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2 discussions in one.
I've heard rumours that Eldar are in some way responsible for Tau as they are now?
Anyone have any information on this?
Also Tau don't really know what chaos is right? Is it possible mr Farsight has picked up the dawn blade (like fulgrim did with a sword) become corrupted and turned from the greater good. I mean it does leach the life from victims and give it to farsight.

There was some vague, nebulous implication published a long time ago that some fans inferred to mean that the Eldar somehow engineered the Tau, or planted the Ethereals among them.
These claims are just fan speculation and ad hoc explanations with no GW certified verification.
In a nutshell, this claim is nonsense.

Tau know what Chaos is. They fight it all the time, they're just not as affected by it. The Perdus Rift Anomaly is like an Eye of Terror in Tau space. Its perimeter is quarantined and patrolled by the Air Caste.

The Dawn Blade is not of any currently playable race. The race that made it is extinct. I believe this is all we know...

I disagree that the Tau know what Chaos is. They have no real understanding what the warp is and so no understanding of Chaos (expect for farsight who I think has an idea nothing more). The tau are a race that is all about logic and reason they as of right now wouldn't be able to understand Chaos and if told about it they would only treat it as nothing more than superstition. To me at least part of the idea behind the Tau is them being naïve about the true horrors of the galaxy.

The Chaos gods have not shown any real interest in the Tau as of yet and the Tau (from what I have read) have largely fought against CSM not demons. They also don't seem to fight the CSM that often either. Mainly fighting the IOM, Orks, Nids, or Dark Eldar/Eldar.

I don't believe the Tau a less effected by Chaos it just that Chaos has no real interest in them right now and the way Tzeentch schemes he could have already affected them a long time ago and is just waiting for scheme to come to pass.

 Gunhead1 wrote:
I disagree that the Tau know what Chaos is. They have no real understanding what the warp is and so no understanding of Chaos (expect for farsight who I think has an idea nothing more). The tau are a race that is all about logic and reason they as of right now wouldn't be able to understand Chaos and if told about it they would only treat it as nothing more than superstition. To me at least part of the idea behind the Tau is them being naïve about the true horrors of the galaxy.

The Chaos gods have not shown any real interest in the Tau as of yet and the Tau (from what I have read) have largely fought against CSM not demons. They also don't seem to fight the CSM that often either. Mainly fighting the IOM, Orks, Nids, or Dark Eldar/Eldar.

I don't believe the Tau a less effected by Chaos it just that Chaos has no real interest in them right now and the way Tzeentch schemes he could have already affected them a long time ago and is just waiting for scheme to come to pass.

I agree from what I have read. The Tau may have fought demons, but would have believed them xenos or otherwise mutations. Such as the SM thought when they first encountered the touches of Chaos. Even the 1k sons didn't know about demons, and they spent a lot of time swimming in the warp.

 Gunhead1 wrote:
I disagree that the Tau know what Chaos is. They have no real understanding what the warp is and so no understanding of Chaos (expect for farsight who I think has an idea nothing more). The tau are a race that is all about logic and reason they as of right now wouldn't be able to understand Chaos and if told about it they would only treat it as nothing more than superstition. To me at least part of the idea behind the Tau is them being naïve about the true horrors of the galaxy.

The Chaos gods have not shown any real interest in the Tau as of yet and the Tau (from what I have read) have largely fought against CSM not demons. They also don't seem to fight the CSM that often either. Mainly fighting the IOM, Orks, Nids, or Dark Eldar/Eldar.

I don't believe the Tau a less effected by Chaos it just that Chaos has no real interest in them right now and the way Tzeentch schemes he could have already affected them a long time ago and is just waiting for scheme to come to pass.

Fair to say that Tau don't entirely understand Chaos. They understand enough about the warp to use it for travel, so they obviously know it's there and that it has characteristics that bend time and space.

I don't think Chaos discriminates when it comes to infesting. If they get a chance, they flock to it. So it's not that they don't want to bother the Tau, it's that they can't. There's just not enough of a psychic connection to the warp by which to possess them. Furthermore, the Tau remain too mentally disciplined to be affected.

