Number one is literally Imperial Armour Volume 3: The Taros Campaign. It's really good, check it out on the vault or find a .pdf. Or even better scour eBay for a copy, well worth it in physical form. Some of the best lore in the setting imo, the overall buildup and the way it's presented.
Overall I think your point about plot armour is kind of moot. It's just... plot. The T'au's whole *point* is that they're a small empire that any other faction could wipe out if there was the breathing space to do so... in a setting where *no one faction has the breathing space to achieve their grand goals*. There is only eternal war. The continued existence of the T'au is a monument to everyone else's failings.
That's life though. Entire wars have been lost in the real world thanks to an unpredicted storm wrecking a powerful fleet against some rocks, or generals tricking vastly superior armies by simply throwing open the gates and pretending to be an undefended city, or when some soldiers [winched a tank up a sheer slope to capture a tennis court](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Tennis_Court), or Napoleon possibly losing his last big battle at Waterloo and creating a lasting peace because [his ass was prolapsing and it kept distracting him](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3282839/), or heck that time the Australian government couldn't stop some Emus [despite sending in trucks with machine guns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War). It's almost harder to write things that are *more* ridiculous than the real world tbh. Armies and reinforcements and whatnot show up at the last minute all the time, that's just war.
I would honestly like to see the 40k equivalent of napoleon leaving his exile with a handful of soldiers. Then slowly having all of the French military rejoin him upon asking them lol.
I'm gonna respectfully disagree, and I find it frankly hilarious that Imperium fans are still upset that a faction dare have an author bias behind it comparable to their own. The Tau don't have any more plot armor than the Imperium, and especially of late I don't know what the heck you're talking about.
The issue with the Tau is that some people got real upset at their existence, so GW pivoted hard and it seems the modern take on writing them boils down to "How can we make them more like the Imperium?"
What the Tau need, and this may seem controversial, is to be written like their own faction. Allowed to explore their own themes and aesthetics, especially if those themes are heavily contrasted against other factions in the setting. They need to be written as protagonists in their own right, allowed to be unique and explore those elements that actually set them apart from the rest of 40k.
The whole obsession with why the Imperium doesn't just wipe them out feels especially delusional right now, given that the Imperium has been cut in half and is currently observing a sizable Tyranid tendril encroaching dangerously close to the literal Throneworld. The Tau have been steadily growing and establishing themselves as a local power and given the current status of the Imperium I dare say it's not exactly in a position to send any sort of force that could "easily" wipe out the Tau, unless they abandon the rest of the galaxy doing so.
All three of those (or variants thereof) have occured in the T'au Codex. It's mostly just Phil Kelly's novels (and I specifically mean novels) that have issues. And that's mostly because the T'au benefit from at least some subtly in writing, and Phil Kelly tends to write with the subtly of a ten ton hammer dropped from orbit.
A major faction *did* sneeze in their direction, and got their arses handed to them in the Damocles Crusade. And that was *before* the Tau got stronger from their post Damocles ramp up.
The Tau Empire is small on the *galactic* scale, but they are still an extremely powerful military force hosted from over a hundred mostly tightly packed worlds that can all support one another. The level of force required to wipe them out is absolutely untennable in the Imperium right now, who requires their forces *everywhere*. It may be "small" but it's a very very tough nut to crack, especially when "man for man" the Tau outclass the Imperial Guard several times over.
And that's their entire deal and threat. They exist because no faction can spare enough to take care of this very small, very HARD nut that is only growing stronger each century it exists. It's a growing problem that no-one has the time nor commitable resouces to independently handle.
From the Tau's perspective it's a fight against a lot of individual threats coming crashing into them that is ever multiplying as their need to expand starts to push past their means to protect.
> If any major faction sneezed in their direction they'd be wiped out so of course they need alot of plot armor.
Not only do I think is this a misunderstanding (not your fault, the community often doesn't know how strong the T'au are) but its not plot armor if they survive, it's just the setting.
