Nimis Zog

Pict capture of Traitor Death Guard officer, Nimis Zog, believed to be taken early in the Age of Darkness. Like all Death Guard legionnaires, Zog was skilled in many aspects of warfare. He proved to be a highly skilled consul, excelling at siege breaker and moritat roles during the great crusade. He later went on to be a capable, if unorthodox, field commander. Zog is armed here with a Power Fist and Lightning Claw, a combination that he used to great effect after the events of Istvaan III. It is believed that the relic terran power fist he is armed with was taken from a defeated loyalist Death Guard who had relinquished his legion and re-imaged his armour in the early crusade Dusk Raiders colours that were in use prior to the rediscovery of their Primarch. Zog is said to have beaten the terran to death on Istvaan III with his own fist after first disabling him with a lethal duel plasma pistol salvo that also wounded Zog himself. Zog retained the fist as a trophy, and used it to great effect against the loyalists he later encountered. Zog's armour appears to be a mix of different patterns, typical of "MKV" armour, complete with molecular bonding studs on the shoulder and leg greaves. 

Hanging from his belt can be seen a pendant from the priests of Davin that provided him with additional protection. It was believed that this pendant contained some form of archeotech field generator due to the significant protection that it provided to it's bearer.

Another item of particular note is the retention of an oath of moment on Zog's belt, indicating that he has retained some of the martial traditions of the legions after declaring his loyalty to the warmaster.

This model is a metal Limited Edition Games Day 2005 Captain Aurelius space marine. Originally it came with a storm bolter arm, which I decided wasn't what I was after. So I glued on a plastic traitor marine arm with a magnet in the elbow joint, and painted up a lightning claw/power fist to go on him instead. Because it's magnetic I have plenty of options for his loadout. The main limitation is that he has to have the power fist.

The fist arm itself has the two crux terminatus on it, so I wasn't sold on if it could be in a heresy era army, as there is a fair bit of conflicting canon. It also just looks like a loyalist weapon rather than a traitor one. In the end I decided that it didn't really matter, and that the arm was liberated from a loyalist terran Death Guard on Istvaan III.

Occasionally I might use this model as the Death Guard special character  Durak Rask, who is armed with a thunder hammer. So the big and impressive looking power fist may be a terran relic that can count as a thunder hammer in those situations. Simple.

For the default backpack for this model I went with a jump pack from the plastic blood angels honour guard. These look fairly Death Guardy in my opinion (without the wings on them), and are what I used on my Destroyers/Raptors. So he can hang out with the Destroyers, swiftly zooming around the place hitting irradiated things with his fists, before moving on.

So in some games I'll be using this guy as a Praetor, so he will look something like this.

In games where I'm planning to run him with the Destroyers I mightn't bother to give him rad grenades, as he'll be effectively using theirs. But this should hit pretty hard, with six attacks on the charge, hitting plebs on threes, re-rolling one miss, and wounding them on 3's with a re-roll at initiative (thanks to rad grenades), or wounding on two's at AP2 at initiative 1. The combination of rad grenades and the strength 8 means that he's wounding a thanatar on 3's which isn't too shabby.

Like all my Death Guard models I also plan to run him in 40k games. In this case he will be a power armoured Chaos Lord with some nice kit.

The 3+ save is a little disappointing, but the gift of mutation potentially adds some nice defensive bonuses, including the (admittedly not very likely) possibility of it upgrading to a 2+. He also has toughness 5, so that helps out defensively, as do the blight grenades that deny charging opponents the +1 attack for charging. The sigil of corruption is a 4++ so when all is combined he isn't too easy to kill. Veterans of the long war gives him hatred vs. space marines, so re rolls to hit in combat is pretty handy. So overall not too expensive, and should be fairly killy.

As you can see I've still got this guy on a 25mm base. I haven't taken the plunge and upgraded to the bigger bases for this army yet. I will do that in the future, as I think models generally look better on bigger bases. If I play more competitive games then that will be something that I should do, but for now I'll keep this army on the 25's. 

So that's it for now, the first 28mm Death Guard model I've painted in quite a while.