Among the downsides of my unplanned 2024 hiatus into the voidspace of IRL is that while there was a lot of discussion earlier in the year of whether or not Space Marines or Custodes specifically could be women, I was unable to weigh in. For a long while my Death Guard army has been a split, though, of traditional Death Guard models and kitbashed Plague Marine / Battle Sisters. Whatever the Imperium in-universe makes of the question, and whatever Games Workshop does outside of it, I feel like Nurgle would be one of the last Chaos gods to discriminate and one of the first to just make it work. As Jeff Goldblum would (probably) observe, life finds a way.

Jeff Goldblum aside, I kind of just wanted to paint more Plague-y, Chaos-y Battle Sisters, and so I did. These were a trio of Plague Marines that came with a lot that I bought online a while back and I switched out their head sculpts and made some other minor adjustments to them to bring them in line with the aesthetics of the rest of my army. The stippling and sponging blend that I use worked great for these, and the heads that I got from Wargame Exclusive really worked as a great finishing touch, especially on the Sister with the flail. I’m really happy with how that one turned out.

And, of course, in order to be verifiably Plague Marines, beyond shadow of any reasonable doubt, these gals needed a Nurgling, and Grandfather Nurgle provided. I was lucky enough to get this in a batch of bulk Chaos bits and I’ve been looking for the right excuse to paint him up and let him go. Between these and the ETB marines I recently repainted, my Death Guard battleline is getting a boost and I couldn’t be happier.