COMMANDER DANTE

Chapter Master of the Blood Angels

To many worlds within the Imperium’s borders, the Adeptus Astartes are nothing more than a myth. Among those planetary populations enlightened enough to be aware of the existence of the Space Marines, many of those only come into their knowledge through the unwelcome brutalities of war. When their world falls to invasion or rises up in rebellion, it is the God-Emperor’s Angels of Death that answer the Imperium’s call. In this way, knowledge is too often bought with blood.

But there are always names that drift through the dark regions between isolated worlds. The names of heroes, spoken in whispers. The names of Mankind’s guardians; those warriors that walk the line between fact and fiction, prayer and myth.

Few are spoken by as many voices, and with greater reverence, than Dante, Lord of Angels. The Bringer of Light. The Bane of Daemons.

‘In the Time of Ending, we will see the final flight of the Dead Angel’s Host. They rise above us on howling wings. They fall upon us in a celestial storm. At their vanguard flies the Last Archangel.

To the Neverborn, he will be the Death-that-Soars. To you and I, he will be a mortal man bearing the immortal face of his fallen father. To the Imperium of Man, he will be hope.

A warrior of infinite courage. A soldier of infinite sorrows. Beware the golden mask that forever stares and never smiles, weeping tears of frozen gold.’

– From ‘The Mourner’s Prophecies’,

by Sargon Eregesh, Storm Oracle of the Black Legion

THE OLDEST SON OF BAAL

Commander Dante holds the bleak honour of leading the Blood Angels in the swansong days of the Imperium. He is the embodiment of every virtue in his Chapter’s long and glorious history, renowned as a paragon of the Blood Angels’ noble ideals. And yet, beneath his golden facemask lies a shadowed contrast, for the Lord of Angels bears the heavy weight of his Chapter’s secret melancholies.

Dante is noted in many of the Adeptus Terra’s archives as the oldest Space Marine warrior still alive in the Dark Millennium. According to Imperial histories, Dante has reigned for over a thousand years as Chapter Master, and served the Blood Angels for several hundred years before ascending to the rank of Commander. He lays claim to a Record of Triumph longer than the entire honour rolls of several Chapters founded in the twilight centuries of the 41st Millennium.

Somehow, this isn’t enough. As with all of its heroes, the Imperium’s official archives blend legend and truth with impunity. Facts become distorted by time, flawed retellings, and authorial myth-making. In an empire of a million worlds, there is no such thing as objective truth.

Perhaps, in his humility, Dante lets his legend grow even beyond its heroic boundaries because he knows Humanity needs heroes at the dawn of the End Times. Or perhaps he is simply too focused and dutiful to pay heed to the words of mortal men and women. His charge is to defend the Imperium, not worry as to how history will remember his name.

THE FIRST OMEN

The warrior who would become Dante began life as any other Blood Angel: born on Baal’s second moon, and growing to adolescence in the radiation-blighted deserts that cover the surface of Baal Secundus. The moon is an unkind home to those that claw out an existence on its back. At eleven Terran-standard years of age, like most of his peers, Dante’s growth was stunted by malnutrition, and his skin pocked by exposure to the rad-deserts of his homeworld.

It’s said that he showed no special promise among the tribesmen that reached the Place of Challenge; in the trials that followed, he neither killed with the greatest ferocity, nor amassed the highest soul-count. But he survived, and he conquered, standing with the victors when the burning sun set. He had earned his place among the Aspirants taken from their tribes and transported to the Blood Angels’ fortress-monastery on Baal itself.

In the Chapter’s vast, armoured cathedral, beneath the glowering marble gazes of Blood Angel champions throughout the Age of the Imperium, Dante was presented with the Sanguinary Chalice, and drank the synthesised blood of the Ninth Primarch. He fell into the ritual year-long slumber necessary for the process of gene-seed implantation, and was entombed within a sanctified sarcophagus.

It was here that the boy first drew notice from the Sanguinary Priests. While all somnolent Aspirants will dream visions of the primarch’s life and death, the child Dante cried out endlessly over the course of his year-long internment, shouting the names of fallen primarchs, dark gods, and long-banished Daemons, while drifting between consciousness and slumber, never truly rising to one or falling into the other. Many Aspirants die in their sarcophagi – it is simply the way of things. The weak will always fail, even at the first step. But no Aspirant had ever shown such torment, and lived to be freed.

Upon emerging, with the cancerous flaws of Baal Secundus shriven clean from his remade, angelic form, none of the Sanguinary Priests failed to note the marks left by desperate clawing at the inside of his coffin lid. And yet, there he stood among them: perfectly whole, perfectly composed, ready to begin his true training.

