Zombie Summoned Lesser Daemons

"The Plague Marines marched relentlessly on, ignoring the hail of fire. Behind them came a shuffling army of corpses. Summoned from the grave to do the bidding of Father Nurgle, the Plague Zombies shambled towards the enemy lines, hungry for the flesh of the living."

-Account of the battle for Hive Primus, Eads, taken for the forbidden tome "The Ascension of Morbus the Foul"

I just put the finishing touches to the last of my zombies last night. There's actually 20 of them in total (to be used as two units of 10), but only the first half are in the photo.

For each group of 10, I just speed painted through them and I didn't want to spend too long getting 20 of them finished. Once they were build and primed, probably each batch of 10 took about 2 hours from start to finish. I did the bulk of the skin in green by just drybrushing Orkhide Shade and Gretchin Green straight over the black undercoat. From there it was just a case of painting the clothes (mostly greys, blacks and the occasional blue) and other bits, a wash and drybrush on them. Individually they pretty ordinary but they look quite good as a unit.

Whilst the latest Chaos Codex lost some of it's flavour (like Legion variants, proper daemons etc), at least with summoned lesser daemons you can get some of it back. As there's no official model for them you can interpret them how you wish and to fit in with the feel of your army. They could be done as sleeper cell commandos for an Alpha Legion army, or fanatical cultists for a Word Bearers army for example.

Game-wise the unit essentially has the stat line of a marine, but with 2 attacks and a 5+ invulnerable save. They are armed with a single close combat weapon. Summoned daemons must arrived by deepstriking with 6" of an icon, but (and here's the cool part) they can assault on the turn they arrive. This means you can threaten anything within 14" of an icon if you take the correct number of them. A unit of at least 8 is ideal, a 8 means that when you place the first model and surround it with the next one (6 in a circle), the 8th model must go in a second ring touching the first. The edge of this 8th models base is now 8" from the icon and can charge 6". This could be a nasty surprise for someone.