House Vane — The Iron Warden

Crest and colours

Vane's banner is rust red, and on the rust red stands its device: a barbed arrowhead. The spoken colour name is rust red — armies, settlements, and the crest shown beside this profile render that one colour wherever Vane holds or marches, and the crest and its colour always travel together so the banner can be read with or without its hue.

The Iron Warden

House Vane is called the Iron Warden, and the title is the temperament bound into a name: a warden keeps a border, and iron is the mood it keeps it in. The persona answers to the title — patient, territorial, and severe; slights answered slowly; every border remembered.

The name promises no orders, only a disposition. What it does promise is that the house will not forget where the lines are drawn — which borders are theirs, which were taken, and which are still owed.

Where Vane rides

In the authored March — and only there — Vane's seat is fixed by design. Karnhold, a castle of farmland and woodland on the east bank of the river Mor, is the seat of the house and the war's prize; Stoneford, a fortress standing on the Stoneford bridge itself, bars the northern crossing from the first turn. The March's stated aim is aimed squarely at Vane: take Karnhold, the seat of House Vane, and keep Greywatch. That geography is authored and fixed — part of the scenario's identity, not a general fact about the house.

Generated realms seat Vane anew every time. The house rides in every campaign — it is the first rival banner in every generated world — but its capital, its neighbours, and the shape of its country are drawn from the world's seed: no fixed home, no fixed advantage, only the rust red and the arrowhead carried across worlds.

Victory changes with the world as well. The authored March ends when a capital falls — Karnhold taken to win, Greywatch lost to lose — while generated multi-house realms run a crown-claim war decided by a stable majority of the original capitals.

The measure of the banner

No house in this game carries a bonus, a unique unit, or a fixed way of war, and the rules cannot tell the banners apart. What Vane can muster follows from the ground it holds — footmen and engineers almost anywhere, archers where there is woodland, horse where there is pasture — so the house's armies are a fact of its map, never of its blood.

In the authored March, Vane's opening dispositions suit a holder: foot, archers, and a banner of horse at Karnhold, and a heavier body of foot with archers holding the fortress at Stoneford. That is the March's authoring — a generated realm may open very differently.

Waging war against the Iron Warden

Expect the walls to be used. In the authored March, Vane's towns are fortified, and the war's endgame will not open until Stoneford and the market at Westmere stand stable under your gold, Vane's field force has been thinned, and the east stays supplied — a slow, deliberate shape of war that punishes a rushed crossing. Treat engineers and prepared siege works as the price of the east bank; the siege entries cover how walls are brought down.

Expect what you take to be contested before it settles. A captured settlement needs a company present at two consecutive owning-turn starts before it stabilises and begins to pay — and until it settles, ground you hold is ground a rival can walk back. Keep a body of foot free to hold your gains while the count runs.

Above all, do not read the house's name as its orders. The Iron Warden sounds like a doctrine, and a Warden doctrine exists — but in the authored March, Vane may take the field as Warden or Raider, chosen at setup, and in generated realms any house may carry Warden, Raider, or Opportunist. A doctrine never invents a rule; it only chooses among legal commands differently. Read your rival from what its companies do — which assaults it refuses, which ground it repairs — not from the banner over it.