Exchange of Realities

I had an adventure today; a chance run-in with an old Navy veteran on the trolley, his leather jacket covered with military patches. And for each one he had a story—the patch for the carrier he served on, patches for each of the aircraft squads stationed on that carrier, patches for having been in the Vietnam War, a patch for a submarine he detected….

What was really interesting about this man and his unit patches was the sheer variety of them. Every one of them had a design, and most of them referenced the unit in a way that wasn’t immediately obvious. They were artistic, referential, and very quirky, and each of them had a story.

This got me thinking about game groups.

The game group isn’t that difficult from a military unit. They’ve got a history, and that history in itself probably has a notable event or two for which they’ll be remembered. They’ve probably got a nickname, some way of referring to themselves en masse. (I’ve seen several; for instance, I refer to my PC group as the Loose Threads, because of their maverick nature.) Some will have a purpose, from a kind of operation they specialize in to a task that they’ve been put together for.

And military units regularly have military unit patches. The design varies like anything; on my conversation partner’s jacket alone, there were ones with words and ones without words, one that had half a dozen disparate design elements and another that was just a single image, ones in few colors and ones in many. Some of them were straightforward in their symbolism—the anti-sub unit with the picture of the submarine being broken in two, for instance. Some were less so, like the one with the two strips of what it took me five minutes of increasingly broad hints to realize was supposed to be plaid fabric. They might be serious, either in words or pictures; on the other hand, they might be mildly situation-mocking, like the “Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club”. Heck, some are even downright hilarious. There’s an Air Force unit that was put together to test plane windshields for bird crash resistance, which they did by firing frozen chickens at planes on the runway from cannons. The patch for that particular unit was a cartoonish chicken, on crutches, with its arm in a sling. Who says being military precludes a sense of humor?

So why not challenge a game group to come up with a military-style unit patch? It doesn’t take near the art skill that character portraits do, and takes a lot more imagination; you could probably get the whole group involved. It might incorporate their name, their deeds, their problem-solving style, a combination of the above; could be so obvious someone who knew from neither story nor system would get it, or based on an in-joke (very) peculiar to the group themselves. If they’re having fun, maybe patches for each campaign, or each plot arc—it’d let you see what they really remembered about it, and give them a chance to show off a little without having to put too much effort into it.

Give it a shot!