Raise a Banner

How it works

Three sets of choices sit on screen at once and the banner redraws the instant any of them changes — there is nothing to submit and nothing to wait for. Eight fields, six divisions and twelve charges make five hundred and seventy-six banners, which is more than anyone will click through by hand, so there is a button that rolls one at random when you want to be surprised.

The banner is drawn as vector art in your own browser from three numbers. No image is downloaded, nothing you design is uploaded, nothing is fetched from anywhere, and the whole thing works with no connection at all once the page has loaded.

What you are choosing between

• Eight fields — sable, gules, azure, vert, purpure, tenné, or and argent, under their proper heraldic names.
• Six divisions — plain, per pale, per fess, quarterly, barry and per bend. A quartered field means four claims and at least two arguments.
• Twelve charges — a sun in splendour, a crescent, a mullet of six points, a tower, a sword point down, an ancient crown, a tree eradicated, a flame, waves of the sea, a mountain, a key and a raven volant.

The charge is coloured for you rather than chosen: light fields take a dark charge and dark fields take a gold one. Letting anyone put sable on sable is the freedom to build something invisible, and every heraldic tradition on earth has a rule against precisely that.

Sharing a banner

Your three choices pack into a three-character code that lives in the address bar, so you can copy the link at any moment — no button-hunting required, though there is a copy button too. Whoever opens it sees the identical banner, drawn the same way, and can change one thing and make it theirs.

Where the artwork comes from

All of it is drawn here, from circles, polygons and arcs written for this page. No image file is loaded from anywhere, and nothing traces, copies or approximates any official sigil design. The charges are the ordinary furniture of real heraldry — suns, crescents, towers, keys, ravens — which has been public for centuries, arranged on fields and divisions under their proper names.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

More diversions

The fan tributes hub has the others: a region sorting quiz, a daily lore round, a house words generator and a sixteen-sigil bracket. The one that started it is the Which Great House Are You? quiz. Or go and play Iron Realms — free, in the browser.