It’s been a long time, but the wait is finally over: The Death Guard now have their own Codex for Tenth edition, and with it, new Crusade rules. If you missed our big review of the new Codex, you can find it here. But if you want to know about the book’s Crusade rules? You’ll find those in here.

Before we dig in we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for review purposes.

Unlike most other factions, the Death Guard are blessed with two completely different Crusade mechanics: you’ll keep track of your Crusade force’s progress toward concocting a Grand Plague, all the while crafting Alchemical Pathogens which will help out your stinky lads in each game.

A Note on Daemons

One important thing to note (and complain about endlessly on Reddit) is that for those players who are fans of the Tallyband Summoners detachment, you’ll need to be aware of the fact that your daemons neither gain experience points nor battle honours. There’s some marginal upside in that they can’t gain Battle Scars either, but on the whole the idea is that your summoned daemons don’t stick around between battles.

Beanith: I really wanted a Legendary Greater Unclean One to partner up with a Legendary Daemon Prince for the ultimate buddy cop movie where they are very sick with this shit and would like some more please.

A Grand Plague

The Grand Plague is your Crusade force’s pet project, letting you try to concoct an even deadlier version of man-flu and then have it infect an entire world to impress good ol’ Grandpa Nurgle.

You’ll start by choosing a world to infect, either by selecting one of the three example worlds or generating one of your own by rolling three D6 in sequence and assigning the value to the world’s Fecundity, Population Density and Vulnerability characteristics. These are all added up to become that world’s Suitability Score. 

The higher a world’s Suitability Score, the easier and quicker it is to create your Grand Plague, but conversely the rewards for completing this task are much better when the score is much lower. Those that rolled suspiciously high and managed to cobble together a quick and dirty Grand Plague with a score of 15 or higher walk away with a mere 2XP for a character and a note that lets them reroll results of a 5 or 6 for the world characteristics on the next Grand Plague. Suitability Scores of 11-14 aren’t much better, still handing out 2XP for a character, but at least they also throw in a free Battle Trait for someone in your roster. 

Suitability Scores of 10 and less are where you gain the Blessings of Nurgle (and some XP for a character of your choice too). These Blessings are for the most part not terribly overpowered and shouldn’t ruin your opponents day too easily until you have a couple under your belt. The “pregenerated” options for your target world each have a Suitability of 10, which is the highest that still gets you access to the Blessings table.

A world’s Fecundity and Vulnerability scores are locked in and will never change beyond the range of 1-6, whereas Population Density can and will fall quickly after every battle. Should that value reach zero, you’ve accidentally killed everyone and ruined all your research into the Grand Plague forcing you to start over again on a fresh world. (Beanith: Nurgle is very aware of the effectiveness of the undead variants and wants to see something new for a change; looking at you Typhus).

Each of the world’s characteristics has a corresponding Plague characteristic: Fecundity has Reproduction, Pop Density matches up with Survival Rate, and Vulnerability pairs with Adaptability. Each Plague Characteristic starts out at 1 and can be increased by following the Path of Contagion after each battle. 

The Path of Contagion is your post-battle homework. After each game, you’ll go through six steps, two of which are just Grandpa Nurgle asking, “Are ya winning, Grandson?” You start by Reaping the Rewards and making any changes to your Plague’s characteristics based on any Death Guard Agendas you achieved. You’ll then immediately move to the First Check for a Breakthrough by looking to see whether you’ve won. If you haven’t, the Cultivation step is your chance to adjust the one of the Reproduction, Adaptability and Survival Rate characteristics up or down by 1 so long as you can roll a 4+ (or a 2+ if you won your last game), keeping in mind that higher isn’t always better. Then you’re checking to see if the world has managed to develop a Counteragent. If they have, you’ll reduce the Vulnerability characteristic by 1. After all that, you then check the Death Toll and, as mentioned earlier, cross your fingers in the hope that you haven’t accidentally killed everyone by reducing your Population Density to zero. If anyone’s left alive, you’ll have one Final Check for a Breakthrough, offering a second chance to win.