Some among the Sanguinary Priesthood believed this first omen signalled a swift descent into the maddened depths of the Red Thirst and Black Rage. Others pointed to Dante’s perfection after enduring what seemed like greater pain than any other Aspirant, and argued that it heralded only greatness.

A SON OF SANGUINIUS

A rarely-spoken truth, known only to the Blood Angels and their closest Successor Chapters, is that Dante was never destined to rise to the rank of Commander. This warrior, who now stands astride the Imperium in the burnished armour of a living legend, was a line officer that ascended to the highest position during one of the Blood Angels’ bleakest eras.

More than once, the Blood Angels have been threatened with destruction. In the final decades of M37, they were a broken Chapter, ravaged by the Black Legion on the world of Mackan during the tumultuous years of the Ghost War. Although the Angels restored their strength over the following centuries, for the first time it introduced the threat of mortality upon one of the proudest and noblest First Founding Chapters.

Nearly three thousand years later, in an event that would come to be known as the Kallius Insurrection, the Blood Angels would again taste the risk of annihilation, losing nine out of every ten Space Marines, and almost the entire Chapter Council. Three full Companies – including the young Brother-Captain Dante and his 8th Company – launched a devastating assault on Kallius’ Landing and its dependency worlds, in support of their overwhelmed Successor brethren, the Angels Numinous (more commonly known, because of their symbol, as the Blood Eagles).

World after world rose up in rebellion, insurrections spreading across the region and blanketing the sub-sector. Entire populations and ragtag fleets were led into battle by chanting Traitor Marines, clad in a panoply of colours, drawn from countless warbands. The Blood Angels found themselves tied up in protracted conflicts and trench wars, caught in a cobweb of a much wider heresy. As the weeks became months and the months became years, more and more of the Chapter arrived to punish, cleanse, and reclaim the rebellious worlds.

The Rolls of Honour run black with the ink of millions of enemies slain, but the Blood Angels suffered casualties beyond their ability to sustain a fighting front. With dozens of Imperial Guard regiments arriving alongside several relief Chapters, the Blood Angels withdrew from the conflict with their heads held high. Yet the bitterest blow was yet to be struck: it came as the remnants of their fleet mustered above Kallius’ Landing itself, when a Traitor armada broke from the Warp, hungry for the chance to wipe the Angels from the face of the Imperium.

The battle that followed lasted for three days of void war and vicious boarding actions, during which Dante and his warriors were responsible for the taking and scuttling of seven capital-class vessels. When the Blood Angels at last stood victorious and took stock of their losses, fewer than two hundred Space Marines clad in red still drew breath. The last surviving Sanguinary Priests and Chaplains came together in communion, electing the last-living Captain as the next Chapter Master.

Dante accepted the mantle of Lord of the Angelic Host, while still wearing his bloodstained, broken armour. It would be the last day he ever wore red, forever after to be clad in sacred gold. Not because he was the best or the brightest, but purely because he was the last man standing.

Such an ascension should have heralded a grim rule, but fate would tell a different tale.

THE ARCHANGEL’S MANTLE

Since taking the role of Chapter Master, Dante has led the Blood Angels into their most glorious and triumphant millennia since the time of the Scouring.

Logan Grimnar of the Space Wolves is perhaps beloved by the people of the Imperium above any other Space Marine commander, and Marneus Calgar is often considered the most respected by the other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. Commander Dante of the Blood Angels bears a reputation similar to theirs, but where the Great Wolf is celebrated by the populace for his wisdom as well as his warfare, the Lord of Angels is a distant, golden saviour - a hero of myth come to life. Where Lord Macragge is a composed, ruthlessly efficient front-line general admired for his acumen as much as his battle prowess, the Bringer of Light is an avenging angel, falling from the sky ahead of his brothers to strike the first blow.

No loyal soul would ever compare such exalted heroes – all are equal beneath the gaze of the God-Emperor – but over 1000 years of supreme service speaks for itself.

Dante’s deeds are already stained with the patina of mythic storytelling. Each fall of his axe ends the reign of a Daemon Lord. Each descent from above, flying on contrails of fire, spells the end of another rebellion.

Much of it may be myth, but much more of it is true.

Skarbrand, the Prince of Rage, the Exiled Son of the Blood God, fell to Dante at the Gates of Pandemonium. With the Daemon’s banishment, the creature’s armies soon lost their hold on reality, cast back into the foulness of the Warp with their defeated master.

