For a bit more commentary and close ups of the individuals you can check out the replies to this tweet:
I've been monkeying around with the guilds of Capital some more. Still a few bits I'm not 100% on (and details will change as Matt creates them of course!) but I'm mostly happy. pic.twitter.com/skAZk3KoP3
— Dan (@dan_connolly) May 1, 2018
Thanks to a pretty successful Kickstarter campaign (I mean, I guess it’s going ok), Matt Colville will be streaming his next D&D campaign. I’m especially excited because the campaign his players have chosen is the Black Company campaign:
A mercenary company, the Chain falls on hard times and regroups in Capital, the greatest city in this, or any age. There the small band must lick its wounds, recruit new members, and plot its
revenge… Read more.
One of the features of this is that each player will hold a rank/title in the Company, one of which is Standard Bearer. I, of course, then had to think about what this standard might be…
So what does the name mean? Well, Minauros is a layer of the Nine Hells, and home to Jangling Hiter:
Suspended above the fetid bogs of Minauros, it is a literal city of chain, with everything from the buildings to the ground itself made of chains or chain mesh of various sizes…there is no finer chain anywhere in the multiverse than that from Jangling Hiter.
So as well as sounding super fucking cool, the Chain of Minauros are named for a chain that cannot be broken: they will honour their contract, they will hold their nerve. In word and in resolve they are unbreakable. Which is what you want from a mercenary company! (Damn, he’s good at writing this stuff.)
One train of thought I like that is that whatever the banner might be the standard is also hung with actual chains. Maybe when you enlist you’re given a single link of a chain, when you die that link is added to the chain on the standard so the standard bearer is literally carrying the history of the company.
Or, maybe the standard is hung with chains and the link you’re given when you join is from one of these chains. When the company is small the banner hangs heavy with chain, but if you can see the standard you know you face the company at full strength. That seems cool to me. But anyway, let’s play with some chains.
I think black and white makes sense, their contracts are written in black and white, they honour things to the letter. It’s no nonsense. (I guess they could write their contracts in blood? White on black is just so stark and powerful though.)
I think some of the horizontal chains look a bit weak. But! I also think that they make the most sense, imagine a wall of shields all side by side, forming a single, unbreakable chain. This even fits with the ability the Sergeant gets. So we need to make that cooler.
What else do I like? The bottom right with the surrounding chain could work, it could be a bordure with the insignia of their employer in the centre.
The chain on a bend sinister is fun too, the sinister could be a nod to the hellish origins of their name. Or maybe when they fight for ‘good’ it’s a bend proper and when they fight for the less good it’s sinister. Probably impractical, unless they have an ‘are we the baddies?’ checkbox on their contracts or something.
Let’s play with that horizontal chain and employer arms:
I think the horizontal chain is much stronger as a chief. We’ve also got the arms of Haldrim to stand in as the employer of our company but I’m less enamoured of this. It looks a bit jumbled. And I think I’m set on white on black.
If you went with the chief you could use different chain patterns to denote rank or distinguish troop type:
It’s neat enough but how can we take it further. How about some more intricate chainwork:
I really like the fine rings, they reinforce the idea of standing strong together, you can picture the row of shields bearing this chain. I think this might be pick of the lot. We’ll see how I feel in the morning.
The centre one is riffing on the idea of the link to the hells what with the sharp, angular chains, and an impossible/unbreakable link at the centre. But I like it less.
The last one is what I’d choose if the direction was to go functional, mundane.
As they’re a mercenary company including weaponry makes sense. There are a few directions I thought of on this tack:
The first is that the Chain is stronger than any blade. I tried to do something with a hammer striking the chain and shattering but it was a bit too busy, the broken blade is ok but I’m not sure how well it conveys the concept.
The next is intended to show that the swords are bound/chained in your service. It also has a Damocles motif which I think works: when they take a contract there’s a burden of responsibility, and possibly, death hanging over each member of the company.
The last one is somewhere between the two ideas. The sword can’t break free from the chains but equally the chains are bound to it. Not sure about that. I prefer things to be less busy.
The final direction I thought of was having the chain bind a creature, the difficulty here was that the company could end up in service to… anything! If you bind a dragon or demon in your arms (not in the romantic sense) would it be awkward if you ended up in service to them? Not sure. I drew a shackle anyway:
I’m doodling heraldry again…
(Also it’s for D&D again.)
Board with Life‘s Adventures in the New World campaign is coming to a close and the next campaign is XP Academy. A Harry Potter-esque school for heroes.
Of course, I couldn’t resist thinking about school arms, crest, and motto.
