Green Dark Angels in the heresy?

[Valkyrion]

Although I can't find the source, they repainted their armour green to remember caliban and distinguish themselves from the fallen, right?

 

Is there enough of a a fluff justification (Honouring their homeworld) to have a a green dark angels heresy force? Obviously, Caliban hasn't yet been destroyed and there are no fallen so....thoughts?

[Allart01]

I spoke with Dominick Oedinger at the Forge World Open Day 2017, while he was working on some preliminary art for Angelus (the black book the DAngels were supposed to be published in at the time), and I remember him telling me one of the specifics of that commission was to avoid green on those Dark Angels. 

My takeaway (but these are no longer his words, just what I thought I could read between the lines) was that they were saving that as a way to distinguish and characterize Calibanite (read: pro Luther) Angels further along the line. I think this is the reason why you see virtually no green on the Angels in Book 9: Crusade.

Of course, a lot of plans seem to have changed in the meantime (and in 2017, that short story by Gav Thorpe with recruits from Caliban painting a pauldron green was already out) and the heraldry of the First Legion leaves you a lot of room for personalization. 

Personally, I feel that COMPLETELY green armour would definitely be a post heresy thing, but a transitional heraldry -Disciples of Caliban style, let's say- would be fair game for a Chapter of "your dudes" within the Legion.

Edited June 13, 2021 by The_Bloody

[Grotsmasha]

Although I can't find the source, they repainted their armour green to remember caliban and distinguish themselves from the fallen, right?

 

Is there enough of a a fluff justification (Honouring their homeworld) to have a a green dark angels heresy force? Obviously, Caliban hasn't yet been destroyed and there are no fallen so....thoughts?

 

Official lore states that Calibanite DA's were allowed to paint their left pauldron green. Although there is no official lore to support this, with so many of the other Legions having alternate schemes, who's to say that there wasn't a Company / Chapter within the Legion that had all green armour.....

[Marshal Loss]

The Legions are huge, and the Dark Angels are particular are often spread across the galaxy with little regular contact with the main body of the Legion, so with the above two posts I think there's plenty of room to do them in green/use green elements without worry. It's not much of a stretch.

[LameBeard]

I agree. Remember how the Serated Sun went crimson while the rest of the Word Bearers remained grey? And then Lorgar decides he likes it and rolls it out to the rest of his dudes. I don’t see why the Lion couldn’t do something similar. Maybe some company commander didn’t like serving alongside Ravenguard and broke out the paint pots as a way to show “we’re different”.

 

And Justaerin etc are black already, foreshadowing the Black Legion, some Imperial Fists are mostly black foreshadowing Templars etc.

[Gattopardo]

The Heresy is a very large canvas, so everything is possible, but for me...I think all green armour on Heresy era First Legion is going a bit too far. I think there's a couple of problems with it. 

 

Firstly, there isn't anything in the established lore that provides support for it, so it's fully in the realms of coming up with your own stuff. Which is fine of course, but...

 

Secondly, it just sends problematic signals to me, in that it's such a huge part of the Dark Angels' identity that they were black armoured, and their colour scheme only changed with the fall of Caliban. So to go against that, for me, you'd need some real strong narrative reasons to make it make sense and not jar. 

 

Now I think this is very different once you move away from all green armour. Using green as an accent colour makes loads of sense. And you could go beyond that actually - a quartered black / green scheme would be cool too, without breaking that (very personal and subjective) distinction between pre- and post-Heresy Dark Angels.

 

If I really did want to do all-green Heresy era Dark Angels, I think I'd be tempted to do them as a band of Calibanites loyal to Luther over the Lion (or possibly actual Heretics fighting for the Warmaster, albeit out of a motivation to save / preserve Caliban). The direct support for that in the Lore is a bit sketchy in that as far as I'm aware, Luther's forces had black armour, but I think this approach is a bit more consistent overall with what we do have.

 

Just my perspective obviously. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it!