Warhammer 40k

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Newcomer 42 said:
I wonder what special rules they'll have. Cain better has massive plot armor and surprisingly good combat skills, as he should have.
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He better get to re-roll armor saves, and hopefully Jurgen gets some special intervention rules, on top of an anti-psyker bubble from being a pariah.
 
Just don't like em. said:
Is it just me or does Cain look ape like? Sideburns on models this small must be hard to do but it could also be the paint job aswell.
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Looks like tiny packed in details, with a typical 'eavy metal team paintjob on the face. The scars across his face aren't helping things either.
 
I've finished the first of the free books they gave out a while back for the app launch, it sucked.

Female authors are a mistake. Or at least this one is since she can't write a consistent character to save her life. While this wouldn't be a problem if the novel was just bolter porn, it's not that. It's fairly introspective and the bulk of the runtime is spent inside the internal monologue of our two main characters/narrators. They both struggle with survivors guilt, Evangeline the batter sister after surviving a face off against a lord of change on Ophelia VII (presumably the tyrant of blue flame). The other one is a schizophrenic inquisitor (literally, she can't differentiate between reality and prophetic dreams) on a quest to save her almost dead interrogator/lesbian lover. There are other characters but they get very little screen time and wouldn't you know they all also have some manner of survivors guilt.

Evangeline can be both extremely zealous, as a SoB should but also weirdly understanding at times. At one point a young sister under her command blindly charges into some kind of demon which results in another sister getting heavily wounded. Said sister just gets a stern talking to and they literally hug it out. But for the entire novel she thinks she's heading toward certain death and is completely fine with that. When that death fails to happen during the final battle, she decides to become a repentia becouse she doubted Big-E. . She also sometimes acts a bit marry sue-ish. Not only does she survive a lord of change without immediatly turning into fruit-by-the-foot, she gets marked with the titular mark of faith and is prophecized by the ecclisiarchy on terra to go and get the McGuffin, which leads to people literally worshipping her. To give the author credit she leaves it up to interpretation if everything involving her mark and prophesy was a tzeentch scheme or not.

The problems sart with Ravara, the afformentioned shizophrenic inquisitor. She's also bipolar but the pollar oposite of Evangeline. While Eva is a gentle souls who blames herself for everything that happens Ravara is the kind of person who wont take blame for anything ever. She's a very sterotypical inquisitor. She very quickly resorts to threatening anyone who dosn't agree with her, has in her past sanctioned exterminatus and all other fun stuff. She's also a seer, having prophetic dreams. So while lesser members of the Inquistion might result to lowly techniques such as interrogation and invesitgation to acomplish their goals she just dreams up the solution. She searching for a diffrent McGuffin that she belives will help her both close the great rift and heal her dying interrogator. As the plot progresses her shizophrenia gets worse and she starts seeing a ghost of her father. This time the author leaves no room for interpretation. Her visions and the ghosts are all part of a thousand sons sourcerer's scheme to unrubric his brother.. The issues with her are twofold. First of all the author clearly wants us to be symphetetic with her plight. Which is very difficult becouse her problems are entirely her own fault and as previously mentioned she's a very brutal cunt who probably killed billions becouse she dreamed someone will do a heresy. While very grimdark and a good idea the execution falls flat. You don't get to go 'I'm just a smol bean' as an inquistor. Second of all how did her powers not set off any alarm bells in the inquisition long before she earned her rossette. Seer powers are generally associated with the eldar and Tzeench. Not even the strongest human psykers could do that.
 
Snekposter said:
Kais is a fucking great character. If Farsight is this old, wizened sage who keeps his trauma in check through will and meditation Kais has become this PTSD-riddled nutcase completely unable to verbalize anymore from how mentally broken he is as a result of all the shit he's seen and done. IIRC it was made canon that the Kais in Dark Crusade is that same Kais, so it seems like he decided to recover enough mentally to try diplomacy like Farsight... only to lose and then start freaking out again and snapping.
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The canon with Kais is a bit weird because the timeline doesn't hold up and he has a common tau name but I do prefer to assume he's the same guy they promoted the shit out of. and then put him in a suspended animation that left his brain awake for 300 years so he could eventually be crazy enough to solo an entire fortress monastery. Ill have to get around to reading that sequel someday. (Otherwise the tau have three guys with the same name that are all equally badass.)

