To whoever said it (Kot i think?) why would the Tau be particularly chanceless? I thought it was the psychic-less species that were particularly defensible against Chaos. Although maybe my notion that the Tau don't psyke is just a misconception too?
They aren't psychic-less though, there is one case of Tau Fire Warrior being a Champion of Khorne. It's however mostly not a matter of "Chaos", it's mostly a matter of Tyranids, Imperium, Chaos, Necrons, etc. at the same time. Tau simply do not matter enough at the Galactic scale (there are minor races that are only mentioned few times in Canon that have domains bigger and are more powerful than Tau), unless they only exist for some "Just as planned reason", in which case it's still hard to fanthom them ever becoming really succesful. In the best case scenario (which assumes that Necrons and Tyranids do not exist, because while Imperium, Eldar, Chaos not murdering them could be justified, they literally lie in front of main Tyranid vector of attack on Galaxy, and Necrons want all living shit to die, so) for Tau they'd just replace Humans just like Humans replaced Eldar before, and then promptly get fucked due to developing psykers and so on.
Every faction is essentially fighting for survival, they just express it in different ways.
Exactly my point. If everyone is doing the same, whose motives are the "good" ones?
I mean, fuck, the motives of all of them aren't great either, but at least humanity fights for your own damn race goddamnit. For you.
I can respect that opinion, but at the same time the whole point of a fictional setting is that I'm not obligated to sympathize with the human faction because I myself have a human body.
Fair enough.
WHAOK humans aren't even the same species as me, they have psi genes and shit. Why should I sympathize with this particular alien species of furless apes just because they look mostly like me and are from a planet called terra? May as well say the Eldar are the good guys then, because they're basically humans too.
On outside. Internally their biology is fucking insane, and by insane I mean they're further away from you than you are to dinosaurs. WH40k humans are direct descendants of modern humanity from Earth (which, by the by, Terra is) with little to no mutations.
So muchos heresy con this thread... Only Kot makes the emperor happy! The rest of you prepare for reeducation camps!
Praise be.
Sorry to go in a diffrent direction, but is that assuming that the ethereal's are actually....tau rather than some sort of warp based beings or something? I mean they came out of basically nowhere, right.
Xenology, which is oop, hinted towards the Eldar theory being true, the Eldar kidnapped a queen from a colony based species called Q'orl who used pheremones as part of their language to make an 'uncorroded swarm' after the Q'orl were infected by a warp plague and aided in finding a cure by the Eldar. A while later Ethereals popped up and took control of the tribal Tau. I personally doubt GW will go that route if they ever bother explaining it, linking the Tau to a race of bugs that have never appeared in any actual capacity beyond a single utility item in Dark Heresy just seems like a bad move likely to alienate Tau players, and Q'orl are too similar to Tyranids in core concept to be introduced into tabletop to get them established first
Eh, we don't really know. They probably aren't warp-based beings, as they have bodies made out of matter, and generally share the same trait, of having really little to do with Warp, with the rest of their species. They could be dropped off by some other race (Eldar? Necrons? Humans?), they could be pretty much Tau versions of Emperor. Most evidence really points to them being product of genetic engineering, since they share the same "mind-control" traits with a xenos race on the other side of Galaxy, with said xenos having half-recorded history, half-legends of "human-like" (which people take as either Humans or Eldars, but tbh, anything remotely humanoid would be "human-like", like Necrons, for Q'orl, as they are the local space bugs) creatures stealing one of their Queens for whatever reason.
Could you clarify what you mean by "we" humanity isn't a unified whole and quite a few societies try a great deal to distinguish guilt versus innocence.
Humanity as a whole. The fact you weren't part of Nazi regime or ain't related to Kim Jong Un doesn't make them different species, and heck, to most extent, most societies did a great deal of bad shit in their history, as world generally got better only in the last one-two hundred years or so.
I've heard it was Tzeentch. The fact that warp storms showed up just as humans were going to nuke the primitive Tau, storms that lasted several millenia and when they finally subsided, the Tau came out swinging under unified leadership, suggests some Chaos dickery.
That's the point. We have 0 idea, it could be Eldar, because >Eldar, it could be Necrons, since they probably needed a meatshield to at least soften up the initial Tyranid assault, it could be Deceiver, judging by some recent lore, who really says cryptic shit that might be related to Tau and their role in the Galaxy, could be Mechanicus loons, could be Chaos, could be (very unlikely and mostly meant as a joke, before you ask) Orks, since they seem to share some traits with The Beast era Orks. That's the point, evidence is lacking and sometimes contrary, though one thing is considered most likely - they didin't do it alone. They could have, but most probably didin't.
As far as I know the Tau do are resistant to warp corruption. Instead of hearing voices and stuff they don't hear anything or just static over the radio or something.
However there's a difference on that and being physically resistant to chaos. The line seems blurry and change depending on the author and such, but it seems chaos once manifested in reality can physically affect things. Ie a deamon stabbing a guard, but sorcery over living things (ie making guards levitate and explode) needs something to get a hold to, a flick of a soul or something and Tau just don't have enough or at all.
But of course lore chages and all I don't know if that's true anymore.
