And it's okay really, btw, wanna see my monkey pall just made?

*Tosses Vortex grenade*

It's at this point you realise that due to the random and unpredictable nature of a Jokaero upgrade, that thing which looks like a Vortex grenade is actually a decorative and fancy looking glow orb and you stand there with a pin looking rather silly...

I kid ye not the rules for it in codex were that crap that it could redo your entire weapon aesthetics and somehow make it look different to what it actually is and that's it.

Thats still ok, everybody runs when they see a vortex grenade comming at them. Nobody can survive that.(And don't say Kaldor Draigo can! )

Or the God Emperor. Anyone who says otherwise will be shot for heresy.

I like to imagine the Old Ones as Slann but I do have a crazy theory... Ethereals are the Old Ones! I know, laugh all you like but to me it makes sense. What is the chance a new alien race comes to Tau as they destroy themselves and save them and rise them to power. I thought Old Ones. The tech could be styled on Old One tech and the Tau use their Xeno allies very cleverly.

No dice. Old One tech is heavy on the warpstuff manipulation. Eldar tech is weaksauce derivative.

The Tau are more likely to be a Necron splinter faction experiment in regaining the flesh/reversing the effects of the biotransference processes they all underwent. Which could help explain the Tau's general lack of warp presence and their caste stratification - the various castes would be loosely lined up with some of the internal Necron organizational structures..

However the fact that the Tau don't have such an influence in the warp may be on purpose. If legends are true the Old Ones created the warp, eldar and orks. Look what their affect on the warp was. Eldar and Orks created several Chaos Gods (Gork, maybe Mork are technically Chaos Gods) and the Warp turned into their chaotic playground. I don't think they would rely on anthing to do with the warp again.

What made Farsight turn against the Etherals? The fact they controlled the entire Tau race with mind magic. However fluff (why fluff) states that Farsght saw something, knew something that they would not want him to know. As Lynata keeps saying every interpretation of the warhammer 40k galaxy in essence is correct. Not exactly what Lynata says but close enough.

What? Gork and Mork are chaos gods? Blasphemy! There are only 4 chaos gods, except for the time there were three, but after Slaanesh was born there were four, except that there were five of them, but Malal left so he doesn't count. Ugh, now where was I? oh yeah...BLASPHEMY! Four chaos gods! Bloody Imperials don't even know how many chaos gods there are! No wonder you stick with "there's only the emperor". Lorgar give me strenght!

Last i remember the old ones made the webway and eldar and (kr)orks. The warp is sorta part of the universe.

I'm still betting Farsight's Dawn blade is really a chaos weapon (yeah it doesn't look like one, but thats the clever bit, see?)

I must now don my Commisiar Uniform and load my Bolt Pistol. I'm so sorry...

Three days later...

We are gathered to mourn the passing of poor Mr Tickles and Buster...

However the fact that the Tau don't have such an influence in the warp may be on purpose. If legends are true the Old Ones created the warp, eldar and orks. Look what their affect on the warp was. Eldar and Orks created several Chaos Gods (Gork, maybe Mork are technically Chaos Gods) and the Warp turned into their chaotic playground. I don't think they would rely on anthing to do with the warp again.

What made Farsight turn against the Etherals? The fact they controlled the entire Tau race with mind magic. However fluff (why fluff) states that Farsght saw something, knew something that they would not want him to know. As Lynata keeps saying every interpretation of the warhammer 40k galaxy in essence is correct. Not exactly what Lynata says but close enough.

The Old Ones created the Eldar, (kr)orks, and probably meddled with/experimented on Humans/human ancestors, introducing or enhancing psy-related gene groups (and probably are responsible for Discordants -gag-), depending on which bit of the legend fluff you look at. They were big on warp-tech and warp-manipulation.

The ones who were in opposition to warp-tech and warp-manipulation, were the Necrontyr. They had no psykers. They, or their Necron descendants, may have meddled with/experimented up on humans/human ancestors and introduced the blank/null/pariah gene groups, depending on which bit of the legend fluff you look at.

Farsight would have turned against the Ethereals if he found out that they were Necron puppets too. Mind Magic is not the only possible explanation for why he'd've turned against the Ethereals.

Gork, Mork, and the old Eldar Gods aren't Chaos Gods proper, but what you get when you have a psychically powerful living being with a soul (in their cases, Old Ones), being worshipped as gods by a sufficient number of psychically resonant beings for a long enough period of time. In other words, if the God Emperor were up and walking, he'd be the human equivalent, more or less.

