When I got to the Egyptian incursão, I had a problem that looked like it had no way out. The discard rule I wrote for the whole project — no figure can be human, none can have an identity tied to ethnicity or practiced religion, none can use a base that has already been used as an insult against the group that created it — rules out almost all of Egyptian mythology on sight. Anubis, Horus, Sobek, Bastet, Thoth, Sekhmet: all of them are a human body with an animal head. Apply the rule literally and the incursão loses its icons, and not much is left.
I went and researched before giving up on the whole incursão, and the research solved the problem in a way I didn't expect: the animal head in Egyptian iconography was never a literal description. It was an iconographic system — a visual language to communicate attribute and domain, not a portrait of what the deity supposedly looked like. Sekhmet got a lioness head because she was a warrior, not because she had a lioness's head. The human body in the artwork is the label. The animal is the report.
What that unlocks
If the human body is an ancient artist's convention, and the animal is the real data behind the convention, the Ordem can do exactly what it already does with any other testimony: strip the convention and recover the report. Anubis becomes a canine whose flesh doesn't decay — a TEMPO violation, generic base, no human trait left. Sekhmet becomes a lioness whose heat has no source — pure ÍGNEO. Thoth, the very god of writing and record-keeping, becomes an ibis with non-local action — NEURAL, almost too poetic for me to have made up on purpose. None of the four needs adapting. The research handed me a ready-made roster.
Where this got even better: the oldest religious text I used
The same move — strip the artistic convention, read the literal description — works even better on angelological texts that are two thousand five hundred years old. The human angel with white wings is a Renaissance invention, not the original text. The original text describes something else entirely: Ophanim are wheels within wheels, covered in eyes, that move without turning. That's already a pure kinetic violation, without changing a single word, written two and a half millennia ago. Seraphim have six wings — two cover the face, two cover the feet, two fly: textbook AERO. Cherubim have four faces, calf's feet, and the color of polished bronze: GEO with a secondary VETOR. Thrones are wheels of fire: ÍGNEO.
This isn't the Ordem proving the divine exists. It's the Ordem holding that what people called divine had mass, geometry, and measurable behavior — which is materialism, and reinforces the game's central premise instead of breaking it. A literal "divine Brecha" is banned by my own rule, because if something is genuinely divine, measuring it makes no sense, and the whole game is about measuring.
The mistake I almost made right after
Riding that win, I proposed that every incursão have "anchor classes" — three or four specific classes that would dominate that themed wave, since each mythology seemed to naturally fit certain physical violations more than others. I got corrected, and the correction was right: if the Norse incursão anchored on CINÉTICO, CRIO, and GEO, the ninety species in that wave would pull the entire roster distribution toward those three classes — and the game's build coverage, which was already calculated at 22.78% against a statistically derived baseline, would get worse exactly where I couldn't afford it to get worse.
The correction became a permanent rule: an incursão's dominant law is a lens, not a quota. Every incursão covers all thirteen classes — the law doesn't filter which classes exist, it changes how each one expresses itself there. In an incursão about impossible proportion, that wave's ÍGNEO becomes a flame at the wrong scale, HIDRO becomes a volume that doesn't match its mass, and so on through all thirteen, without hijacking the roster's balance to serve one specific mythology.
The fourth figure that completed the Egyptian set
Sobek, the crocodilian, came in without any of the other three's complications — because his base was already animal at the source, with no human head to strip away. That specific incursão's dominant law (tissue that doesn't decay, time that doesn't pass) defines how that wave's Sobek manifests, but the silhouette itself never needed translating. It's a reminder that not every figure demands the same reading work — some arrive ready-made, and recognizing that quickly saves you from spending research effort on a problem that doesn't exist.
What still demands discipline every time
Every figure that enters an incursão has to pass four discard tests before any art starts, and the easiest one to forget is the third: has the obvious generic base for this figure already been used, historically, as an insult against the group that originated it? It's not a gut-check test — it's a written test because gut checks fail, especially at three in the morning, when whoever's authoring it might not have the cultural context to spot the problem alone. I write that test into every new incursão proposal, even when it seems too obvious to need it, because I've already seen once just how much it isn't.