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The Tau's purpose in the galaxy is to serve as an example to other Xenos.

That example being: poke the Imperium and, eventually, it will turn around and End you.

If the Armless Wonder has no trouble beating the crap out of Humanity's best in the 41st Millenium, it should be no surprise that more competent forces- from the Orks, to Eldar, to Tau- have no trouble turning aside the "might" of the Imperium.

Abaddon didn't take Cadia easily. He was victorious, yes, but at great cost, nearly to the extent of a Pyrrhic victory.

*MY* favorite theory leaves both of those out, and has the Tau being manipulated by the last Old One. The Tau, unique among the galaxy's powers, are dynamic, intelligent, and creative. Humanity has a lifespan at least three times that of the Tau- the Eldar a thousand times greater- and neither race is capable of many of the technological feats the Tau have made in the last 6,000 years. Of all the wars and all the weapons employed against Chaos and the Necrons, only one was never fully brought to bear. for it was never truly finished. It may be that the Tau are destined to create a control mechanism for the Orks, and use them to crush the Tyranids, Chaos, the Necrons, and Imperial Cult, and to bring peace to the galaxy.

DAoT Humanity would like a word. What the Tau do now is not particularly impressive, as nothing they currently field was not fielded (and done better) by Humanity at a previous point in their history.

In fact, pound-for-pound, the Tau are no more advanced than the Imperium.

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 raiden wrote:
Tau iirc were in a warstorm and were advancing for 10k years. (Or 50k read this a long time ago)

What is known is that only 6,000 standard years ago, in the 35th Millennium, an Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleet had discovered the Tau homeworld of T'au and determined that its population of sentient xenos were a primitive people at the Stone Age level of development who had only just mastered fire.

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Tau

6,000 years to go from throwing stone spears and barely mastering fire to star ships and rail guns.

In contrast, humans discovered fire 125,000 years ago, and we still haven't sent people to another planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

Humanity's stone age ended somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Age

The Tau advance much faster than humans do. Considering their shorter life span, it isn't unreasonable to conclude that Tau are, individually, much smarter than individual humans of the Imperium.

We have no idea how much time passed for the Tau while they were in that Warp Storm. For all we know, while 6000 years passed in Realspace, fifteen million years passed in that storm.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 raiden wrote:
Tau iirc were in a warstorm and were advancing for 10k years. (Or 50k read this a long time ago)

What is known is that only 6,000 standard years ago, in the 35th Millennium, an Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleet had discovered the Tau homeworld of T'au and determined that its population of sentient xenos were a primitive people at the Stone Age level of development who had only just mastered fire.

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Tau

6,000 years to go from throwing stone spears and barely mastering fire to star ships and rail guns.

In contrast, humans discovered fire 125,000 years ago, and we still haven't sent people to another planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

Humanity's stone age ended somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Age

The Tau advance much faster than humans do. Considering their shorter life span, it isn't unreasonable to conclude that Tau are, individually, much smarter than individual humans of the Imperium.

We have no idea how much time passed for the Tau while they were in that Warp Storm. For all we know, while 6000 years passed in Realspace, fifteen million years passed in that storm.

They were not literally inside of a warp storm. Passage to them was blocked by a warp storm.

The history of the Tau, from first-contact to now, posits that unknown events, during the time the Warp Storm was active over their homeworld, allowed for a startling jump in their technological and societal levels. In fact, the faction requires this mystery to exist. It's the whole point of the question of "where did the Ethereals come from?", "what's with those crystals?", "Is it pheromones?" and so forth.

The Eldar don't "do" non-psychic tech (even the rifles are made of wraithbone and psy-plastics), the Orks can't do anything on the level the Tau have (and why would they?), and no one else, other than Humanity, is in that corner of the galaxy. There is an implied time-manipulation effect going on before the second encounter with the Tau and their new, shiny Gundams.

The topic is theoretical at best.

Do the Tau have a greater purpose (other than being a product line to attract anime fans)?

We don't know, GW has never said. Everything beyond this point is nothing but speculation.

Of course there's a sinister purpose behind the Tau, this is Warhammer 40,000.

Will that purpose ever be revealed to us, the players?

Probably not.

That is because Xenology is written from an in-character perspective, and the characters writing the book are largely insane and incompetent.

Minor point... the first war the Necrons lose with the Old Ones is not the War in Heaven, we're not even given a name for that farce. That isn't started until after the Necrons have made contact with the C'Tan and are given the tools to effectively wage war against the Old Ones. This war became the War in Heaven, as it was the war that saw the most-destructive weapons unleashed.