The world of Terion, at the dawn of the 41st Millennium, saw Dante lead his Angels against an unholy alliance of Night Lords and the Traitor warband known to Imperial records as the Brotherhood of Darkness. Centuries later, Terion has been rebuilt into a paradise; all that remains of the war’s legacy is a monument to Dante, sculpted in marble and standing as a colossus in the capital city, with the statue’s outstretched hand reaching to the horizon, offering mercy to the citizens’ forefathers.

The cursed war-world of Armageddon remains the site of his most famous victory, where the Blood Angels rallied the defenders of the besieged hives Acheron and Tartarus, and Dante’s leadership was instrumental in devastating the Orkish hordes sweeping across the planet’s principal landmass. A generation later, his name is still spoken with reverent awe, and one of the Armageddon system’s deep space monitoring installations was named in his honour.

Dante has held the Blood Angels together during the tempestuous years of a civil war unknown to the wider Imperium of Man, and set whole fleets of Traitor vessels aflame with the wrath of his fleet’s cannons. Alone, he has taken the helms of hundreds of champions of the Dark Gods, keeping their tainted relics in stasis when they could not be destroyed, so that no others would rise as heirs to the blasphemous fallen.

And so, the legend thrives.

THE TIME OF ENDING

With his face shrouded by Sanguinius’s golden visage, he is the Bringer of Light, commanding some of the most loyal and mighty warriors ever to raise weapons in the defence of Mankind. In every battle, Dante is the lance’s thrust; the spear’s tip - he leads his Angels in a wrathful descent, their blades bared and thirsting for enemy blood. Though he is forever to be found where the fighting is thickest, Dante has never been too proud to cede honour to battle-brothers and other Imperial commanders, if his skyborne warriors are best used elsewhere, hunting particular prey or taking a specific objective.

In every battle, he will be seen at the head of his praetorians, the Blood Angels of the Sanguinary Guard, whose golden armour matches his own. Each of these champions of the Chapter are heroes in their own right, forgoing their chance at personal rank to remain by their master’s side. Each has served him for centuries; they are his weapons as surely as the Axe Mortalis and Perdition Pistol that he bears into battle.

On the rare occasions he takes to the field of battle without his closest kindred, Dante will lead a Company Captain’s Honour Guard, or even take temporary command of a Sergeant’s Assault Marines. The squads seconded to Dante never forget the privilege of being chosen to serve, and most adorn their armour in some way to acknowledge the honour.

In his millennia of humble service, the Blood Angels have cleansed entire sub-sectors, destroyed whole Renegade Chapters, and stood fast against the encroaching doom of the End Times. And through it all, the Imperium sees nothing but the unmoving, beauteous death mask covering Dante’s features.

However, what they see is a lie.

Without the mask, Dante’s face is a monument to one and a half thousand years of bloodshed and battle. He retains his angelic beauty, a gift of his primarch’s genetic coding, but the inhuman serenity of his visage is lined by tracks of weariness and ennui unknown to any other mortal. His hair, once gold, has turned as white as the marble statues cast in his image. He is old now. It shows.

The Blood Angels are a soulful breed, and their master exemplifies it above any other. Pale eyes stare out at a galaxy that holds nothing but war, populated by beasts and aliens that spill into Mankind’s domain in a never-ending tide. Dante knows there will be no final victory for the Imperium, yet defeat and surrender are anathema to his warrior spirit. The Lord of Angels is simply pragmatic in his infinite experience: he fights to survive, so that the candle of Humanity may light the darkness for a little while longer.

225 Points

UNIT TYPE: Infantry (Character).

WARGEAR: Artificer armour, infernus pistol, jump pack, frag and krak grenades, Iron Halo.

Artificer Armour: Artificer armour confers a 2+ Armour Save.

Infernus Pistol:

RANGE: 6"

STRENGTH: 8

AP: 1

TYPE: Pistol, Melta

Pistol

All Pistols are effectively Assault 1 weapons. A Pistol also counts as a close combat weapon in the Assault phase (pg 24 and 51 of the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook).

Gunslinger

All models with two pistols can fire both in the Shooting phase. This follows the normal rules for shooting.

Melta

Ranged weapons with this special rule roll an additional D6 when rolling to penetrate a vehicle’s Armour at half range or less. If the weapon is more than half its maximum range away, it rolls to penetrate as normal. See the Vehicles rules (pg 70 of the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook) for more details on armour penetration.

Jump Pack: Models equipped with jump packs gain the Jump unit type.

Frag grenades: Frag grenades are assault grenades.

Shooting

When a unit armed with assault grenades makes a shooting attack, one model can choose to throw a grenade, rather than using another shooting weapon.

RANGE: 8"

STRENGTH: 3

AP: -

TYPE: Assault 1, Blast

Assault

Models equipped with assault grenades don’t suffer the penalty to their Initiative for charging enemies through cover, but fight at their normal Initiative in the ensuing combat.

