That's the spirit! Steel cross or even just a simple steel vertical bar -- get a little decorative on the ends of either one... you know -- fleury, bottony, moline. Heck, just a couple big, cut notches.
Unless you'd like to pitch that ventail plate up altogether and cut out another with a nasaloid extension going up between the sights... and repurpose the first ventail somewhere else, say cut down a little into a nape plate. No big change, so it's an easy add to a ventail.
What the SCA looks for in armor can be found in the Known World Handbook, and on the Weapons & Armour Standards on every Kingdom website somewhere, generally as a .pdf. We could recite it for you, but you'll know it better reading it for yourself.
I'm not exactly sure what the SCA looks for in armour so does it all have to be historically accurate as possible and then pass their inspection process for safety?
Other way around, safety then historicity. But the required additions may be and very often are hidden under something that's at least plausible from a little ways off. Some of us think it's a PITA; others look on it as a chance to be artful and ingenious -- like making what's really like a camail or mantle of mail somewhat look like a coif emerging from under a greathelm, but really being hung from a leather strip riveted to its inside bottom edge, and by that stood-out suspension, protect like bascinets' camails do, an inch or two off the neck -- spaced armor.
Summing up, there's a few smallish differences in the helmets and their details, barring bargrills (I see what I did there
), things like wider sights than the medieval models, chinstraps such as no medieval hat generally had, because we say a "snug fit" isn't an equivalent, and wearing what I call "safety gorgets" -- back then some helmets and helms didn't get accessorized with rigid throat coverage as far as we know, but we often do it ourselves, being much attached to breathing and to walking.
They didn't always have rigid protection covering the joints. We used not to ourselves -- just volleyball pads -- but we require it now. First such unperiodlike hardening-up was not the joints of the limbs, but hard stuff over the kidneys, after early SCAdian fighters got hit crossbody hard enough to piss blood. They knew from the beginning they wanted helms for their heads and cups for their nuts; kidneys they learned the hard way.
We hit hard with our sticks. We started with sawed-off hockey sticks -- and worried about their sharp shards when they broke. We found rattan: very tough, quite elastic (bends remarkably in hard strikes even in a 1-meter sword) and doesn't splinter in breaking. Truly, we've never found anything else quite as good, at any price. I'm acquainted with a couple of almost-as-goods, some of which other groups fashion into practice swords generally called "wasters."
Nobody knows where the word comes from, nor why these syllables mean a practice sword made out of hard wood or other materials. But there we are. One material the Society accepts, after experiments, for certain limited practice uses, is rods of UHMW HDPE plastic: we use it for hitting fixed or wiggly pells (posts to beat up with weapons) to practice sword technique, sparing one's supply of rattan for use on live targets! Said targets express a strong preference for being hit with elastic, springy rattan, declaring this to be quite enough! The UHMW thuds into you like a sap or a deadblow hammer. It's like the quarterstaff problem: caves armor in, can't provide authentic handling without a hefty helping of authentic danger.
The idea behind this shit is to have
fun, not test the abilities of the ER.
So, hitting full power with our tropical climbing-palm sticks, we require our striking edges, whether hard or of foam, to be 1 1/4" across. 33-35mm for our SI correspondents.
Since most of our weapon attacks are circular attacks, left and right hooks as it were, the hits of our weapons most commonly fall on our silhouette rather than our centerline where our vital organs cluster. A rib cage is actually a fairly good defense of vital organs against clubs. Who knew? So that's another SCA armor feature -- we need more on the edges and extremities of us than right in the gut. Kidneys aside, we tend to armor our limbs and shoulders well before getting to centerline protection, and some of us never do, except for our cups. Our heads, however, are always our best-armored spot, and our new fighters find they'd rather take a hit on the helm than anywhere else most of the time. (It also happens a lot until their shield arm grows stronger and more nimble.)
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http://www.fleurdelis.com/symbolism_ABC.htm
It's highly typical of those "family crest" mailorder services that were around before the Internet and abound all the more now.
If you'd
like to have any of those mean anything to you, great! Designing arms to bear for yourself, you quite have that liberty. Having a charge on your Society Device (becomes your Arms when you get your Award of Arms and may style yourself "Lord", meanwhile you have your Device registered with and protected by the Society's Laurel King Of Arms and nobody else gets the same thing) that gives you a warm fuzzy inside, that's a good thing! It's certainly the thing I picked -- something that had resonance for me, reflected my creativity directly, and happens to be my sole claim to fame in the Society because in their search for practicing Medieval authenticity they don't nowadays pass graphics that have no example in middle-ages heraldry, artwork, or design. Though once they used to, and stuff that passed in those times is grandfathered now.
It's a sun symbol, really; I have a thing, an attraction, to designs that rotate and radiate. If I couldn't have had my charge that I did get to register, I would probably have designed something
gyronny, which I am going to have you look up for yourself, instead of what I used, and which Laurel carefully blazoned to avoid mention of "fylfot" or "gammadion," possibly doing some violence to the design I submitted and which was approved long before they tightened the rules about what was acceptably medieval-style. Soooo... I get to use a green, five-legged, what they call a "pentaskelion," like a triskelion but with five legs not three, on a golden field with a barrulet across the middle horizontally, the pentaskelion set a little above it. Nobody else does, now. What I draw and paint is a 5-legged gammadion, occupying a regular pentagon. Thing looks like a buzz saw. Instead of a Nazi orientation, I put the feet the other way, so the symbol walks sunwise, not antisunwise Nazi style. (Black sun symbols turned backward -- spooky, huh? Quite a portent of calamity.)
But nothing in that handy little list
has to mean what they
say it does. That's a popular misinterpretation of genuine heraldry. So at the top of their list they post a little disclaimer; actually a pretty big one. Heraldry is graphics, not verbiage. It may salute your ideals, be a symbol or set of them for your noblest ideals, but it does not by rebus or word or off a list of pictures state them. If you adopt a motto,
that might, and often did in mundane-world heraldry. Suggested a noble high-mindedness, you know -- something that was not necessarily the daily bread and butter of a military aristocracy in charge of doing war.
(Parenthetically, for the simplicity of avoiding pedantry: Revolutionary, Napoleonic France did propose and promulgate a systematized, rebus-like heraldry for the use of the more elevated of the
citoyens of the empire -- an extreme version of the kind of thing that handy little list is. Bees all over your field said you were productive... stuff like that. It, ah, didn't get used.)
Arthur Charles Fox-Davies' century-old book available in inexpensive reprints,
A Complete Guide To Heraldry, is engaging reading, entirely related to English and Scottish heraldic practice, and can steer you away from falling into what Fox-Davies called heraldry's "pleasant little insanities" that grew up in error, error perhaps too much ignored by Lyon and Garter Kings of Arms, busy with coat-armour and protecting copyrights, which is what most of the law around use of real-world heraldry resembles.