Eldar do perform crop manipulation. Many RTs trade with them for these modified crops, as they grow better in less-fertile soil on worlds in the Imperium. In fact, this is quite a dangerous risk, as the money to be made from xenoflora is lucrative, but most RTs don't have the charter to strike these deals (and most of the Imperium doesn't trust these kinds of crops anyway, so they're sold them unknowingly).

Such an arrangement is mentioned in the first Eisenhorn novel, as they attempt to infiltrate the cabal while undercover as an Agri-concern seeking to buy xeno-engineered seeds.

There's also the fact that Farsight is wielding what is probably a Warp Weapon, which is prolonging his life... so there's all kinds of propaganda to spin around that.

The Tau aren't really nice folks, they just have good PR. Join the Tau Empire and have a complaint? You disappear into a re-education center and are never seen again. Your family is either told that you never existed, or told to ignore it and work for the Greater Good.

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:

Why did he have a crisis of conscience?

Because the War in Heaven was his idea, and the C'tan was his idea, and turning on the C'tan was his idea.

He realised that his entire life was one mistake after another and had led to the destruction of his people - not on a physical level, for they were still a powerful empire, but culturally and spiritually, as almost all of their individuality and emotion had been lost as a result of his actions.

Why did it take him 60 million years? Wouldn't 1 million years be enough? A hundred thousand? Ten thousand? After all, if certainly looks like, after all this time, the Necrons seemed to awaken just as the Eldar fell, so the 'Crons couldn't get their asses whooped by the Eldar.

The Eldar were fighting the Necrons sixty million years ago, during the War in Heaven (this is when the Old Ones created them and the Krork)... not anywhere near the current era (though Iyanden has been kicking the Necrons' asses for 60 million years... they never stopped.)

The War in Heaven lasted thousands of years. I'd hazard to guess that more things died than have ever been alive since then. The entire face of the galaxy was changed. And, yes, sixty million years is a long time, but when he left the galaxy, he wasn't in a hurry. He might have been slow-boating it... though even at relative speeds, the universe is really, really big. Then he ran into the Tyranids (who slow-boat it between galaxies), turned around and flew back.

Of course, even giving the AdMech that much credit is too much credit, because the AdMech exists only by tapping into the latent powers of the Void Dragon. Without it, humanity's already poor technological capabilities would be that much worse.

Given that the C'Tan are considered the gods of the physical realm, and the effects of their existence is still felt, tens of millions of years after their defeat, it would probably be safe to say that the influence of the Void Dragon has shaped the technological advancement of every sentient species, with the possible exception of the Eldar, who were contemporaries with the C'Tan during the War in Heaven.

... except he was locked in a box on Mars long before the Tau entered the Bronze Age, meaning that he really couldn't influence much of anything, assuming the box keeps him locked. If not, it's safe to assume that the more he is capable of, the more he has corrupted the AdMech with his presence.

The Nightbringer was sharded 60 million years ago, and yet all living creatures fear Death.

would any of these races have the ability to engineer or influence the Tau and what would be their motives?

The Tyranids would not, they have no reason to.

The Necrons would not, they don't need to build their own slave-races.

The Eldar might, but they chose a really bad place for them if they're supposed to oppose Chaos. They're on the far side of the galaxy from the EoT.

The Kroot lack the means.

The Vespid lack the means.

The Hrud don't do that.

The Emperor doesn't like aliens, why would he create aliens to work alongside human? He was very much a species-centric individual... to the point of exterminating entire cultures of non-humans for no reason other than they existed.

The Gods of Chaos would not, as that would be stupid.

The C'Tan did not/do not create.

The Old Ones died long before these creatures existed.

... and yet, Slaanesh was born.

Chaos mumbo-jumbo aside, Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle weren't born. THEY always existed. Slaanesh didn't. That's why it needed to be born.

And it engineered its own birth. Chaos mumbo-jumbo is what applies when speaking about things that reside wholly in the Warp, because the constraints of our physical reality simply do not apply there. Things like physics are quaint and humorous notions.

And? The presence of something in realspace, which *is* bound by linear time, is no indication of what was in the Warp.

Nice theory, but flawed. The Tau aren't blanks or Untouchables. They have a dim presence in the Warp, but that is not to say that they have no presence in the Warp.

