The Nurglings

The Nurglings
Abbreviation:	Nurglings
Group Numbers:	34 as of 05/26/13.
Leadership:	Ephraim Pitman
Goals:	Barhah is the path to freedom. Barhah is the way of meaningfulness.
Recruitment Policy:	Zombie Players
Contact:	grinatcha@yahoo.com

The Nurglings are a horde dedicated to threatening the increasingly complacent masses of harmanz plaguing Malton. The suburb of Vinetown is a favored hunting ground.

Although not Barhah Fundamentalists in the traditional religious sense of that word, the Nurglings do favor dedication to the undead lifestyle as means of achieving freedom. Freedom in this context is understood in more of a political and emotional than necessarily spiritual sense.

Recent Events

The Nurglings have been most active lately in the vicinity of Vinetown. The horde overran and ruined Mitchem Mall in April 2013 with the help of the Tyrant's Legion. The allied hordes then seized Shyar Cinema after a sharply contested siege in May 2013.

The 1st Nurgling Fox Hunt took place over five days from 27 May - 1 June 2013. Seven zombie kill teams hunted humans in Vinetown with a special focus on seven primary targets: 1812lsd, Berkman Frick, MrHappySocks, Sister Rita, Mick McManix, Damon Delacroix, and John89.

The winning kill team was Team DUPAY (Down Under Plus a Yank) with 26 points (four primary kills plus six regular kills).

Lost My Dog - 1 objective kill (Damon Delacroix) and 4 kills (Henrietta Hoggs, snarflesnort, Hoofbyte, and Mimi Plastique)

Shaax - 3 objective kills (Sister Rita x2 and Damon Delacroix) and 2 kills (killerzone101 and Ulysses Demonshatter)

Stimpleton

Eldarcaveman

Doctadeth

2nd Place went to Team Basher with 12 points (one primary kill plus seven regular kills).

The Kronk Shuffle

Azazel the Cat - 6 kills (darkwolf25, shdwmnkyX, The monkey Lord, civic132, Lanosian, and Luigi291)

Shambling Wanderer

Rockie Piggo - 1 objective kill (MrHappySocks) and 1 kill (DolanPls - unverified)

3rd Place went to Team Biter with 6 points (one primary kill plus one regular kill).

Savus Jebus

terriblehorus

Ijustwantaname - 1 objective kill (MrHappySocks - unverified)

M'kar - 1 kill (Whatishappening)

MANBAGZH

The Killy-est zombie was Azazel the Cat with 6 kills. Lost my Dog and Shaax had five kills each. Notpopped had three kills. Other zombies with kills: Kay VanRaven and JustDave.

	Big Bash 4!
	This user or group was with Big Bash 4. They're heading home after the party. Please have your brains ready for next time.

The Nurglings have group Flair, The_Nurglings_Medals.

Members of the horde

Ephraim Pitman. The Founder.

AgeofEgos.
Albacorpse. Currently inactive.
Alfndrate.
Azazel the Cat.
Barfboo.
Benamint. Currently inactive.
Brains McVee.
Callsign Blood Rose. EXPELLED FOR TEXT RAPE
Cannerus. Currently inactive.
Damn Jensen.
Dan Usar. Currently inactive.
Doctadeth.
DrkOblitr8r.
Eldarcaveman.
gunslingerpro.
Ijustwantaname.
Joshua Lemon. Currently inactive.
LevelheadedLunatic.
Lhuegar. Currently inactive.
Lost My Dog. Currently inactive.
Lumpsneeze.
M'Kar.
MANBAGZH.
Mr Janje.
notpopped.
Ossifer Butthead. Currently inactive.
Patient 13.
Rockie Piggo.
Savus Jebus.
Sevatar.
Shaax.
Shambling Wanderer.
Slow and Purposeful. A zed who likes long walks on dark nights with a bite to eat at the end of the stroll.
Stimpleton. Currently inactive.
terriblehorus.
The Blind Hunter.
The First. Currently inactive.
The Kronk Shuffle.
Trisha Creed.
Zombie's Law.
Zommar. Currently inactive.

Origins of the Nurglings

The Nurglings were called to action by Ephraim Pitman so that zombies who actively seek the spirit of barhah might come together and fight against the intolerance of humans who continue to infringe upon their rights. Zombies responded to a passionate call to action by Pitman whose speech remains one of the best examples of the spirit that drives this group.

Those who followed Pitman made the trek north from Kenefie Lane Police Department in Chudleyton, where he quietly delivered his speech to a chosen few companions, back to Quarlesbank. Some died on the way there while others began banging down the barricades of Quarlesbank as living men. What few survivors haunted that suburb lashed out in revulsion at the distubance, unkowingly guiding the Nurglings to their desired destiny: the embrace of barhah.

