Your changes to the normal boon table are interesting. Some of the options don't scream "Nurgle" to me (mostly the movement ones), but I think something like this would be a reasonable alternative to the chaos boon system in general.
Vessels of Nurgle: So this makes possessed sort of like chaos Wulfen then? That's an interesting approach that potentially gives them a better niche as buffers/debuffers rather than just another melee unit. I'm not sure I care for the execution as you have it though. A 6 result, which is statistically likely to come up once a game, basically causes you to automatically win every combat you're in until your next turn (except perhaps against invul save-centric deathstars). There's no real counter-play to this, it makes for a feelbad turn for enemy assault armies who now don't get to do the thing their army excels at because they pretty much auto-lose against you for that turn, and pretty much destroys any unit your opponent was unlucky enough to have in assault range on the turn this kicked in. If you're anywhere near an
MC when this kicks in, it is more likely to kill a 3 Wound
MC than not.
"Oh look, I rolled a 6 while I was near you. We can keep playing if you want, but the game's pretty much over now."
I'm not clear on how you'd roll a 7, but that would make it even nastier.
Even ignoring the 6 result, the other results are pretty nasty. The 1-3 result's buffs are pretty reasonable, but a plague-bearer-heavy army will kind of go "meh" when this is rolled. Also, it could get really annoying to sit through a Nurgle player resolving all those 1d6 auto-hits against you. That last part actually synergizes well with Nurgle's tarpit-heavy playstyle, but it doesn't seem like much fun to be on the receiving end of. The 4-5 result is pretty potent to the point of maybe possibly pushing it, and the hits on enemy units reads as, "Remove
d6 not-marines in every unit near these guys." Which again, isn't necessarily much fun to be on the receiving end of.
Power level aside, this stands to give a bunch of aura buffs to units that are already possibly getting lots of (very similar) army-wide buffs from Nurgle's Tally. As a result, you risk having the Vessels of Nurgle effects become redundant/too good/a pain to keep track of and sit through.
Sorry, man. I don't mean to be too harsh, but I'd seriously consider nerfing Vessels of Nurgle. A lot. What I really like about the rule is that it gives you a chance to make possessed more thematically Nurgly and to give them a better defined army role. So with that in mind, maybe change it to something like this?
1-2: -1 Toughness for all enemy units within 6".
3-4: Friendlies within 6" gain Poison 4+ or improve their Poison by 1.
5-6: Friendlies within 6" gain +1 Toughness
Something along those lines. They all help with assault in various but unpredictable ways. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to making it a player choice instead of a random roll either . That makes it slightly more powerful, but it also eliminates (yet another) random roll that tends to bog down the game.
Also, as you have it, would different rolls from multiple possessed units stack on allies and/or each other? For instance, if two possessed units rolled a 7+ result, would they give themselves a +2 Toughness and each other an additional +1?
Tally of Nurgle: This seems pretty reasonable overall. I'm not sure how many wounds a nurgle army typically inflicts in a turn (I tend to kite them and shoot them to death when I can), but I'm guessing that those higher results are pretty difficult to pull off. Which is good. The +1 Wound option seems potentially problematic though. Suppose you pop the +1 W option and increase your daemon prince's wounds to, for argument's sake, 5. He then proceeds to lose 4 wounds in your own assault phase. Because the benefits only last for one turn, he would lose the +1 W benefit. So does this mean that he would lose that extra wound and abruptly die? Or is the extra wound considered to be lost before the "base" wounds? Similarly, if a plague bearer suffers a single wound that turn, does the plague bearer die at the end of the turn when the +1W goes away?
Also, do these benefits last one game turn or one player turn (until the end of your own assault phase, basically)?
Overall, it looks mostly solid and very fluffy. I like the new, fluffy options you've added in. A couple random other nitpicks:
* No Typhus? I know
KDK excluded Kharne for some reason, but that never made sense either.
* You've buffed zombies to have 2
ccw which they don't normally have. This is probably an unnecessary buff, especially as they're already both cheap and good.
* Zombies are actually better than cultists (even with only 1ccw) because cultists are meant to tarpit rather than kill. Being fearless and having
FNP makes them significantly better at this than low-leadership cultists that will only rarely get any kind of armor save. Despite this, you have zombies costed lower than the significantly less useful cultists. I realize you gave the cultists marks of Nurgle, but
FNP is probably better in more situations, and Fearless is much better for their purposes than Lead Through Fear.
*Am I correct in understanding that a cultist unit can take two characters at the same time?
* You list cultists as automatically having an aspiring champion. Is this meant to be the same sort of aspiring champion you can get in a marine unit? That's a cool and fluffy option, but this aspiring champion seems to have the statline of a single cultist, and it would be nice to have the option to NOT take a marine in a cultist unit. unless this is a regular joe cultist with a name similarity or a copy+paste error.
* The naming convention of "champion ascendant" and "aspiring champion" is mildly confusing.
And if I may toss my two thrones in, the (probably overly complicated) version of a Nurgle Blood Tithe equivalent that I like the idea of is something like this:
*Start the game with 1 infection token +1 more for various modifiers (like formation bonuses, certain characters (dark apostles?), etc.
*After your opponent deploys, immediately distribute the infection tokens among their non-vehicle units. This can include units still in reserves.
*At the start of each of your turns, any infected units must make a Toughness test (using the unit majority Toughness) for each infection counter they have.
*For each test a given unit fails, inflict a wound on a model of your opponent's choice (no saves of any kind allowed) in that unit AND place an additional infection token on any enemy unit on the table.
*If an infected unit is completely destroyed, immediately redistribute their infection tokens. (Or maybe have the tokens be lost as a form of counterplay? Not sure on this.)
So you basically get the sense that the disease is slowly spreading. Assuming you start with a low number of infection tokens (like.... 2 or 3), your opponent will only be taking 1 or 2 wounds a turn at first, but the effects increase exponentially as you get more and more infection tokens on the table. Couple this with special weapons or formation rules that let you place more infection tokens throughout the game (like when you kill an enemy character or something), and that can add up pretty fast. The idea is to have a sense of growing, contagious infection in the same way that Khorne's Blood Tithe gives a sense of mad bloodshed regardless of friend and foe.
That rule is probably complicated enough as it is, but you could then add on the following if you really wanted to.
* The disease grows more powerful as Nurgle's blessings proliferate. For every 7 infection tokens on the table, select one of the following options. Each option may be taken any number of times and stacks with itself.
-Bleary Eyed: All infected enemy units suffer -1
WS and
BS (minimum 1)
-Weak Bodied: All infected enemy reduce their normal movement speed by 1" (to a minimum of 1"). So an enemy infantry model with -2" to his movement that rolls a 5 on his difficult terrain test would only be able to move 4".
-Feverish Delirium: All infected enemy units reduce their leadership by 1 (minimum 2).
So on top of the sense of a spreading contagion, you'd have the sense that the disease was growing worse and more potent. Plus, this would give you some motivation to spread your infection tokens around (very fluffy) rather than concentrating them in one place to kill a problem unit.
EDIT: Note that my proposed "Snot Tithe" would be instead of the Tally of Nurgle rule rather than in addition to it. Having both simply seems too complicated. I like the Tally of Nurgle thing, but I feel that my proposed suggestion mimics the concept of a spreading disease better while the standard tally thing, while very cool, has more of a Khornate feel.
