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I am not a great lore-follower, but my recent army background has been bugging me immensely.

I really need to know whether it is plausible for a D.E. kabal to strike up a deal (not worship) nurgle, so that he protects their souls from slaanesh, and they co-operate with the death guard and what-not.

I JUST NEED CLOSURE!!!

That's pretty anti-fluff.

Why would the Dark Eldar need to worship a chaos god? They're functionally immortal, anyway. As long as they can continue to feed on the pain and despair of lesser races, (or can scrape together enough wealth to afford a regeneration) they don't have to worry about She-Who-Thirsts.

The Dark Eldar have a pretty intense hate-on for demons or psykers in Commorragh. They don't want anything serving as a beacon for other demons to be able to get into their city.

There IS one precedent for a kabal using demons/demonic allies to try to gain power, but it really didn't work out well for them.

It's a super-remote possibility I suppose, but if it DID happen, they wouldn't be long for this world. Every hand would be turned against them in the Dark City, and that kind of transgression would draw down the ire of Vect himself. And while "our kabal works with daemons" is stretching the bounds of believability, "our kabal outsmarted Asdrubael Vect" shatters them completely.

If they were a small kabal exiled from The dark city, that was being pursued by slaanesh-worshipping faction of some sort or the other, and had no other choice but to receive extra-dimensional help, would that make a partnership any more realistic?
Or am I clutching at straws?

In the Dark Eldar trilogy it deals with the idea of the Chaos Gods in Commaragh. It didn't go well for them, as it started with Nurgle making a deal with the Mandrake King to beat his rival and expand the shadow realm to cover all of the Dark City. It didn't go well for that Mandrake King, while at first his army of Nurlge Infested Ur-Ghuls worked wondrously and slaughtered millions of the Dark Eldar in the slums and at the very bottom of the Dark City, but as soon as they got mid way up any they met *real* resistance they lost momentum and couldn't get any further. Then Vect used Webway Tech to funnel them all into one Sub Realm, which also coincidentally was the Sub Realm of one of his rivals, and he proceeded to use the Stolen Sun to immolate the entire Sub Realm.

So, yes, it has happened. But no, it didn't work well for them. Ally with the Dark Powers at your own peril.

TheworkingSaplin wrote:
If they were a small kabal exiled from The dark city, that was being pursued by slaanesh-worshipping faction of some sort or the other, and had no other choice but to receive extra-dimensional help, would that make a partnership any more realistic?
Or am I clutching at straws?

I would go with something like that personally. Papa Nurgle loves all his children, even those with ears as pointy as their armour

 Jimsolo wrote:
That's pretty anti-fluff.

Umm.... Spoiler... but no

Does that mean that a mandrake heavy army would be necessary to remain fluff-full?

Could it be possible that the mandrake cult sowed the seeds of
a cult of eldar that had similar principles towards worship of nurgle? Perhaps through rigorous preaching, the mandrakes convinced a small insignificant kabal that the chaos gods are the true dark muses, and this kabal-cult gradually spread its ideas through different kabals, eventually reaching up to see inside the higher order.

Through these informants, the inexperienced kabal learned of a plan to cripple the cult. They fought, which had the desired effect of ravaging the kabal of the plague fly and destroying worship of nurgle within commoragh. Not, however, before the dracon, archon, and haemonculi of the kabal ( haemonculi really not part of a kabal, but they are still
eligible!) escaped with two ships of the fleet of the obsidian rose. They stow away with the fleet of duke sliscus, and coerce three ships and kabalites and whatnot from his pirate armada. This causes a great rivalry between the archon and sliscus.

How does that sound?

If that's what you want your army fluff to be, power to you, but pure fluff wise? Sorry, but that doesn't sound right for Dark Eldar. The problem is that the Dark Eldar society is all about ruling through power, or rather lack of weakness. Being a pawn to Chaos is a weakness, so a Dark Eldar touched by the Dark Gods might well exist, but they would never gain the influence to rule a Kabal. The reason this works for Mandrakes it because they have a different kind of hierarchy, were power isn't about Political wits but more about who can rip the head off of who, and Nurgle helped the Mandrake King rip the head off of his rival. But real Dark Eldar would never follow someone like that.

But as a counter proposal, what if the Dark Eldar are playing the Nurglite Faction for fools for their own gain? Doesn't that sound more Dark Eldary? Lets say a Kabal is kicked out of the Dark City because, i don't know, the Archon yawned during Vects anual Christmas Speech, and is slowly being drained of their lives by Slaanesh as Dark Eldar outside the Webway are wont to do. But during his time of hiring out his Kabal to other forces, he was hired by a Nurgle Warband and noticed the draining stopped. His Haemonculi deduced the pungent smell of the Human Nurglites covers the Dark Eldar's, so Slaanesh can't soul-suck them. So the Archon has the Haemonculi surgically give every member of the Kabal a Filter Nose, and the renegade Archon works with the Nurglite Faction from that day on for Plunder and Protection. Does that sound feasible?

To be fair, Mandrakes are more Daemon than DE too, so it's less surprising that regular DE that they'd work with daemons.

My DE are lunatics, lurking in some very out of the way backwater of the webway. I went with a cthullian theme, just because, so they are worshipping Nurgle without realising it, as a creepy religious cult from the time of the Fall.

That said, my sidefluff is not in any way intended to hook up with the current commorite fluff. Pre-fall religious loonies never even heard of Vect, after all

You sir, are a genius.

But, what if instead of exile from the webway, Vect traps the kabal in a closed of fragment of the webway.

The nurglites discover the starving D.E., and hire them, knowing that the eldar's stench will be covered by theirs.

The nurglites free the eldar, and the eldar believe that they must continue killing and whatnot, and they become mercenaries of a sort

Whadaya think?

Referring to Alexisawesome

Could work, but Vect tends to make sure that the renegades are trapped, then dead. Not just trapped...

Could have a group not affiliated with commoragh get Nurglified, such as a fleet based Kabal. They could be infected with nasty diseases and cut a deal with nurgle to survive. Worked for SM in the fluff, after all..

Not all DE live in the Dark City and pay homage to Vect after all.

Okay, but I think that I like the idea of the D.E. getting tricked by nurgle : he tells them that he'll give the a way out of the webway, when in actual reality he is sustaining them as his servants.
Thoughts?

Yeah. that sounds reasonable. It also sounds like a very Vect-ian thing to do, He thinks an Archon is getting to uppity and ''Hey Archon Notc Haos, could you take your entire Kabal to go raid this planet for me?''. ''Sure Lord Vect''. As soon as he gets everyone together and leaves the Webway portal, Vect Seals the exit and the entrance, thinking the Kabal will die off. Instead, they use their Void Mines to literately blast a hole in the Webway thinking they can escape, instead the Warp floods in and they make a deal with Nurgle that if they can escape they will work for him...temporarily. But after a few fights they find the 'benefits' of fighting beside the smelly creatures that they don't drain, so they are trapped under his protection.

Does that sound OK for fluff?

What if the Eldar don't know that the thing helping them is Nurglitch?

What if they think they have found and exploited a powerful webway creature?