I'm curious to know what people's thoughts are about the icons/symbols
that appear on piecepack parts. Are the Crown/Sun/Moon/Fleu-de-Lys(or
Anchor if you're a JCD piecepack admirer) icons set-in-stone,
sacred-as-the-bible parts of the piecepack spec? ...or, are people
receptive to piecepacks, built to specification so as to preserve
normal functionality and versatility, that would have new and
different icons/symbols on them (and I don't mean as a simple
expansion, but as someone's main and perhaps only piecepack).
It seems to me that the suits/symbols specification is the one element
of piecpack that could easily be strayed from, in practice. By that I
mean, I don't think an actual constructed or manufactured piecepack
need to keep to the Crown/Moon/Sun/Fleur(Anchor) motif.
Certainly the basic specification should remain as C/M/S/F(A), but a
maker of a different piecepack style need only suggest correspondences
between the basic spec's suits and those of the piecepack in question.
As an example, I recently adapt icons/symbols that Ed and I developed
for a roleplaying game system to piecepack. It just happens that we
developed eight icons, so it made the developement of a double
piecepack with eight suits easy. This is the piecepack design I plan
to use to construct my own piecepacks. The icons don't include a Sun,
Moon, Crown, or Fleur (or an Anchor for that matter); the symbols are
quite a bit more abstract than that, but are quite evocative in their
own way. To use these piecepacks with the new icons, I really need
only make a list of which icons I want to represent (correspond to)
the original specification icons.
As another example, I recently postulated another potentially fun and
unique 'new' piecepack graphic design to Ed the other day; my idea was
to make a piecepack with national flags as the suits/icons. Now
admittedly this is a bit more of a stretch, but it would still work;
the core piecepack functionality would still exist. As an extension
to that idea, we had figured that we could make such a piecepack
almost specification legal by using flags that contained one of the
basic spcecification icons within it... such as Spain or Andorra for
Crowns, Pakistan or several others for Moon, Antigua or Argentina or
several other for Sun, perhaps the flag of Imperial France (the long
superceded gold cross and fleur-de-lys on blue flag) or maybe even
Barbados (which has a trident on it) would be a suitable analog.
I imagine graphic design of piecepacks could be a fun and exciting
aspect of the piecepack community/subculture, but that would only be
true if people were receptive to new piecepack graphic designs.