I don't think Tzeentch has much influence over the Tau. Certainly not enough to be scheming and manipulating them. And even if he could, he'd have no mechanism by which to exert his will, beyond throwing some demons at them and hoping for the best... Which kinda sums up the way ALL of Chaos is forced to regard the Tau.

They understand that the warp can be used for travel, but it does mention in the Tau codex that when they examined a IOM warp engine they had no idea how it worked let alone be able to reverse engineer it. Not saying they couldn't but its is going to take them a long time to do it.

The Tau seem to less affected by Chaos because the Tau don't have superstitions nor are they religious the two easiest ways for Chaos to corrupt a race and we can't forget that the IOM was the same way before Chaos came in and ruined the party (though the IOM still had religious factions hiding in it).

Also Tzeentch schemes (from my understanding) start more like this a person stepped here so that in turned effected this which effected this and so on until the desired outcome is reached. Not always effecting a person's belief system until they are worshipping Chaos.

From what little I have learned from the Farsight supplement codex (don't own it yet waiting for the hard back version, though have read some pieces so anyone with more information feel free to correct me or add to) it looks like he had a major battle with Chaos demons realizing that the ork gods and human gods can be real and at the same time realizing that they are functioning well without the Ethereals. This could led to civil war for the Tau with Chaos coming to corrupt the Tau population when their whole belief system has been destroyed and them weak to outside influence. Now I'm not saying this is where it is going to go, but it is a possibility. No one is immune to Chaos expect nids and maybe Nercons though they don't have souls. The Tau I do believe have souls its just that they are tiny and bland that is why Chaos ignores them. That and plot armor.

 Gunhead1 wrote:

From what little I have learned from the Farsight supplement codex (don't own it yet waiting for the hard back version, though have read some pieces so anyone with more information feel free to correct me or add to) it looks like he had a major battle with Chaos demons

Was it a Chaos infestation that spread through demonic possession?... Or did Chaos just sort of throw some demons at the Tau and hope for the best?

I haven't read it yet either, but I'm going to bet it was the latter. Even the Eldar are in awe of the Tau's remarkable resilience to Chaotic corruption.

It seems to me that everyone is virtually immune to Chaos except the Imperium... and maybe Orks.
To illusrtate:
The Eldar plot armor from Chaos is strong self-discipline and Soul Stones.
Dark Eldar plot armor is living in the webway and torture.
Necron plot armor is their negative, black hole-ish souls.
Tyranid plot armor is the Shadow in the Warp.
Tau plot armor is strong self-discipline and their tiny, unappealing souls being too small to climb through.
Orks... I don't know if they're corruptible or not.

I think all that happened is Farsight found a super killy sword and said "Hey, I believe in being deadly in close combat so I think I'll use this." Meanwhile, the chronophagous blade secretly lengthens his life. The End. (Note the lack of Chaotic shenanigans.)

Orks aren't easily corruptible because Chaos offers them nothing. Gork and Mork are far stronger than Chaos will ever be and Orks only respect strength.

Tau aren't remarkable nor especially resilient. Just living creatures and thus as interesting as everyone who isn't a soulless space robot. Chaos likes emotions....

The supplement seems to provide 2 Answers:

1) the Blade is of ancient origin, from a extinct civ. Titles may carry over but Farsight is the original because the blade keeps him alive.
2) as a high ranking commander of the Empire, Farsight wasn't able to identify the demons. If the Tau would know about chaos, why should the caste dedicated to oppose threats run into chaos so misinformed?
Because the Tau don't understand the concept of chaos, of gods. Sure there is a phenomenon, the warp, there is a rift, something unfriendly lurks there.

Additionally, we have the hot-headed fire caste, the Allies of the Tau, DE entertaining themselves with Tau, and many other hints that nothing says Tau are immune to chaos. They may be low on the dinner chart of chaos. Doesn't mean there not part of it.

