Flagellant
 This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it |
"Does our most holy father reward those who take the easy road? Does he traffic in temptation? Of course not! Sigmar rewards hard work, resolve in the face of temptation, and, above all, courage when confronting mortal danger. My friends, the easy path leads to corruption... to damnation... to perdition. Only through suffering can you ever see the glory that is the truth, that is the founder of our glorious Empire, that is our divine father; Sigmar!"
- – Rolf von Steulden, Flagellant. Also, manliness at its finest. Ministorum Priest pray the emperor to sound so fantastic in their speeches.
IMPORTANT!! PAGE UNDER COSTRUCTION, WAIT AND HAVE FAITH BECAUSE FURTHER ADD WILL COME SOON.
Flagellants are smelly religious hobos who have different origins but one thing in common...purge every fucking heretics who dare to stand 400 miles radio from them. they roam around the Empire, spreading their belief, gathering followers and help out the empire army against the occasional brawl against goatfuckers, vikings raiders and undead hordes.
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.
Warhammer Fantasy
Flagellants are something unique for the empire (Bretonnia have something similar called "battle pellegrins", but we will see later the key differences), and the lore behind them is both easy and credible. Life in the Empire is difficult if not shitty. While your position in society surely determines your lifestyle, there aren't assurances that all you have will be destroyed by one of the many, many enemies of the Empire. Everything that you have will be destroyed or stolen, your family and friends will be killed horribly, taken prisoners or sacrificed to horrid gods who will torture their souls for all eternity. Those who go through such harshness cannot possibly remain sane or hope to retake what they have lost. They will become bandits, desperados and this if they have enough mind to keep their sanity. But for these madmen, faith and vengeance are also an option. Inevitably, a Prophet of doom will arise between this madmen, convinced that what they had seen and gone through are clearly sign of the coming of the apocalypse. The Empire will fall, nothing can save it from such a destiny, and if everyone is doomed, the only "logical" thing to do is to take care of our souls through zealous acts of faith to impress the empire's pantheon, especially Sigmar, the God-king. When this happens, a group of like-minded fanatics will band together with this prophet, and start to travel far and wide the Empire, spreading their message of doom and looking for the only possible outcome, a martyr death in the name of the gods in bloody battlefields. In their bloody pilgrimage, more men will join the band of flagellants, creating a crazy parade of undeniable madness zealotry. Common people have mixed feelings toward them, a combination of respect, fear and owe. The state church of Sigmar support the flagellants actions, found them to be useful assets. What better retinue for a witch hunter or a Warrior priest that devoted people who don't fear death, but actively look for it? Flagellants on the other side obey the official clergymen with awe and fanatical loyalty, because their word is that of Sigmar itself. Some groups of flagellants indeed follow a particularly famous man of the church, such the crazy and obsessed stalkers DEVOTED, LOYAL AND ABSOLUTELY NOT CREEPY FOLLOWERS known as Tattered Souls, who follow Volkmar the Grim wherever he go.
It must be noted, however, that while many flagellants are obvious followers of Sigmar, some band will dedicate themselves to another god of the pantheon, such as Morr, Ulric, Shallya or other. (Someone can actually argue the sense of venerating the goddess of health with flails and self-torture, but flagellants don't give a fuck about logic and common sense.)
Age of Sigmar
And they were right all along... The End Times had come, and with it Age of Sigmar had born... and flagellants get a quality jump of their lore of such awesomess that you will not believe it! first of all, for some time, the flagellants were a stand alone faction called Devoted of Sigmar, together with warriotr priests and the wall altar models. with it, they also appear in a series of books who explore their way of life weirdly deep. Flagellants now have many backgrounds: many of them are people from Azyr who are convinced by skillfull orator and priests to join the armies of Sigmar and fight to reconquer their ancestor lands, gaining a sure pass torwards heavens if they die during the process, turning them into the fantasy versions of the "peasants crusaders". In other cases, they are the ancestors of those unlucky fuckers who didn't reached the azyr portals in time, and so had travel throught the corrupted lands of the realms, until the storm of Sigmar hitted the fucker where it hurt, turning this desperados into killer machines, craving vengeance and care little for their own lifes. Until this points this changes will look nothing special to you considering the old lore, but shit truly hit the fan when you read that these fuckers, throught processions, rituals of martirdom and penitance, root out chaos corruption, because where their blood falls, such is their faith that the chaotic influence is burned out, letting people recolonize those lands without fears. All of this is further confirmed by the new battletome Cities of Sigmar, making this guys from those annoying smelly fuckers who roam around the country, shouting nonsense about apocalypse incoming, into one of the mst important fuckers of the orders armies, because without them the "reconquista" would be really more difficult. Also, there is a stormhost who use them quite frequently, as is depicted in some short stories and cameo, the Tempest Lords (yes, the most noble and pridefull of all the stormhost has a close ties with flagellants, we are reaching shipping tier of bullshit.
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 part of the 'Grim and the Grave' DLC that should have just been in the base fucking game. They are unbreakable, with little to no defence so they cave quickly in the face of strong opponents which makes them less useful than your normal state troops unless you're going for a gimmick.