Dark Angels Organizational History

[Phoebus]

I don't know to what extent this interests members of this forum. Personally, I've been curious to what extent one could piece together the main characters of the Dark Angels Chapter. I spent some time perusing through the various Codices, novels, and articles published by Games Workshop and Black Library.

Obviously not everything matches up neatly. To make all the news reconcile, one has to come up with a neat reason as to how no less than five (!) Company Masters of the Dark Angels presumably met their end sometime between 997.M41 and 999.M41 (four of those positions actually change name in 999.M41).

There are also three issues that I didn't try to reconcile:

1. Codex: Angels of Vengeance shows the three Battle Company Banners and references them to Company Master Belial, Company Master Sheol, and Company Master Sammael, respectively. Sheol can be managed in, but Sammael's history has clearly been changed in the intervening years. His progression to Grand Master of the Ravenwing not only makes no mention of him being Company Master of the Fifth, but specifically qualifies he came to the Second Company as a Sergeant.

2. Warlords of the Dark Millennium - Asmodai makes mention of a Company Master Charon... but does not mention which company he leads. Rather than guess, I have chosen to omit poor Charon. I'll make an attempt to reach out to Gav Thorpe and see if he wants to give poor Charon a home, though. Stay posted, I suppose!

3. Imperial Armour Volume Five - The Siege of Vraks Part One operates on a clearly different timeline than the Codices, as Azrael is stated as being Supreme Grand Master as early as 821.M41. "The Warp did it!" has a lot of uses, but a 118 year time-jump that goes unmentioned in any other material is a bit of a stretch. My convenient solution is to assume the Company Master who accompanies Azrael to Vraks, Orias of the Third, did exist... but that "The Siege of Vraks" chronicle is a flawed document written by Imperial scribes who wrote it well after the fact... and, in the absence of any lore regarding Supreme Grand Master Niberius, simply assumed Azrael had been in command back then.

Note, this is NOT a chronological chart. It's impossible (I think) to accomplish this for the Dark Angels, as the lore provides specific dates for only a few individuals. Thus, this table merely aims to show which officers occupied the known major offices of the Dark Angels Chapter, as far back as 897.M41. Prior to this date, the line of succession is not clear enough; names and specific dates are not provided.

Legend:

Each cell contains a name, the date (or closest approximation) the character assumed his office, the source material indicating said date, and any amplifying notes.

The top name in each column identifies the officer that can be assumed to be in command circa 999.M41.

A red block indicates a known death.

A gray block indicates someone who has been replaced in that office, but whose fate is unknown to us.

[C:AoD] Codex: Angels of Death

[C:DA] Codex: Dark Angels
[DV] Dark Vengeance
[MoS] Master of Sanctity
[TPoK] The Purging of Kadillus
[TU] The Unforgiven
[WotDM - A] Warlords of the Dark Millennium - Azrael
[WotDM - B] Warlords of the Dark Millennium - Belial
[WotDM - E] Warlords of the Dark Millennium - Ezekiel

If you can think of any that I have missed, please let me know!

[Guest]

Didn't Ravenwing lose 3 Masters in the space of 100 years after Gideon?

[Phoebus]

Didn't Ravenwing lose 3 Masters in the space of 100 years after Gideon?

No, the period you're referring to is referenced to as "The Blackest Time" in Codex: Dark Angels (6th Edition) , and it occurred around 666.M38.

[Guest]

My mistake I just recalled it from memory. :)

[Phoebus]

No worries!

[ValourousHeart]

I always understood that the GMs were picked from the 1st company... And the 2nd company GM had to be both RW & DW.

 

So Sammie moving up the ranks of RW, then moving to DW, then becoming a GM over the 5th, and finally being made GM of the RW seems like a very logical progression.

[Phoebus]

The problem is, no source post-Angels of Death mentions Sammael commanding Fifth Company, and the most recent lore explicitly states he went from being a Sergeant in the Ravenwing (albeit one that obviously was his commander's protege) to Grand Master of the Ravenwing upon Gideon's death. The Inner Circle ratifies his promotion immediately, as shown in Warlords of the Dark Millennium and "A Hunt in the Dark."

[Phoebus]

Sorry, I forgot to say this: you are obviously correct, progression through the Deathwing is a requirement for one to become a Master. Sammael appears to have been an exception in that he earned the rank of Sergeant, was inducted into the Ravenwing, and was then unofficially initiated into the Inner Circle by Gideon - not unlike the case of Sergeant Kaelen, from the short story "Unforgiven," by Graham McNeill.