Warhammer 40k fluff is constantly being revised, frequently internally inconsistent even within editions, and has a fanbase stretching back across three decades who gleefully mix and match canon from different eras together and then boldly declare that this patchwork of whichever version of each faction's fluff they happened to remember is the holy canon. The truth is that 40k has never even tried to be a consistent universe, instead rewriting anything they don't like out of the setting and anything they do into the setting, often over fan protestations. It's not a fictitious history that people want it to be, but is instead a fictitious mythology, which means it is entirely to be expected that certain myths will be internally contradictory and the story as told by any one poet or playwright is no more valid than the story as told by another.

This includes fans. The idea that only the original creator is an "authoritative" opinion on a universe which is entirely fictitious in the first place is an abberation on human storytelling. The Legend of King Arthur would be a hollow shell of the epic it eventually grew into if every addition not officially authorized by the original creator were regarded with the same contempt as fanfiction is now. Huge chunks of Le Morte d'Arthur would be invalidated. The test of a story's validity is not an archaelogical/legal defense of its roots in the writings of whoever owns the copyright of its parent universe. The test of a story's validity is whether people retell it.

In that spirit, my personal take on the relation between Gork and Mork and Khorne:

In the aftermath of the War in Heaven, there were but two Chaos Gods, Tzeentch and Nurgle, now locked in an eternal stalemate with one another. Tzeentch needed an attack dog, something he could sic on Nurgle while keeping his own hands clean, and with the Necrontyr and Old Ones both annihilated, the Warp was now fed by a new rising star, those that the Orks would eventually call brainboyz. These creations of the Old Ones were alarmingly resilient and of particular intelligence, and had served as the Old Ones' enforcers. Now, in the aftermath of the Old Ones' annihilation, they began scouring the galaxy for lost Old One vaults and, after properly cleansing the teeming and hostile life forms that had grown out of the Old Ones' putrefying corpses, studied and reverse-engineered the secrets contained therein. In this era they had rivals, the Eldar, and the two fought a number of wars and skirmishes with one another over the valuable Old One ruins until finally they came to an agreement and split the technology of the Old Ones down the middle. Both were able to make only a pale imitation of what came before, the Eldar developing Webway technology while the brainboyz adopted the genetic engineering the Old Ones had used to create their servants.

The brainboyz created the mobile ecology that we know today - Orks to fight their wars, Gretchen to act as servants, and squigs to provide food, draft animals, and other animal functions. This infinitely adaptable ecology could be stamped onto any planet that had enough air for the brainboyz to breathe (and they required relatively little) and any kind of plant or algae for the hyper-omnivorous squigs at the bottom of the artificial food chain to live off of. The treaty between the brainboyz and the Eldar was always unstable, and the two frequently came to blows again, and sometimes fought civil wars with themselves as well. Under the guidance of Tzeentch, the brainboyz developed their own rapidly developing psyker powers and the fighting capability of their Ork warrior-slaves, worshiping twin gods called Mourne and Khaine. Mourne was merely an alter-ego for Tzeentch (whom the brainboyz knew better than to trust), and Khaine the identity which Tzeentch had assigned to the new Chaos God he was gestating in the Ork species' collective subconscious. Khaine a bloody and vengeful god of war and courage, and Mourne, despite his name, a mocking god of trickery and deceit. Khaine screams. Mourne laughs.

Everything went according to Tzeentch's plan. The brainboyz descended into civil war, fighting an intense and hellish war over valuable worlds near the galactic core, which contained dozens of valuable hub worlds of the Old Ones' Webway. The fighting lasted for decades if not centuries before finally, in a great scream of psychic rage, Tzeentch's creation was born, tearing open the Maelstrom and devouring the greater part of the Ork race. The newborn Khaine led his new worshipers in a great purge of those who resisted, although with the Orks' ability to colonize nearly any world, hunting down the resistance was difficult. Some of the resisting brainboyz began programming new generations of their Orks to be able to safely channel the Warp through a collective subconscious for which weirdboyz would act as lightning rods, the effects of the Warp thus distributed across Ork mobs and unable to corrupt any one of them, but the presence of brainboy psykers still threatened their creations. Some departed their tribes willingly, knowing that their blindness to the dangers of the Warp had already damned them, and leaving behind the almost entirely Chaos-immune Orks as a final act of spite to the god who had devoured their race.

