Scourges

Commorragh's personal take on Sanguinius.

The fem-fatale variety, literal Harpies. If she hitches you for a ride, it's to drop you to your death, maybe onto something long and sharp.

"The earth does not deserve to touch our feet."

– Typical Scourge attitudes

Scourges are the Dark Eldar equivalent of the Swooping Hawks and are often a particularly rich and daring individual.

Originally conceived as a heavy weapons team with wing-shaped jetpacks, Phil Kelly decided that wasn't crazy awesome enough. He re-wrote the Scourges as a Dark Eldar who has submitted themself to a haemonculus's attention; that is to say, having their bones hollowed out, powerful wings grafted to their frame, and new bands of muscle and adrenaline dispensers added to their torso so that they are capable of true flight. They form airborne cliques who serve as neutral messengers in Comorragh when not conducting realspace raids. This new lore is far superior to and much better received than the old lore, and has remained ever since.

This also means they are the closest army to compete with the Blood Angels in the wing department (but only literally, as someone with hollow bones going into melee with a Blood Angel is ... not a good idea).

Unlike other armies, who have assault-oriented jump-troops, Scourges carry heavy weapons into battle, often employed for hit-and-run tactics against vehicles and heavy infantry. A scourge squad leader is known as a Solarite. Scourges have access to a range of powerful ranged weapons, including splinter cannons, dark lances, shredders, heat lances, haywire blasters, haywire grenades, blasters and shardcarbines.

Unlike some other Dark Eldar units, Scourges are purely co-ed, with both male and female Dark Eldar joining their ranks. Usually /tg/ calls the men as literal/real Swooping Hawks while the women as literal Harpies.

Tabletop

Scourges are versatile units that can easily shred lighter units with their default weapons, and can be deployed in smaller squads with Dark Lances or Splinter Cannons for troubleshooting vehicle, infantry, or independent character targets. As tempting as it may be to take dark lances, they should be ignored. Point being, take the heatlances or blasters for tankbusting (and their mobility and good accuracy does support this), but the short range of these weapons mean that you will be quite vulnerable. On the plus side, they've got excellent armor for Dark Eldar, with a 4+ armor save and 6+ Invulnerable save due to their Ghostplate armor and now have Trueborn-tier levels of options for weapons.

Just don't treat them like typical assault jump infantry. Scourges are absolute shit at close combat, like Tau Fire Warrior levels of bad, with no melee weapons (or pistols); upgrading one of them into a Solarite with Solarite weapons is the only way to make them at all viable for melee. Doing this is a surefire way of letting other Dark Eldar players shove a Voidraven Bomber up your ass.

Gallery

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  A flock of Scourges led by a Solarite (the one with the power lance in the bottom left).