Your ultimate goal is to make sure that all three sets of characteristics (so Fecundity + Reproduction, Population Density + Survival Rate, and Vulnerability + Adaptability) each separately add up to a Plague total of 7 all at the same time. Do so, and your breakthrough will result in a nice chunk of XP for a character of your choice, and potentially a powerful Blessing of Nurgle, depending on your overall Suitability Score. When you earn a Blessing, you get to choose from the following list:

• Burgeoning Fortitude is the boring ignore the first failed Out of Action test.
• Eye of Nurgle lets you select an additional unit to be Marked for Greatness after each battle on a 6+, 5+ if you won the game.
• Fecund Fervour gives your Battleline units 2XP each time they survive a battle.
• Seeping Poison gives you the additional option of just adding Lethal Hits to a weapon when you use the Weapons Modification Battle Honour.
• Endless Harvest gives you a bonus Req after each battle on a 4+
• Vile Possession lets you slap the Daemon keyword and 6XP on any new vehicles you decide to add to your roster.

Alchemical Pathogens

This mechanic is very long and convoluted to explain, and in the end really just boils down to: All Lethal Hit weapons can gain bonus abilities with drawbacks that last X number of rounds. But since the editors are watching, I should probably expand on it properly.

Alchemical Pathogens is a powerful enhancement that affects every single Death Guard model packing a [Lethal Hits] weapon. At the start of your Command phase, you can declare that you’re using your Pathogen, then apply your Pathogen’s effects to all of your weapons with [Lethal Hits] for a number of battle rounds equal to your Pathogen’s duration. You start out with a basic “do-nothing” Alchemical Pathogen with a lone mark in the One Round Duration box.

Don’t worry, though: you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make it nastier. After you win a game, you can spend 1 RP on the Tainted Tinkering Requisition to Brew Your Batch. This lets you customise your Alchemical Pathogen by selecting a new bonus for your Pathogen. You can increase the number of rounds your pathogen is in effect for, choose a powerful ability to apply to your army’s [Lethal Hit] weapons for the duration, or suppress the Drawbacks of some of the more potent properties.

Once you’ve marked off seven boxes, that’s it: you’ve achieved the maximum Pathogen Potency there is. But if you get bored of your particular combination, you can either pay 1 RP on Fruits of the Cauldron or use the Vile Research Agenda to Tailor the Toxins, allowing you to remove marks so you can then go back and use the Tainted Tinkering Requisition again to change things up.

Out of the 12 boxes on offer, the first four will increase the number of rounds that the Alchemical Pathogens will be in effect for. Where the real fun begins is the Properties and their Drawbacks that can be suppressed.

• Putridity changes the Crit from a 6+ to a 5+ on [Lethal Hits] weapons. Its Drawback subtracts 3 from the Strength characteristic of those weapons.
• Hypervector makes ranged weapons with [Lethal Hits] add the Afflicted status to a unit hit by one of those attacks until the end of the game. The Drawback this time subtracts 1 from the Attack characteristic of those ranged weapons.
• Parasitic Implantation tacks on [Sustained Hits 1] to your [Lethal Hits] weapons, but the Drawback prevents you from re-rolling the Hit roll for those weapons.
• Lurid Flux forces your opponent to take Battle-shock tests after being prodded in the Fight phase by one of your units with [Lethal Hits] melee weapons. The rules here don’t include a Drawback, but that makes sense: one Battle-shock test a turn? Neat, but not awe-inspiring.
• Rounding them out is Spreading Pox, and whoever came up with this one is a real Typhus stan. If one or more units are destroyed by a unit with [Lethal Hits] while the Alchemical Pathogen is active, the first Poxwalkers unit added to your Roster after this battle gains 6XP and a battle honour. Honestly, you’re just trolling the Plague Legion units at this point.

Beanith: There’s some interesting combos on offer but frankly it’s going to be hard for any Death Guard player to pass over having Putridity on everything with the drawback suppressed for the entire game. 

Condit: Any of the three options that come with drawbacks are very good, especially if you put the points into suppressing the downsides. Even if it’s limited to a single turn, Lethal and Sustained 1 both on 5+ that leaves the target Afflicted for the rest of the game is a hell of a go-turn. Alternatively, you could simply choose one of those effects for the entire game, if that’s your poison of choice.

