpox In Black Legion Army

[Masked Thespian]

tl;dr: I want to use Dark Imperium Death Guard models and Kill Team: Rogue Trader Gellerpox Mutants in a Black Legion CSM army. Need help deciding whether to use native rules or as "counts as Black Legion" (with some conversions) instead.

 

 

Hey everyone, hope you're all doing well during this current time.

 

During lockdown, I've been stuck away from the majority of my collection so I've been looking at some things that I bought a while back but never got around to assembling. In particular, I've got unassembled sets of both Dark Imperium and Kill Team: Rogue Trader, so I have a bunch of Death Guard and Gellerpox Mutants that I can assemble and paint.

 

I've collected Black Legion since the Second Edition Codex came out in 1998. I have dabbled with a couple of other Legions in the interim but the Black Legion are my first and foremost Chaos Space Marine army.

 

I would like to incorporate the contents of the two above boxes into my Black Legion army; my opinion on the Black Legion is that they are almost like the Ultramarines of Chaos, having access to anything and everything in the Chaos arsenal, so Plague Marines and Gellerpox would fit right in. But I'm unsure whether to do them as their rules intend (I.e. Death Guard and Gellerpox Mutants respectively) or whether to try and incorporate them into the Black Legion with some conversions and "counts as" models.

 

Each method has multiple reasons to not do it that particular way. Mainly:

Intended Rules

• Having to bring multiple books to games and using those multiple books to build army lists,
• Having different <Legion> keywords means that my army-wide rules only affect certain portions of my army, and some parts of my army can't benefit other parts,
• Having to reference a much larger pool of Stratagems to use during games,
• The potential of being labelled a power gamer due to using multiple codexes together as keyword soup.

Counts As

• Not everything can be used as a "counts as" easily,
• I really like some of the non-"counts as" unit choices rules, even if they're not the best (mostly the Poxwalkers and the entirety of the Gellerpox Mutants),
• Needing to do extensive conversion work on the Foetid Bloat-Drone model to make it into something from the core Codex: Chaos Space Marines (maybe a Nurgle Helbrute or Venomcrawler),
• Potential confusion for my opponents due to using existing Chaos models in an unintended role.

 

Due to the last bullet point, I feel that I shouldn't do "counts as" because of all the issues I've listed above, that's the one that's going to affect my opponents the most. My ideas currently include counting the Lord of Contagion as a Nurgle Chaos Lord in Terminator Armour (converting his weapons accordingly), the Malignant Plaguecaster as a Nurgle Chaos Sorcerer, the Noxious Blightbringer as a Nurgle Dark Apostle, the Poxwalkers as Nurgle Cultists, Vilgar and the Nightmare Hulks as Nurgle Chaos Spawn, Mutilators, Greater Possessed, or Obliterators, the Gellerpox Mutants as Nurgle Cultists or Dark Disciples for the above Dark Apostle, and all of the small Gellerpox critters as allied Chaos Daemon Nurglings. There's not a lot of converting going on so what the original models are will be clear to anyone looking at them (albeit with a Black Legion paint job).

 

I just don't like the feel of having a "Black Legion" army that uses (non-Daemon) units without the Black Legion keyword, especially as the models will be painted as Black Legion. I know that there's a stratagem that specifically helps such an army out (Legacy of Horus) but thematically they're supposed to be Black Legion so it kind of doesn't work (even though the rules let it).

 

I'm not particularly interested in just assembling and painting the models and using them as whichever type takes my fancy: I want to pick one of the two options and stick to it, otherwise I could confuse opponents who play me in multiple games.

 

If it makes a difference, I'm not a tournament player.  I enjoy playing themed games and campaigns rather than win-at-all-cost ones.  I'll possibly play with the models at a Games Workshop event or in a store at some point, as well as at independent events and gaming clubs.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on which of these options I should do and help make me feel better about choosing it?

 

[battle captain corpus]

I’m doing this very thing right now. I picked up the same miniatures you have. My plan is to run them as a small unit of Plague Marines, Chaos Lord and cultists. All will have Black Legion keyword obviously.

I wouldn’t worry too much, if you’re painting them as BL too then you may aswell use the them as standard units with a mark. Then it’s all good. We can’t have everything after all. :)

 

BCC

[tangoalphatwo]

I run a squad of plague marines with my black legion. Hadn’t thought about the gellarpox though, but then again I have a decent sized death guard army too

[Hannibal]

Hi,

 

I´m in the process of painting some Plague Marines for my Abaddons Plague Legion project and it seems to me that I can give you some advice.

 

• The Plague Marines can be used as – well – PLague Marines in a Black Legion army. There they will be an Elites choice but the rules are identical to those found in Codex Death Guard. It doesn´t matter wether you paint them Black Legion or Deathguard or any other Nurgle related paint scheme.
• The characters that come with the Dark Imperium set can be used as Nurgle marked characters in a Black Legion army. Though I would slightly convert them, because some weapon options are not available.
• The large Gellerpox guys are superb Chaos Spawns. In fact, they already have pretty similar rules.
• The medium Gellerpox Guys can be used to represent Plague Bearers. That way you can summon them in. Though you´ll need at least 10 then, but some conversion work based on different models should do the trick to give you a nice looking blob of Plague Bearers.

 

On the other hand, the rules for Gellerpox aren´t that extensive and therefore the transport problem isn´t that real. Though there are no synergies between Gellerpox and Black Legion. Gellerpox can´t even use transport vehicles, which is a big disadvantage. And they can not benefit from various buffs. That´s why I recomment using them as Chaos Spawns.

 

I think it is important to ask yourself wether you like to have the Gellerpox as a stand alone unit for Killteam or not. If you don´t like then you can use all the smaller creatures to decorate some character´s bases or use them on 40 mm bases to represent Nurglings (which, of course, will give you the need to get additional rules because Nurglings are not part of Codex CSM).

Edited June 6, 2020 by Hannibal