Flagellant

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Flagellants are smelly religious hobos that fight for the Empire of Man against Chaos or anyone who threatens their livelihood. In the fluff, they are insane murderhobos who have lost everything, and believe the only path to salvation is to brutally torture themselves, massacre their enemies, and preach their message to any who will hear it (read: anyone within a ten-fucking-mile radius of these screaming cunts). While the common flagellants tend to "devote" themselves to Sigmar (thus beating themselves while beating off to that beautiful barbaric beard), some flagellants are just generic loonies who might possibly worship another God and are here as punishment. It's not actually clarified in the lore if any of this madness is actually part of Sigmar's teaching, but nobody seems t care. The Warrior Priests and other holy men of the Empire tend lead many flagellant warbands, likely since it's the only way these madmen can be directed to doing anything even remotely productive. Some groups completely devote themselves to a particular person, like the Tattered souls, Volkmar the Grim's most zealous followers and some fucking creepy stalkers.

Old lore also had a Chaos equivalant in the diseased flagellants, basically people who caught some manner of incurable disease and were exiled from their homes so they started wandering around, whipping themselves in hopes of getting Nurgle's mercy.

On Tabletop

On the tabletop, they are a ludicrously expensive unit that needs to be in numbers of 30+ to even be worth taking, and even then they'll die to anything within a turn or two of combat. Their strength is that they'll take down whatever they're fighting too. For example, say the enemy has a 500pt unit of chaos knights with a fancy chaos lord marching towards your flank; just send in your 300pt unit of flagellants to delete the fuckers. Sure, your flagellants are dead, but so are the enemy, so who cares.

In total Warhammer: War, they are a bullshit cashgrab for the 'Grim and the Grave' DLC that should have just been in the base fucking game (fuck you, CA). However, they are unbreakable, and are henceforth one of the single greatest meatshields in the game. Just send a battle line of the fuckers against the enemy, and then blow up their rear ranks with mortars and wizards. You win, GG, I hope you enjoyed your pay-to-win bullshit.

In Age of Sigmar their lore is... Peculiar. While is said that Sigmar, being the fabulous order God who is, tend to imprint unquestionably zealot and unbreakable faith in his followers, flagellants now are quite varied in the lore. In order general book flagellants are azyrit people completely devoted to Sigmar, who follow his holy crusade conquering the loses lands from chaos. Their are incredibly useful indeed, because thanks to processions, martyrdom and self punishment across the corrupted land, their blood removed the chaos taint, letting the people to occupy and settled on those lands (the power of faith). Is still true actually that flagellants can be just simple men, devoted to Sigmar but without a military training who takes the weapons and rebel against their chaotic oppressors when armies of order arrives (this is what happens to the tauroi warclan, who convinced by the tempest lords they rebel against fucking minotaurs.) generally speaking, they now to be simply incredible fanatics who do what they can against chaos, undead and destruction factions, following their hero (sigmarines) everywhere. Damn! There is a fucking stormhost famous for being followed by tons of flagellants and created them everywhere they go (the tempest lords).