Fantasy Heraldry pt. 2 - Specific design

Now we move on to the Fantasy Heraldry specific for the project I have in mind. Namely the invasion of Capalan by Tereken in the ongoing RRtK campaign over at Talomir Tales. So, just in case you're new to Talomir, Tereken are essentially Anglo-Saxons and Capalan are Italian city states around the 15th century.

As such I have to come up with one symbol for Tereken and then as many as five, one for each original province, for Capalan. Capalan also has Brethren Mercenaries so I'll have to make a Symbol for them. Tereken seems pretty straight forward. I've already identified the colors Green and Yellow and some kind of Dragon.

Dragon or Wyvern?

Capalan...hmm. Okay we know we want some kind of Italian wars theme. Looking here (particularly Mazzacane and Palma) gave me the idea to try a base scheme to tie them together with different emblems added to differentiate. So we have Resta, who is the leader, so I'm thinking skeleton or bones since google translate tells me Resta means remains. Cosimo was one of the Medici's so I will use the six circle configuration similar to that shown here. Bertolli definitely gets an olive branch if not an outright lift of the Olive Oil companies logo, probably not since that is a bad thing to do. But I'll riff off of it. Bellissima, I had thought of making her a proxy for princess peach, but then I saw a Mermaid in my collection so I think I'll go with that. And lastly Orso, the Bear. Seems like he should have a bear on his heraldry. The only question is what kind? Rampant? I wonder if there is a sleeping bear, I'll have to investigate. As far as color scheme goes I'll have to ask Ruarigh what the hex number or name is for the border highlight on his map. It appears to be some shade of violet. Could be a problem as I'm not sure what colors complement that.

From Wikimedia Commons

The bits and pieces for Capalan

Ruarigh told me what the hex # for the CC3 color was. I'm still not sure what color to pair with the purple, I'm leaning towards yellow.

Lastly the Brethren. From the RRtK rule book we read that "The Brethren have numerous holdings in Talomir called Red Castles and are found in Ekra, Altengard and Treyine."(RRtK, p66) Now as we know from reading Talomir Tales, Ekra and the Brethren have been defeated and absorbed by Treyine. So the only independent source of Brethren left is in Altengard. That being said one could make a case for the Treyine and Ekran branches hiring out as mercenaries since they have been disbanded, and their wealth reverted to the crown, by Treyine. My original thoughts were to have a central theme for the brethren, with a device to differentiate the three nations of origin. Since Ruarigh gave them the Teutonic black cross already I may stick with that, however red is the brethrens color of choice being devotees of the Red Sun. I think a cross, with a red sun in the upper left quadrant and then a device in the middle for the country. This of course may mean that I now need to make them for Ekra, Altengard and Treyine. Oh bother.

Altengard, Ekra, Treyine and a non aligned Brethren

So I did this after more correspondence with Raurigh and Javier. Okay so I phoned in Ekra, but these are all just concept drawings.

Also thanks to Iain from the THW Yahoo group for adding a link to the meaning of Heraldry symbols, aptly named Symbolism of Heraldry. I'm not sure I like it as much as at least one of the others I found, but the information looks good. Perhaps I'll do a comparison of these symbolism sites in another post.

Also as a postscript (since it's taken me days to work out this silly post) to more links of use. Color Wiki where I searched for hex codes for these oddball colors (yes I mean you Murrey).

And looking for Plantagenet herldry I stumbled upon the gold mine that is Early Blazon.

Enjoy and if you have constructive feedback I'd love to hear it.

A rash of good posts

"It's not herpes if it's all over!" - Peter Segel's character in Knocked Up.

I've just noticed a couple of trends in the blogs I follow that are worth taking a look at.

Ahoy matey, model ship building:

http://gowansmodelblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-build-wargaming-warship-part-1.html

http://gowansmodelblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-to-build-wargaming-warship-part-2.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-1-getting-started.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-2-ships-sides-preparation.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-3-finishing-hulls.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-4-viking-ship-complete.html

Boys do Battle Cry:

http://littlejohnslead.blogspot.com/2012/11/finally-got-up-steam.html

http://hordesofthethings.blogspot.com/2012/12/prairie-grove-refight.html

And of course an explosion of activity concerning the Portable Wargame et al:

http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/2012/12/lots-of-portable-wargame-action-but-not.html

Fantasy Heraldry - one man's approach

When playing a fantasy campaign I like to make little heraldic icons for each nation/player. Sometimes I just go with something stock other times I try to create something new. The beauty of fantasy heraldry is that you aren't bound by convention. What follows is a walk through (or ramble) of my process and some resources I have found along the way.

