Or and Vert

This is the first time I’ve been assigned a pair of champions’ scrolls, and on the one hand, I was pleased to find that my estimates for how much work it would be were pretty accurate; on the other hand, I was surprised by how hard the creative freedom was! My usual process includes researching the candidate and tailoring not only the document itself but the text of it to their persona, so having to create a scroll without knowing who would receive it was a new challenge for me. My first impulse was to tailor it to TRM’s personas; however, I also wanted the scrolls to generally match each other (to reduce creative overhead when I knew I was stretching my available time to take these on to begin with), and there isn’t a particular theme for this reign that I could easily follow. The obvious next step was to just say screw it and lean into the specific champion tournament - this is for equestrians, so what horse manuscripts can I find from period to riff off? This turned out to be the...

Okay, first off, I have to say that this is probably the scroll I am most pleased with to date. I have criticisms of my work, as always, but overall this came out a lot closer to my intent than most of my previous work, and it’s nice to see the gap between taste and talent starting to close a little. I wasn’t planning on doing any scrolls this reign, given how busy I currently am as reign herald for Donovan and Meghanta, but I saw the AoA for this recipient come up on the list of upcoming awards, and given that (a) it wasn’t assigned yet and (b) I absolutely adore this person, I cornered Kingdom Signet at an event and made grabby hands. Given that level of busy, though, and the fact that I work a second job in December, I knew that my timeline on this would be pretty crunched, so I would need to continue using fairly simple exemplars that lean into my strengths, rather than work on expanding outside my comfort zone. So! What do we know about the recipient? Their persona is ea...

It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk. This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it. Behold, the East'...

One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo...