☙ A Brief Survey of Land, Lore, and Lineage ❧
“In Vulgaria, the borders are old, the monsters older, and the coats of arms older still.”
Though maps may fade and titles fall out of fashion, heraldry endures—etched in stone, stitched into standard, and whispered through bloodlines.
The Arch-Principality of Vulgaria is no monolithic land, but a patchwork of Counties—twenty-two in all—each steeped in shadowed legend, ancestral pride, and a curious defiance of modernity.
Grouped beneath seven Marches (styled Marken), these territories form the administrative backbone of the realm, while their coats of arms serve as mnemonic sigils for the tales they hold. Each County bears:
- A German name, echoing the administrative tongue of statecraft and war
- A Latinized name, used in legal texts, ecclesiastical ledgers, and magical grimoires
- A Heraldic blazon, adhering to the traditional rules of tincture and composition
- A Specialty or theme, reflecting the County’s monsters, myths, or mysteries
These are not merely symbols. They are shields against forgetting—each device a compact story told in tincture and charge. Consider:
- Zatterfels, whose three black towers recall the siege of 1283 by moon-mad heretics
- Kollmilz, raised upon the bones of a Roman legion and guarded still by its unquiet dead
- Schattenburg, home to mirror-haunted halls and the famed Order of the Pale Vow
To a knight of the Order, these coats are not ornamental. They are guideposts—a way to read the land like a codex, to know its dangers by device, and its dignity by design.
The Codex Armorum, kept within the Collegium’s vaults, records every officially sanctioned blazon. Among them, a few rules endure:
- All Order Knights bear, at base, Argent, a chevron Sable—the chevron rising, ever upward.
- Commanderies quarter this base with colored arms: Red for the militant, Green for the learned, Purple for the chancellery, Black for the veiled.
- Counties bear individual arms, rich in lore and layered with meaning.
Each quartered shield, then, tells a dual story: that of the Knight’s allegiance to the Order, and that of the land from which they hail, serve, or are tested.
In time, the full Codex of Vulgaria shall be made public. For now, let this post stand as its herald—an invitation to study the shields, speak their names, and remember that in Vulgaria, a banner is not just a mark of rank…
…it is a warning to the dark.