The map of the Galaxy has dead worlds. Remnants of civilization who didn't pass the test of time. Some of them may have fallen to chaos. We have a few corrupted ones in the HH series. We have xenos who know chaos.

Why should we stumble into the trap of : chaos vs humans = xeno aren't a valid target of chaos?

Chaos may corrupt. It will ruin whoever joins it . It feeds upon emotions. It is a mirror of the material realm.
The first galactic wide war stirred the warp and created chaos. Without humans. Eldar gave chaos a portal.
Without humans involved. This galaxy has enough fools to let chaos in, to feed upon.

Perhaps Tau technology repels demons while in the warp?

The single book where the "Eldar made the first ethereal" is hinted at, is Xenology. AFAIK this was never taken up by any other book.

Tau don't know exactly what Chaos is, but who does. But Tau are learning through experience with fighting Chaos forces. It is just a long way.

At least for warp travel, Think of the Tau ships as a boat. It can move over the surface of the water but the water wont drain into the boat because they stay on top of it. Now take the IoM's warp cruisers. These are nuclear submarines, They can travel at high speeds for much longer times, while submerged, but unless the ship is water proof it will immediatly flood with water.

Their warp travel is essentially the same. The tau merely skim across the surface of the warp in much shorter bounds while Imperial warp ships use their geller fields to dive through the warp. The results are the same, one of these is entirely fethed if something goes wrong and gets flooded with demons, the other just drops back into realspace because they bounced off the surface.

That is why their warp travel at least is safer. As for not beeing able to be touched by chaos. Keep in mind the Warp was either created or simply adapted into use by the old ones as far as old fluff goes, the races they created were given access to it. The psyker mutation in humanity, the entire eldar race, even the orks unique way of dealing with the warp are nothing more and nothing less then genetic acces codes to am engineerd system. Tau don't have the psyker gene, likely they just weren't created to have it. Its a hell of a lot harder to get a computer virus when you don't run a standard operating system, I think the same applies here. The tau are literally just not created with a warp acces key in their genetic material.

There were indications given before that Ethereals aren't actually tau, and a diffrent races intervention in their natural development. Could Eldar farseers have the foresight to create Tau-like beeings to control the direction of the Tau race's future, advancing their technology at an alarming rate and steering them into a single unified direction? Probably. Did they? Thats where it gets tricky. Its not actually specified who or what the Ethereals are, who created them or who assumed their guise. Could have been Tzeentch it could even just be a natural mutation heck there are also explanations that have nothing to do at ALL with any of the other factions in 40k. Hints are all that were given, sporadic ones at best. And how they apply in the current fluff is ANYONES guess.

 Archonate wrote:

 Gunhead1 wrote:

From what little I have learned from the Farsight supplement codex (don't own it yet waiting for the hard back version, though have read some pieces so anyone with more information feel free to correct me or add to) it looks like he had a major battle with Chaos demons

Was it a Chaos infestation that spread through demonic possession?... Or did Chaos just sort of throw some demons at the Tau and hope for the best?

I haven't read it yet either, but I'm going to bet it was the latter. Even the Eldar are in awe of the Tau's remarkable resilience to Chaotic corruption.

It seems to me that everyone is virtually immune to Chaos except the Imperium... and maybe Orks.
To illusrtate:
The Eldar plot armor from Chaos is strong self-discipline and Soul Stones.
Dark Eldar plot armor is living in the webway and torture.
Necron plot armor is their negative, black hole-ish souls.
Tyranid plot armor is the Shadow in the Warp.
Tau plot armor is strong self-discipline and their tiny, unappealing souls being too small to climb through.
Orks... I don't know if they're corruptible or not.

I think all that happened is Farsight found a super killy sword and said "Hey, I believe in being deadly in close combat so I think I'll use this." Meanwhile, the chronophagous blade secretly lengthens his life. The End. (Note the lack of Chaotic shenanigans.)

