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More hyperbole than over-reaction.

 

Am I really the only remaining bastion against the hordes of 'Chaos Sister' worshippers?

No you are not the only one and yes its annoying what  our background/fluff has become....

 

I dont believe SoB are totally incorruptible but its starting to  sound like we are as weak minded as the average IG

 

SoB are human but trained/indoctrined to believe in the Imperial Creed from Birth at the school of "The Emperor is everything"

roll a d6  and miracles happen!!

Yes biggrin.png

It took my local meta nearly 2 years to get a 2nd Night Lord player. lol

But on topic, yes, I understand the idea that sisters CLAIM to be incorruptible, but in the end they are only human. They may have a huge boost, considering their faith alone gives them a 6+ invulnerable save, but hey, things can happen.

This was in my opinion what made their fluff flawed since the beginning.

I have nothing against the concept of being immune to chaos but there must be a logical reason: genetic enhancements, technology, even chance (namely eveolution, radom genetic mutaion etc) but faith won't help you when something enterer your mind and start to reshape it.

In fact willpower may be more useful than faith and you can believe in nothing and still have strong willpower. In the end the two things are not necessarily related.

The 6+ invul save is a good gift they made to army and if they wanted to be "faithful to fluff" they shouldn't have given it to the army. How can faith save you from a Titan weapon?

Anyway, you SoB players are always yelling at something.

You get a WD codex, you're unhappy, you can only make squads by buying three metal sisters at a time and you're unhappy, a Canoness wipes out a full order and you're unhappy...

Come on, just enjoy what you have !

The WD codex even gave them 6+ invul save to every unit including vehicles! That should be able to stop whining, in my opinion.

The add the fact Celestine has the WS of a Primarch!

GW was not so polite with the new CSM codex, for example.

NOTE: I have no intention to be hostile toward SoB players so treat my words are a mere analysis on fluff on rules, nothing more. Thanks msn-wink.gif

EDIT: Fixed typing error

Vesper, on 23 Feb 2013 - 23:09, said:snapback.png

Anyway, you SoB players are always yelling at something.

You get a WD codex, you're unhappy, you can only make squads by

buying three metal sisters at a time and you're unhappy, a Canoness

wipes out a full order and you're unhappy...

Come on, just enjoy what you have !

The WD codex even gave them 6+ invul save to every unit including vehicles! That should be able to stop whining, in my opinion.

The add the fact Celestine has the WS of a Primarch!

GW was not so polite with the new CSM codex, for example.

I wasn't serious about SoB players always whining.

Vesper, on 23 Feb 2013 - 23:09, said:snapback.png

Anyway, you SoB players are always yelling at something.

You get a WD codex, you're unhappy, you can only make squads by

buying three metal sisters at a time and you're unhappy, a Canoness

wipes out a full order and you're unhappy...

Come on, just enjoy what you have !

The WD codex even gave them 6+ invul save to every unit including vehicles! That should be able to stop whining, in my opinion.

The add the fact Celestine has the WS of a Primarch!

GW was not so polite with the new CSM codex, for example.

I wasn't serious about SoB players always whining.

And it wasn't my intention to makes polemics. Anyway I suspect it's time for my "disengagement" ;) (namely abandon the discussion here).

I'm not popular among Ecclediarchy, after all tongue.png and that's the reason I barely frequent this section. I just wanted to say my opinion on the original post because I read things that forced me to intervene (there are times when I cannot remain silent ;) ). Now that I did I disengage before a new War of Faith starts biggrin.png

I have been with the sisters for a while. Personally I have always considered absolutely incorruptable to mean hardly ever falling to corruption. But it seems like lately the sisters getting beaten, murdered or corrupted are how they show whoever else is awesome. The Grey Knights thing keeps coming up because of how random and pointless it was.

 

Everyone wants to see their army as the biggest and baddest, and it would be nice if the sisters could see a little more of that instead of getting fridged to make a random canoness seems weak. If it happened to say a Ultramarines, well at least they have piles of stories of them being awesome. Even in their own microdex they onlye get two clear victories and one was playing wingman to the Salamanders (one of the few chapters that has not murdered a bunch of Battle Sisters for giggles and armor paint.)

I don't mind people thinking Sisters are weak, so long as they kick-butt on the tabletop smile.png Why do you care what the made up stories say who did what to whom? Will someone throw it in anothers face when the GK's fictionally destroy a billion deamons within a book? What if said deamon player then whups the GK's on the table?

I don't care how the sisters are portrayed in the books, so long as they are well-written, interesting stories. The problem is they generally are not.

I do also believe sisters get put into the fridge quite often. The GK thing is really eyebrow-raising too, of course. It's almost as bad as the writing in the tyranid codex (who got outperformed in their speciality by a random tau outpost, which was consequently wiped out by another nameless force of necrons.)