The major thing holding these upgrades back is the fact that you can’t get them unless you win games. Not that that’s something we expect this book to have too much trouble with, but that requirement will limit the speed at which you can create something truly terrifying. That said, Alchemical Pathogens offers some of the most potent army-wide boosts we’ve seen from a Crusade supplement without gating them behind the sort of hoops a lot of other armies have to deal with.

Agendas

Four fairly basic Agendas on offer with some nice XP up for grabs. They also reward various points towards helping you in achieving your Grand Plague, assuming you go the extra distance.

Sow the Seeds of Corruption lets you nominate three objective markers (one of yours, one of theirs and the other in no man’s land). Simply control them at the end of any of your turns with no enemies in range, the objective becomes seeded, and you select a unit within range to gain 2XP. Managing to seed all three objectives will give you a Fecundity point whereas seeding only two of them will grant the point on a 4+.

Can’t be arsed killing everything on the table? Unwitting Vectors is the Agenda for you. It just straight up gives one of your surviving Death Guard units 3XP, so long as you have a few surviving enemy units to fuel it. At the end of the game, you’ll roll a D6 for each surviving enemy unit–adding 2 to the result if that unit is below its Starting Strength–and if any of them result in a 6+, you’ll pick up the XP for a unit of your choice and add 1 to the Survival Rate of your Grand Plague besides.

Viral Harvest makes all of the objectives in No Man’s Land a “Vector Target.” At the start of each of your Shooting phases, one of your Death Guard Infantry units can then give up their shooting and charging to harvest feculent ‘treasures’ from one of these objectives. Doing so nets them 1XP, to a maximum of 3XP, and increases the Viral Harvest tally by one. Keep in mind that the objective doesn’t lose the Vector Target status if you’re successful, so you can repeat it five times on the same objective and max out the tally, ideally with a pair of units so you don’t waste any XP. At the end of the game, roll a D6 and add your tally, on a 7+ you gain 1 point to add to the Adaptability of your Grand Plague.

Vile Research is a nice and simple Agenda, awarding your units 1XP to a maximum of 3XP for each Afflicted unit they destroy while also increasing a “Research tally” by 1. At the end of the battle, if the Research tally is 1-3 you can Tailor the Toxins of your Grand Plague once for free, while a 4+ on the tally lets you do so twice.

Requisitions

We’ve got five requisitions and a sixth I hope was a joke. I hope you weren’t planning on using the Increase Supply Limit requisition any time soon as you will probably want to spend the bulk of them on Tainted Tinkering, Careful Cultivation and maybe Remissive Ruse to help the Grand Plague limp along whilst supercharging your Alchemical Pathogen.

Tainted Tinkering is how you increase the effectiveness of your Alchemical Pathogen. Winning the battle and spending the 1 RP lets you Brew the Batch to check another box on the Alchemical Pathogen table.

Fruits of the Cauldron is priced to move at 1 RP. This lets you Tailor the Toxin to uncheck a box on the Alchemical Pathogen table. A bit of a waste given you can achieve the same result or better with the Vile Research Agenda, but if you’re desperate to switch things up and somehow find yourself with extra RP, it’s nice to have.

Remissive Ruse is for those about to fail in the Grand Plague. Use it after you win abattle and the 1 RP lets you add 1 to the Population Density of your world (Beanith: Giggity).

Careful Cultivation is the 2 RP pay-to-win Coward’s Path requisition that helps speed along the Grand Pathogen to its successful conclusion. You get to resolve the Cultivation step twice when doing the Path of Contagion part of your homework after a battle, letting you roll a second time for the opportunity to tune one of your plague’s characteristics.

Putrid Ascension is the 2 RP requisition you’ll use to turn your Heroic or Legendary character with three Boons of Nurgle into a Daemon Prince with or without wings with the same number of Battle Honours and XP. Best of all, they can keep the three boons and lose any Battle Scars they may have had. 