Others tried to maintain control, and inevitably any smart enough to become a psyker or bold enough to take the fight to Khaine's followers were quickly wiped out, the Orks having grown to levels of strength and durability far in excess of what the brainboyz had been to start with. With the rapid generational cycle of the Ork race, the brainboyz rapidly evolved, with all of strength, courage, and intelligence strongly selected against, into snotlings. Orks, meanwhile, had developed a near-perfect resistance to Chaos: Ork kultur, which praised Gork and Mork, derivatives of Khaine and Mourne, whilst remaining independent from the actual Chaos Gods who had inspired these two figures. To this day, Ork followers of Khorne-ne-Khaine are shunned (to death) by all but the most desperate or radically unkultured of warbosses and freebooter kaptins.

And yes, Khaine = Khorne in my version of the 40k universe. That barely even counts as speculation, the Avatar of Khaine has a Khorne symbol for a hat. Why the Eldar ended up worshiping the guy and why the name the Eldar worship him by and the name he's known to proper servants of Chaos eventually divurged is a story for another time, because this is already a long enough off-topic post. Also a story for another time: How Khaine went from Tzeentch's baby to his arch-nemesis and (this one related to the Khaine->Khorne transition) why he hates Slaanesh so **** much when Tzeentch is the god of psykers, which Khorne hates.

Although to go back on-topic, what kind of tech should the Old Ones have? The kind of tech that lets you make Webways and mobile, self-contained, hyper-adaptable Ork ecosystems.

Technically Eldar are of interest to Slaanesh which sustains them...also some of the images of the Ork deities (Gork and Mork) do have bestial horned characteristics which can resemble to some degree Khorne. It may be possible that Khorne and one of these two are the same which implies worship to this being further involves worship to the chaos gods.

That's not entirely true in the case of the Ork gods. They are clearly not Chaos entities, but something else entirely. In 2E fluff(maybe 3e, but I think its older) it's mentioned in at least one place that if they really got down to it Gork and Mork could curb stomp the chaos gods because they aren't fighting for worshippers unlike chaos. Literally every Ork that has ever or will ever exist worships them, there are no Ork heretics or unbelievers, and there are VASTLY more Orks than Humies. That's a ton of "faith" to be brought to bear.

Nah it's not the faith that matters... Orks iz made ta fight an win! same fur ar godz! Gork an Mork iz gonna stomp dam puny gits flat! Waaagh!!!

Sorry, by "Faith" I clearly meant "Orky know wots!"

However the fact that the Tau don't have such an influence in the warp may be on purpose. If legends are true the Old Ones created the warp, eldar and orks. Look what their affect on the warp was. Eldar and Orks created several Chaos Gods (Gork, maybe Mork are technically Chaos Gods) and the Warp turned into their chaotic playground. I don't think they would rely on anthing to do with the warp again.

What made Farsight turn against the Etherals? The fact they controlled the entire Tau race with mind magic. However fluff (why fluff) states that Farsght saw something, knew something that they would not want him to know. As Lynata keeps saying every interpretation of the warhammer 40k galaxy in essence is correct. Not exactly what Lynata says but close enough.

I think it's pretty accepted that the Old Ones created the Orks and Eldar as servant races - warriors, labor, etc...

I don't believe there's any indication whatsoever that the old ones created the Warp. I was always under the impression that the warp has always existed. It's just another dimentional layer beneath or parallel to realspace.

As for the space commies... Necrons makes very little sense other than the lack of psykers and caste stratification. It's far more likely that the Ethereals are just a new player. And, by new player, I mean GW hand-waving as solutions to problems.

The Xenology book includes some history which suggests the Ethereals were geneered into the Tau race by the Eldar, actually.

The Old ones created the webway. The warp existed, they just took advantage of it. During the war in heaven, one of their last ditch weapons - after the C'Tan got involved - was psykers; the eldar are one of their weapon-species. This both worked (as in 'the C'tan do not like warp energy one bit') and didn't (as in 'triggered a massed possession epidemic by enslavers').

And yes, Old One tech verges on the ridiculous. The only example we have of three things which might be old one artefacts are the Blackstone Fortresses and their control artefacts, the Hand of Darkness and the Eye of Night. The latter two have stats in 40k - and given how scary they are for something whos ability to act as a weapon is a byproduct of their real purpose...... ****.