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Mark of Nurgle

The Mark of Nurgle

Nurgle's Rot is the most horrific of all the plagues unleashed upon mortals by the Chaos God Nurgle. Though any disease can drive a mortal into the waiting arms of the Plague Lord, Nurgle's Rot is the most certain. The Lord of Decay's most infamous accomplishment sets the benchmark for all his other creations. Despite millennia of effort, the Plague Lord has never bettered that disease which bears his name. It is the most contagious, most rapacious, and most heinous of all sicknesses, poxes, and fevers he has ever produced. The Imperial authorities have put entire villages to sword and flame at a single instance of Nurgle's Rot; such is the terror it provokes.[2a]

Symptoms vary so wildly that no physician can deduce a cure, but the disease incorporates all the worst elements of every plague that has ever afflicted the Known World, slowly rendering the sufferer into a bloated, rotting, living corpse before an eventual, agonising demise. Worse, its effects do not stop with death, for the soul of a mortal who succumbs to the infection belongs to Nurgle, doomed to serve the Fly Lord forever as a Plaguebearer Daemon.[2a]

Tradition has it that, for each person who contracts Nurgle's Rot, a seed like a rotten boil sprouts from the boughs of the mouldering willow trees which grow in Nurgle's Garden in the Realm of Chaos. As the disease takes hold of the sufferer, that seed is said to swell into a vile, bubonic fruit which feeds off the afflicted person's soul like a tick gorging itself on its host's blood. When the bloated victim expires in a mess of bloody phlegm, the final traces of their soul are sucked into the engorged fruit, and the ripe flesh bursts apart as a new Plaguebearer slips and slithers into existence.[2a]

Neighlish Rot[]

"During one of my many travels, I had the unfortunate opportunity to come across a village in the throes of an outbreak of Neiglish Rot. While trained in the arts of medicine, I was unprepared for what I found. The entire population seemed to be in the grip of inactivity. It seemed the sky was darker. The colour was leached from the turning autumnal leaves of the trees and the once gay dresses of the women. Sadness, despair, and hopelessness were as invasive as whatever plague wormed its way through the rotting flesh of its victims."

—Machad, Arabyan Philosopher, Surgeon, and Explorer[1a]

A variant of Nurgle's Rot transferred into the flesh of Plague Rats, also known as "Neighlish Rot," this virulent disease wreaks havoc within a living body's system. Painful buboes erupt in the soft tissues, and it's always accompanied by a high fever. Many sufferers of this terrible disease slip into madness, or at the very least, commit suicide to avoid experiencing its nastiest effects.[1a]

Neiglish Rot kills slowly, sometimes taking weeks for the victim to succumb to its ravages. What's worse is that mutation almost always occurs too, so that even those victims who manage to recover can look forward to a fiery death strapped to a witch hunter's stake. The worst case scenario is that they may even transform into Plaguebearers.[1a]

Neiglish Rot spreads through contact. The infected merely has to touch another to spread its taint. Occasionally, this plague pops up on its own, but individuals can catch it in a variety of other ways, including being struck by an infected Champion of Nurgle, stepping in a sticky pool left by a Great Unclean One, or by touching a Death Head of Nurgle. Such exposures are all blessedly rare.[1a]

Sources[]

  • 1: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition: Tome of Corruption (RPG)
    • 1a: pg. 19
  • 2: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition: The Book of Plague (RPG)
    • 2a: pg. 10
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