Krak grenades: Krak grenades are shaped charges, excellent for cracking the armour on light vehicles.

Shooting

When a unit armed with krak grenades makes a shooting attack, one model can choose to throw a grenade, rather than using another shooting weapon.

RANGE: 8"

STRENGTH: 6

AP: 4

TYPE: Assault 1

Assault

Unless used in assaults against vehicles or Monstrous Creatures, Krak grenades have no effect. When they are used in assaults against vehicles or Monstrous Creatures, krak grenades have the following profile:

RANGE: -

STRENGTH: 6

AP: 4

TYPE: -

Iron Halo

An Iron Halo incorporates a powerful energy field that can turn aside even the most deadly attacks. It confers a 4+ invulnerable save upon the bearer.

SPECIAL RULES: And They Shall Know No Fear, Descent of Angels, Independent Character.

And They Shall Know No Fear: A unit that contains at least one model with this special rule automatically passes tests to Regroup. The unit can move, shoot (or Run) and declare charges normally in the turn in which it Regroups (in addition to the 3" Regroup move). If a unit containing one or more models with this special rule is caught by a Sweeping Advance, they are not destroyed, but remain locked in combat instead. Additionally, a unit that contains at least one model with this special rule is immune to Fear.

Descent of Angels: A Blood Angels unit with this special rule can re-roll failed reserve rolls if arriving by Deep Strike. Also, due to the precision of their descent, it scatter D6" less (normally D6" rather than 2D6"). Other units in the Blood Angels army that can arrive by Deep Strike do so using the normal rules.

Independent Character: Independent Characters can join other units. They cannot, however, join vehicle squadrons or units that always consist of a single model (such as most vehicles and Monstrous Creatures). They can join other Independent Characters, though, to form a powerful multi-character unit!

Joining and Leaving a Unit

An Independent Character can begin the game already with a unit, either by being deployed in unit coherency with it or, if the unit is in reserve, by informing your opponent of which unit it has joined.

In order to join a unit, an Independent Character simply has to move so that he is within the 2"+ unit coherency distance of a friendly unit at the end of their Movement phase. If the Independent Character is within 2" of more than one unit at the end of its Movement phase, the player must declare which unit it is joining. If an Independent Character does not intend to (or cannot) join a unit, it must (where possible) remain more than 2" away from it at the end of the Movement phase. This is to make clear whether they have joined a unit or not. Note that, after an Independent Character joins a unit, that unit can move no further that Movement phase.

An Independent Character can leave a unit during the Movement phase by moving out of unit coherency with it. He cannot join or leave during any other phase – once shots are fired or charges are declared, it is too late to join in or duck out!

An Independent Character cannot leave a unit while either he or the unit is locked in combat, falling back or has gone to ground.

He cannot join a unit that is locked in combat or falling back. If an Independent Character joins a unit, and all other models in that unit are killed, he again becomes a unit of one model at the start of the following phase.

While an Independent Character is part of a unit, he counts as part of the unit for all rules purposes, though he still follows the rules for characters.

Look Out, Sir

Independent Characters pass Look Out, Sir rolls on a 2+.

Heroic Morale

A unit that contains one or more Independent Characters does not need a double 1 to Regroup if reduced to below 25% of its starting numbers, but instead tests as if it had at least 25% remaining.

Special Rules

When an Independent Character joins a unit, it might have different special rules from those of the unit. Unless specified in the rule itself (as in the Stubborn special rule), the unit’s special rules are not conferred upon the Independent Character, and the Independent Character’s special rules are not conferred upon the unit. Special rules that are conferred to the unit only apply for as long as the Independent Character is with them.

Independent Characters and Ongoing Effects

Sometimes, a unit that an Independent Character has joined will be the target of a beneficial or harmful effect, such as those bestowed by the Blind special rule, for example. If the character leaves the unit, both he and the unit continue to be affected by the effect, so you’ll need to mark the character accordingly.

Death Mask of Sanguinius

This ancient artefact resonates with the Primarch’s rage at Horus’ treachery, and can be used to call down a curse upon a foe.

Before forces are deployed, choose one enemy independent character: that model has -1 Weapon Skill, -1 Wound, -1 Initiative and -1 Attack (all to a minimum of 1) for the remainder of the battle. The Death Mask of Sanguinius otherwise follows the rules for Death Masks given in the Sanguinary Guard.

The Axe Mortalis

The Axe Mortalis is a master-crafted power weapon.

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Published in 2013 by Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

© Games Workshop Limited, 2013. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-78253-442-6

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