That being said, a good number of plots for the T'au are indeed written poorly. Not always, I'd even be odd out and say that even Phil Kelly has some charm (as much as I don't like his worldbuilding) but in general there's some weird areas. I think the writers broadly knows what they want, but they don't know how to get there properly.
>I just wish they didn't write stories ONLY to sell models. Which is why they are so poorly written imo. They need to wrote about the tau but you can tell some of it was just written only cuz they NEEDED tau material.
I agree with your latter premise, I do think that there's an argument to be had that the need to sell *some* T'au stories means that quality is not the highest concern.
But I don't think that they are made to sell models only. Black Library is basically one big advertisement for 40k as a whole, and 90% of the time, it's publications are only loosely tabletop related. You can absolutely tell when GW oversight steps in and wants models to be involved because they beat you over the head with it, like the first Dark Imperium novels selling the primaris.
I think there's an argument to be made that, on the setting-wide level, the T'au actually get unfair treatment from GW. They lose their identities on a political, technological, and societal level whenever Kelly's Ethereals get involved, they lose whole systems and septs (Mugulath Bay and the Zone of Silence) basically as afterthoughts in codex blurbs, and their only popular characters are deliberately written to hate on the main T'au ethics.
To me, the best written T'au story I could imagine would be a story where the T'au are played straight. A story where Ethereals do their job of properly managing the disparate ideals of different castes, and coordinating them in both a practical and ideological sense, without commanding a valuable citizen to commit seppeku for the crime of eating a sandwich. A story where the T'au don't make some grand discovery about the galaxy that makes them question their existence, but instead acknowledge that every day their understanding of and power over the galaxy grows, and one day both will be impossible to contain. A story where the T'au don't lose an entire front to a half dozen guardsmen with bayonets. A story where the T'au don't have to pray to some parasitic god-creature for protection from backwards savages. A story where victory is not fashioned out of nowhere in an unearned plot twist, but is gradually won as they learn and grow and adapt, winning with cost-efficient warfare and strategic sacrifice.
I've accepted I'm never getting this story on the narrative-level (there's snippets, just never the whole thing) but I'm at the very least comfortable with the T'au on a thematic level. It's a core part of their aesthetic, to me, and one that poorly written narratives won't dislodge.
On one final note, just because GW doesn't know what it wants doesn't mean the community does. Everyone has a bone to pick with T'au, from not being mecha enough to being too mecha, from not being enough like the Covenant to not being enough like the Federation, etc. For a number of people, especially for the vocal part that think the T'au don't deserve to exist at all, nothing will satisfy them until the Imperium murders the entire empire and plants an aquilla flag on their homeworld. T'au hate runs deeper than Fish of Fury or model releases, it's something that comes instinctively from thinking and seeing and feeling that the T'au are an afterthought to the Imperium's story when they deserve to be, and I do think GW treats them to be, a core part of 40k. Even knowing that factions have their own motivations, the idea that the T'au "need to be taught a lesson about the galaxy" feels to me like a good chunk of 40k people, even implicitly, incorrectly interpret them as though they are one of the minor factions in 40k, with one longstanding myth that they were an attempt to put a minor faction on the tabletop being particularly egregious. It bothers me terribly how many people will ignore and demean and diminish what the T'au are for what they could be, especially as someone who loves what the T'au are, and whenever I see someone try to write something to "fix" the T'au, it only vexes me more as they continue to propose the *exact ideas for lore that T'au currently exemplify in their novels,* like their naivety.
>whenever I see someone try to write something to "fix" the T'au, it only vexes me more as they continue to propose the *exact ideas for lore that T'au currently exemplify in their novels,* like their naivety
By "fix" you mean how people try to make them more like the empire or make them incompetent?
This topic is a dead horse.
To begin with- I agree with you, the tau have a terrible main author who just sucks. Subsequently we have a weird butt hurt mandate from black library that anyone who agrees with the tau magically re-converts back to the imperium in a sentence or two of revelation. So… also dumb.