 

One of the coolest Sister characters I've come across is in Gaunt's ghosts, actually, where gaunt supposedly meets an old, retired sister of battle in a small chapel. While clearly old and past the age of battle-use, she still instills him with fear whenever she looks at him, because she's so accustomed to using a targetter, gaunt keeps feeling he gets a target lock on him. And all the while, the elderly lady is calm, quiet, and wise. She leaves Gaunt, a tough-as-nails character, profoundly shaken by how she moved, but moreso by what she said.

And she didn't even have to actually be there to do it.

 

 

I believe, though I'm not sure, that there's also some sisters of battle in Hellsreach, which seem to be described as I would expect them. Fanatical defenders of their temple ground, even with just a handful against a multitude, they will fight to the last and never waver in their resolve.

 

Now, something else bugged me earlier in the discussion - about the sisters and the ecclessiarchy standing for something so wrong, and having ruined the imperium - which I'm not entirely sure is true. The emperor may have been advocating science and everything, but in the horus heresy, euphrati keeler did banish a daemon simply by her faith in the emperor - just as all the sisters get a 6++ save and other miracles simply by their faith in the emperor. Now, I'd say that is something special.

 

And during the times of the Horus heresy, and thereafter, the imperium would've fallen apart into all kinds of small shisms if not for the faith of humans in the emperor as a god. That's their one unifying uniting goal, and I think the first three books in particular show this really well - how in the face of adversity, those who belief in the emperor as a god are holding stuff together for the good of the imperium.

 

Of course there've been some rotten apples in the ecclessiarchy (age of apostasy, anyone?), but the same could be said of the space marines, and noone would want to do without Space Marines, now would they? I think the imperium wouldn't last very long. And I think the same about their faith - without it, it wouldn't last very long.

 

 

I do remember one book from the series with the commissar that always runs away from dying/fighting

or generally being a good Commissar

 

A witch hunter was basing them selves out of a SoB convent doing some naughty expirements with a Tyranid

which atracts a massive force of Nids already on planet.

 

Another Inquisitor+the commissar comes along for a visit ,says hey hes been naughty !

shows the proof and the girls go crazy mad ready to sell their lifes as penance while the main hero+inquisitor exit stage left

and call in a Massive orbital bombardment to nuke the bugs.

 

to me it was very SoB how they reacted they knew they would die and still fought on

Just to be clear, are you are asking why we care how our fictional army is persented in the fiction?

 

You might not care personally, but part of the reason some of us get attached to armies is what happens off the table. The stories, the books, the codexes are all part of the appeal.

With respect to sisters and incoruptability, in the past I've envisioned it as a result of the selection process and development program. To compare with marines, Astartes are selected based on their warrior prowess and later conditioned for corruption resistance whereas Sororitas are selected for corrupton resistance and later trained for warrior prowess.

 

In the original Necromunda Outlanders you could hire Wyrd's, a form of untrained psycher, most of them had some form of minor power, a rare example of which was immunity to demonic attack. If one in thirty six underhive witches are immune and you're filtering millions through the Schola Progenum, it shouldn't be to hard to assemble a unit of immunes. Yes this extrapolates from game rules into fluff and assumes immunity isn't related to psychic talent. It does support the notion that if deliberately selected for, you could create incorruptable units.

 

It's a cheap trick to use shock tactics like "OMG Choas Sistaz!111".

DISCLAIMER: I have not yet read the Death of Antagonis. I have heard, however, that Protagonis boots his rear pretty hard.

 

Ahem.

 

Since.. quite some time, accusations of heresy have been thrown around gratuitously by the various actors of the Imperium. It's become pretty much a running gag to accuse one of heresy for not eating his breakfast cereal or not tying his shoelaces in a certain, most pious way. Needless to say, the standards are set at nigh-impossible heights to reach by the common folk, by virtue of the arbitrators of what constitutes heresy being.. well a bit touched in the head. One can look at Inquisitor Karamazov for a template of just how great the expectations can be. Better a thousand innocents die than one heretic go free and all that.

 

This order in question may have failed not because they were being Chaos-y in the dorms, but simply because, at that point in time, they didn't meet the impossibly high standards of the Cannonness in question and thus were branded "heretics".

 

Of course, it could just be that the author was being lazy about it.

 

In fact willpower may be more useful than faith and you can believe in nothing and still have strong willpower.

How can faith save you from a Titan weapon?

Try taking a D Weapon's damage with the belief that you'll be fine because you don't believe in anything and your sheer Force of Will will stop it.

No cheating, psykers.

