They move because they are empowered by Papa Nurgle's love...
[Darth Grunt]
From the 6th Ed. Chaos Marine codex, and I quote:
"Plague Marines are Chaos Space Marines who have sworn themselves to Nurgle, the Chaos God of pestilence and entropy..."
"Plague Marines have disgusting, rotted bodies that stink of decay. The putrescent slime that oozes from their many weeping sores corrodes their armour and boils away their
skin, but despite their horrific disfigurements, the Plague Marines are fearsome warriors indeed. Their rotting brains are inured to the agony of bodily corruption, making them
all but immune to the pain or debilitation caused by battle wounds."
If you say tl;dr, they are blessed by Nurgle. Nurgle's gifts involve rotting and decaying anything he blesses.
Think like undead status in the less realistic Zombie horror fictions... cutting off its arm is just going to remove the arm, its not going to bleed out.
only by destruction of vast portions of the body will result in a removal of effect on the battle field (hence why back in the day they had two wounds... more wounds repersenting how much their form can suffer before it cant go on any more, where toughness more like how much punishment can be withstood before damage happens) For example, The Heros just possess a higher will power that enables to continue past horrible damage (first grey knigts novel, the evil human took a bolt round that did not explode, but shore off a good chunk of his bicep "wounds that would have incapacitated a normal man")
there is alot of semi logical explanations for why Chaos works, one just needs to expand mental horizons a smidge.
WindOfTheUnwrittenLaw (talk) 09:17, September 27, 2014 (UTC)
In order to understand this, one has to understand what Nurgle really stands for, which is not disease unlike most people's (superficial) perception of Nurgle, but despair. Disease causes despair, it is a means to an end, but disease is no emotion and ALL Chaos Gods are manifestations of emotions (you will easily know what the other big three Chaosgods stand for as they are less subtile).
Returning to your question as to why/how plague marines work: this is exactly the idea. A normal human being like you sees a rotting space marine and thinks he must be weak, slow, bad for combat in every respect. But if you were actually fighting against him, you would see the opposite. He would be faster than you, stronger than you, better coordinated, and a hell of a lot tougher than you. This is because the rotten appearance is Nurgle's way of mocking your expectations. Your initial thought upon seeing these warriors will be that they will be easily defeated, after all they are half dead already. Upon fighting them, you will see that the opposite is true, they are not weaker, but at least as strong as they were before the infections and even tougher now. Hence your hope will vanish and that is when Nurgle's favourite emotion comes into play: soldiers will despair and not understand how this can be true. Logic itself does not allow these half-zombies to be so strong, so fast, so intelligent, but it is all true and it is all meant to break morale and hope.
Sadly, GW has broken a little bit with lore in the most recent rules as they start depicting nurgle daemons and followers at least a little slower than their counterparts. If you look at older (more original) rules, you will see that plaguebringers were very fast (I think initiative 5? Which is unreal-speed from a human's eyes) and Plague Marines were just like Space Marines, just tougher.
Only white scars!!!!!
And here I thought good old papa Nurgle stood for love of all things, offering eternal life in his putrefaction ;)
Yes, of course,oh and nathan, you're absolutely right!