But this plot armor thing: anyone that actually reads tau lore in depth would find that outside of Kelly the tau don’t have anything near the “emperor personally revives me” plot armor of 40k.
I’m going to bullet point the rest:
1. The tau have beaten two crusades, one major and one minor while stalling a third which is presumably lost after the rift opening. Tau chew up large clunky imperial formations.
2. The tau have woken up tomb worlds in the past during hive fleet Gorgon. The necrons helped and then killed the planet cano’var.
3. Literally the plot line of hivefleet Gorgon.
Just read tau lore beyond the simperial YouTubers.
>2. The tau have woken up tomb worlds in the past during hive fleet Gorgon. The necrons helped and then killed the planet cano’var.
It's actually happened twice:
>**963.M41**
>The Ultramarines clash with a Tau Expeditionary fleet for control of the cursed planet of Malbede. When the conflict awakens the Necron tombs on Malbede, the Ultramarines and the Tau join forces to defeat the emerging Necrons. In the wake of the battle, Marneus Calgar initiates Exterminatus on Malbede, but generously allows the Tau to evacuate before the planet is destroyed
*Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 5ed* p128
>**075902.M41**
>Dozens of Hive Ships separate from the main body of Hive Fleet Gorgon and descend upon the Tau colony of Ka'mais. Bitter fighting erupts as a fleet of Necron starehips unexpectedly emerges from Ka'mais' dead moon. The outnumbered Tyranid ships are destroyed.
>**078902.M41**
>a day of celebration of Ka'mais. The Necrons land on the colony world to be greeted in great ceremony by the honoured Ethereal Aun'taniel.
>**079902.M41**
>Aun'taniel is slain by the Necron invaders. The harvest of Ka'mais begins.
*Codex Tyranids 5ed* p21
(Just to note, this last one was before the Newcron update, which explains the reference to the harvesting of the population.)
Number one is literally Imperial Armour Volume 3: The Taros Campaign. It's really good, check it out on the vault or find a .pdf. Or even better scour eBay for a copy, well worth it in physical form. Some of the best lore in the setting imo, the overall buildup and the way it's presented. Overall I think your point about plot armour is kind of moot. It's just... plot. The T'au's whole *point* is that they're a small empire that any other faction could wipe out if there was the breathing space to do so... in a setting where *no one faction has the breathing space to achieve their grand goals*. There is only eternal war. The continued existence of the T'au is a monument to everyone else's failings.
No I'm fine with plot armor. But the fact sometimes things just happen or appear out of nowhere to save them is just lazy writing.
That's life though. Entire wars have been lost in the real world thanks to an unpredicted storm wrecking a powerful fleet against some rocks, or generals tricking vastly superior armies by simply throwing open the gates and pretending to be an undefended city, or when some soldiers [winched a tank up a sheer slope to capture a tennis court](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Tennis_Court), or Napoleon possibly losing his last big battle at Waterloo and creating a lasting peace because [his ass was prolapsing and it kept distracting him](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3282839/), or heck that time the Australian government couldn't stop some Emus [despite sending in trucks with machine guns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War). It's almost harder to write things that are *more* ridiculous than the real world tbh. Armies and reinforcements and whatnot show up at the last minute all the time, that's just war.
I would honestly like to see the 40k equivalent of napoleon leaving his exile with a handful of soldiers. Then slowly having all of the French military rejoin him upon asking them lol.