The nascent Nurglings tore their way through the empty blocks of Quarlesbank to little avail. As Pitman had told them, much of Malton was boarded up and abandoned by the ungrateful breathers. Feeling the pangs of hunger, both in their rotting guts and within their otherwise stoic spirits, the Nurglings turned south.

The Nurglings unleashed in Quarlesbank.

Ephraim's Speech

Dear Friends:

You have known me as Ephraim Pitman, the dissolute and obsequious heir of the Pitman family fortune. In this persona, I have encouraged you all to stand up against the restless corpses writhing through the bowels of Malton. And from our earliest days together, you have risen to the bloodiest challenges. Nearly six months ago, we abandoned dull, secure Augarde Street in Quarlesbank for the eternal battleground of Chudleyton. For nearly six months, we've been up to our armpits in an endless, cyclic tide of rotting gore.

Has it been glorious? Hardly. Caiger Mall is one of the last bastions of balance in Malton. Life and death have struck an ageless bargain here. It wears on me, my brothers, and let me tell you why. This little island of clockwork stagnation is a sign of the times. The trouble is not that Zack shambles forth again and again. This balance here belies a greater imbalance. Look out across the city and you'll see safe, boarded-up neighborhoods abandoned by the living with nary a rotter to tear it apart. The sad truth is that the quick outnumber the dead almost 2-to-1 and yet Caiger is ruined time after time. We survivors have not forgotten how to fight. We have forgotten why.

So today, I won't speak to you as Ephraim Pitman but with an older voice, the voice of Issachar Ward. I was once a man of mercy, once a troubadour of the apocalypse, and am now fallen. But what I found in falling was how to rise. Perhaps you have heard a strange word whispered in the dark or glimpsed it in the blood-smeared graffiti: barhah. It is a word from the other side; Zack brought it back with him. How can I give you a taste of barhah? Many if not all of you have slept the restless sleep and yet you never knew barhah. You clung to the slippery warmth leaking from your brains and knew nothing of barhah or else forgot. But I have died so many times, following the drone of humming generators back to the world of the living until the weariness of it became crushing.

In the coiled depths of my moribund cortex, it occurred to me at last: what if I didn't go back? This was my first inkling of barhah. Perhaps some of you have been tested by this same doubt, felt it sitting like a lump of human flesh in the pit of your guilty stomach. Ask yourself -- where does this doubt come from? Malton is a ceaselessly turning wheel, spinning an illusion of change. Perched upon a spoke, we pretend to have direction and goals. But look down at the wheel from above: the motion blurs the spokes and the wheel becomes a smooth, forever-featureless disc. The barricades go up, the barricades go down. Supplies are found and spent. The people are born and die and rise again and again in this meaningless prison. But they do not truly rise.

What makes this slavery possible? It is such a simple thing, a thing you have spent so much time thinking about but really you have never thought about it at all. The needle. The needle pins us to the whirling illusion, the endless cycle of punishment. The needle will not let you die nor will it give you more than a fleeting whiff of life. The needle is hypodermic despair, a vaccination against choice. Revivification dissolves the consequences of our actions, reducing everything we do to dumb vanity.

Barhah is the path to freedom. Barhah is the way of meaningfulness. But I'll warn you, there are rotters who are just as much prisoners as those caught in the turning of the wheel. You cannot rise without falling. And you who have labored in Chudleyton, fighting on the spokes of the wheel of punishment, you are ripe for falling. There are some of you who can be free. Who has the courage to start down the road towards Barhah? Any of you who do, come to Ridleybank. That is your homeland and there is great work to be done there.

Beliefs

The basic goals of the Nurglings are driven by three tenants of belief, symbolized by the three-lobed pockmark of Nurgle.

First, Life is Delusion: every beat of the heart, every breath drawn is a delusional denial of the natural destiny of all things, which is freely-chosen, permanent undeath.

Second, Delusion Proceeds From The Needle: the delusion supporting the denial of freedom, whether imposed on oneself or by others, is perpetuated by and only possible because of revivification.

Third, Barhah Is Freedom: barhah means overcoming the delusion but is not merely the renunciation of revivification.

While the Nurglings venerate brain rot as an act of the most significant commitment to barhah they do not hold that it is a reliable path to barhah. As Pitman warned, it can also be a prison that prevents the realization of barhah. Furthermore, the Nurglings do not view barhah as the discrete endpoint of a spiritual journey or even a philosophical position so much as an experience of freedom from the illusion of life. In this sense, it is analogous to political activism: the meeting of ideology and action.

