Drowned Men

The Drowned Men are the rot of Nurgle carried on the tide. Sworn to Gutrot Spume, they crew a fleet of barnacled hulks that should long ago have sunk: plague-ships whose holds slosh with green bilge and whose tattered sails hang heavy and buzzing with flies. Out of sudden fog banks they come, unlooked-for and unopposed, striking the long coastlines no land army can everywhere defend.

Theirs is a war of appearance and disappearance. A Drowned Men raid falls upon a harbour town without warning, and where their boots and contagions pass the blessing of decay takes swift and total hold: wells souring, granaries blackening, the townsfolk swelling with fevers no physic can turn. Then, as abruptly as they came, the reavers withdraw on the ebbing tide, leaving a coast that will never be wholly clean again and water gone sick and sluggish for leagues. What makes them so feared is that they cannot be met on the defender's chosen ground; they keep to the fog and the deep, choosing where and when to make landfall, and by the time a muster is raised they are already a sail on the horizon, bound for the next unwary shore. Gutrot Spume's reavers do not besiege the realms: they infect them, one drowned and rotting harbour at a time.