Together
Houses
A House has a name and a Crest, and flies both as a Standardbeside your seat in a match. Founding one costs 5,000 Gold; changing the Crest costs 1,000, which is deliberate — a House that could re-Crest for nothing could cycle artwork faster than anybody could moderate it.
On the ring
See the ladder →What a Crest is made of
A field, a division, a charge and two tinctures — each from a closed set. Four of the combinations, drawn the way the game draws them.
The Ashen Host
We hold the fire.
Salt and Iron
The sea takes it back.
The Long Watch
Nobody moves.
Rimwardens
It was here first.
Why there is nothing to upload
An uploaded image is not a picture — it is a file somebody else chose, and it can be a decoder exploit, a polyglot, a zip bomb, or an SVG carrying script. The safe way to accept one is to re-encode it server-side and never store the original.
Bannerfall’s server ships with no image library and therefore cannot re-encode anything, so it does not accept an upload at all. A Crest is a field, a division, a charge and two tinctures — each from a closed set, rendered from primitives. There are no bytes in it for anything to hide in, and for a game about heraldry it is the better Crest anyway.
And why it cannot touch your rating
A House is social. The moment membership moves a rating, the ladder is about politics rather than play — so nothing in the House code reads or writes a rating, and a test scans that code to keep it that way.
Names are compared after folding: case, spacing, punctuation and the common look-alike letters are all removed, so a House cannot register a name that renders identically to another one’s. One Cyrillic letter is all impersonation takes, and it is refused at the door.