Codex: Chaos (1996), p13 — Nurgle

Nurgle is the Great Lord of Decay who presides over physical corruption and morbidity. Disease and putrefaction attract his daemons like flies to a rotted corpse. For his amusement he devises foul and diverse contagions that he inflicts upon mortals. Many of the most horrible diseases are Nurgle's proudest creations. Mortals who perish in their grip are claimed by the Plague Lord so that their souls are caught in the eternally bubbling foulness of his realm.

The god's immense body is bloated with corruption and exudes a sickly, diseases stench. His skin is greenish, leathery and necrotic, its surface pock-marked with running sores, swelling boils and infestations. His inner organs, rank with excremental decay, spill through the ruptured skin to hang like bunches of scrofulous grapes around his girth. From these organs burst tiny daemons which chew and suck upon the nauseous juices within. This then is the appearance of the Chaos God Nurgle, though mere words cannot do justice to his truly monumental foulness.

Although Nurgle is ranked behind Khorne and Tzeentch the truth is that his power is more variable than that of the other gods. His passion is to unleash ghastly pestilences into the material universe and when he does his power rises to a peak. Like a plague his power waxes greater and greater, reaching epidemic levels as it temporarily overshadows all of the gods put together before waning again. At these times the great corrupted legions of the God of Decay are swollen by the uncountable millions of plague-struck dead, rusting war engines thunder out a dirge of destruction and the tattered banners of Nurgle are raised against life itself.