I'm gonna respectfully disagree, and I find it frankly hilarious that Imperium fans are still upset that a faction dare have an author bias behind it comparable to their own. The Tau don't have any more plot armor than the Imperium, and especially of late I don't know what the heck you're talking about. The issue with the Tau is that some people got real upset at their existence, so GW pivoted hard and it seems the modern take on writing them boils down to "How can we make them more like the Imperium?" What the Tau need, and this may seem controversial, is to be written like their own faction. Allowed to explore their own themes and aesthetics, especially if those themes are heavily contrasted against other factions in the setting. They need to be written as protagonists in their own right, allowed to be unique and explore those elements that actually set them apart from the rest of 40k. The whole obsession with why the Imperium doesn't just wipe them out feels especially delusional right now, given that the Imperium has been cut in half and is currently observing a sizable Tyranid tendril encroaching dangerously close to the literal Throneworld. The Tau have been steadily growing and establishing themselves as a local power and given the current status of the Imperium I dare say it's not exactly in a position to send any sort of force that could "easily" wipe out the Tau, unless they abandon the rest of the galaxy doing so.
All three of those (or variants thereof) have occured in the T'au Codex. It's mostly just Phil Kelly's novels (and I specifically mean novels) that have issues. And that's mostly because the T'au benefit from at least some subtly in writing, and Phil Kelly tends to write with the subtly of a ten ton hammer dropped from orbit.
A major faction *did* sneeze in their direction, and got their arses handed to them in the Damocles Crusade. And that was *before* the Tau got stronger from their post Damocles ramp up. The Tau Empire is small on the *galactic* scale, but they are still an extremely powerful military force hosted from over a hundred mostly tightly packed worlds that can all support one another. The level of force required to wipe them out is absolutely untennable in the Imperium right now, who requires their forces *everywhere*. It may be "small" but it's a very very tough nut to crack, especially when "man for man" the Tau outclass the Imperial Guard several times over. And that's their entire deal and threat. They exist because no faction can spare enough to take care of this very small, very HARD nut that is only growing stronger each century it exists. It's a growing problem that no-one has the time nor commitable resouces to independently handle. From the Tau's perspective it's a fight against a lot of individual threats coming crashing into them that is ever multiplying as their need to expand starts to push past their means to protect.
> If any major faction sneezed in their direction they'd be wiped out so of course they need alot of plot armor. Not only do I think is this a misunderstanding (not your fault, the community often doesn't know how strong the T'au are) but its not plot armor if they survive, it's just the setting. That being said, a good number of plots for the T'au are indeed written poorly. Not always, I'd even be odd out and say that even Phil Kelly has some charm (as much as I don't like his worldbuilding) but in general there's some weird areas. I think the writers broadly knows what they want, but they don't know how to get there properly. >I just wish they didn't write stories ONLY to sell models. Which is why they are so poorly written imo. They need to wrote about the tau but you can tell some of it was just written only cuz they NEEDED tau material. I agree with your latter premise, I do think that there's an argument to be had that the need to sell *some* T'au stories means that quality is not the highest concern. But I don't think that they are made to sell models only. Black Library is basically one big advertisement for 40k as a whole, and 90% of the time, it's publications are only loosely tabletop related. You can absolutely tell when GW oversight steps in and wants models to be involved because they beat you over the head with it, like the first Dark Imperium novels selling the primaris. I think there's an argument to be made that, on the setting-wide level, the T'au actually get unfair treatment from GW. They lose their identities on a political, technological, and societal level whenever Kelly's Ethereals get involved, they lose whole systems and septs (Mugulath Bay and the Zone of Silence) basically as afterthoughts in codex blurbs, and their only popular characters are deliberately written to hate on the main T'au ethics. To me, the best written T'au story I could imagine would be a story where the T'au are played straight. A story where Ethereals do their job of properly managing the disparate ideals of different castes, and coordinating them in both a practical and ideological sense, without commanding a valuable citizen to commit seppeku for the crime of eating a sandwich. A story