I will also say that when I say heraldry I am conflating it with banners for wargaming purposes. So you want to make a banner/ heraldic symbol? What better way than to reference actual symbols. My first stop is usually Wikimedia Commons, search term Heraldry. Heraldry.ws is another good resource. For banners I like Warflag, Fanaticus, Grimsby Wargamers Society,and of course Dansk Figursspilsforening. I could go on but here are the basics.

So I now have culled through a bunch of stuff and have plenty of ideas of real or speculative designs. Next I need to think about the back ground of my Lord or nation and start throwing around the various bits that make up a heraldic device. One thing I found in researching this article is something I don't recall encountering before. There are a few sites that describe the individual meaning of the various parts of a coat of arms. The aptly named Heraldry Symbols and The Meaning Behind the Symbols - Fleur-de-lis Designs. So now I can also think about what I want to say about the individual that this CoA represents.

My method usually involves a rough sketch with colored pencils. (Please forgive my drawing, I'm a terrible artist.)

These were for my Linlandia map project.

So the since this was originally based off of a Mighty Empires campaign I was heavily influenced by Warhammer. So the Empire proxy uses the black eagle on a yellow field. The Bretonia proxy uses a yellow fleur-de-lis on a blue field. Orcs have lots of skulls, Chaos some kind of Chaos symbol. For the dwarves you need some kind of blacksmith reference and a rune, for the elves something suitably elven.

My method was to take some heraldic gifs I found out on the interwebs and use inkskape to trace them and convert them to vector images. I think I mostly made pngs because my svg file associations were weird. So by way of example, I came up with this for one of the Chaos coastal cities. I assembled the parts in GIMP, although I could have continued with Inkscape.

I kept it clear for the project

So as you can see it is chaosy with a ship to show it's status as a port. Maybe they are pirates? I don't know.

The final product made to look hand painted.

So as you can see I basically re-created the elements from my sketches using clip art. I think in this case I already had the clip art and just finagled it around.

Does this differ much from your workflow? Anyhow in the next installment I will show how I am working out  using these methods for the Talomir Tales campaign.

A major award!

Well thanks to Dale over at Dale's Wargames I have been awarded the Liebster Blog Award.

To quote Dale " I find a good bit of humor and a few ideas on tools to use and things to try on his blog."

Thanks. Since I am not a great painter, and seem to be unable to concentrate on a project long enough to finish it, I try to share useful tidbits and leverage the hive mind that is the wargaming blogger community. If such a thing exists.

Now I won't re-award him back, thus making a closed loop, but I will say that the Liebster award for Dale's Wargames is well deserved. He is very thoughtful and investigates the games he plays and designs pretty thoroughly. I've made several purchases after reading his thoughts on a few games. And if you are into solo gaming you should check out his other blog,  Solo Battles. In his most recent post there are a few titles I need to add to my Christmas wish list.

On to the rules of the Award (cut and pasted with love):

• Copy and paste the award on your blog, linking it to the blogger who has given it to you.
• Pass the award to your top five favorite blogs with fewer than 200 followers by leaving a comment on one of their blog posts to notify them that they have won the award and list them on your own blog.
• Sit back and bask in that warm fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that you have just made someone's day.
• There is no obligation to pass this onto anyone else but it is nice if you do.

So for my awards I will adhere, as strictly as possible, to the 200 followers limit. I will also try not to award a blog that has already received one. Believe me, it's hard enough to get nominated once so I'd prefer to spread the love. And lastly, many blogs are deserving but I can choose only 5. If I don't pick you it's just that there are a wealth of deserving blogs, sorry.

Here they are in Blogger Reading list order:

1/72 Multiverse - an indispensable resource for finding fantasy figures compatible with 1/72nd scale. Excellent reviews and odd ball figures.

Atomic Floozy - a Wordpress blog, but I won't hold that against her. She plays interesting games and has strong painting technique. Her recent tutorial on Native American, and Horse painting techniques should not be missed.

Colgar6 and the Infinite Legion of Toy Soldiers - His games just look phenomenal and like a lot of fun. I really like all the game aids he makes, like event cards and character cards. A really enjoyable blog to read.

Here's no Great Matter - A wargamer in Japan. He has some good tips for making playing surfaces and plays some interesting games. And he wrote a how to post for me after a comment I made asking him about his battle mat. Now that's responsive blogging. I also would like to appropriate his idea for making a page dedicated to paint combinations. Sort of an online painting journal.

Terrain for Hippos - A blog about, what else, Terrain building. Lots of interesting projects. Of late he's been speed painting a Skaven Army. I wish I could paint that fast.

Well there you have it. That was much harder than I anticipated. I had to leave out quite a few that I feel really deserved mention. Oh well.