wtfNeedSignUp said:
I never liked Tau lore, they just read like a worse Eldar with a constant superiority complex over humans (despite being a tiny fish in a pond), and faction wide plot armor with how they aren't fucked by AI and Chaos. Humans being better under Tau is also more of an informed trait as they are still third rate citizens who work constantly, live and die by the whims of an approachable caste and only stick with the system due to religious dogma and the threat of violence.
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The superiority complex is there, but it comes across more as propaganda indoctrination then racial dickery. (and again the average Tau age is 40 years, its usually youth talking) The Tau are capable of wising up once shit gets real. One of my favorite scenes in the first book of the Farsight trilogy is seeing him get insanely pissed off at one of his best men for underestimating the Imperium again after everything they've seen and been though. All but saying "WE ARE ANTS AGAINST A MOUNTAIN, IF YOU WERE A RECRUIT ID SEND YOU BACK TO THE ACADAMY IN DISAGRACE"

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(It is so satisfying reading it in Peter's voice)

AI can be explained by how well they are treated by the Tau, Often times they view them as brothers in arms and dont ask them to do anything they wouldn't do if they could. That said, there is an example in the shadowsun book of an AI freezing up in a logic problem when it cant guarantee her safety and almost gets her killed.

The Chaos side is actually pretty interesting because it's actively working to find a way to corrupt the empire. For all their shadyness, the repressive System set up by the Ethereals is good at preventing chaos (and the stealers funny enough) from getting a foothold by giving everyone a purpose and not tolerating deviance. That doesn't mean they cant be possessed, it's just a lot more rare. A tau water caste guy gets possessed by a tzeentch demon after absent mindedly touching a warp engine the Tau were working on and he does some crazy shit ill talk about later.

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Humanity is an interesting pickle, because they dont get a choice in working for or with the greater good. But if they play ball, the benefits are "usually" pretty good (free medicine, better quality goods, better working conditions). The trouble is the Tau is not a monolith when dealing with them. There are different ideas about their treatment under different leaders. And there's no cops enforcing the rules to protect them. In the grand scheme of things I think it usually works out as long as everybody gets the picture and plays ball. Otherwise the Tau gradually ramp up pressure with sterilization and work camps. They dont usually engage in wholesale genocide but there may be exceptions. With Farsight, I appreciate that underneath the racial superiority and misgivings about humanity he does want to free slaves from a horrific mechanicus death world.

Dollar Store Crack Whore said:
Damn, that is a glowing review. That was the one 40k book I simply couldn't read all the way through because I couldn't stand it. I thought the idea of this Tau going against the grain and becoming more violent was really interesting at first.

This is where it really lost me. So much of it felt contrived. On practically his first deployment, in his first encounter with SM, he gets nailed in the head with a bolter round that happens to not penetrate his armor and on top of that doesn't explode, he gets KO'd with space marines standing right over him. You're telling me nobody's gonna stomp on his head and make sure?

It was decent bolter porn, but it felt like the character was just invincible by dumb luck, and made SM feel like lumbering, slow idiots rather than highly trained devastating killers. It's interesting that you came away with the opposite perspective; I did like how the Tau started to fear him and get freaked out by his increasingly merciless perspective. Maybe I'll give it another shot, as I did not get to him working with UM.
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A lot of it can be handwaved as Chaos outright giving him an edge or looking out for him.

The first time he kills a marine he uses an ethereal as a human shield and pops his head with a plasma pistol. 2nd time he fights 5 marines, he Snipes a unhelmed librrian in the middle of a mind probe, shoots a grenade launcher into a guys face and pops another with a plasma round. Really the biggest bullshit isn't surviving an unexploding bolter round to the face. It's being able to outrun and dodge Bolter fire to the point to where some SM's kill each other in a cross fire. Last guy almost gets to stomp him before his Tau buddies Volley fire him to death. I did like how it emphasized that tau rifles do shit against their armor unless you have a lot of concentrated fire. There's also a moment where he flings an explosive drone into a bunch of marines in a tight corridor and kills them all. That may or may not be total bullshit, but it was cool.

I chalk a lot of the raptors fucking up to being not as suited to ship interior combat as open ground but I dunno. Poor bastards really went in with light expectations against the Tau. And to be fair its kinda like fighting on easy mode at first.




I also want to correct the meme that Tau are incapable of melee. There's a line that the bog standard infantry are not trained for it. But Farsight has his regulars trained in using their ceremonial knives.

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It aint much, but it can work in a pinch and Kais was able to kill a fucking demon (and a guardsman) with it. But more importantly in the lore, the battlesuits kick total ass.

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A tau battlesuit in a tight hallway with a couple SM's can easily kill them all. They have melee based plasma weaponery, but even without that they can backhand everything to death with their fists. They also have Beam shields so they can take a shit ton of punishment. The tau really need to make entire SM style company's of these dam things. They can do everything.
 
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