Look and Feel

Lerona Mere is a metropolis that draws from the Italian cities states such as Venice, the Hanseatic League and other powerful cities in the late medieval and early renaissance. However a powerful sense of urban style is tempered by revolution. Fine billowing shirts and wide hats, but also daggers and knee cops. Jewels and tall boots, but wide belts and reinforced gloves. The perfect Lerona Mere citizen is equal parts ready for a masquerade ball, a ship's voyage or a street fight.

Feel

Italian Renaissance, Musketeers, Venetian trading ships, protest-punk, revolution, street thugs.

Influences

Italian City States period of the 11th to 16th century, Hanseatic League, Assassins Creed 2, Marienburg and Warhammer Fantasy, The League from Empire LRP,

Materials

Velvet, Cotton, Brocade, Damask, feathers and leather.

Colours

Mixed colours, bold and contrasting. Wine red, sea blue and golden yellow contrasted with night blacks and brilliant whites.

Clothing

Building from a billowing poet-shirt or a high-collar, add a sharp doublet or jerkin. Pants should be slim leggings or far too big if you want to draw attention to them (Lerona Mere also has the joy of being on the few realms that really suits braies or short breeches). Add a silly hat, and you're good to go.

Hero Pieces

Slashed Sleeves

The bright colours and silhoutte of slashed sleeves is definitively Lerona Mere, providing a shape and style that is confident and even unwieldy in the name of fashion.

A Good Hat

Any self-respecting Lerona Mere wouldn't be caught dead without a good hat, particularly ones festooned with patches, feathers, and other bullshit. Ideal styles are any large and formless beret, flat caps , and for the particularly avante-gard, a wide brimmed floppy hat, (particularly with one side up). In Lerona Mere your hat is style and a billboard for more pins and patches. It is not designed to protect you from the elements (thats what buildings are for. If you start to look like a pirate, redcoat, or Napoleon, you've gone too far.

Pins, Patches, and Ribbons Oh My!

Who you are in Lerona Mere is very much a city build on inter-personal loyalty. Because of this, Lerona Mere mark their clothes and accessories to communicate this. Any good Lerona Mere kit should be replete with patches, pins, and accessories that symbolise membership to certain groups or causes, home towns or regions, professions and achievements. If your kit is looking like the walls of a Hogs Breath or any other stuff-strewn restraunt, you're on the right track.

Fine Jewels that are definitely yours

Lerona Mere is a realm of trade and wealth, but it is also a place of scrappy violence, where sharp words often lead to sharp deeds. Every Lerona Mere should have some sort of jewellery on their person ,and the best Lerona Mere jewelry is equal parts gaudy and scuffed. Large gemstones with rusty settings, large rings with pitted scuffs, or bracelets going green with age. All the better to show your wealth, and that you're not afraid to defend it.

Tattoos and Scars

Sailors, revolutionaries, and punks are well known for their love of tattoos to both commemorate and signal. Just as your clothes are an opportunity to include markers of loyalty, your skin is no different. Use of tattoos, particularly on the face, neck, and hands where they are uncommon elsewhere immediately adds a Lerona Mere feel. By the same token, scars held dirty-up an otherwise pristine kit. Lerona Mere is certainly pomp and style, but it is also blood and bone. A beautiful set of tatoos split by a knife scar is perfect.

Naked without a Knife

Just adding a knife in a scabbard to any other kit immediately creates an implicit threat. Lerona Mere are quick to anger, quick to threaten, and quick to cool. Adding a knife to your kit gives you the capability to quickly jump to this physical roleplay, which your couldn't do if it was missing.

