Wednesday, December 26, 2012

CAMELOT Trigger - Heraldry

While I wait for CAMELOT Trigger to come back from the editor, I thought this would be a good time to talk about some elements of the setting.

Heraldry is important to knights. Colors, symbols and patterns have important meaning about who the knight is, where he falls in his household and what he's accomplished.

A blog entry isn't big enough to go into the meanings of everything, but a quick Google search can lead down a rabbit hole. In addition to the basic symbols above, there are animals whose meaning is different depending on their positioning. The crest on the shield was how you let someone know who you were when you met them on the field.

There are, of course, symbols for the planets as well:


Mixing these in with the classic symbols gives a distinct flavor to the knights of the setting. Arthur's armour, Calibur-N, featured the Earth symbol with each quadrant filled with an allied planet's symbol. Mars in the lower right corner, Venus in the upper left, closest to his heart.

When making a knight for CAMELOT Trigger, take a moment to design your crest. You can do it even if you are a terrible artist. Original knights painted their crest on their shield. A CAMELOT Trigger knight has a huge canvas in her armour. The colors and patterns might run across the whole of the armour, rather than a shield or a shoulder joint.

4 comments:

  1. A symbol for the asteroid belt? Or are they all minor fiefdoms?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The asteroid belt, known as the Wreck, is home to brigands and Emergent raiders.

      Delete
  2. Would be cool if we had a few colouring pages featuring some different Armour configurations. We could use them at the table for designing the heraldry.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am campaigning hard for a character sheet that includes a Pendragon-style shield space to design your coat of arms.

      Delete