Chaos to me never just throws forces out there and hope for the best. There is always a goal and that goal can be just one person with the goal of the war to get a point across to that person. The goal Chaos could have had was to show Farsight that the Ethereals were not needed for the Tau race to continue. Not only that, but to break his trust in the Ethereals as well as to show him a taste of the true horrors of the galaxy. Chaos never just fights for no reason there is always something they are after even Khrone is after blood and skulls with ever fight.

Now as far as the Eldar creating the Ethereals I believe this has already been covered by others pretty well. To me the Ethereals are just a piece that makes up the Tau race. The piece that leads the rest of the pieces that makes up the Tau race. Though if it is true that the Ethereals are no longer needed to govern the Tau race (Farsight and his empire are proof of this) and this idea spreads from the Farsight enclaves this could be a big problem for the Tau destroying their empire due to civil war caused by those who wish for more governmental power from the Ethereals who don't wish to give up their power or due to the rest of the race deciding they no longer need the Ethereals or third option attacking the Farsight enclaves . Once again this is a possibility of what could happen. One doesn't need to corrupt a race to destroy it or break it one just needs an idea and a way of getting it across and from the sounds of it Chaos succeed in doing this they just have to wait for the idea to spread across the rest of the empire.

The Tau have colonised many human world... have taken many human prisoners and have made many human allies and taken them under the protective wing of the greater good.. Now you cant make me believe that not a single humans has given the Tau any info about chaos?? Hell yeah they know what chaos is... Its just that they are not affected by it as humans are... Humans are o so easily corruptable while tau are far less enticed to corruption...


And who knows what the Eldar have done... when humanity was barely walking they were thousands of years old... maybe a farseer (as some already have and tried to turn the heresy in their favour... read the book Legion) anyway,.. maybe a farseer has forseen a terrible evil on the rise and guided humaniy in the early years to kill it? Maybe a farseer is responsible for the birth of the emperor?


And ehm,.. to Archonate... the Eldar are deffinately affected by Chaos,... just in another way,.. their lust and joys are exploited and driven to the extreme... BAAAAM!!!! Birth of a Chaos god Now dont tell me Eldar are not affected,.. every eldar that dies goes to this specific chaos god... Its just that Spirit stones and the webway/torture thing holds off their biggest fear... becoming a puppet of Slaanesh!!

Boniface wrote:
I've heard rumours that Eldar are in some way responsible for Tau as they are now?
Anyone have any information on this?

The Tau codexes refer to "lights in the sky" the night the Etherials came down out of the mountains.

This hints that something brought the Etherials to T'au.

Xenology (a BL publication that Tau fans absolutely hate) hints that the Eldar were responsible for the creation of the Etherials (not the Tau race).

The book explains that the Eldar had asked the Q'ral (a race only referred to in this book) for one of their young Queens.

They said no and so the Eldar launched a raid to steal one. The raid was successful. The Q'ral are an insectoid race that uses pheromone control.

The Magos Biologis incharge of the autopsies claimed that the Q'ral pheromone gland and the Etherials forehead diamond/gland/bone were one in the same.

This suggests that the Eldar had created a master race to guide the Tau.

It is also worth noting that the T'au system was overtaken by warpstorms almost immediately after its discovery. This could hint that the Eldar were protecting them.

Xenology is also the first book to give Necrons emotions and a plot line that wasn't just "kill everything". Most people tend to overlook that.

The main problems people have with Xenology is that it depicts Tau as having a multi-toed hoof. Though the models show a horse/cow hoof there are several other forms.

So before anyone jumps in here and shows their complete lack of biology knowledge:



Behold. It is entirely possible that Tau have many variations of hoof. If they can have 5 different subspecies living together it is entire plausible that they have different types of feet.

Saying they all have the same feet would imply that all Tau have wing membranes under their arms or big crystal things growing out of their heads.

Another thing of note: The book came out before Shadowsuns model. So there was no previous female reference for the illustrator.

