Assembling Marauders, the choices!

[grungolah]

I'll preface that the easy part is that these guys will be holding flails.  I have 15 old school metal marauders with flails that a new box of 20 will join.  I already have a champion and icon bearer, and maybe a musician.  My questions:

1) I can throw shields all over the place (backs, arms).  It looks like the new AOS rules encourage this.  Does this violate any rules?

2) Should I add 2 more champions, drummers and icon bearers?  Thought being I may someday want to play several small units.  Again, the warscroll seems to anticipate this.

3) The fun one.  I'm looking for ideas to paint otherwise healthy looking marauders to reflect their mark of Nurgle.  Pics?

[Somanlius]

1) Absolutly you can! Nothing stops them from wielding shields and flails.

2) I'd go for it. Can't hurt, as lomg as you are sure which will be your champ im a big unit. And if you ever play Khorne then having small, easily slaughtered units of Marauders is great!

3) Cant help you there. I made Khorne Marauders and throw them unshielded to the wolves at the start of every game  

 

[Lucio]

All good on the weapon and anncillary choices

As for painting, think about how in real life you'd show devotion to something, you'd wear symbols so liberally paint Nurgle and general Chaos symbols on their shields, maybe a few are slightly sick, or have let wounds fester to show their devotion. Maybe one or two are maimed, missing a foot or fingers

[NemoVonUtopia]

An easy way to get a sickly effect is to paint the skin pale and use a sepia wash and then a light green wash. That is how I did the skin on my blightkings. Small areas of purple wash can look like bruises. Green stuffing some boils doesn't seem to difficult. 

There is no reason not to have multiple drums/standards in one unit. I usually paint one unit leader a bit fancier than the others so I can tell which one leads the big unit.

[grungolah]

The models are assembled.  I will take a stab as a color scheme now.   Large units are always maddening!

[grungolah]

I might need to add more red to the diseased arm.   Otherwise I think it did what I wanted. 

[Praecautus]

Nice and nurgly.

If you are still looking for alternative paint schemes then I recommend Duncan's tutorial on painting blight kings. In part 1 he shows you how to a nasty pale looking skin and then in part 2 he shows how to do bruises and horrible warts and zits. Also good tips for using washes to do horns and metal so they look all manky. You can apply to your marauders.

Current wip with no bruising or zits yet.

[grungolah]

I'll check out the videos. 

I think I'd find it easier if these marauders weren't so brutishly pristine.  I just finished the base coat on the plastic 20 (9 colors... ouch), working on washes.   I have 2 different skin tones and 2 different plagues in motion.   The second one should look white and flaky, but I haven't color tested that yet.

 

I should be done by tommorrow on this batch, then I have to reassemble/repaint the metal ones.  They are painted in more traditional chaos colors.

 

 

[grungolah]

I got the first 20 done but I had forgotten the shields!  Quickly painted all 24, only had room for 9.   Those capes are in the way. 

 

In the end,  everyone is diseased,  and everything corroded and faded.   140 points down,  1860 to go! 

[Kaleb Daark]

Please tell me that the 1860 to go are all going to be marauders 

[grungolah]

Very unlikely!  LOL.     The first army list only has 35, but I will probably try to pick up enough metal models to round that up to 40.  I could see having a second list that requires 70-80.  I would almost certainly be bored of painting the models by then.  

I could see myself owning up to 20 Marauder Horsemen as well, but I'm only up to 780 points in total.   I would need to expand beyond Nurgle to reach 2K marauders!  That's the long game though, as I'll probably be well over 4K into my collection by then.