Update: I’ve put together a cleaner version (not including the supporters yet):
And the original sketch:
The arms were obvious. Four quarters (like our four Hogwarts houses) but for the four core classes: Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue. Sword, wand, hand and daggers to represent each.
For the motto I wanted something a bit clever. After dancing around a riff on hic sunt dracones for a while (and a brief dalliance with an XP/expecto patronum something or other) I got it: Solve for XP.
It riffs on ‘solve for x’ as a common maths question, has a sense of school patriotism (‘solve puzzles and challenges for XP Academy’), and literally describes what the characters will do. (Then Google translated into Latin cos, you know.)
For our crest we have a Dragon emerging from a Dungeon (for hopefully obvious reasons).
And for our supporters we have a Beaver and an Owl. The Owl represents knowledge, learning, wisdom. The Beaver represents hard-work, and reflects the story from medieval bestiaries where beavers would bite off their own testes to escape hunters (heroes: know when to run!). It was also an excuse to draw a heraldic beaver. They’re pretty weird.
Who knows if this is anywhere near what Donald had in mind! Luckily I won’t have to wait long to find out.
In the meantime I’ll maybe work this up from idle doodle to something a bit cleaner (that mantling needs work for sure). Update: I did!
Far from an original idea (I don’t even need to google it to know that there will be a hundred takes on superhero coats of arms) but it was fun to think how I might represent each hero without just resorting to their logo/uniform on a shield.
Banner is a personal fave. The two halves of his shield for the two halves of his personality. The left side has a snake wrapped around a staff, a nod to his title (I know he’s a physicist rather than an MD but we do see him treating the sick), by cropping the head/tail of the snake also represents a gamma wave.
The snake wrapped around the branch also led to the crest: a dragon chasing a dove. In medieval bestiaries, doves would fly to the Peridexion tree to escape the dragon (the devil) and the tree would keep them safe. On the shield the serpent is climbing the tree, it simultaneously represents the good Banner could do as a doctor and the worst that he lets in to the world.
Natasha’s crest is fun too. All the guys have such martial crests but she’s a spy, hers should be more subtle.
The wheel has eight spokes (legs) and looks like a spider sat on a web, it also spins thread like a spider, or spins a yarn like a spy. And if fairy tales have taught us anything it’s that a spinning wheel can be pretty deadly: Natasha isn’t the girl pricking her finger on the spindle, she’s the point of the needle.
A bit of fun for a Sunday morning.
Cap for funsies. Mostly playing with outlines on my charges, adding helms and mantles, and crests. Thinking of working this up into a set.
(I’m a sucker for completeness)
We don’t know much about the old Kingdoms of the Southern Sanction. We know the names of their capitals (Saldon, Holgast, Tirrell) but the names of the kingdoms themselves are lost… (or not on the map at least!)
We know that the lich performed the rite of desecration to halt the destruction of the forest so we could try to symbolise how the landscape changed as the kingdoms of men spread.
(And we can always just do something cool for no good reason because why the hell not.)
Starting in the East we have our first kingdom. This one is closest to Titan’s Gate, on the fringes of the forest. I imagine this kingdom would have had the best chance of clearing the most land before the kingdoms fell, it’s also served by three rivers.
The gold and green check represents the verdant pastures (green) and abundant crops (gold). It’s also distinct from the other kingdoms so far, we haven’t use chequy anywhere else.
Next up we have the kingdom to the South. My initial idea for one of the kingdoms was inspired by something I saw in York Minster a couple of weeks ago:
I loved the idea of arrows or daggers intertwined with tree trunks. It could represent conflict with the forest itself as the people of the kingdom carved out their domain, or their prowess as hunters.
Or maybe there’s an old folk tale of the first king of these lands who blooded three arrows and fired each to mark the bounds of his kingdom, the land feared his reach would be too far and give him dominion over the whole world so a great forest sprung up and trapped his arrows and that’s where the forest first came from.
But, ultimately I decided this was too fiddly a device for one of the main kingdoms. I liked the idea of including a weapon (as none of the human kingdoms do yet) so I figured three swords worked. As the southern kingdom’s capital is near(ish) to the coast the blue field works, and with the marsh to the North and the goliath to the East I figure they would have had plenty of groups to fight.
Finally we have the kingdom to the North. These guys are closest to the lich’s island, I reckon they would have had to carve their lands from the thickest, darkest forest. My first thought was an axe but we’ve already got blades for the kingdom to the south and axes evoke some of our dwarven kingdoms so my next thought was fire.
We haven’t used rayonny anywhere else and they’re the only human kingdom using red so they’re still distinct. I went for the flames moving across rather than burning up or down to give them feel that they are crawling across the shield much as the flames of men would’ve burned across the land.