The Nurglings are therefore not Barhah Fundamentalists in the traditional religious meaning of that term. Although they reject the sedentary proclivities of harmanz as part of the delusional survivor mindset (and indeed one of its chief expressions), they harbor no necessary opposition to trans-mortal tactics excluding dedicated death cultism. A revivified Nurgling will pursue the same goals as an undead one, proceeding according to whatever options his current state allows, but without any concern for whether he lives or dies. In this same vein, revivified Nurglings take no offense to being attacked by other zombies. The Nurglings do strongly reject, however, the tenants of dual naturism as an obstacle to barhah and yet another neurosis of the delusional survivor mindset.

Rules

The Nurglings do not accept zerging tactics or text rape. If you see a Nurgling doing these things, please contact us with a screenshot.

The Sermons of Ephraim Pitman

The Pure Fight

You can't think of them as the enemy. That's yet another survivor delusion. The harmanz and us form a symbiotic circle. But the living harman mind is incapable of truly perceiving this. The living contemplation of undeath produces all kinds of neurotic behavior: barricade plans, revive points, "holding ground," etc. And it eventually spins into total madness: dual naturism (disassociative disorder), randomness cults (psychopathy), and ultimately PKing (sociopathy). Neither are zambahz immune to this. The echo of the needle rings in many undead brains. This is where life cultists and death cultists come from, not to mention the flightiness of the big hordes. If a zambah excepts Brain Rot before this echo is silenced, undeath will be a prison. True Barhah comes before Brain Rot.

We Nurglings fight the pure fight. We're not harmanz disguised as zambahz, like the bigger hordes tend to be -- planning and fiddling around and eventually stalling out because of boredom. Rather, we are on the path to shedding the survivor delusions and abandoning harman neuroses. The pure fight is not against the harmanz but rather against their madness. The barricades are to the material world what denial is to the psyche; so we hammer them down. Our infection is an invitation to be free of their sickness. Every kill is a cure.

But we also don't measure our success in converts. It is a long, long journey away from the harman mindset. Our patients must undertake it inside of themselves. Freedom cannot be forced. It is a happy thing then that by treating them, we also treat ourselves. We're an esoteric group, it's true. We're not open to all-comers. But we're glad to help where we can.

Barhah Strategy

Strategy defines our purpose; our tactics achieve it. As barhah is a strategic matter, let's always ask ourselves what we want in contrast to the survivor mindset. Survivor gameplay aims at imposing a static order on Malton. Our gameplay must be dedicated to realizing Malton's chaotic potential.

Ridleybank, the Homeland, is an instructive example of the survivor mindset at work in zambahz. Superficially, it is the opposite of what harmanz want: buildings all dark and ruined with their doors hanging loose. But this, too, is a kind of static order. This is what zambahz who still think of themselves as harmanz would produce. The RRF is ultimately just an undead version of a survivor group.

This is not because the RRF employs tactical organization. This is because their strategy is take and hold. Their strategy is not what I would call barhah. Now, the strategy of barhah does not preclude organized tactics generally. There are tactics, however, that tend to imprison zambahz in the survivor mindset. The line can seem very thin if you do not have a clear understanding of barhah.

For example, when we smash open a building, kill or chase away all the harmanz, bust the gennie, and ruin it, what should happen then? What further action justifies the investment of so much AP? The survivor mindset, which is unfortunately our default, is to defend our investment and keep it dark and ruined. Rejecting that urge does not mean we cannot be tactical; it means we must first think strategically -- and do so as zambahz.

Harmanz believe that the value of their actions depends on how long the consequences endure. If they recapture and fortify a mall only to have it ruined a day later then they say their efforts were wasted. This is because anything that disrupts their imposition of order defeats them. Therefore, if zambahz ruin a mall and it is repaired and barricaded the next day we zambahz should not say our efforts were wasted. To do so is to think like harmanz.

Now, that does not mean we should only and always strike, ruin, and move on. The harman attempt to impose order comes down to a strategy of defending resource buildings. Disrupting the harmanz sometimes entails tactically sticking around. But this is different from "holding" a building. A zambah standing in building is like a barricade; it makes the survivor attempt to impose order more expensive.

But a zambah is not a barricade. Barricades are the harmanz' second best weapon in their war to make Malton static. A barricade is frozen AP, like a zambah who has run out of AP. When we try to hold buildings, we are reducing ourselves to a piece of barricade. This is okay for when we "sleep" but otherwise? How boring! No wonder then that so few play zombahz these days. This is what I mean by the survivor mindset marginalizing zambahz.

Only when we stop thinking like harmanz can we start playing like zambahz. In Urban Dead, unlike for example Walking Dead, zambahz are not mindless props in a story about harmanz fighting each other. We are the antagonists. Without us, there is no story -- no Malton -- no Urban Dead. And yes, we can act tactically. But those tactics must always be founded on barhah strategy, otherwise the story will fizzle.