Wretched Might has to be some sort of weird joke or space filler assuming they ran out of Death Guard art. This requisition lets you piss away 2 RP just to give a unit of Poxwalkers a Battle Trait for A SINGLE BATTLE. Use this in a game against me and I’m going to assume you’ve increased your Supply Limit to 3k+ points and run out of units to use Legendary Veterans and are just flexing on me at this point. Condit: It’s especially strange given that 3 of the 6 battle traits available to them in this book impact ranged attacks, which they don’t have. Though the mortal wounds from Bone Horns could be funny if played right.

Battle Traits

The Death Guard kinda get stiffed here with only three tables for Infantry, Daemon and Vehicles, especially considering most of the Daemon units are Plague Legion units and thus ineligible for the fun toys. The big winners are the rest of the Daemon units as most of them can also choose to use the Vehicle table as well after the obligatory Weapons Modification upgrade (Beanith: Not the Daemon prince sadly, they don’t make bikes in their size yet).

Death Guard Infantry Characters may seem a little hard done by as well but that’s why you have the Boon of Nurgle, a couple of those with a Weapons Modification and a relic or two and you’ll be laughing/coughing up phlegm in no time.

The Infantry Battle Traits are pretty sick and you’ll certainly want a couple on your Terminators and maybe even on your non-zombie objective holders.

• Spatterflith lets your unit ignore any modifiers to the Hit and Wound rolls in melee along with any changes to Armour Penetration.
• Choking Mist is a once per battle ability that makes the unit untargetable by Overwatch until the end of that turn. 
• Bone Horns (Beanith: or “Infantry Shock”) is a 5+ chance at handing out Mortal Wounds when charging into enemy units for each model that ends the charge in engagement range.
• Stolid Bulk adds 1 to the Ballistic skill of your ranged weapons… (Beanith: I would have named this one Eye Tentacles but I bet that got taken by the Thousand Sons.)
• Cackling Plague Mites adds Ignores Cover to the ranged weapons.
• Quivering Cilia sounds filthy which is pretty on brand once you stop and think about it. It also upgrades your Overwatch to 5+, which is filthy in its own right.

I’m assuming they didn’t label this table as the “Daemon Prince, Defiler, Blight-drone, Blight-hauler, Plagueburst Crawler & Haha Suck It You non-Daemonic Engine Daemons for being Plague Legion” to save space, so Daemon units table it is.

• Infectious Buboes gives you the chance to punish the enemy that dares to attack you in melee. Roll a D6 for each melee attack that was allocated to your unit (to a maximum of 6) and each 5+ causes 1 mortal wound to the attacker.
• Sporebelch is for those cowards that fall back from combat. When your unit falls, back, roll 3D6 and each 4+ causes 1 mortal wound to the enemy unit they ran away from.
• Lambent Taint is not only fun to say, it’s fun to use. It lets other Nurgle Daemon units reroll 1s to hit in the shooting phase when targeting the visible survivors of whatever unit this one shot at in this shooting phase.

Rounding out this section is the Vehicle units table with two excellent choices and one runner-up that you can game your way out of with some finangling.

• Plated Growth reduces the Wound roll by 1 of any incoming attack that is stronger than your Toughness. Something something 50/50 chance instead of a 33/67 chance of surviving a BFG. I nodded off when Primaris Kevin pulled out the charts.
• Skittering Limbs is so close to getting you to add the FLY keyword to the model without opening them up to Anti-fly weapons. Sadly, you can only pass through enemy models and not over terrain when making a normal Move, Advance or Fall back moves, but it does let you autopass any Desperate Escape tests you may have to take.
• Masterwork Maladies adds 6” to the range of all weapons with the Lethal Hits keyword equipped on this unit. Units that don’t have weapons with the Lethal Hits keyword equipped may reroll this result. Given Lethal Hits has been handed out like chickenpox lollipops to the Death Guard, there are only a few vehicles that will qualify for the reroll depending on their loadout, but the extra range is nice, especially when combined with Alchemical Pathogens.

Crusade Relics

The Death Guard gain access to five very cool toys. Interestingly enough, none of them are really weapons per se, and thus you get to go ham on Weapon Modifications and other non-codex Relics. Handy given the amount of characters you can have running about in a typical Death Guard force.

