Fantastical Vexillological Adventures - Part I

I've been running a continuous fantasy world know as Nightcall since September 2018 orginally starting as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as of August 2024 there has been 9 campaigns, near two dozen short stories, over 150 player characters and notable non-player characters, spread across four planes (or worlds) and 15 nations filled with many more factions, groups, and families. But enough of a sales pitch.

Since before the first campaign I've found interest in flag design but never really had an excuse to create ones of my own, just studying and taking note of flags I do and don't like, various elements that make up a flag. To build out the fantasy world more I made 15 flags, one for each nation. Some I really tried my hand at good design, others intentionally bad. Here I wish to go over my own thoughts and in-world reasoning for the designs.

In this post we'll review the flags of Mor-Thir an island continent of Mor-Thir roughly land mass of Australia. This includes the first four flags I made for the nations of Covania, Oxtrad, and Reton, the forth flag in this collection is for the Royal Conglomerate, a political alliance between the three nations after the continent was invaded by the Nine Hells. In a later campaign the players lead a rebellion against the Reton Empire, from the region of Greyhawk forming it into a new nation. I won't go into detail but if any of this interests you, I encourage you to visit the wiki at nightcall.net

The flag of Covania was an original design in the vague shape of the nation in an orange-brown and the black representing the hostile nature of their vast deserts. I picked the orange-brown as more flags need orange. One of if not my favourite flag is of the Northern Territory, brilliantly simple and beautiful design.

The flag of Oxtrad is a simple horizontal split, blue skies above a frozen land with a symbol of the Crown of Oxtrad in the center. Not too much thought into this one outside the Crown itself being a great weight to bear and constant reminder of control.

The very first flag I designed, the flag of Reton, a six pointed star, each point representing a state/region of the Empire, the blue being a reminder of that. Still very fond and proud of this design. I haven't made an alternative but I imagine in-world during and after the Greyhawk rebellion supporters of the cause may have scratched out or painted over one of the points.

The Royal Conglomerate being an alliance akin to the UN or NATO, their flag represents each nation, green for Reton in the West, white for Oxtrad in the North, and yellow for Covania in South-East, and a crown in each section for their various royalties, kindoms, and empires.

For the flag of Greyhawk I purposefully gave myself limited time and used MS Paint rather than illustrator, helping create the feeling of a new nation that needed a new flag to fight under. The three block divide was an intentional reference to the Royal Conglomerate somewhat as an act of defiance. However the colours have different meaning, red for the loss of innocent lives by the conglomerate's hand, green for the land and future growth of Greyhawk, and white for the pursuit of peace and truth.

Well that's it for this issue of Fantastical Vexillological Adventures! Next up I want to cover the flags of the other worldly. The Nine Hells mentioned earlier, three nations who have formed in the Feywilds, and while not used I also made two flags for Exilis and for the Livion Virus.