:p

 

Also to be clear I'm not arguing that Sisters ARE corruptible, and I like this:

 

This order in question may have failed not because they were being Chaos-y in the dorms, but simply because, at that point in time, they didn't meet the impossibly high standards of the Cannonness in question and thus were branded "heretics".

edit: derpy stuff

So, are there any good Sisters of Battle stories?

 

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the short story "Daemonblood" by Ben Coulter, where a Sister of Battle proves to be even MORE resistant to the wiles of the Dark Gods than an Ultramarine Sergeant.

Anyone got others?

There are the two books Swallow wrote. The White Dwarf codex is actually pretty good for its stories, too; they just need more of what's there.

 

Even the comic book Daemonfuge(sp?) showed SoB in a strong light.  The company that was betrayed, corrupted and possessed still managed to retain some autonomy and managed to impart their knowledge to sister Ephrael Stern.

Black and Red is the best of the "Sister Miriya" trilogy (Black and Red, Faith and Fire, Hammer and Anvil).

 

Black and Red is the audio-novella of how a Sister Celestian, if given overall field command, might handle an encounter with a Tzeentch-run lost colony with an army of 'deactivated' clone soldiers.

 

Faith and Fire takes that character, a few months later as she's pulling duty on a Black Ship to have a psyker illegally shipped to a cardinal world. Surprise surprise, said psyker escapes, the book is supposedly about tracking him down, she ends up breaking orders, siding with him, breaking the Cardinal's toys (but it's OK because the cardinal was a heretic too), then getting a "slap on the wrist but you did well really" punishment.

 

Hammer and Anvil is supposedly about her and her girlfriend going off to reclaim Sanctuary 101, but really, it's just a big spoiler for the (at time of release) unrevealed Newcron codex. There's basically no story ("Sisters arrive with AdMech, Admech wake up Necrons, Necrons besiege convent, Oh, and Miriya gets to explore a tomb complex). There's something about some ancient secret relic book or something, but it's just a distraction from the complete lack of story or character development in the rest of the book.

Red and Black is the audiodrama that goes between the Swallow books I believe.  Same set of characters.  I remember that short story about the Seraphim and the Space Marine Sergeant, that I liked.  I haven't gotten to touch or read Daemonfuge though, and I feel like I'm missing out.

 

Honestly though, there aren't a lot of Sisters stories... in some sense this is to be expected.  It's not a popular, mainstream army like the Guard or the Space Marines.  In a way though, avoiding writing stories because an army isn't popular is a self fulfilling prophecy.  If there were more stories about the Sisters and their unswavering faith, stories about them accomplishing great things, they would become more popular.

 

The ratio of "mindless religious fanatics who all fall to Chaos or die horribly" to "Awesome religious warrior nuns who blast away evil when other humans and even some Space Marines would fail" is too high. :)

Sisters were truly corrupted in Daemonifuge. They fought each other and all that, hence the martyrdom of Silas Hand. 

 

I've never viewed the Sisters of Battle as incorruptible, because it's never been said that they are. I'd rate their corruptibility right with Space Marines, and look how poorly the latter do! Despite the psychoindoctrination and all that jazz, there will still be weak-minded soldiers in every branch of the Imperium (except the Grey Knights, it's kinda their thing).

 

I think the original thing that peeved you though is kind of a lame story to have though...something like how she happily punishes herself for only perceived failings (despite having never failed anyway), or something like that.

I remember reading once that ADB either wanted to write a Sisters story, or was going to.  I did post on his FB page asking about it a while ago.  No response, although the sheer amount of messages etc on that page, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just didn't see it.  It would be nice to see what the situation is with that, but I don't want to spam his page asking.

I remember reading once that ADB either wanted to write a Sisters story, or was going to.

I saw a mention of this at one point on his FB and I'm pretty sure I brought it up here (with obvious glee) however I've seen nothing on it since. I'm certain I'd enjoy it, but it may just be rumor/a joke/my insane imagination.

 

One question I have...whether Sisters are incorruptible or not, when a sole surviving Canoness shows up and says "Hey, I killed my entire order because they were corrupted" any self-respecting Inquisitor would put a bolt through her noggin to "finish the deal". That's the Imperium's traditional method for dealing with corruption: kill the planet, erase the chapter, expunge all evidence. I don't see this canoness being excused from that. Maybe that's just me though. <3

 

I remember reading once that ADB either wanted to write a Sisters story, or was going to.

I saw a mention of this at one point on his FB and I'm pretty sure I brought it up here (with obvious glee) however I've seen nothing on it since. I'm certain I'd enjoy it, but it may just be rumor/a joke/my insane imagination.

I'm sure some would enjoy a book including SoB shower scenes, considering the one in Emperor's Gift. :P

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