It was and it did! Its just a bit disappointing that it could not also be done in a way that showed off how tactical the game is when playing it. Like by having Agatha be the one to go into CC, only to eat a hit on the way in due to a template, activate Dogged, and then take something else with her via her own template. You don’t have to give the players brain damage to show off a good fight. These battle report videos also have a tendency to completely forgo “Pie-slicing” in favor of having units take fights with 2 or even 3 ARO pieces at the same time; while cinematic, this has tricked more than 1 new person I’ve seen IRL into thinking putting multiple Snipers on a rooftop forces people to engage them both, only to watch an HMG rip them apart one-by-one. This video did its job by being exciting and pretty, but new players should stay the heck away from it if they are looking to learn the game.
No, he's actually courteously paving the way for the Grrls by ripping the barbed wire. But the second use as a CC utensil is plausible Got all the interesting ones built Also I had the courage to chop the sword off!
I begin to wonder if the "Thelema" is not intended as a simplified variant of the freemasonic symbol, as depicted in some of Russian propaganda imagery.
I do not know why people keep misinterpret the monogram of "Ave Maria" for anything other than what it is...
I will be honest, I had no awareness of this monogram, so I had no point of reference for what the symbol the Observance had emblazoned on their uniforms could be. Though I remember Bostria mentioned in one of the studio updates that it was a stylized symbol for the virgin Mary.
Because Thelema intentionally riffed on/played with that symbol, and we assume that CB’s very well-read design team might be making an intentional reference to that sort of symbolic distortion? Some sources say the symbol is known as “Auspice Maria”, not Ave Maria, too.
To be honest, this symbol is about the clearest acronyms (or acrolexos, cryptonyms etc as they are sometimes called) that CB could have picked. The beginning of Observance stems from Greek Orthodox traditions and in Orthodoxy we see much more sophisticated examples. To give a couple of examples - these are inscriptions on icons with images of the Virgin Mary from Byzantine and Russian orthodox iconography: (Bentchev, I. Zur Beschriftung der Ikonen. – Іn: Мосховия. Проблемы византийской и новогреческой филологии. К 60-летию Б. Л. Фонкича. М., 2001) And this is the acrolexo of a single 18th century Greek encolpion (Emanuil Mutafov, Christian Cryptography, De Artibus Monographiae tome 1, in Bulgarian) So really, the Observance symbol is very "normie" thing, compared to actual real life Christian symbolism. Heck I'd expect that in the lore the reverends use much more diverse set of symbols, acronyms, cryptograms, memes and patina cues, some of which probably don't make much sense even to some of their younger acolytes. And if I was a better painter, I'd have totally exploited that when painting my Bakunin box, but alas, my freehand skills are next to nonexisiting.
I also wasn't aware of the ave maria symbol. Iconography on this remake seems to be all over the place.
The first picture is just riffs of "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" (technically written Mary virgin gods mother) the second needs study, but I like the idea on integrating the religious cryptograms in their code given they are in part the hacker protection of Nomads nation.
Yes. ΜΡ ΘΥ is quite obvious. It is not meant to be cryptic, I put it mostly to show how much more awkward and ornamental these things can be. The second has some common and easy to recognize parts. We obviously have the name of the owner - Hieromonk Eremia and the year, 1720. ΘΘΘΘ in the bottom is known - Θεού Θέα Θείον Θαύμα. Mutafov gives ΦΧΦΠ = Φως Χριστού Φαίνει Πάσι (The light of Christ illuminates everything), which is apparently extremely common. Same author gives ΤΚΠΓ = Τόπος Κρανίου Παράδεισος γέγονε, based on the fact that apparently we also have this cryptogram in Church Slavonic (The place of the skull became paradise). The rest - no idea, I'll have to check but they have probably been deciphered convincingly. But either way, this is beyond the topic of the forum, I mostly wanted to show that the symbolism we have associated with Observance is nothing particularly cryptic or deep and just scratches the surface of actual stuff.
Really wish they hadn't veered straight into space nuns for a sectorial that's supposed to have more anarchists than Exarchia...
they didn't 'veer straight into space nuns'. While observance now composes half of Bakunin, the other half (which my community has taken to calling the Vaudeville half) is still very much made of freaks and crazies. To the point you can still make an army without observance units. It's pending how effective an army without observance units will be effective (we don't know if there will be changes to the other half of the army). But so far it's not 'oops, all nuns' And come on, Cenobites are cool.
And part of the fluff has always been that the zealots of the Observance, always ready, willing, and able to shed blood both in the physical and quantronic realms, + the mad geniuses of Praxis making marvels that magnify the few troops at hand, are what gave Bakunin the breathing room necessary for the freaks and crazies of Vaudeville room to grow.
And if you keep googling, the top left one, the only one actually matching the design used on the minis, is the least popular and shows up mostly only on the variants of this particular set of symbols. It virtually seems like somebody retroactively squeezed the Thelema into the set "because it fits".