As I said, there was literal Tau champion of Khorne (the novelization of Fire Warrior game, which is actually very good book. Kais literally screaming "Blood for the Blood God!" helps to explain how the fuck single Fire Warrior got so deadly pretty well tho. Also, it's canon), so that's also not enterietly true. They are more resistant, but not fully.
I don't really see the Necrons being involved. Their AI tech isn't really all that great, canopteks are technologically advanced but are very far from intelligent, they mostly rely on necrodermis and phase tech to be much use at all, while simple Tau camera drones are borderline sapient. There's only one canon named Necron into fleshy stuff and Szeras doesn't seem the type to create a species or even control one. The Tau also completely lack any actual warp protections beyond being the spiritual equivalent of dry toast so being an anti-chaos weapon seems unlikely for that reason as well.
It'd be like Fantasy Dwarves having the no wizards rule but not getting their magic resistance stuff, a flaw not a feature.
The Necrons aren't fond of using AI but theirs is canon the best, and probably the first invented in the galaxy (don't see the Old Ones learning programming). In the old 3rd ed canon the C'Tan Void Dragon is either capable of controlling most all machines and AI and is also likely the source of much of humanity's technology invented after the Dark Age of Technology (so all in all it's rather fortunate ironically that the mechanicus have been stifling innovation), though the mechanicus are also possibly stripping away their humanity on the whims of a toaster god. In the new fluff this is more or less the same but we do get one notable canon fluff of one of the Necron tomb worlds' AI glitching out over the millennia, reprogramming all of its Necron guests - assuming command despite having been invented as a caretaker program, attacking other tomb worlds with its necrons to continue conquering and reprogramming with no end limit. I'm not sure how powerful an AI with the computational power of Necron science and the space of a planet is, but for that matter there isn't much detail over exactly how intelligent even their lesser autonomous machines are - the scarabs, spiders, wraiths and other janitor bots. I wouldn't use sapience as a judge for the complexity of Necron AI, especially since in 40k the real challenge is creating AI that doesn't develop its own will - with the newfluff glitched tomb world being one such notable example where a Necron AI fucked up and stopped being subservient. And then of course there's the oddity of the actual Necrons themselves, but to put things into context: The C'Tan in both new and old fluff have conscious thoughts because the Necrontyr built their minds for them; Necrontyr computer science was quite literally godly. How much of that knowledge some Necron Crypteks or the C'Tan still have is pretty unknown, because the Necrons don't like communicating with the species that make good fluff. But from what we do know, Necron AI is immune to chaos, sapience (sans the one notable exception) self-building, repairing, capable of communication, receiving and processing a wide spectrum of information (light, sound, magnetic fields and so on) and is capable of lasting eternity.
So you have a race of people who in their infancy are about to be exterminated by Imperials when their planet is engulfed in a warp storm for thousands of years. When the warp storm ends, what remains of the planet is not a gibbering mess of chaos spawn, but a technologically advancing and emerging power that is untainted by chaos - being a race of young, short-lived scientists that have incredibly weak warp-signatures. They make use of advanced technology and AI, and have very little knowledge or experiences dealing with Chaos. Where they have eradicated growing Chaos incursions, they have done so not realizing that there was more to the incursions than unusual xenos rebellions, with the few exceptions of Tau who haven't gone insane upon learning the truth being Farsight - who is notable for having stumbled upon some technology which messes with time and is anti-demonic.
That to me speaks to the Tau being the product of either interference from Necron Crypteks, C'Tan or an Old One remnant. If there was an Old One remnant left alive when that warp storm hit the Tau homeworld (or indeed, if the Old One remnant caused the warp storm) then it's plausible that that Old One was capable of protecting the Tau homeworld the same way Emps covered Earth. We also know that the Old Ones are capable of and regularly engineered other species to fight for them in the War of Heaven, and from the Krork we also know that the Old Ones were capable of programming an instinctual knowledge of technology into a species. The genetic caste system and the ethereals controls over them would be of no issue to an Old One remnant. It would also reveal that the Old One remnant had changed priorities, from engineering a species capable of fighting the materially powerful but warpfully weak Necrons, to the warptastic chaos.
The Necron theory rests on the Necrons or C'Tan being involved, as we have seen them be involved with humanity previously. The Necrons possess all the technology needed to shield a world in perpetuity from the warp, with the Cadian pylons being the most dramatic example. We also know that they still possess, and that their Crypteks still continue to do, all kinds of experiments and shenanigans with time and the genes of species. Most notable would be the pariahs or human blanks, who were engineered by Necrons as an experiment against the warp. The low-warp signature of Tau and the ubiquitous of their technology harkens to this and the Necrontyr, and I find it more likely that if it was the Necrons, the Tau were experimented upon by a Cryptek and not the Void Dragon. This would also fit right into the Necron agenda, as they have been continuously seeking ways to eliminate the warp's influence over the materium
Could be Tzeentch, but then unless this was some Nth dimensional Vostroyan roulette strip poker chess, it doesn't make much sense to create a race of blueberries that are pretty efficient anti-Chaos weapons.
I had a ridiculously long tinfoil theory on this lost somewhere withing the confines of this thread pages. Could also be the Deceiver playing the Nth dimensional Vostroyan roulette strip poker chess with Tzzentch, Cegorach, Emperor and Creed.
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Topic: WH40K discussion thread: from Tyran's heart I stab at thee. (Read 1044591 times)