Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Think like in Gaunts Ghosts how he sees the ghosts of the dead battle sister and other supernatural visions in the build up to Sabbat returning. Or when Horus is wounded and chaos shows him visions of the future in a dream world. You know, that sort of stuff.

I assumed that a Tau wouldn't be able to perceive such things as they have little to no presence in the warp "they don't have souls" as they put it in the book Fire Caste. Clearly they can percieve demons but I always assumed that this sort of connection was very much beyond the taus perceptions. Would you say thats the general impression? Would it be unprecedented for a tau to have visions from a chaotic or even stranger an Imperial source like gaunt encountered?

It would be rare and bizare to them I should think - something similar happens in Fire Warrior.................

Manifested Daemons are physically real so they can see them just fine - Daemons have a hard time seeing Tau using their own unearthly senses..................

In Shadowsun: The Last of Kiru's Line, Shadowsun begins to have visions of her possible future Son after drinking water blessed by the Emperor's tears.

Long story short; no. Tau are completely nullified to the warp and, unless one of them happened to undergo a mutation (could be from birth) which stopped this happening, then I am extremely doubtful.
I always imagined them to be similar to the Exorcists.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:
Long story short; no. Tau are completely nullified to the warp and, unless one of them happened to undergo a mutation (could be from birth) which stopped this happening, then I am extremely doubtful.
I always imagined them to be similar to the Exorcists.

Based on what exactly ?

 1hadhq wrote:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:
Long story short; no. Tau are completely nullified to the warp and, unless one of them happened to undergo a mutation (could be from birth) which stopped this happening, then I am extremely doubtful.
I always imagined them to be similar to the Exorcists.

Based on what exactly ?

Based on the fact that they have literally no presence in the Warp, cannot travel in the warp (no navigators) and cannot develop psychic powers of any shape or form.

It's not no Warp presence, it's very little Warp presence. The Tau aren't Pariahs. Warp powers still affect them, while Pariahs are completely immune. The Tau still have souls, they're just very faint ones that tend to blend in to the psychic equivalent to background radiation.

Granted, I'm still not clear on if Pariahs are Pariahs because on a Psychic level there's nothing there, or if Pariahs are Pariahs because on a Psychic level there's nothing there.

And they can travel in the warp. They use stutter drives which means they do lots of short jumps, not as fast as imperial warp drives, but infinitely safer.

The reason for the super small warp signature is probably the fact that they evolved next to a particularly violent warp storm, not something that is not very conducive for psykers.

Animus wrote:
In Shadowsun: The Last of Kiru's Line, Shadowsun begins to have visions of her possible future Son after drinking water blessed by the Emperor's tears.

Really? Thats weird because in the recent Damocles book Shadowsun is again affected by "Imperial" visions which are done to push her into adopting the wrong strategy and allow the Imperials to win. At first I thought it was chaos but in the final battle she sees angelic spirits appear among the Imperial battle lines. Plus theres this weird bit where a girl shows up with a fishnet and crustaceans on her toes and speaks with the voice shes been hearing in her mind. Does this character appear in the novella about Shadowsun? Could drinking those tears be a possible explanation about why she can hear these ghostly voices of the fallen faithful?

Farsight rebelled because his encounter with daemons, and their specific targeting of the ethreals. The though they claim it's pheromones and body language that gives the ethreals their control over the Tau, they are suspected to actually be psykers, lots of shady stuff with the ethreals.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

Based on the fact that they have literally no presence in the Warp, cannot travel in the warp (no navigators) and cannot develop psychic powers of any shape or form.

Except that's false. They have "little presence in the Warp", not "literally NO presence in the warp".

I see this all the time for some reason. The actual statement is that they have very little presence in the warp, not no presence. No presence is what happens when you get a pariah or a blank, which Tau are absolutely NOT. It also would mean that Tau have almost no emotions at all, when in fact they are merely somewhat less emotional than everyone else.

There are several fluff pieces that simply couldn't have happened if the Tau had absolutely zero presence in the warp and were soulless. Their very first novel Fire Warrior delving into it quite a bit but it's still touched on here and there in other places. And there's a detailed article describing their souls as akin to "cookie crumbs" to a daemon, but again, there is a HUGE world of a difference between "cookie crumb" and "nothing at all".

Animus wrote:
In Shadowsun: The Last of Kiru's Line, Shadowsun begins to have visions of her possible future Son after drinking water blessed by the Emperor's tears.

Why did she drink the tears?

leivve wrote:
Farsight rebelled because his encounter with daemons, and their specific targeting of the ethreals. The though they claim it's pheromones and body language that gives the ethreals their control over the Tau, they are suspected to actually be psykers, lots of shady stuff with the ethreals.

The Taros Campaign book states that ethereals are not psychers and emit no pheromones. The Imperium tried to use null souls on them and that failed, and Imperial scientists found no pheromones in dissected ethereal bodies. Tau worship ethereals in the same way humans worship god kings. Think pharaohs and Japanese Emperors, they literally view them like many humans view gods. Them telling a Tau to do something is like Jesus telling a room full of baptists to do something in person. It is the be all end all of spiritual orders.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
theres this weird bit where a girl shows up with a fishnet and crustaceans on her toes and speaks with the voice shes been hearing in her mind. Does this character appear in the novella about Shadowsun?

No, though that does sound pretty weird.

 Gitsmasher wrote:
Why did she drink the tears?

She was thirsty.

Pretty much what Animus said. It was a freshwater pool that was supposedly blessed with the Emperor's tears according to local superstition and she stopped for a drink.