In 2010 I gave Tarkus a plasma gun purely because of its name. This was Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, on a laptop that sounded like a hairdryer, and the wargear screen had a better gun sitting right there with numbers I could see were bigger. I ignored them. The plasma gun was called the Final Absolution of Caliban, and its flavour text said the Dark Angels considered the name an insult and had “been heard to call for the Blood Ravens to suffer a similar absolution.” I was a year and a bit into the hobby, I had about four hundred points of half-painted Imperial Fists, and I thought this was the funniest thing I’d ever read in a video game.
Tarkus carried it for the whole campaign. I lost at least one mission I can remember because of it.
So when the new Dawn of War IV trailer dropped yesterday and the Dark Angels came screaming in to save Captain Cyrus and the Blood Ravens on Kronus, led by Lion El’Jonson himself, my first thought went straight to that gun, and the Primarch came second.
What the Dawn of War IV trailer actually shows
The Warhammer Community post is short. The Blood Ravens are back on Kronus, the recruiting world from Dark Crusade, and they’re losing. The Great Rift has cut them off from reinforcement, and Chronomancer Thothmek’s Necrons are sweeping across the battlefield when the Dark Angels arrive “in the nick of time,” with a bike-mounted Chaplain and Deathwing Terminators front and centre. The game is set roughly two hundred years after Dark Crusade. It now releases on 3 December 2026, a slip from the September date GW gave at Skulls, and the Commander Edition gets in three days early.
The earlier story trailer and the publisher’s notes fill in the rest. Both Chapters are fully playable Space Marine factions, the first time Dawn of War has given you two. The Blood Ravens get the smaller, stealthier missions and the Dark Angels get the big set-piece battles. At the end of the campaign the Lion takes the field himself, the first playable Primarch the series has ever had.
I wrote about the Blood Ravens and Kronus back when the game was first announced, and I’m not going to rehash the Thousand Sons theory here. It’s still the best fan theory in 40K and it’s still officially unconfirmed. What I didn’t think about properly back then was the Dark Angels, who got one throwaway sentence near the end.
The Blood Ravens collect other people’s relics
If you only know the Blood Ravens from the tabletop, the relic thing might need explaining. Dawn of War II and its expansions came with a loot system, and every piece of wargear had a little paragraph of lore attached. Somebody at Relic clearly had fun with those. A lot of the Chapter’s best kit turns out to have belonged to, or been made for, someone else.
The Barding of Ultramar is a suit of power armour the Ultramarines supposedly gave the Blood Ravens after a Blood Ravens strike cruiser turned up during a Tyranid last stand. Fine, that’s a gift. The Matchless Savagery of Russ is a power axe the Blood Ravens forged “in honor of Leman Russ,” and the description admits that the Space Wolves’ artificers took this as an insult, and “much bad blood remains between the Blood Ravens and the scions of Fenris.” Then there’s the plasma gun, which goes a step further than the rest: a Blood Ravens weapon named after the thing the Dark Angels spent ten thousand years making sure nobody talks about.
Lexicanum has it as a real entry now, sourced to the Chaos Rising wargear screen, which is how a lot of Dawn of War lore ended up on there.
Somewhere along the line the fanbase turned all this into “the Blood Ravens steal everything,” which was a meme on r/40kLore long before I was reading r/40kLore. I think it’s a bit unfair as a reading of the games. But the Chapter does have form. White Dwarf #412’s Blood Ravens feature puts the “rumours of the Blood Ravens seeking out knowledge and artefacts considered tainted or forbidden” right at the heart of why other Imperial institutions don’t trust them. And every one of their ships carries its own Librarium, with curatorial staff whose job is to write down everything that happens aboard and copy it back to the Chapter’s archive. They’re compulsive about it. Those records all end up in the Librarium Sanctorum aboard the battle barge Omnis Arcanum.
The Dark Angels keep secrets
The Dark Angels have the opposite problem. They know exactly where they came from and they’ve spent ten millennia making sure nobody else finds out.
The short version, for anyone who hasn’t been down this hole. During the Heresy, part of the Legion on Caliban turned on the Lion under his old friend Luther. The Lion came home, the fight between them broke the planet apart, and the traitors were flung across time and space by the warp. Those are the Fallen. The Lion vanished. Ever since, the Inner Circle has hunted the Fallen in secret, interrogated the ones it catches, and lied to everyone else, including most of its own battle-brothers, about why. I always liked how Imperial Armour Volume 5 handles this at Vraks. Azrael commits almost half the Chapter to the siege, and the book just says nobody except the Inner Circle knows why, before pointing out that there happened to be traitor Space Marines on the planet.
