Warhammer 40,000: Dark Imperium (2017), p4 — Lords of Contagion

Many and varied are the diseased champions who lead the Death Guard. Amongst the most aggressive are the Lords of Contagion. Clad in hulking suits of corruption-riddled armour, wielding roaring, tri-bladed axes, the Lords of Contagion tread the most direct route to victory over the corpses of their foes.

A Lord of Contagion leads his followers into battle from the front. A mighty warlord in a blade-horned helm and slime-smeared Terminator armour, he embodies the diseased resilience of his Traitor Legion. Few weapons have the stopping power to even slow a Lord of Contagion as he lumbers across the battlefield, let alone lay him low. By comparison, every unstoppable swing of this warrior's saw-bladed axe sends blood spraying in spattering fans, and reduces enemy warriors to ripped and mangled cadavers crawling with disease.

Only the most aggressive of Nurgle's mortal champions become Lords of Contagion. Many have fought amongst the festering ranks of Mortarion's inner circle, the Deathshroud. There they hone the art of reaping a toll of their enemies in close assault before rising to command their own warbands.

Whether leading Colonies, Vectoriums or entire Sepsis Cohorts, Lords of Contagion tend towards direct strategies with high body counts and little in the way of cunning or subtlety. This is not to say that they are rage-lost lunatics or unimaginative fools. Rather, the Lords of Contagion are pugnacious commanders, supremely confident in the abilities of their diseased followers to absorb any amount of punishment and still prevail. They embody the swift-spreading plague that tears through a doomed crowd, killing indiscriminately and leaving mounds of dead bodies in its wake.