The full lore cards for the Caste System of the T'au Empire! Complete with auxiliary forces information!

You can see the lore video here for sit-and-relax lore absorbance: https://youtu.be/QEKLSpQbBAU

These beautiful pieces of art were made by the amazingly talented @rowscara! Check out her Etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/rowscara/?etsrc=sdt

Shas'O Sa’cea Qimerra Esakruai Bentu

Commission art

My beautiful son

I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.

Via r/Grimdank

The Fire Warrior novelization is wild

For anyone who doesn’t know, Fire Warrior was a game from 2003 where you play as a Tau Fire Warrior trying to rescue a kidnapped ethereal before it’s revealed that the planetary governor that kidnapped the ethereal was secretly a chaos cultist and you have to deal with that too.

What’s more unusual though is that the game actually had a novel tie in and it’s wild. It’s not perfect obviously, there’s a lot of parts where it skips from the main character, Shas’la Kais, starting to do something to after it’s been done with maybe a fight scene with the boss. But to be fair it is a novelization of the game and constant variations “He then turned the hallway and shot some guys” would get old fast.

What’s even more wild is that the book treats everything you do in game as something Kais actually does. As a result Kais becomes this freakishly hyper competent killing machine fueled almost purely by daddy issues. Like he is a genuine blood drenched cryptid and there’s practically no characters that aren’t at least slightly terrified of him. And that is not an exaggeration.

Like from everyone else’s perspective Kais is just a fresh recruit on his first ever battlefield and out of nowhere he’s gunning down hundreds of guardsmen. He takes out a tank with a hijacked imperial turret, kills an attack helicopter single handedly, saves the ethereal completely by himself from a heavily fortified prison, two shots a space marine, fights off two attempted boardings of his ship (which includes killing four more space marines completely by himself), counterboards the Imperial ship where he kills even more space marines and even more hundreds of guardsmen crippled the ship with a bomb and nearly kills the entire command crew all by himself, fights off a demonic invasion in the ship while completely lost to his blood rage, cripples the imperial ship even more, killing who knows how many CSM and demons the entire time, solos a chaos dreadnought, goes back to the planet to kill even more chaos marines and demons, fights his way through a titan to blow it up, solos a warp spawn, and a demon prince, falls to Khorne for a bit and eventually even kills a greater demon.

Within the book the entire time he’s doing all this he never has a mech or supplies, he’s constantly forced to fight God with guns and ammo he’s scavenged from the countless corpses he’s left in his wake. He rocks up to the Tau ship in orbit before he sneaks into the prison literally drenched in human blood and there’s nothing they can do about it because he’s basically the single best person at killing in their entire army at this point

These are all the things he does in the book because he does them in the game and it’s a just amazing to see the rest of the world react to this video game character played straight. Usually in other game novelizations, the sheer number of enemies your guy kills is usually brought way down and is just chalked up to the enemy numbers being inflated in the game for the sake of gameplay. But Fire Warrior decided to say fuck that, our blorbo really is just this much of a hyper competent war criminal and you should fear for your IRL life.

And honestly?

I don’t think I could respect them more for that decision.

My partner's little brothers are also into Warhammer, so I decided to make them each a leader for their favorite factions for Christmas

The base is one of the fancy hero bases GW made a while back, glad to finally have found a use for this one

I do love Tau, but I'd want to do so many weird auxiliaries I'd forget all about the battlesuits

Iron Gue'vesa, or "Tau Man of Iron", by wolfdawgartcorner.

Other Tau Empire aligned Astartes

Art by Mohammad Z. Mukhtar

Hammerhead Gunship fully finished!

Gue'vesa'vre Lucas Bradford in XV-15

Unnamed Tau Shas'ui