The blog looks like it is slowly reverting to normal as of last check 61 views today, 243 on Dec 3rd, 868 on Dec 2nd and 211 on Dec 1st. One thing to note is that the mouse window shows the dates one day earlier I'm not sure why that is.

Welcome to Ubique Matt of Ubique and All over the Place the former has some great painted figures and the latter has some interesting travel pictures.

And Whisperin Al has told his blog, it's The Wargame Shed reviews of the Skirmish Campaigns series and some nicely painted WSS figures.

Whew I'm beat.

Boobs Aftermath - an independent peer review

The question on everyone's minds is does putting the word BOOBS liberally throughout your post increase traffic?

Here is the Data:

A breast like uptick in page views.

 From the first picture you can see a pretty big bump. Yesterdays page views 211, today's already at 487. I'll have to investigate the TMP link as I don't normally notice a lot of traffic from there. Probably one reason my site languishes around the low page view numbers it normally has.

A decided uptick.

After crunching the numbers in a spread sheet I see that for the month of November I was averaging 39.75 views per day. Of course I neglected to establish a baseline but I suppose I could do that from the monthly totals. (Der!?)

After crunching the numbers I see that I was climbing from 14 hits per day at the beginning of the year to stabilizing at about 40 hits per day in July with an uptick to 50 in October. So thus far for the year I'm averaging 32 hits per day.

Onward and upward.

November was down slightly, but I think that was mostly due to not posting very much. Illness and Holiday travel I didn't have much to say.

So after all that I think I can say that 211 views yesterday and 487 views thus far today qualifies as a success in increasing traffic.

So:

Good Taste is Timeless indeed. I think I first heard this when it came out.

Welcome to:

Kris Marquardt, no blog listed in you Google friend profile. Let me know if you have one and I'll post a link.

Whisperin' Al. Same, I'll post a link if you've got one.

Thanks to all for viewing and I hope that actually having BOOBS in the post made it feel like less of a trick.

Boobs in gaming.

The other day Phil from The Wargaming Site was showing how his traffic had increased since switching to the Flipcard style for his blog. You can read about that here. In the comments Ray, of Don't Throw a One, suggested that adding the word BOOBS to a post was also a way to drive traffic to your site. Phil tried it here, and showed the results here. You know what? It works.

Now rather than just make another post and pepper it with the word BOOBS, I began musing on that elusive creature the female wargamer. Now I don't have any pictures of wargaming as such but I did stumble upon some pictures of women gaming on Boardgame Geek. I noticed that it had the tag "cute" so a little search later I had a few gems.

Now before you think that any old BOOBS made the cut, I did actually have some criteria. The BOOBS in question had to jump out at me, so to speak, from the thumbnail. No Pregnant women or kids in the picture. And if I had a feeling that the BOOBS in question might not quite be of age they didn't make the cut.

On to the Mammalian protruberances.

The Adventurers: Pyramid of Horus

 This first picture got the ball rolling.

Aquaretto

Cylon (with some crack)

 These ladies look like fun.

Dominion

Mammoth Hunters

 Aptly named but not my cup of tea.

Terra Prime

 The caption for this one was "he looks distracted". The Mini Mouse outfit is a nice touch.

Zombies!!!

Had to include a picture of Zombies!!! I also like the mug with the chemical structure of caffeine on it on the pony wall in the back.

Well let's see if this has an effect on my hit rate, and hopefully people who are actually looking for BOOBS won't be too disappointed.

I did also wonder if you could get the same effect with PAMELA ANDERSON, or some ingenue du jour.

This week in Talomir #3

Finally fought this battle. My hopes were up one turn, then dashed the next. Read about it here.

Sample of the report.

I had given up on having the forces painted earlier in the week but never got on fighting it out, until today.

Although I am feeling better, this cough is still kicking my ass. I went back to the doctor and saw another physician at the practice who thought it might be a good idea to test me for valley fever. Apparently if you live in the Valley of the Sun, or Salt River Valley if you prefer, long enough you eventually get a fungal infection in the lungs. The results will come back in two weeks. In the meantime I've been prescribed Benzonatate pills and some codiene cough syrup. The pills seem to be helping, I forgot to take the cough syrup.

I made the report photos with GIMP again, the lighting situation was terrible so they are not the best. I do like the birdseye view though. I only really pimped the first picture, the rest were just text on an image.

Welcome to Frontline Gamer of Frontline Gamer, a lot of reviews and information about gaming. I also think his tips for blogging are really good. He certainly gets a lot of traffic.

In my next post I hope to apply Ray's blogging theory with a post that has a subject that rhymes with NOOBS.