Should all of the other races vanish, you can be sure that the forces of Chaos will turn their attention to the Tau... and by that time, the Tau would have lost the naivety that keeps them alive right now.

Warp Storms affect Daemons as much as they affect anything else moving through that region of the Warp. It's a hurricane/monsoon/apocalypse weather formation formed of pure spite and anger...

... not even Daemons will try to float through that gak in most cases (though sometimes some do get sucked into it and then spat out on worlds trapped inside it, or the Warp simply spins them out through whatever Warp-tainted materials exist on the world to do so with... like windows and mirrors, which the Tau may not have possessed at the time).

However, as mentioned, Tau *are* hard to see. That does not make them *impossible* to see. When the Tau disappeared behind that storm, there were much more interesting things going on in the galaxy to draw the attentions of the daemonic.

It is also equally possible (and more likely) that GW simply did not consider this aspect of a Warp Storm. They might have thought "Ok, trapped in a Warp storm for five thousand years in Real Space aaaaaannndd.... they jump forward fifty thousand years in technology! Yes! WINNING! Tiger's blood!"

Uh, Sisters of Battle and Ordo Hereticus: Created M.36 - Previous precedence Sisters of Silence (dating back the Great Crusade even in books not affiliated with other Sisters) are basically whom the SoB are spiritual successors to. Ordo Hereticus is literally 1 model.

No. The only similarity or relation between the two is the fact that they both use the word "Sister". Otherwise, they have absolutely nothing in common.

The origin of the Adepta Sororitas is very well known, and they are not descended from the Sisters of Silence.

I'm really not seeing a spiritual succession between an order of Untouchables from a time pre-dating the Ecclesiarchy. and a penitent organization of women who worship the Emperor as an absolute god and, through that faith, manifest miracles, other than the usage of "Sisters" and the fact that both organizations are exclusively female.

I'm just not seeing it. That the Sororitas now crew the Black Ships is more an indication that the SOS simply doesn't exist anymore, or perhaps not in sufficient number to meet the demand, as this function was not why the SoB was created. I just don't think these two organizations have the ties through history. The SoB are wrapped up in the Age of Apostasy, Vandire, the Thorian Reformation and the establishment of the Ecclesiarchy as we know it today, rather than the Heresy-era Imperium.

That device is, currently, only theoretical and, possibly, entirely impossible as our understanding of physics expands.

The Tau have the best infantry rifle in the galaxy. The standard-issue Tau weapon is blatantly superior to the weapon of the Imperium's elite warrior class. In no way does a bolter compare favorably to a pulse rifle whatsoever. The Necrons and Eldar both are incapable of producing an infantry gun that hits as hard as a pulse rifle, or one capable of hitting at such a long range. The Tau Hammerhead, by virtue of range, firepower, or survivability, also compares favorably to every other main battle tank in the game. Eldar lack range, Imperials generally lack survivability and firepower- with occasional exceptions, like Vindicators, that lack range. The Tau are a special snowflake, because they are the ONLY faction in 40k still developing technologically.

The Conversion Beamer would like to have a word.

Also, I think it's less that the Tau have a small Warp signature and more that they actually are essentially very mild Blanks. This would explain why they can't be Warped while inanimate objects (which have no Warp signature whatsoever) can with ease.

But they can be. They can definitely receive the benefits of Warp-based "technologies" (is why Farsight is still alive), which implies that they are likewise subject to the corrupting effects of Chaos. If, say, a Tzeentchian Sorcerer were to blast a Fire Warrior with a Bolt of Change, you'd expect that Fire Warrior to sprout tentacles and beaks and otherwise collapse in a screaming, mewling pile of rapidly-mutating flesh.

The Conversion Beamer is man-portable. Especially if that man happens to be a Skitarii or Space Marine.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Conversion_beamer#.VCMRGJRdVKY

And in the Dark Age of Technology, they *were* very common. What the Tau now possess is *nothing* to the technological marvels Mankind possessed in its Golden Age, wherein the Baneblade was considered a light battle tank and the Rhino was just a tractor.

We lack sufficient fluff representative of the Tau to say for certainty whether they're immune to it. However, since they are explicitly *not* Untouchables, then the fact that they have no active psykers in their race (or do they? The Etherals might be, the pheromone thing is demonstrably false) doesn't mean anything. There's plenty of non-psychic races that are subject to psychic effects (such as the Necrons, both pre-and-post Biotransference)... and *there's* a race that didn't have any psykers at all and were not Untouchables.