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:
The Tau have colonised many human world... have taken many human prisoners and have made many human allies and taken them under the protective wing of the greater good.. Now you cant make me believe that not a single humans has given the Tau any info about chaos?? Hell yeah they know what chaos is... Its just that they are not affected by it as humans are... Humans are o so easily corruptable while tau are far less enticed to corruption...


And who knows what the Eldar have done... when humanity was barely walking they were thousands of years old... maybe a farseer (as some already have and tried to turn the heresy in their favour... read the book Legion) anyway,.. maybe a farseer has forseen a terrible evil on the rise and guided humaniy in the early years to kill it? Maybe a farseer is responsible for the birth of the emperor?


And ehm,.. to Archonate... the Eldar are deffinately affected by Chaos,... just in another way,.. their lust and joys are exploited and driven to the extreme... BAAAAM!!!! Birth of a Chaos god Now dont tell me Eldar are not affected,.. every eldar that dies goes to this specific chaos god... Its just that Spirit stones and the webway/torture thing holds off their biggest fear... becoming a puppet of Slaanesh!!

I would like to remind you that the vast majority of humans do not know anything about chaos. In fact the only people who know about chaos are; Inquisition/SoB/Grey Knights and Chaos Cultists. Now which of these two groups is going to talk about it with heretical xenos? The other groups are aware that there are really funky xenos out there but not where they come from or what they wanted.

Additionally Tau are not necessarily more resistant to corruption but rather are not worth devoting any major effort to corrupt as they have little to no warp presence. It would be like a tiger hunting a gnat, the tiger just isn't going to expend effort.

I agree that there is no way to know as GW doesn't like to expound on the tricksey plans of the elfs.

It is actually the other way around for the eldar. They were not affected by chaos but rather went out of control due to their own emotional proclivity to extremity and their emotions effected the warp so much they birthed a chaos god. They are the favored snack of slaanesh but have you ever seen a possessed eldar in the books, I can't remember one? Either way their culture effectively makes them the most chaos resistant of the "good" races. The only races that have a more comprehensive anti warp plan are the DE and necrons.

I think it's plausible that Tau's lack of warp presence makes them immune to Chaos taint. There's no way to say for certain, though. Another facet that makes them much less likely to be corrupted is their philosophy. A Tau who believes in the Greater Good and understands his role in society isn't going to have many levers for the Ruinous Powers to manipulate.

"The road to hell is littered with nice guys with good intentions"
-Alice Cooper

Lack of presence wouldn't stop anything from doing anything. It just means the bigger/badder warp entities are usually not interested. Similar to if a gnat angers me enough I will get out the fly swatter and kill it despite it not having the presence of a bee or butterfly.

Additionally their philosophy actually makes them more susceptible to manipulation due to their reliance on a ruling caste to make decisions. They probably won't fall for "Khorne wants you to kill all the kroot because blooooood!" but they would very easily fall for "The kroot assassinated the ethereal and wish for the fall of the tau race. For the greater good all kroot to the fifth connection should be purged.".

The summary of Xenology given above is accurate, as I remember it. Especially given that GW made an artistic choice to include that bit of writing, if it is canon it is pretty close to outright confirmation that Eldar (of some kind) had something to do with the appearance of the Ethereals. Could have been Harlequins instead of a Craftworld, I suppose; it almost seems like the sort of thing that would require the foresight of the Craftworlders and the biotech of the Dark Eldar. Whether or not Xenology is canon is, I suppose, open to debate - GW probably isn't going to provide any more information on this for quite a while.

Thematically, the Eldar connection makes a lot of sense, especially if Farsight's blade is Necron in origin (which seems pretty likely). The Tau are in some ways a modern-day Necrontyr, with little ability to compete with the psychically powerful now but a lot of long-term technological potential.

Clearly the Ethereals aren't "natural" Tau. Something weird happened, and the safe money is on Eldar or Necrons being responsible. There just aren't that many other options. Tyranids wouldn't be a totally out-there guess, but one would have expected the Tau's battles with Kraken to go differently if Ethereals were like Genestealer cults. It seems very unlikely that Chaos was involved. The Imperium hadn't encountered them yet.

