Basically I'm wondering if I can make a clothing item that looks like a tail, and is worn on the tail slot that I can give to actors belonging to a certain race in my game. I've tried just making an armor piece referring to the NakedTailKhajiit AA and assigning it to slot 40 of a new race, but that didn't take. Any ideas?

the khajit tail may either be havok enabled or animated, but either way, it requires a skeleton that has tail bones.

you can probably put an external tail on the 40 slot on a human biped, but you would have to create it as an armor (in a 3D editor) and skin it to either the pelvis or the rear skirt bone

I didn't know what any of that last bit meant (I don't do 3d editing yet) so I'm just gonna go with "Not for now" on this particular issue, and work on other things.

For future reference, how does one "skin" something to a "bone"?

its a process called rigging. in a 3d editor there is a tool called something like Skin which basically weights the 3d model's vertices to the bones of the skeleton, you can alter the amount of weighting, so that the bone drives the verts more fluidly or more rigidly, depending on your needs. its complicated to explain, but imagine it is sort of like a wire armature for a clay animation character, only it can deform the clay with "elasticity" like human skin

Huh, thanks.