Augury

Although I’m not currently running a game in my campaign setting, I’m always on the lookout for useful materials that I will be able to put to use in the future. One of the major elements that I want to emphasize with this setting is the political relationships of various factions. When I was running the campaign the players found themselves caught up in events and they were offered assistance by two major players in that area, both who were vying for power over the other. They sided with one of the factions that these men represented, which created friction for them when they encountered people aligned with the other faction.

Ideally I wanted to introduce even more factions, but I didn’t want to overload the other guys in the group — It’s difficult to keep all of the characters in the immediate plot, much less the larger metaplot, straight from week to week. What I really needed was some serious aids to help them along. I had started drawing some crests when the game was ongoing but usually that endeavor was cut out during prep triage. With the virtually infinite amount of preparation one can do for a game, spending a few hours drawing sketches of crests just didn’t rank up there high enough most of the time. I could have done some very hasty sketches, but once I begin a task my perfectionist streak will usually insist that I follow through to the best of my abilities.

The thought just hit me sometime last week — Guild Wars has a variety of crest designs available to guilds in the game as ways of representing their faction — Why not use Guild Wars’ iconography? It seemed like a good idea, so today I went and downloaded all of the crests available via the Guild Wars website. I ran them through a simple desaturation and contrast action in PhotoShop and then created vectorized versions of each crest by using Illustrator’s livetrace functionality, in case I ever need to scale the images up. Though I don’t think I’ll use all of the images there is certainly a large percentage of usable crests overall. If you’re any good with Photoshop you can likely take bits and pieces from the existing crests to create new ones as well.

I figured that other people might be interested in these as well for their own games. Here’s the original images, as well as the desaturated-contrasted versions I made:

Download Link.

If there’s any desire for the vectorized versions I can make those available, but considering those are about 20 MB I’m not going to upload them if there’s no desire for them (not to mention you can always vectorize as necessary on your own).