The Knight Houses

[This Dave]

Your pardon, gracious worthy, but our Gue'vasa are anything but evil - they are loyal, courageous, and remain faithful to the God-Emperor in spirit and in deed. They stand between us all - the Empire of Mankind and the Concordiat of the Tau both - and the darkness, and we hope they will provide an example that all might follow in the Future. The Greater Good is not exclusionary, you know. Your Commissar Cain is an excellent example...

Rules-wise, I'm kinda in limbo here, Dave. On the one hand, fluff-wise, Gue'vasa are definitely part of the Tau... but rules-wise, the only options for playing Gue'vasa are either as Allied IG (I guess AM now?), which means allies of convenience - or as stand-as Tau, which lets me claim Battle Brothers status (I can use my markerlights) but denies me all the melee units and Commissars. Since I built my humies with Tau pulse carbines, I pay for them as Fire Warriors. I have some Tau-refurbed Sentinels that I play as counts-as Crisis Suits in the same way. I don't have many vehicles yet.

Theme-wise, I don't see why an orphaned Freeblade or an impoverished House on the Mechanicus poopie-list might turn to the Tau for maintenance and parts, esp if they knew about Riptides...

Okay they're not evil, just misguided. Perhaps if they all went through this blue door and wait in that room they can explain themselves to the nice man in the robe...

According to the Codex and Companion Freeblade Knights aren't mercenaries or such. They're either the last of their House going out in a blaze of glory, one that hates courtly life and wants to stay in battle, or one that's taken a vow or oath to do some task. I'm not even going to get into the ones that may just be rogue Machine Spirits running the things. They're all still bound by vows and codes of loyalty and honor as well as some mental conditioning so I couldn't see one joining the Tau voluntarily.

That being said I really like the way your Gue'vasa army sounds and in friendly games I couldn't see any problem at all with a renegade Knight joining your army. Officially though because of the allies thing if you have any Tau units you'll have to deal with the Desperate Allies thing, though the 1 in 6 inaction might be due to poor maintenance or possibly Machine Spirit rebellion at serving with xenos rather than the pilot watching for treachery.

[Thomas Anthony Borja]

It's only required a D6 roll if he's within 6 inches of the tau units, which depending on how you run your tau this can easily be avoided if most of your tau hang back or converge on different ends of the field, but it's not to terrible of a gimp as long as you pay attentiom to a 6 inch halo to not make the d6 roll, that being said, I'm pretty sure if you play with friends no one will call you on it as long as you give em a heads up.

Lore-wise maybe a freeblade would help, but there is a deepsense of loyalty, towards their feudalism, that being said there were many knightworlds dead or still lost so whos to say that one of these knight worlds were not in tau space, with the Nobels agreeing to joins the Tau, If you win the nobels their planets will follow regardless