In Search of a Guild Tabard

I feel like guild tabards fell by the wayside a long time back in Azeroth.  First they started giving players game faction tabards as rewards, then tabards helped you earn faction if you wore them, then we got transmog and once that settled down it was all fashion all the time.

But back in vanilla a guild tabard seemed like kind of a big deal.  I know we got one put together pretty quickly back in the day.  When it came to WoW Classic though we never quite got there.  Nobody wanted to spend the 10g to design one.  We were poor or cheap, or both in my case, and had better things on which to spend out limited gold.

Then came Burning Crusade Classic and suddenly a guild tabard became necessary because of the Outland gear models.  We were out with alts on Saturday night and Ula got her first chest piece upgrade for Scscla, he warrior alt, and it turned out to be a skimpy halter top.

We did get through the exciting exorcism scene

I can’t say I’ve forgotten how bad some of the gear looked back in Burning Crusade, but as a male paladin it was mostly due to the clownish and colorfully mis-matched style of much of the gear.  I had forgotten how much worse it could be for female characters.

So it was decided, with that quest reward, that it was time to get a guild tabard.  Gold is much more freely available… again, the market is still pretty hot if you have stuff to sell… so we were good to go.  We just had to pick a suitable design for our guild, Crag Boar Rebellion, and we would be set.

So we got to the guild master in the visitors center in Ironforge and quickly found that there was no boar option for a tabard graphic.  In fact, if we’re going to list out things I have forgotten over the years, we can add the bizarre and disappointing set of graphics available for tabards.

You call this selection?

To some extent I get why the options are limited.  For whatever reason… probably simplicity… a tabard isn’t one texture but two, being left and right hand versions that are mirror images of each other.  That means that every logo must display bilateral symmetry, so visions of anything like a boar rampant on a tabard is unrealistic.  We would have settled for something that looked like a boars head, but were disappointed on that front as well.  The closest we got to a boar was something that was either a boar’s tail or a whisk broom.  So we started going through the other options.

A lobster has bilateral symmetry

I have to say that even with the symmetry requirement, the options for logos is pretty bad.  Well, some are not bad.  A few are pretty good.  But I am not sure what they represent, and they certainly did not fit with our guild name.

We began to favor the old Twilight Cadre tabard style, which was a red field with gold trim and the crossed hammers logo in gold.  Very proletarian.  However that felt like a re-do.  So we considered the angry gingerbread man and the flattened roadkill squirrel, but nothing was really clicking.

Eventually we decided… more out of making a choice than any real love for the design… and went with the concentric circles.  The target.  Which is now painted on all of our backs… if we chose to hide cloak at least.

Alioto wearing the tabard

Having made that choice… we then had to swap guild leaders.  On the guild leader can set the tabard and Ula was driving the design, so I had log Tistann in and set Ula as the leader, which took a bit to figure out.  You don’t do it in the UI, it is a command line option, /gleader.

So she pressed the button and we had a guild tabard.  Then we got back to actually playing after about an hour or so of tabard talk.  You can see the tabard on Alioto, the big target on his back, in the screen shot up at the top of the post.

I at least comforted myself in a sense of surety that this was really an old WoW problem, that Blizzard must have made this better or given people more options over all these years.

But no.  I logged into retail WoW to check and it is the exact same interface with the exact same logo options.  Not an important feature I guess.

If you want to see the tabard creation options, somebody built an page that let’s you design one offline.