Today, harmanz outnumber zambahz nearly two to one. What that translates to is wide swathes of Malton where the game has basically ended. When I talk about barhah, I am trying to explain how this happened. It's not the harmanz' fault; they're doing exactly what they should. It's zambahz who are playing like harmanz because they never heard of barhah, or think its some religious idea, or just a slogan grumbled while eating bra!nz.

On Death Cultism

I have been opposed to death cultism from the beginning, citing it as a part of the delusional neurosis afflicting harmanz (the worst cases of which self-identify as "survivors"). But I also see a tendency among the Nurglings to avoid transmortal tactics, which is simply the contradictory disorder.

The clearest example is asking for death from fellow Nurglings. Any Nurgling who finds her- or himself revived should simply press on with the cause. But there has arisen a tendency to feel useless and vulnerable and want to escape back into animated death as soon as possible. This is what is truly meant by "the needle is anti-barhah."

What is NOT meant is that the needle is the irresistible nemesis of barhah. Anti-barhah is a state of mind -- again, the worst case possible is what I call the delusional neurosis of harmanz. This disorder manifests in obsessive compulsive and paranoid behaviors: stocking up weapons and supplies, claiming and fortifying territory, and ultimately genocidal aggression against zambahz. This last symptom marks the transition point between neurosis and psychosis.

This delusional neurosis develops from obsession with the feeling of vulnerability. Freedom from that obsession, and ultimately from any feeling of vulnerability, is the true barhah path. Barhah itself is the brotherhood of fearless undeath. This is ultimately why I named us the Nurglings.

Zambahz who become paralyzed, as it were, with the feeling of vulnerability upon being revivified have not experienced true barhah. I think this might be my fault, for overemphasizing the importance of undeath. We zambahz are not really about death or undeath -- barhah is more like the No Death. With barhah, the needle has no sting.

Swallow Their Brainz

It is not only the case that harmanz currently outnumber zambahz by nearly 2 to 1 but also roughly 69% of all harmanz are zambah hunters. This basically means that significantly more than half of all harmanz, even when adjusting for (the negligible amount of) active death cultists, have transitioned from delusional neurosis to psychosis -- and furthermore that their genocidal aggression has been and remains effective. You can see the effect this disorder has on the landscape: generators without fuel and powered-down radios sitting in abandoned, barricaded buildings stretching across entire suburbs.

To this, the Nurglings say Tear It Down, Break It Apart, Smear It, Smash It, Bash It, Trash It, Chew Their Flesh and Swallow Their Brains. Play on the fears that drove them insane until they can't take it anymore and finally, hopefully they can see past it and join us. By "us" I don't mean the Nurglings -- I mean the brotherhood of fearless undeath, barhah.

I mean, as bad as it is to spend 49 AP to successfully bash cades only 8 times ... imagine the despair you face spending 49 AP to find 8 clips when you have no pistol or the like. There is a reason these "people" are nuts!

Contra Siege Mode

We have to be mindful about not falling into the survivor mindset.

Let's go back to basics.

Take and hold is not our game. We can't win that fight and we get nothing from it. And yet here we are in siege mode. Siege mode is not necessarily contrary to barhah but I have concerns in this case.

So what is barhah strategy?

We have two goals:

Short Term - Feed: XP is a priority and the best way for zombahz to get it is by eating harmanz

Long Term - Carnage: have fun by roaming Malton destroying things and killing

When zombie players get invested in take and hold strategy, which is an uphill battle that a horde our size cannot really manage, they get discouraged and bored and stop playing.

The False Distinction

Barhah is the shining path to freedom -- the needles form the shackles of slavery. But the needle alone is powerless. What gives it power is the neurotic survivor mentality that is the true opposite of barhah.

Let go of thinking like the harmanz. It's the harmanz who are obsessed with hording junk picked from the remnants of consumer society. It's the harmanz who are compelled by some manic frenzy to maintain the status quo in repairing, barricading, and lighting buildings as if this was the past. The past is gone. In the past, the dead stayed dead. But, now, here we are.

This is why the harmanz hate us: because we remind them that they are the past.

Harmanz believe that "they" will "win" by eliminating all of "us." So you can see that the most important distinction for them is that between "us" and "them." For them, harmanz and zambahz are two irrevocably separate categories. It is the needle that makes this illusion possible. The thing we zombahz call barhah is the collective realization that such a distinction is in fact only an illusion.

In practical terms, this means realizing that when they stick you with the needle and your blood flows warm once again -- nothing has changed. You remain who you are, a zombah. Your thoughts are the same. Your goals are the same. You are still you. You can still tear down the barricades, bust the generators, and hack at the neurotic survivors.

So do not call on your fellow Nurglings to bring you "back" to undeath. Realize instead that you never left it. The survivors will still hate you and still persecute you, whether your blood flows warm or is coldly stagnant. Even in their neurosis, they have a dim understanding that the harman/zambah distinction is false.