Tau vs imperial guard skin#

T'au legends tell of the first appearance of Ethereals at the besiged city of Fio'taun after the strange lights appeared in the skies.

T'au history records this period as Mont'au, 'The Terror' or 'death age'. But with the harvests disrupted, the breakdown of trade, and blocked access to fresh water, disease ran rampant in the squalid conditions most T'au now lived in, and as many died from sickness as battle.

The T'au of the river valleys leveraged their skill at architecture to build walls and fortresses, and quickly discovered the manufacture of black powder weaponry to defend themselves. The mountain T'au and the plains T'au allied to take the farms and cities of the river valley T'au, and the merchant caravans were regularly sacked to prevent alliances from forming. Unfortunately for the T'au, the rapid sociological, biological, and technological shifts they were undergoing lead to conflict. The T'au that remained on the plains became strong and skillful hunters, larger and stronger than most other T'au. The development of settlements led to the need of trade, and wandering T'au began to negotiate and mediate between the disparate tribes, traveling up and down rivers in crude barges. The T'au of the river valleys developed agriculture and metallurgy, forming the first true settlements.

Tau vs imperial guard skin#

The T'au of the mountains grew flaps of skin and light bones that allowed them to float over the deserts on thermal drafts. Some of these tribes eventually expanded into other environments. In their prehistory, they lived as nomadic tribes on the desert plains, hunting and gathering their food. The primitive T'au were a plains-dwelling race. Almost a century later, the Damocles Crusade smashed into Tau space, bringing the two powers into war. The rapid elevation from a primitive species on a single planet to a starfaring power in only six millennia represented a new danger to Imperial interests, especially as some of the human worlds on the fringes of Imperial territory were discovered to already have trade relations with the Tau. Bodies recovered from the wreckage were a close match to the records from the Land's Vision. After failing to respond to naval challenges, the ship was opened fire on and destroyed. It would be another six-thousand years before the Imperium had any further contact with the Tau, when an unknown class of alien vessel was encountered by system defense ships at Devlan in the Ultima Segmentum. The outbreak of the wars of the Age of Apostasy shortly thereafter preempted any further Imperial follow-up and the then-minor xenos race was effectively forgotten by humanity outside a few Explorator records. Before the planet could be cleansed and colonized by the Imperium, however, a violent Warp-storm erupted around the planet. Adeptus Mechanicus records indicate that at that time, the Tau species had mastered the use of simple tools and weapons, as well as fire. M35 by the Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator Fleet ship Land's Vision.

T'au, the Tau home planet, was discovered in 789. The T'au (or Tau) are a young race of technologically-oriented beings from the Eastern Fringe and the dominant species of the Tau Empire.