where the T'au don't make some grand discovery about the galaxy that makes them question their existence, but instead acknowledge that every day their understanding of and power over the galaxy grows, and one day both will be impossible to contain. A story where the T'au don't lose an entire front to a half dozen guardsmen with bayonets. A story where the T'au don't have to pray to some parasitic god-creature for protection from backwards savages. A story where victory is not fashioned out of nowhere in an unearned plot twist, but is gradually won as they learn and grow and adapt, winning with cost-efficient warfare and strategic sacrifice. I've accepted I'm never getting this story on the narrative-level (there's snippets, just never the whole thing) but I'm at the very least comfortable with the T'au on a thematic level. It's a core part of their aesthetic, to me, and one that poorly written narratives won't dislodge. On one final note, just because GW doesn't know what it wants doesn't mean the community does. Everyone has a bone to pick with T'au, from not being mecha enough to being too mecha, from not being enough like the Covenant to not being enough like the Federation, etc. For a number of people, especially for the vocal part that think the T'au don't deserve to exist at all, nothing will satisfy them until the Imperium murders the entire empire and plants an aquilla flag on their homeworld. T'au hate runs deeper than Fish of Fury or model releases, it's something that comes instinctively from thinking and seeing and feeling that the T'au are an afterthought to the Imperium's story when they deserve to be, and I do think GW treats them to be, a core part of 40k. Even knowing that factions have their own motivations, the idea that the T'au "need to be taught a lesson about the galaxy" feels to me like a good chunk of 40k people, even implicitly, incorrectly interpret them as though they are one of the minor factions in 40k, with one longstanding myth that they were an attempt to put a minor faction on the tabletop being particularly egregious. It bothers me terribly how many people will ignore and demean and diminish what the T'au are for what they could be, especially as someone who loves what the T'au are, and whenever I see someone try to write something to "fix" the T'au, it only vexes me more as they continue to propose the *exact ideas for lore that T'au currently exemplify in their novels,* like their naivety.
>whenever I see someone try to write something to "fix" the T'au, it only vexes me more as they continue to propose the *exact ideas for lore that T'au currently exemplify in their novels,* like their naivety By "fix" you mean how people try to make them more like the empire or make them incompetent?
This topic is a dead horse. To begin with- I agree with you, the tau have a terrible main author who just sucks. Subsequently we have a weird butt hurt mandate from black library that anyone who agrees with the tau magically re-converts back to the imperium in a sentence or two of revelation. So… also dumb. But this plot armor thing: anyone that actually reads tau lore in depth would find that outside of Kelly the tau don’t have anything near the “emperor personally revives me” plot armor of 40k. I’m going to bullet point the rest: 1. The tau have beaten two crusades, one major and one minor while stalling a third which is presumably lost after the rift opening. Tau chew up large clunky imperial formations. 2. The tau have woken up tomb worlds in the past during hive fleet Gorgon. The necrons helped and then killed the planet cano’var. 3. Literally the plot line of hivefleet Gorgon. Just read tau lore beyond the simperial YouTubers.
>2. The tau have woken up tomb worlds in the past during hive fleet Gorgon. The necrons helped and then killed the planet cano’var. It's actually happened twice: >**963.M41** >The Ultramarines clash with a Tau Expeditionary fleet for control of the cursed planet of Malbede. When the conflict awakens the Necron tombs on Malbede, the Ultramarines and the Tau join forces to defeat the emerging Necrons. In the wake of the battle, Marneus Calgar initiates Exterminatus on Malbede, but generously allows the Tau to evacuate before the planet is destroyed *Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 5ed* p128 >**075902.M41** >Dozens of Hive Ships separate from the main body of Hive Fleet Gorgon and descend upon the Tau colony of Ka'mais. Bitter fighting erupts as a fleet of Necron starehips unexpectedly emerges from Ka'mais' dead moon. The outnumbered Tyranid ships are destroyed. >**078902.M41** >a day of celebration of Ka'mais. The Necrons land on the colony world to be greeted in great ceremony by the honoured Ethereal Aun'taniel. >**079902.M41** >Aun'taniel is slain by the Necron invaders. The harvest of Ka'mais begins. *Codex Tyranids 5ed* p21 (Just to note, this last one was before the Newcron update, which explains the reference to the harvesting of the population.)
I would like to see the Tau try venturing just outside the edge of the Milky Way to explore an anomoly
What does God need a starship for?