However, the fluff we do have suggests that they are nearly-invisible in the Warp ("nearly invisible" is not "totally invisible"), and so are kind of a pain in the ass for a Daemon to possess... but if a Daemon were really interested in doing it, there's so far been nothing stating that it would be impossible.

Theoretical battles that have no depiction in the fluff, or even reference or implication, cannot really be used to prove a point.

Otherwise, I can simply say "the Tau exist to be exterminated utterly, because the Imperium is GW's favorite faction, and that's what the Imperium does to aliens" and that will be the end of that.

Isn't the Dawn Blade heavily implied to be a Necron artefact? Still, it's possible that it's a strange form of healing device that is just powered by Warp energies, somehow. We've seen weirder stuff being done with Warp technology. Regardless, you might be on to something, but the effects of a given spell don't necessarily have to mean the target is susceptible to Chaos. A good example is a Warp Lance from a Tyranid Zoanthrope - it's an explosion that just so happens to be powered by psychic energy (which is why I hate how Deny the Witch used to work), and only the ability to straight up absorb or negate Warp energy (for example, a Culexus) should do much good against that. There does seem to be a degree of disconnect between direct "spells" and the workings of Chaos. I imagine a Bolt of Change could be just as effective on a Necron Warrior for this reason.

Implied, but there's plenty of other sources it could be from (and, also, if it's pre-Biotransference, then it's just as susceptible to corruption as any other mundane object)... but we have to ask ourselves, why would an immortal robot need a weapon that drains life to make it live longer? That makes no logical sense from a CrypTek's perspective.

Warp energy is Psychic Energy is Daemonic Energy. It's all from the same source. The table-top rules, unfortunately, don't often take this into account or they use the same name for two or more different attacks when they are not identical. This is how it is with the Tyranids, in that their "psychic" attacks and such are not Warp-based, but instead are based on the Hive Mind... so the Untouchable trait possessed by some targets simply provides no protection.

Even better! The LR was a tractor, and the Rhino was a Jeep!

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
)... but we have to ask ourselves, why would an immortal robot need a weapon that drains life to make it live longer? That makes no logical sense from a CrypTek's perspective.

They weren't always robots.

Indeed. And in the Time of Flesh, even though they had no Psykers themselves, they were most-definitely affected by Psychic attacks, as when the Necrons launched their war against the Old Ones, they got wtfspanked by those psychic space-lizards.

Do Blanks not receive protection from Tyranids in fluff? I'm not sure, I've never seen it come up. I believe that the Warp is just a local (to the Milky Way) field of psychic energy, and that the Tyranid Hive Mind is essentially their own "Warp", which is incompatible and very different to the thing we call the Warp, but the "energies" are still roughly the same and follow the same rules, more or less (anything that doesn't involve Synapse or Chaos Gods). Still, there is definitely some degree of difference between psychic powers being cast on things and just the Warp corrupting and Daemons doing their thing. Necrons are much the same as the Tau in the sense that they have some degree of Warp protection. They can't be possessed or corrupted but they can be influenced by psychic powers, as far as I know.

Not that I'm aware of. Since they're Blanks, they're not subject to the Shadow In The Warp (and wouldn't be, anyway, if they were mundane people), but I've never heard of a Blank being able to ignore, like, the psychically-generated shrieks or similar Hive Mind-sourced "psychic" attacks of the Tyranids. I simply am not aware of any books covering such specific scenarios. I do remember, though, that Codex: Tyranids.... I wanna say 3E?... made it explicit that Tyranid Psychic Powers were not Psychic Powers as possessed by the other races, and explicitly did not use Warp Energy.

The Necrons, even in their current bodies, can most *definitely* be affected by Chaos. That is why they go to such pains to set up anti-Warp and Psychic Null Fields around their Tombs. It is even stated in Codex: Necrons that daemons love the Necrons for all their hyper-dimensional shenanigans, as these lead the Daemons to "new flavors of reality to corrupt".

If so, they chose a really bad place to stick them. There's a dozen Space Marine Chapters within spitting distance of their miniscule empire, and the Imperium is not exactly known for its friendly foreign relations.

Seems a super-risky gamble. "Might get Chaos attacked... or will almost certainly get exterminated by the Imperium of Man. Hmm..."

While the Warp Storm-fakeout is possible, there's too many holes in the theory for it to be plausible. Mainly, apart from the massive technological evolution of post-Storm Tau, they had (far more importantly) undergone thousands of years of cultural and societal evolution.