Taurox The Brass Bull
"MOOOOOOOOOO!"
- – Taurox according to the Total War community
Taurox the Brass Bull is the most powerful Doombull in Warhammer Fantasy, and serves as one of the main Monster characters for the Beastmen
Story[edit | edit source]
Taurox the Brass Bull is a psychopathic Doombull blessed by Khorne for his prodigious talents at killing, having made it a habit of killing and eating anyone and anything that looked him in the eye.
Eventually, Khorne took notice and sent one of his Heralds to offer a boon to him - remember, in this edition, beastmen are basically the Chaos Gods' unwanted bastard children and pretty much never get anything nice, in contrast to humans, so that shows how good Taurox was at getting shit done.
Of course, remember what we said about that little habit of his? Yeah; when the daemon addressed him, the dumb brute bit its head off! He was then promptly driven insane by visions of apocalypse, went into a berserk frenzy, slaughtered his entire tribe, then rampaged across the Empire for a year and a day without rest, killing everything he encountered. When the frenzy was finally ended (which more or less involved nearly dying from exhaustion lying in a river of blood of his own making), he collapsed. At that point the Chaos Gods - probably mostly Khorne - turned Taurox's whole body into living brass, gave him limitless stamina and two axes that burned with hellfire. Taurox surged to his feet, drank from the river of blood for nourishment, and has been waging a non-stop war for the Chaos Gods ever since, accompanied only by the most vicious killers who don't make the mistake of looking him in the eye.
There was one caveat though; much of his throat was still living flesh, because you do not bite off a daemon's head and get away with it! Because Khorne apparently sometimes does care from whence the blood flows.
On the tabletop, this manifested as him having a 1+ armor save, but if you roll 6s for your To Hit and To Wound rolls, then you automatically killed him dead IF he failed that 1+ armor save of his, no matter how many wounds he had left (and unless he's fighting a special character this would nearly never happen).
Taurox was killed during The End Times, when Huntsmarshal Markus Wulfhart put an arrow in his throat from a couple of hundred meters away, like the archer who killed Achilles except Markus was a badass, during the battle for Altdorf.
Total War: WARHAMMER[edit | edit source]
Taurox and Oxyotl were chosen to rival each other in the DLC the Silence and the Fury for game 2, as well as being the last DLC it features. This is despite the fact that the closest thing to a foe he had in the fluff, Markus Wulfhart, was himself already included as the counterpart to Nakai the Wanderer. Yes, this means CA decided to shove both against random Lizardmen characters, for some reason.
In his vortex campaign story, he must find this relic called The Heart of Darkness on the continent of Lustria. To do so, he must earn the gods' favor by razing settlements and defeating enemies in the Blood-Grounds created by the brand new Herdstone mechanic for the Beastmen. He also needs to watch out for Oxyotl and his Lizardmen goons, who are trying to thwart him.
Thankfully, you don't have to worry about Oxyotl... Or ANY faction for that matter. Because his Rampage mechanic is a buttfucking experience in the hands of a decent player.
His special mechanic allows him to earn power ups and extra Dread (a new currency used to increase unit cap and upgrades for the Beastmen) as long as he keeps up his killing spree across the campaign map. More importantly, if you are in the middle of a Rampage, you can reset your movement. If you happen to be in the middle of a second Rampage, you can reset your movement again in the same turn.
If set up right, his Rampage faction mechanic lets him raze entire factions, continents, and go from one side of the world to the other in a single turn. It's hysterical, and Taurox is one of the legendary lords that benefits from harder difficulties, since the AI will pump out more armies to fight you, thus creating an insane chain to tear up the entire campaign map. The very last Warhammer 2 patch nerfed this (by making it much harder to trigger a bug that would cause your Rampage meter to never empty), so now razing the entire world in one turn is no longer possible, you can only raze half of it.
In battle, he has the ability to gain 40% ward save and deal heavy armour-piercing damage in melee if he engages in melee for a certain amount of time, making him the strongest duelist the Beastmen could offer. He is certainly not the best melee fighter in the game, nor is he nowhere near it. But he is a considerable force on the battlefield.
The RNG mechanic from the tabletop where he can be instantly killed by anyone with a lucky dice roll is not implemented however, and it's up to debate whether that may be a good thing because it removed inconsistent RNG that prevent the Beastmen players' from enjoying using him, or not because it did not give Taurox a necessary Achilles heel and make his character faithful to his lore.
