Loreia's Reveal, Q&A

Loreia's reveal as the mystery knight
https://dragonsdance.rpg-board.net/t3028-lifting-the-iron-cowl-open

I would like to know, did you guys ever think it was me? When you learned it was me, did it surprise you? I remember Gwyneth's stray comment in the Game Discussion thread in Story 1, the whole time I kept silent to avoid people pointing at me, and it seemed to work, I think? When I entered as the Anvil Gloom Knight in the Drakeson tourney, I hoped there might be an IC post among the stands from Daveth explaining my absence away as a consecutive visit to Dorne, just to try and confuse people more. I knew my Endurance test might give me away, because I think I'm the only player with Blood of the First Men. If not, combined with 5 Endurance, that definitely stands out.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you have as well. One thing I'll go ahead and tell you is all the technical and creative info about the coat of arms I made because I'm super proud of it and I wanna tell you all. I'm surprised no one's curious!

Ordinaries: tree and anvil, and a weirwood tree with 7 branches. This shows that the mystery knight honors the gods of both the Old and New faiths. It was tough looking for a good tree, so I decided that in addition to the anvil I would make 7 branches. I later realized that the "branch" at the top could be mistaken as part of the trunk, and probably should be considered as such. Still, 6/7 ain't bad if you're not counting the Stranger. The anvil is a symbol of the Smith, who is most known for having domain over craftsmanship and labor. I took the "labor" part to a broader definition, as diligence in and humility in however you serve, whether you serve the king or you're a ruler who serves the realm.

Colors: black for resistance and constancy, and blue for loyalty. White actually is used to mean purity, perfection innocence, etc but mainly faith, so the weirwood being white makes sense both practically and symbolically.

Division: Per fess. Didn't think a lot about that, I just wanted to evoke the feel of castle walls and didn't like the simple black-blue-black of just slapping a line on there. Which it should have been, because apparently per fess is "rule/authority", which Loreia doesn't have any of. Let's ignore that. Line: embattlement across the middle. It denotes a wall, sort of approaching the imagery of House Coldbrook's portcullis symbol, and also to evoke slightly the treeline divide on the Mormont sigil. Not calling back to it as her being from that house (which she's totally not) but as being proud of where she grew up. But I think that's probably too far of a stretch looking at it now. It's a small image, and navy blue on black makes it difficult to make out the division clearly.

I genuinely had no idea you were the Anvil Gloom Knight. I thought that was Reader's doing.

It's not that I wasn't curious, there was just suddenly a lot happening that required attention.

Honestly, I suspected it was Loreia from the start...just cuz the hypothesis that Loreia was the Knight was the one that checked all the boxes. She had the means to do it, a reason to do it, a reason to hide her identity, had a background that suited the coat of arms, and enough official support to keep the secret. There weren't a -lot- of PCs that fit that profile.

I never caught the 7 branches thing either, nor did I connect the 'anvil' with the Smith. I find I rarely default to religious interpretations of things these days, even in fictitious, highly religious settings. You've clearly put a LOT of thought into this though, and that's very cool! I like seeing how you developed the symbolism from your concept of Loreia...but perhaps also defining that symbol helped you define Loreia in turn?

Thank you! And not quite. Baelon was the first to find out early on that I know of, and PM'd me asking. In addition to telling him what I told you just now, what I was thinking to myself was, "when she comes out, this could become her symbol," so instead of just making whatever I wanted, I needed to be careful. So I took my cues from my answers to those questions at character creation about women in power, religion etc. I actually did not know that one cannot keep more than one faith without it being frowned upon, I just thought "Old and the New" was actually a belief practice where one would keep both faiths. So I guess it helped reinforce her beliefs, as well as a certain IC thread between the Coldbrook PCs.

And I had to make a coat of arms, to make it more fun than having players simply look at stats and line them up. I hope you all (at least those of you with us at the time) had fun guessing, because that's what I did it all for. Also keeping secrets while they're still ripe is fun! Mystery knight's mystery was getting stale, so it was time to retire that, and I couldn't just keep it a secret forever. I know I wouldn't like playing a little mystery game if at the end I was never told what the answer was and finding out if I was right or wrong.

As we discussed by PM at the time I figured it out pretty much right away because I think way to much about text formatting (I wrote a paper about it once ), and you used the same unique way of marking your OOC in bold as both characters.

I made the connection of the smith for the anvil, but missed the 7 branches and other bits of symbolism in the sigil. At the time I was quite confused by the juxtaposition of the smith's anvil and the weirwood, but the religious iconography of the tree and the way the anvil fit neatly in the tree made it seem unlikely it was just a random anvil. As the game went on and I learned more about Loreia, it made more and more sense.

Overall I thought the whole thing was really cool, and really put the 'mystery' in 'mystery knight'.

Baelon Drakeson wrote:As we discussed by PM at the time I figured it out pretty much right away because I think way to much about text formatting (I wrote a paper about it once ), and you used the same unique way of marking your OOC in bold as both characters.

And I was like "thank you" and I went back and changed it!

Baelon Drakeson wrote:I made the connection of the smith for the anvil, but missed the 7 branches and other bits of symbolism in the sigil. At the time I was quite confused by the juxtaposition of the smith's anvil and the weirwood, but the religious iconography of the tree and the way the anvil fit neatly in the tree made it seem unlikely it was just a random anvil. As the game went on and I learned more about Loreia, it made more and more sense.

Yeah I wondered if people were like "what...? There's supposed to be a face there... Is that--is that the face?"

Baelon Drakeson wrote:Overall I thought the whole thing was really cool, and really put the 'mystery' in 'mystery knight'.

I had to hold onto that secret until much later, so not as fun as when you're a man, when it's just "who is it? You'll find out next episode when I lose or when I win the tourney!" But it was a persistent secret that I had fun keeping. But when Story 1 was over, I wished I could just tell everyone and get it over with, because everyone got over Story 1 for the most part when we moved on from the epilogue.

I had you made pretty early. Plenty similarities with your writing, though I think what really did it was that both Loreia and Anvil made the same mistakes with bonus dices and things like that.

Heh, yeah. Sending back stoic replies didn't do it for you, I guess. I tried deviating from my style a little bit, but not enough it seems. Thanks for your help back then and again later, I appreciate it and I tip my hat to you.

There was at least one PC who emailed me with totally the wrong guess, and another (beyond Corrine) who thought it was me. I was busy busy for these kind of fun shenanigans!

I think the narrators in Southron Ambitions did something similar, my memory fails me.