[shabbadoo]

Progression through the Deathwing is required, but not necessarily progression through the 1st Company (the term "Deathwing" having that annoying dual meaning and all ;) ).

And nice chart!  Lots of blanks in there, which just means a lot of stories could be written...

[Augustus]

Great chart Phoebus.

It might be helpful as well to have all the named Company Masters and Supreme Grand Masters etc sorted by title.

 

(Stretching) But The Dark Angels reuse names so it might be a different Azrael?

[Phoebus]

Thanks, shabbadoo, and agreed. One note about that: there's a ton of empty space, but it's not necessarily in the white cells.

 

What do I mean by that?

The white space underneath Sapphon's name, to use him as an example, doesn't really mean anything. I don't think there is any lore stating when Sapphon was made Grand Master of Chaplains. It could've been just recently, or it could've been over a century ago (and he thus could've served under Naberius as well as Azrael). That's why I was keen to express that the chart isn't an indication of chronological order.

 

By contrast, look at Fourth Company. We don't know for sure when Fraciel died (just that it occurred a few years before 949.M41). We have no idea when Sheol assumed command - just that he was no longer in command by 960.M41 (the dates associated with Pandorax, during which Boaz is in command).

 

The closer one gets to 999.M41, however (by which point we have names assigned to each prominent office), the harder it is to be creative. Well, unless you decide one of the named characters abdicates his station in favor of your own, or is slain outright!

Augustus,

 

Can you expand on what you mean by sorting those characters by title?

[Gillyfish]

That's a really interesting chart Phoebus. One thing that strikes me is the apparent degree of attrition amongst senior members of the Unforgiven. Some of them are in office for as little as thirty years and you might reasonably have expected them to be there for longer.

 

One thing I have picked up from the forthcoming Angels of Caliban novel elsewhere on the Board is the concept that the original Legion had officers who sat outside the standard organisational structures and were activated to form ad-hoc formations to deal with specific threats (like the original Death and Ravenwings). That's similar to an idea I had had quite a while back - that the Inner Circle might have additional officers who led formations in the absence of Company Masters, librarians and the like. If an echo of that structure exists in the modern Chapter(s) that could help explain what happened to some officers and you could also argue that the records are pulled together from what is know from the Imperium rather than the Dark Angels' own records.

[Phoebus]

Gillyfish,

 

Re: the attrition rate... agreed. My personal explanation has been that, as we draw closer to the Thirteenth Black Crusade, more and more threats are piling on the Imperium, which results to ever-more casualties among senior cadre (as, among the Adeptus Astartes at least, they tend to lead from the front).

 

I definitely like your theory, however. Interestingly, however, most of the lore examples of "additional officers" leading non-standard formations have been Interrogator-Chaplains. Sadly, the game itself precludes Interrogator-Chaplains from leading a Lion's Blade.

 

Warning: off-topic tangent.

 

 

That in turn has led me to wonder at the Chapter's surplus of Interrogator-Chaplains, who outnumber conventional Chaplains and Company Masters combined. I was prepared to attribute this to the idea that the Dark Angels are modeled after a monastic knighthood in the vein of the Christian military orders (e.g., Knights Templar), but is this an Adeptus Astartes-wide phenomenon? The Blood Angels, too, have more Sanguinary Priests than they do Captains. Point of fact, as long as each Company of a Codex Chapter has a Chaplain already assigned to them, the existence of a Reclusiam basically guarantees that there will be more Chaplains than Captains.

 

[Isiah]

Nice stuff Phoebus :tu:.

[Phoebus]

Thanks, Isiah!

[Augustus]

Oh. Like

Known 3rd Company Masters: Belial, Jimbo, Phoebus, etc etc

Known Supreme Grand Masters: Azrael, etc etc

[Phoebus]

I see what you mean.

 

I actually did compile such a list to use as reference material for a novel I've been working on for, oh, several years now. Past 897.M41, though, there's really not much. There's a handful of names - most of them belonging to Supreme Grand Masters - and you're lucky to get a specific year to go with them.

[Augustus]

Thanks! A while back, someone created a list of all the names* of the Fallen. A Book of Salvation if you will. Perhaps we can do the same with named Dark Angels characters from novels, books, and audio dramas.

[Isiah]

Augustus, well worth undertaking. Bellicose created a list of Unforgiven named individuals here a few years back. It was pretty comprehensive and, at the time, up to date.
 
For reference it currently resides on the Dark Fortress and is in dire need of an update <_<.

 

Cheers

I