 Gunhead1 wrote:
They understand that the warp can be used for travel, but it does mention in the Tau codex that when they examined a IOM warp engine they had no idea how it worked let alone be able to reverse engineer it. Not saying they couldn't but its is going to take them a long time to do it.

Adding to this, Tau travels using method other than Warp travel. Also due the lack of psychic presence for Tau, developing Navigators for safe warp travel would be impossible.

I wanted to comment that the new farsight enclave supplement adds some interesting information on the tau and chaos. I just skimmed the posts, and someone commented that the sword keeps farsight alive, and that it is not a chaos artifact. They did not however say in the section of the book where the etherials are killed in the farsight enclave that farsight realizes that etherials knew of the chaos(a warpgate opens in front of them, letting horrors and blood letters loose which the etherials recognize).

Furthermore the etherials do not tell any of the firecaste about chaos, and farsight accidently looks through the warpgate, which messes him up but makes him realize that it's an alternate dimension.

I disagree with humans in the imperium being ignorant about chaos. Everyone knows that mutation is heresy, Most people understand that the warp exits, especially amongst the classes of people familiar with space travel, every guardsman ever brought to a planet to fight aboard an imperial navy ship knows at the very least that the warp is bad and that the geller field keeps the bad things in it from comming inside the ship. almost every big hive world has chaos cults somewhere in the deepest darkest corners of their labyrinthine undercities. And you just dont pick up the symbols of the ruinous powers, the rituals to summon demons or the names of the chaos gods up out of thin air. People are warned of heresy, they know what to fear in at least the broad strokes.

Not to mention that there are imperial guard turncoats a plenty in the Gue'vesa. Veterans of many wars may be rare but its highly doubtfull there are none. SOMEONE would have been able to tell the tau about chaos. The more logical awnser is the Ethereals don't want or need to bother anyone else with that information. The greater good encompasses and swallows other cultures, they do not take back from what they conquer all that much, so there is really no need to expose the tau to the concept of chaos.

The short of it is that the psyker mutation doesn't exits in the Tau race. Their societal structure is similiar to the Eldar Paths and provides a rigid extraordinarily disciplined and uncompromising mindset. The purpose of the castes are absolute and that structure and discipline is anathema to chaos. If the Eldar did create the Tau then i believe that the caste system and the Eldar paths beeing similair structures meant to ward of chaos is not a coincidence at all. And lastly, no tau tech directly interfaces with the warp. Even their FTL system doesn't pose the dangers of full warp travel. In short the Tau 'Immunity' to chaos is something thats obviously and deliberately engraines or perhaps even engineerd into the Tau Empire. Even down to the way the empire expands in phases it is all orchestrated in perfect fashion.

The Farsight Enclaves Encountering Chaos because they left the safety net of Tau culture that protects from exposure to chaos doesn't surprise me. Not one bit.

 Gunhead1 wrote:
They understand that the warp can be used for travel, but it does mention in the Tau codex that when they examined a IOM warp engine they had no idea how it worked let alone be able to reverse engineer it. Not saying they couldn't but its is going to take them a long time to do it.

Even if they did, it would be useless without a Navigator.

True, but they only skim across it. They don't actually enter the warp.

NickOnwezen wrote:
At least for warp travel, Think of the Tau ships as a boat. It can move over the surface of the water but the water wont drain into the boat because they stay on top of it. Now take the IoM's warp cruisers. These are nuclear submarines, They can travel at high speeds for much longer times, while submerged, but unless the ship is water proof it will immediatly flood with water.

Their warp travel is essentially the same. The tau merely skim across the surface of the warp in much shorter bounds while Imperial warp ships use their geller fields to dive through the warp. The results are the same, one of these is entirely fethed if something goes wrong and gets flooded with demons, the other just drops back into realspace because they bounced off the surface.

That is why their warp travel at least is safer.

Safer, but much much slower and shorter range.