So that’s the setup. The Dark Angels are rescuing a Chapter that digs things up for a living and once named a gun to needle them about Caliban. I’d love to have been in the writers’ room when someone suggested it. I hope they went with it knowing what they were doing.
And then the Lion turns up
So yeah, the Lion. Big lad, sword, lion pelt on his shoulders, been asleep for ten thousand years. Came back in 2023. And what he’s been doing since he woke up is the bit nobody seems to be talking about with this trailer, which is weird, because it’s the bit that actually matters for the Blood Ravens.
He came back during Arks of Omen. White Dwarf #488’s The Knight of the Nihilus says he rejoined the Dark Angels “as their lord and master,” and that even he had no answers about what woke him or how he ended up walking the paths of an otherworldly forest. Mike Brooks’ The Lion: Son of the Forest covers the first stretch. He wakes with no memories in a place called Mirror-Caliban, a forest that lets him step between worlds, and the thing that brings his memory back is meeting a Fallen Angel named Zabriel. Zabriel stays with him. Since then he’s gathered a warband of loyalist Fallen, the Risen, alongside the Lion Guard auxilia.
Think about what that does to the Inner Circle’s secret. Ten thousand years of quiet interrogation cells under the Rock, and the Primarch himself is walking around the Imperium Nihilus with a squad of the very traitors they’ve been hunting. Openly, as far as I can tell from the novels.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know how far the novels have gone with the Lion actually confronting the Inner Circle about the hunt. I’ve read Son of the Forest and bits of the Arks of Omen books, and I came away unsure whether he fully understands what his sons have been doing in his name, or whether that conversation is being saved for later. If someone’s read further than me, I’d honestly like to know.
My first instinct was that this makes the Blood Ravens the worst possible Chapter to rescue. Picture it from the Inner Circle’s side. You have a Primarch who’s become very relaxed about the Fallen, and you’ve just parked him next to a Chapter that writes down everything, keeps copies, hoards whatever artefacts it can get its hands on, and has already made at least one joke at your expense. Every Blood Ravens ship has curators on board whose job is to record every event, and I assume that includes a Primarch’s bodyguard turning out to be Fallen.
Then again, I’m not sure the secret matters as much as it used to. If the Lion is walking around with the Risen, the Inner Circle has already lost control of the story, and the Blood Ravens writing it down is just one more record among thousands. There’s also that Lexicanum list of possible Blood Ravens progenitors, which includes the Dark Angels, filed under “general rumour.” If that rumour were true, the Lion would be riding in to save his own grandsons without either side knowing it, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about that.
I don’t buy it, though, and I keep coming back to the first reading. The Blood Ravens’ defining trait is that they can’t leave a mystery alone. Kronus gave them Necrons with a time-bending Chronomancer. Now they’ve got a Primarch, plus whatever the Dark Angels say or don’t say about why he arrived with the people he arrived with. I can’t see Gabriel Angelos’s Chapter saying thanks and leaving it there, and Angelos is Chapter Master now, so it’s his call.
Pete’s Salamanders and the Imperial Fists question
Small tangent. When I showed Pete the trailer at the garage last night, his only comment was that the Salamanders still haven’t had a Dawn of War appearance worth the name, and that he’d have liked to see the Blood Ravens get a Salamanders flamer with a rude name. He’s been painting Salamanders for over a decade and finished another squad of them that same evening while I based exactly two Fists. Fair enough.
It did make me check whether my own Chapter ever got a Blood Ravens “gift” in the old games. I’d swear there was something with Dorn’s name on it. I spent forty minutes on the Dawn of War II wiki and couldn’t find it. Could be I made it up. I also spent about a year in 2009 assuming the Blood Ravens were a proper tabletop Chapter and asked the guy at my local store for their transfer sheet. He was nice about it.
Back to Kronus. The trailer’s Deathwing are in proper bone white and the Chaplain’s in black, which you’d think a studio couldn’t get wrong, but I’ve seen enough licensed games to be relieved anyway. There’s also a lovely beat with the Chaplain on the bike, which suggests the Ravenwing are getting proper attention, and if you play Dark Angels on the tabletop the unit roster looks close to what you’d field yourself.
Chaos Rising came out sixteen years ago, which is about as long as I’ve been doing this hobby and comfortably longer than I’ve been a dad. For most of that time the Final Absolution of Caliban has been a line of flavour text. If the writers have any sense of humour, it’ll be sitting in a Blood Ravens armoury somewhere in the Dawn of War IV campaign when the Dark Angels walk past. The Lion’s points cost on the tabletop just went up eighty points, for what it’s worth, so playing him in the game on 3 December will be cheaper.
