Planetary Analysis: Caliban

Caliban is named rather purposefully after a tragically monstrous character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a sister setting to Fenris for the Space Wolves, Baal for the Blood Angels, and so on. Fitting the literary allusion of naming the Dark Angel’s Primarch after Lionel Johnson (a poet and author of The Dark Angel) rather than a mythological deity, Caliban is an embittered and antagonistic character bred of half-human parentage, not a great monster. The implied darkness, and potential malignancy works for such an obviously devious universe because this is literally the same world giving names such as “The Despoiler” and “Blood God”. The implication, and subsequent expectation from the original Traitor Legions is perhaps the Dark Angels would have turned, having some inherent bestial nature, a warping in their character from conception which leads to evil. They have reason to, and as notable author Gav Thorpe has stated, a spiritual weakness in contrast to Blood Angels having a physical weakness, but nobility of spirit and little doubt of their good heartedness.

The planet Caliban is a living organism, a blend of the gothic peculiarity and slightly intimidating force of say the lands in 1981 Excalibur, and a Lovecraftian entity. It’s brilliant conceptually to give thematic colour to a Primarch (essentially a demigod of humanity within the setting), and of particular resonance is that an inherently ‘magical’ and evil force permeating a world, as within the setting all magic is the force of Chaos borne from the psychic resonance and energy of the sentient species within the galaxy.

Caliban is the haunting nightmare that the child Primarch woke up to, the centre of battles he would never speak of, struggling against the exaggerated threat of privation, the wild without human company, and the megafauna constantly battling for supremacy. It is a struggle to even stay alive in Caliban, officially designated a “Death World” by the Imperium due to its inhospitality to human life, and it is made into the seat of a figure with a notedly ferocious temper, prowess, and ends justifying the means mentality for conquest.

The Lion is intended to be something of a coin-toss character, one of dubious loyalty, Byronic, intentionally ‘grey’ even for this setting. While an argument can be made that every single faction is oppressive and villainous when compared to any other fictional setting, The Lion and his Legion are always in the compromising position of being potentially corrupt, corrupted by Chaos. Corrupted not entirely by treason, but enough for half the Legion to fall, and no matter the realpolitik causing the division and result of factionalism and the destruction of their home, eternally subject to doubt and cursed.

Old Caliban, sundered Caliban from the breaking becomes an object of nostalgia, of mourning. It is also wrapped in the myth of what would become known as The Unforgiven defining themselves consciously by their atonement. In a somewhat recurrent archetype, these sons of the Lion, masters of The Rock carry a gigantic chunk of the old planet and whittle it into their gigantic star station, a headquarters that was once a home.

Caliban in recent lore has in an utter slap in the face and malicious irony been revived as Wyrmwood by the Chaos Daemon Vashtorr, clearly breaking The Unforgiven’s lies that Caliban was destroyed (and omitting the presence of anti-Imperium forces scatted and becoming The Fall) and making an even deeper mockery of what was intended to be a home. Caliban stands as interesting because it represents both the wide scale and constant battle of the setting’s universe, but also its allegory in relation to upbringing, parentage, and legacy. From a dark and twisted natural environment, the Dark Angels came to love the romanticism instilled within battle, making much of the ideals of chivalry and prowess. It becomes a forlorn thing to see the planet temporarily ‘defanged’ so to speak, stripped of its continent sized forests and magical beasts. Caliban becomes lost to the loyalists travelling the galaxy for war, then sundered apart. But while we have regrets about an upbringing, or feel hurt looking back even at the ‘good times’ in places long gone by; home is still home in the heart, and that heart echoes into the nature of the individual carrying the place in their mind.