In the bargain Artificer Relic bin we start out with the Bountiful Censer, amagical macguffin that lets the bearer choose to add 2 to the roll of any friendly unit’s Deadly Demise test assuming they are within 9”. Gnawing Tome gives you the chance to gain 1 RP every time an enemy unit within 9” of the bearer fails a Battle-shock test, which is neat when it goes off, especially given how RP-hungry this supplement is. Foulforged Armour is just a 2+ Save. Fine, I guess.

Next up on display are the Antiquity relics. Orb of Decay is a once per battle upgrade to the Grenade stratagem, letting it cause mortal wounds on a 2+ instead of the usual 4+. Super good, especially now that your Lord of Contagion has the keyword for it. Casket of Corruption gives the model the Deadly Demise D3 ability, which is a neat bonus for characters who want to be in close anyway. Plus, should they survive the battle and find themselves in the opponent’s deployment zone, you get to skip the Counteragents step in the Path of Contagion.

And behind the counter where it’s only brought out if you know the special cough is the Legendary relic, the Putrid Heart grants the bearer a 5+ Feel No Pain and increases their Contagion Range by an additional 6”. That’s almost as spicy as a shiny new Vortex grenade…

Boons of Nurgle

It wouldn’t be a Chaos Codex without a Boons table and the Death Guard are no exception. Their table has Grandfather Nurgle’s fingerprints–as well as a good number of body fluids–all over it, and it is fantastic. 

As usual, whenever a Death Guard character from your roster gains a Battle Honour, you can instead choose for them to gain a Boon of Nurgle, you then roll 2 D3 and then consult the table to see which cool upgrade you get. The character can keep coming back for more boons but should you end up with the same boon a second time then whoops, the character is now a Death Guard Chaos Spawn with the same number of Battle Honours, Battle Scars and XP.

There’s the usual selection of extra movement abilities for the model and the attached unit. You could also end up with bonus melee attacks or extra AP to said melee attacks. Leprous Insensibility grants the model a power 5+ Feel No Pain, Grossly Swollen is extra wounds, Veil of Flies grants Stealth to the unit. Rounding them out is Plaguesight, letting you reroll hit rolls against an Afflicted unit, and Billowing Miasma, which increases the Contagion range by 6”. Pretty powerful stuff.

Final Thoughts

Beanith: Quite frankly an amazing set of rules for the smelly lads and I can’t wait to field them on the table. There’s an interesting selection of abilities on offer and I find it vaguely disconcerting of the possibility of having a Legendary Daemon Prince round around with a possible +12” to their Contagion range thanks to a boon or three and a relic or two.

The Alchemical Pathogen is wild, as I mentioned, there are some excellent options to play with but it’s really hard to look past the 5 round Putrid pathogen. The Grand Plague seems a little tacked on, there’s no real downside for failing which is odd compared to some of the other systems handing out Battle Scars like they’re party favours.

Condit: This is a lot. Alchemical Pathogens are, as Beanith points out, wild, and are only really gated by your ability to win games. And while they are at least on paper limited to weapons with the [Lethal Hits] keyword, in practice that’s a ton of weapons across your entire army, including some seriously nasty ones mounted on things like Defilers and Predators. If you’ve got a Death Guard player in your local Crusade group, expect to see them running around with Lethal and Sustained on 5+ crits on their “go turn” after a few games.

The Grand Plague and Path of Contagion are more what we’ve come to expect from Crusade supplements these days, though there’s an awful lot of homework here. Keeping track of 6 different statistics and manipulating them after each game is going to result in a lot of work, and the amount of time it’ll take you to get to the rewards means the plague juice might not be worth the squeeze, especially if you’re playing in a weekend event.

All in all, while there is a lot going on here, it takes a bit longer than usual for it to come into play, whether because you actually have to win a few games to bring your Pathogens online, or because cultivating your Grand Plague is hit-or-miss. What you’re left with is a set of Crusade rules that have a lot of promise, but likely won’t pan out if you’re not playing an extended campaign. On the flip side, if you are playing long enough to bring these rules into play, you’ll be rewarded with some seriously potent effects.

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