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 Kanluwen wrote:
From what it sounds like, the fighting between the Gue'vesa and the human defenders started triggering psychic phenomena and the Gue'vesa were getting dangerously unbalanced from it.

This. It said that gue'vesa were watching psykers start blowing people up and flying around, essentially calling out to the emperor for forgiveness and then turning their guns back on the tau and other allies.

balmong7 wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
From what it sounds like, the fighting between the Gue'vesa and the human defenders started triggering psychic phenomena and the Gue'vesa were getting dangerously unbalanced from it.

This. It said that gue'vesa were watching psykers start blowing people up and flying around, essentially calling out to the emperor for forgiveness and then turning their guns back on the tau and other allies.

Do the books ever mention what the Tau do with psychic humans amongst the Gue'Vesa? Psychic potential manifests around puberty for most humans, so they must have had to deal with it in some fashion. What will the Tau do when they realize that humans are one of the most powerful and least in control psychic races in the galaxy? Engage a genocidal progrom to cleanse their empire of human vassals or develop technologies to assist them? My guess is the later, with a fair bit of the former for short term stability.

Which kinda makes me think that a Tau-esque society is what the Emperor was aiming for. Highly developed technological society with a revered leadership and a detached military caste of Space Marines.

I would imagine given how humans have been living in the Tau empire now for several centuries without all dying from rogue psyker apocalypses, that the Tau are somehow dealing with them. I suspect by quietly "disappearing" them and studying them. The most stable of psykers might get used for their special abilities.

They do have psyker detectors which implies they search civilian populations for psykers. You don't need a scanner to find them in battle, just look for the guy/gal making a laughing stock of physics.

123ply wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

123ply wrote:

No, actually, he's right. I have not read it but according to reviews it was a combination of 4th sphere members and the more paranoid, trigger happy elements of the 5th.

He's not. The Fourth Sphere are the only ones who were gunning down their own Gue'vesa and auxiliary units.

When they dropped on the planet and were opened fire upon by the Guard planetside that were either taken over/commanded by Genestealer Cultists or were "loyalists" to the overall planet? That's where it was both Fourth Sphere units(which went in preparing for combat) and the Fifth Sphere members that came from Vior'la or the other more warlike Septs.

It's important to note that distinction. The human forces planetside? They were not Gue'vesa units.

Ah my mistake then, I thought he was referring to the part where they landed down thinking they were bring greeted by friendly humans who turned out to be GSC members, because as you said, that is the part where both the original 4th sphere and the more reserved parts of 5th that stayed back had a hand in fighting off the ambush.

As to the killing of the Gue'vesa, I dont doubt that the 5th sphere had nothing to do with it, but does it explain why they did it? If it was after the GSC ambush I could understand but Im under the impression it happened before. If it did happen before, does it talk about what other Tau thought of it or if the murderers were punished?

I was talking about that part. 5th sphere landed and got GSC, failed to take landing zone because its made quite clearly they don't want to murder all humas. The 4th sphere take the landing pad because they didn't care about such things. I honestly don't know what Kanluwen is talking about in regards to my post.

If I wasn't away at the moment I would even type that section out.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
If I made add extra colour to pm713’s post, which is pretty much accurate.

Orks don’t reproduce in the required way, and react poorly to non-Orky things. The also don’t have the sort of societal structure necessary for cults as we know them.

Eldar? Their gestational cycle is less than ideal. And, as a consciously psychic race, arguably more likely to sense something isn’t right.

Tau? Thanks to the caste system, and no interbreeding, a Cult is essentially stymied. Arguably the best they can hope for is to infect a Water Caste, who can then spread the taint elsewhere, to other planets and races better suited.

Essentially, Human’s are their ideal host organism. Numerous enough, fast breeding, with the right societal structure for infiltration.

For a species renowned for its adaptability, there's a lot of assumptions on what genestealer cults couldn't do.

I don't see any problem with them infecting non human races, not do I see a problem with chaos cults appearing in non human races.

I actually find the idea of them being solely a human problem too unnecessarily special. Too much human snowflake. And it further entrenches the story that this is a human galaxy that everyone else lives in, and only humans interact with it. It says that no one else can have cool hybrid or mutant models of their army, only humans.


You can Hand wave away this by having the hive Mind adapt genestealers for each species, brood telepathy stealth camouflage to hide from Eldar, pheromone mimicry to hide from Orks.


In the end though, I don't even think you need that. Orks follow the biggest and strongest. A genestealer hybrid would be bigger and stronger with more inbuilt weaponry. They would just have to Crump heads, win fights and infect all the Orks. The spores would make this spread very fast and you'd have genestealer squig hybrids too.

So long as the Eldar infected were seers and warlocks, they could help hide the infection psychically.or they just have to infect a large proportion at once to reduce the chance of fightback.

It was the idea that the avatar could be infected that was the most bizarre part of that story.

Well that's simply a 40k narrative problem, huge focus on humans and power armour and most of the time the narrative sucks in my opinion. That's why greater good is such a surprise to me because it hasn't fallen into that trap. All factions got a good showing and we now have an interesting warzone.

What's interesting is that AOS has avoided this problem largely. Stormcast are the poster boys but the narrative doesn't bend around them. As I said this is just my opinion.

Weren't Ork Genestealer cults a thing, with in-game rules and all, back in 2nd Edi?

 Esmer wrote:
Weren't Ork Genestealer cults a thing, with in-game rules and all, back in 2nd Edi?

Just as chaos ones were.
Btw still are infact

Hellebore wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
If I made add extra colour to pm713’s post, which is pretty much accurate.

Orks don’t reproduce in the required way, and react poorly to non-Orky things. The also don’t have the sort of societal structure necessary for cults as we know them.

Eldar? Their gestational cycle is less than ideal. And, as a consciously psychic race, arguably more likely to sense something isn’t right.

Tau? Thanks to the caste system, and no interbreeding, a Cult is essentially stymied. Arguably the best they can hope for is to infect a Water Caste, who can then spread the taint elsewhere, to other planets and races better suited.

Essentially, Human’s are their ideal host organism. Numerous enough, fast breeding, with the right societal structure for infiltration.

For a species renowned for its adaptability, there's a lot of assumptions on what genestealer cults couldn't do.

I don't see any problem with them infecting non human races, not do I see a problem with chaos cults appearing in non human races.

I actually find the idea of them being solely a human problem too unnecessarily special. Too much human snowflake. And it further entrenches the story that this is a human galaxy that everyone else lives in, and only humans interact with it. It says that no one else can have cool hybrid or mutant models of their army, only humans.


You can Hand wave away this by having the hive Mind adapt genestealers for each species, brood telepathy stealth camouflage to hide from Eldar, pheromone mimicry to hide from Orks.


In the end though, I don't even think you need that. Orks follow the biggest and strongest. A genestealer hybrid would be bigger and stronger with more inbuilt weaponry. They would just have to Crump heads, win fights and infect all the Orks. The spores would make this spread very fast and you'd have genestealer squig hybrids too.

So long as the Eldar infected were seers and warlocks, they could help hide the infection psychically.or they just have to infect a large proportion at once to reduce the chance of fightback.

It was the idea that the avatar could be infected that was the most bizarre part of that story.

Things like Krypman's gambit and the Genestealer Cult Codex itself show that infection of other alien races is not impossible. PA also showed how the Tau ideology of the Greater Good can be co-opted by Genestealer Cults.But the Codex itself says it is more difficult due to the barriers already mentioned above. That means cults will generally grow more slowly, be smaller in size and/or be in more isolated settlements where they can more easily avoid close scrutiny.