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The Heraldry Forge

Start from one of 24 ready-made coats of arms or a blank shield, then make it yours — a field, a division, a charge, a helm or crown, mantling and your own motto — watch it draw as you go, read the blazon it writes for you, and take it away as a PNG, a shareable card or an SVG. No sign-up, no watermark, no upload.

How it works

Real heraldry is not a picture, it is a recipe. Three decisions make a coat of arms, and this forge gives you exactly those three and nothing else — which is why a crest built here reads as arms rather than as clip art.

1. The field — the background, in one of 8 tinctures. Armory has always used a small, flat, high-contrast palette, because arms had to be recognisable across a battlefield in the rain.
2. The division — how the field is cut in two, and in what second tincture. 6 of them: plain, per pale, per fess, per bend, quartered, chevron.
3. The charge — the bold shape laid over the top, in a tincture of its own. 11 to choose from, plus none at all.

Change anything and the crest redraws instantly. Underneath it the forge writes the blazon — the arms described in the actual language of armory, the way a herald would record them, so you can say what you made out loud: Azure, a mullet argent.

Your own words, on a scroll

Type into the Motto box and a banderole — the scroll a motto is painted on — unrolls beneath the arms and takes your words. Up to 24 characters, which is not an arbitrary number: a motto is meant to be read at a glance from a distance, and past two dozen characters the letters have to shrink far enough that the scroll stops being legible and starts being a caption. Four letterings are on offer — a classic serif, Cinzel in regular and bold, and a decorative Cinzel — and four scroll colours (parchment, gold, silver and night). Prefer no scroll at all? Plain lettering sets the words straight beneath the arms in the colour you picked.

The motto is deliberately not part of the blazon, and that is real armory rather than a shortcut. Arms are inherited and blazoned; a motto is not. A house may change its motto without changing its arms, two branches of the same family may fly the same shield under different words, and a herald recording your arms would write Azure, a mullet argent and then, separately, note the motto underneath. So this forge hangs it below the shield instead of painting it across the field — the shield is the part that has to be recognisable at two hundred paces, and covering it with text is covering the only thing it was drawn to say.

Leave the box empty and you get arms alone, exactly as before. Fill it and every download grows downward to include the motto — the PNG is no longer square, because a square PNG with a motto would be a square PNG with the motto cropped off it. Your words also travel in the shareable link, so the crest somebody else opens is the crest you made, words and all. Letters, digits, spaces and ordinary punctuation are accepted; accented characters are not, which is a real limitation and the price of a page that can never turn typed text into markup.

Stuck for words? The house words generator writes mottoes in the same register — take one, paste it in, and you have arms and a motto in under a minute.

A helm, a crown, mantling

A herald's full picture of a family's arms is an achievement: the shield, a helm or crown above it, and mantling — the cloth or leaves — spread round it. The forge has three of each to try: a great helm, a barred helm or a crown above the shield, and drapes or a laurel spray around it. The mantling takes its colours from your own field and charge, so it always belongs to the arms it dresses.

These are dressing, not arms. They are not blazoned, they do not change the blazon printed under the picture, and the shield inside is still exactly the design the game's own composer would accept. Take them off and nothing about the arms has changed. The Edge row does the same for the line round the shield — gold, silver, black or none.

Downloading it

Four files, and the reason to care about the difference:

• PNG — a 1024 px image with a transparent background outside the shield. This is the one for a profile picture, a Discord server icon, or dropping onto a slide.
• Card — 1080 × 1350, the arms, their motto and their blazon on a night, parchment or stone ground (or a clear one), at the 4:5 shape that feeds and chat embeds show without cropping.
• SVG — the same crest as maths rather than pixels. It stays razor-sharp at any size, from a favicon to a printed banner, and it opens in any vector editor if you want to keep going.
• Print PNG — the same drawing at 2048 px wide, for a poster, a printed flag or a tabletop sheet. It is drawn at that size, not stretched from the smaller file.

Both are generated inside your browser from the same shapes you are looking at — nothing is uploaded, nothing is rendered on a server, and the tool works with the network switched off once the page has loaded. The “copy link” button packs your design into the address itself, so you can paste it to somebody and they will open your crest rather than a blank one.

Six arms, composed by the machine

These are drawn at build time by the same code the forge runs, so they render whether or not JavaScript does. Each caption is its blazon.

The full vocabulary

Everything the forge can make, listed for the benefit of anyone deciding before they click.

Can I use the crest I make?

Yes — for anything, including commercial work, with no permission and no credit required. Short strings like a name or a two-word motto are not the kind of thing anyone can own, and the crest you compose is your composition, not ours. Take it to a novel, a tabletop campaign, a stream overlay, a band, a boat, a business card.

We ask for exactly nothing in return: no account, no email, no sign-up, no watermark. Nothing you type or make here leaves your browser — these tools have no server behind them that could keep your design. Opening the page is recorded like any page on this site: what we record. If you want to tell somebody where it came from, a link back is kind, but it is not a condition.

Where this vocabulary comes from

The eight tinctures, six divisions and eleven charges are not invented for this page — they are read straight out of the strategy game this site belongs to, from the same module its in-game sigil composer uses. Compose a crest here and it is a legal design in the game, drawn by the same recipe. That is deliberate: two versions of a palette is one version that is wrong.

The shapes are generic armory — divisions and charges that predate every fantasy setting by several centuries and belong to nobody. No real family's arms are reproduced here, and nothing on this page is taken from any other game, book or television series.

More free tools

No account for any of them: house name generator, house words & motto generator, castle name generator, lord & lady name generator, dragon name generator, or the which dragon would you ride quiz. The same heraldry drives the inn signs in the tavern generator, which is the crest maker's tabletop cousin. The full list lives on the tools index.