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Bob Greenwade wrote on Sun, Oct 1, 2023 02:35 PM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from 06:52 AM:

Fair enough point; I should've explained the names a bit further (even though they're Gilman's).

An ancress (a word unfamiliar even to most native English-speakers) is a woman who has cut herself off from secular society entirely for religious reasons, staying in small quarters in an abbey, convent, or other religious building. The word is the feminine form of "anchorite," for a man who does the same (it's also Gilman's name for a Manticore/Rhinoceros).

I'm presuming Mr. Gilman was using Metropolitan to describe a woman who does the opposite: living among the people in a city, being around them as much as possible. (Probably a better word for it, in that context, would've been Socialite, but Metropolitan is what's stuck.) What I was going for there is a sort of Eiffel Tower/Empire State Building mashup, though now that you mention it I probably shouldn't have set aside my usual base. This is one of a handful of pieces where a good, logical design escaped me.

I like the Simurgh as an alternate name for the Anchorite; but isn't Qilin basically a different rendering of the well-established Kirin?

I do thank you for your feedback on those; a suggestion for a better look for the Metropolitan would be very welcome (especially from you, Jean-Louis).

As for those other three, I just managed to get together workable Reaper and Harvester pieces. For Cerberus I've tripled what the Musketeer's Dog can do, from F2sW to BsW3; Hydra is a cool-sounding piece, but evokes images of something extending the Snake, possibly as the Gryphon/Rehinoceros. Similarly, the name of Godzilla evokes something like a Fire Dragon that takes up four squares. (But that's just me; half the established pieces in this game, including most of the orthodox ones, don't quite scan for me, with the Bishop and Knight being two of the worst offenders.)


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