Example Kits


Bright colours, dynamically compared against strong blacks, a slouch hat festooned with symbology and ostentation, repeated use personal iconography to indicate achievement and loyalty. This kit is wonderfully Lerona Mere both on the complete and minute level.	Slashed sleeves in strong colours immediately evokes Lerona Mere, as does a floppy, circular hat. Worn armour that clatters against jewels calls to a martial styling while also bringing forth mercenary tendancies. A great Lerona Mere combat kit.	Contrasting colours, prominent jewelry, a circle hat, and a caplet is a fast path to a great Lerona Mere kit. Lerona Mere is a place where demonstrating style, loyalty, and wealth is more important than survival, so kits with plenty of minute ostentatious detail are great.
Slashed sleeves, slashed sleeves, slashed sleeves. The Landsknecht of 15th century Germany are a great touchstone for Lerona Mere kit. The punk stylings of split hose, and a smattering of jewelry turns a simple poets shirt into a Lerona Mere Bravo.	Nice leather armour, visible patches, a good hat, and more knives than you know what to do with. A solid Lerona Mere kit that shows city-fashion on the battlefield. For many Lerona Mere, their walking around clothes and fighting kit are not much different.	Bright colour is not required, even a strong black-and-white theme can be Lerona Mere. A fine hat with matching feathers, a goblet in easy reach, and plentiful pins makes for a kit carried by a stuck-to colour scheme and its accessories.
Slashed sleeves, velvet, a prominent sword, and stylish facial hair, this is a Lerona Mere kit that speaks to the fashionable city life.	A variety of colour schemes, jerkin styles, and accessories, but all are Lerona Mere. Lots of accessories, tall boots, and flair.	Nothing should stay pristine, and this surgeon's bloody patches speak to their work, while their tattoos speak to a revolutionary past, and a smattering of jewels evoke the city's wealth.

Common Mistakes

Going too far forward

More than any other realm, Lerona Mere exists on the cutting edge of fashion, and also Concords ideal kit guidelines. Its very easy for musketeers and Italian city states to become the Golden Age of Piracy and Redcoats. This is certainly too far and do not contain the silhouettes, stylings, and shapes that we want. Clothes should be lacking heavy structure, such as starched collars, or shoulder padding. Circular hats are ideal (the more medieval-strange the better), with a single raised side on a slouch hat being the most avante-guard. Bicorns, tricorns, and other age of sail options are a no go. Also beware the creeping Victorian influence. Van Helsing, Jack the Ripper, and the Industrial Revolution are too far. With this in mind, avoid dusters, top-hats, gothic corsets, and heavy bustles.

Doublet vs Waistcoat

Particularly for new players, it can feel easy to grab a vest or waistcoat from an old suit and chuck it on to give a percieved city-feel. However this very quickly becomes 'Peaky Blinders' more than 'Romeo and Juiliet'. Doublets should ideally button up high (to the clavicle or throat), be attached to sleeves if possible. If your waistcoat looks like it belongs at a year 9 formal, or on the streets of Birmingham, it may be best to leave it at home. For example; vests and bodices such as this and this are not on-brief.

Cosmopolitan vs Nowheresville

Legend City, being a metropolis of mixing cultures, gives Lerona Mere some argument to mix and match from far off places. But be warned, too much variety leads to a mess. Its important that your character remains a Lerona Mere one, not a charity shop from the 17th century. Use pieces from other realms and far off lands to accentuate your kit in one or two places, not to dominate it.

Do Nots

The following items are not appropriate for Lerona Mere kits:

Lolita Fashion, Anime maid outfits or simmilar.
Bicorns or Tricorns
Dusters, top hats, or bowler hats.

Weapons and Armour

Whatever you do as a Lerona Mere fighter, do it with style.

As befitting a city rocked by revolution and owing to a maritime might, the fighters of Lerona Mere are more often lightly armoured bravos than defensive juggernauts. All offense all the time and looking damn good while doing it.

Light armour ranges from long leather armoured coats to fine gambesons. Both with embroidered trims. Medium armour may include a heavier leather brigandine or coat of plates. Chainmail is common but often worn under clothes so as to not appear so pedestrian. Heavy armour is often a steel breastplate and more maneuverable armour such as open faced helms or, jack chains or articulated greaves.

Shields are not particularly common, being unwieldy in the street and aboard the ship. Those that are present are often full metal and of smaller sizes, more a duelist's buckler than legionnaires barricade.

Lerona Mere mercenaries will often carry halberds, fine greatswords or heavy pikes, whereas the street fighters of the revolution are more practical folks; hammers, maces, cleavers and stolen swords. If it has an edge or a weight, it has a loving hand to wield it. Finally the free captains and their crews epitomise the duelists tradition; dual blades, fine rapiers, main gauche and steel bucklers.

Particular pieces of armour or weapons that evoke the Lerona Mere look and feel include:

Morion Helmets
Rapiers, Smallswords, or Basket-Hilts
Secret Helms under your favourite hat

Lerona Mere Look and Feel