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False Flags #7

House Ynhart

House seal, CR 331-999

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

House Ynhart was one of the largest and longest-lived of the Houses of Intelligence. The wisdom and resources of these great landless guilds were highly prized by the nations of Aorav, but they resisted swearing fealty to any realm or ruler in particular, instead taking contracts and collecting payment from across the continent. The threat of a hostile takeover by some upstart prince was kept in check by fear of the shadowy planar technologies the Houses had at their disposal.

House Ynhart specialised in the restorative arts, and became known to soldiers as "House Corby" for their agents' tendency to gather around recent battlefields (and for their rumoured cannibalism, though there is little evidence of this practice). The grievously wounded were used as test subjects for new experimental treatments, promising either a chance at survival or a quick and novel death, while fresh corpses were harvested for their humours. Many a noble line owes its continued existence to the timely intervention of the Ynharts in a moment of crisis.

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False Flags #6

City of Veropol Fire Brigade

Badge of office, Prealignment-present

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

Despite the fluid nature of Prealignment time, cryptohistorians concur that the Fire Brigade is Veropol's oldest surviving institution by far. Veropolitan firefighters are imposing sights - eight-foot giants, rumoured to be a stable mutant strain, clad in head-to-toe protective suits with gas masks and wielding enormous fire axes.

The Fire Brigade has two main duties. The first is what one might expect - controlling fires is especially vital in Veropol, where heat and combustion aggravate the Wrong. The second duty is to hunt down and destroy anyone perceived as a threat to the city's integrity. Lighting unlicensed flames, possession of firearms, and even certain proscribed engineering practices are all sufficient to mark one for swift, brutal execution.

In theory, the Fire Brigade answers to the Senate, but even the most ardent anti-civic Endurant wouldn't dare speak out against it. After all, it draws no budget, makes no demands beyond freedom to operate, and keeps the city safe. Is that not worth a little fear and uncertainty?

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False Flags #5

Tzab Renunciate

Secessionist flag, CR 450-530

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

Contrary to popular belief, the Tzab Renunciate did not liberate ancient Tzabra single-handedly. The momentous collapse of the Manifold in CR 530 owed as much to simple hubris as it did to the efforts of rebels and rogue cities - but those efforts should not be discounted.

The Renunciate was by far the most competent resistance movement the Manifold had ever faced, establishing secret trade routes with neighbouring powers and wisely targeting their otherworldly master's infrastructure, rather than the godlike gestalt creature itself. By the dawn of the sixth century CR, with dozens of its nodes destroyed or damaged beyond repair, the Manifold could no longer enforce its will in the troublesome western provinces, and Burning Flower partisans continued to harass logistics strands and sow dissent in cities until the bitter end. To this day, the Tzab don orange-dyed cloth flowers twice a year to commemorate those zealous few who refused to bow to the Manifold.

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False Flags #4

Capricorn Ring

2555-2901

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

For nearly a century after construction was officially abandoned, the Capricorn Ring was a byword for economic hubris, a monument to the tragic arrogance of the pre-Detonation tycoons. Though structurally complete, it was left with no atmosphere and no ecosystem, a hollow shell of the thriving ringworld it was supposed to be.

In the mid-26th century, however, a refugee fleet from the collapsing Lockeite Dominion settled on the Capricorn Ring, and its meagre terraforming resources were enough to make a single segment habitable and arable. As the refugees established themselves, they attracted more like them, and the Ring became a beacon for the lost and needy across settled space. Theirs was not an easy existence - the tiny habitable zone was atrociously overcrowded, and resources harshly limited - but, from the hulls of their starships and the airless husks of neighbouring segments, the Capricorns built themselves hope.

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False Flags #3

Domesticist Party

Membership badge, 9B-present

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

When the Domesticist Party formed in 9B as a splinter group of the then-ascendant Imperative Party, Geb Halligan and his followers were ridiculed for their hubris by their peers and the press. Twelve years later, as the Imperatives drowned in an ocean of schisms and scandals, Halligan's alternative suddenly looked like a much safer bet, and the Domesticists rose to claim their progenitors' throne almost by default.

The Domesticist platform revolves around taming and moderating the Wrong, the seething miasma that surrounds and permeates the city of Veropol. Its worst extremes are tempered by the city's basic infrastructure, but the Domesticists want to build on this achievement, harnessing the Wrong as a tool through technology (such as the twin lantern they use as their party sigil) and civic development. They lean authoritarian and paternalistic, but not quite to the totalitarian excesses of the Imperatives - though this does not stop their main opposition, the Endurance Party, from making the comparison anyway.

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False Flags #2

Iron River League

Coalition Naval Flag, CR 730-943

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

The Iron River carves a ragged thousand-mile scar across the foothills and plains of northern Aorav, the current stained red with ferrous residue from its source in the Vylan Heights. Dozens of upstart nations and pocket empires have sprung from its fertile banks, but, for over two centuries, the region was ruled by the Iron River League, a triumvirate of city-states that grew from an informal trade bloc into a continental powerhouse.

The League's success rested on its members' free access to one another's markets and resources, which allowed all three to punch above their weight economically. They dominated their neighbours with trade power, bribes, and mercenary armies, and, between them, they held or controlled by proxy the entire length of the Iron River by CR 800. This flag, only flown by the League's united navy (on land, each city retained its own iconography), combines Ghan Rai's triple daggers, the mountain fox of Olbha, and Kuzol's ancient civic emblem of Mt. Aor and the Midden Star.

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False Flags #1

Free Cantean Cities

Extranational flag, 2430-2437

Text version and clean flag PNG below the break.

Though the term is not her own, labour organizer and anarchist philosopher Ximena Cantes is widely considered the mother of Extranationalism. When a general strike on the prophetically named mining world Kropotkin-III brought down the planetary administration, Cantes seemed a natural namesake for the Extranationalist experiment the workers set up in place of the old order: the Free Cantean Cities.

Commentaries of the time dismissed the Cantean Cities as lawless cauldrons of crime and corruption. Contemporary studies have tended to overcorrect, neglecting the real, deep-set dysfunctions at the heart of their governance. As usual, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. It is hard to dispute, however, that the Cantean movement's peaceful seven-year existence, in the face of blockades, sanctions, and bombardments, helped spread Extranationalist thought far beyond its radical cradle, and lit a torch for generations of revolutionaries to come.

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Blog Introduction

Welcome to False Flags!

My name's Rowan and I'm an (extremely) amateur vector artist and lifelong fan of colours, shapes, design, and symbology. I'm also a keen worldbuilder, and one of my favourite aspects of any fictional universe is the iconography used by its factions and polities - flags, banners, emblems, logos, coats of arms, and the like. My main aim for this project is to improve my craft, so constructive criticism is more than welcome.

Everything on this blog should be considered copyleft, more or less. If you'd like to use something I've made and posted here in a creative project of your own, or as inspiration, please do, no need to ask for permission. Attribution is nice, though, and in any event, please tell me if you've made something cool with something from here - I'd love to see it.

The font used in my graphics is League Spartan, by Caroline Hadilaksono, Micah Rich, and Tyler Finck at the League of Moveable Type. The LMT is an open-source font foundry which I seriously can't recommend highly enough.