Credit where it's due

The artwork in the crest builder, the strings Wire plays, the sheet music behind the bar, the sounds of the tavern and the music and noises in the cellar aren't ours. Who made them, and what the licences ask of us.

Last looked at 2026-10-13

The short version

The charges you can put on your coat of arms — the dragons, the axes, the little flaming tridents — were drawn by other people and given away on terms that ask for a credit. This is the credit.

And the music by the fire: every note Wire plays is a real string somebody else recorded. That's here too, along with the crickets outside, the room's murmur, and everything you hear down the cellar.

RPG Awesome

Most of the emblem library comes from RPG Awesome, a fantasy icon set by Daniela Howe and Ivan Montiel. The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and the CSS that ships with it under the MIT licence.

We don't actually use the font. The outlines were pulled out of it once, turned into plain SVG paths and normalised to the same box as everything else here, so that a charge can be painted in whichever tincture you picked rather than whatever colour a font happens to be. That's a derivative work, which is why this page exists.

game-icons.net

RPG Awesome's artwork is itself built on game-icons.net, an enormous, genuinely remarkable library of game iconography released under CC BY 3.0. Attribution flows downhill through derivatives, so the original artists are owed the credit as much as anyone: Lorc, Delapouite, Skoll, Willdabeast, Faithtoken, John Colburn, Felbrigg, Carl Olsen and the many others who contributed to it.

If you're building anything at all that needs icons of swords, potions, tentacles or moon phases, go there first. It's a better resource than it has any right to be for free.

The class emblems

The thirteen class emblems — artificer through wizard — aren't ours either, and this page used to say they were. They're from Intrinsical's D&D 5e Icon Set by David Kor Kian Wei, released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

We pulled the outlines out, normalised them to the same box as everything else and made them fillable so you can wear one in whichever tincture you picked. That's a derivative work, which is exactly the situation this page exists for.

ShareAlike matters here in a way plain attribution doesn't. CC BY-SA says derivatives go out under the same licence, so those thirteen emblems and the versions of them we generated are CC BY-SA 4.0 as well. That's not a footnote we're burying — it's the deal, and it's a fair one for artwork somebody gave away.

Wire's strings

The psaltery you hear by the fire is a kayageum — a Korean zither, a cousin of the psaltery — recorded one string at a time by spt3125 on Freesound, in the pack Kayageum1: twenty-three strings, C2 to D5, each plucked once with a finger and left to ring, on a stereo pair of Oktava MK-012s hung overhead.

They released it under CC0, which means we owe them nothing at all — no credit, no permission, not even a link. So they get one anyway. Somebody sat down and recorded twenty-three strings cleanly, labelled every one with its note, and gave it to strangers, and that's the entire reason Wire sounds like an instrument instead of a ringtone.

We trimmed each string to its attack, evened out how loud they are, and cut the tails at four seconds. Which note comes next — the tune, the pause, the phrase that comes back a little different — is ours. The sound of the string is theirs.

The sheet music

Every tune sold behind the bar is old enough to belong to everybody: traditional songs, and composers who died long enough ago that their music is now public domain. The composers are the obvious credit, so here they are: John Philip Sousa, Scott Joplin, Julius Fučík, Kenneth J. Alford, Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian Bach, Edvard Grieg, Luigi Denza, Jacques Offenbach, Mildred J. Hill and Patty S. Hill, and Euphemia Allen, who wrote "Chopsticks" at sixteen and published it as Arthur de Lulli.

The notes themselves came out of other people's work: scores, MIDI files and engravings they made and gave away. Some were public domain and asked for nothing. Most asked for a credit, and they get it:

  • The Sailor's Hornpipe, from "College Hornpipe" by Kildwyke on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • Colonel Bogey, from the piano solo by James Brigham on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • The Wedding March, from Théodore Dubois's organ transcription typeset by Alexander Brock for the Mutopia Project, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • The Menuet (Bach, BWV 814), from the Mutopia Project edition of the French Suites, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Chopsticks, from the MIDI by Michael Bednarek on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Happy Birthday to You, Pop Goes the Weasel, La Cucaracha, Korobeiniki, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Scarborough Fair, Spanish Ladies and The Skye Boat Song, from the scores in their Wikipedia articles, by Wikipedia's contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0.

And the ones that asked for nothing, credited anyway: The Liberty Bell, typeset by Benjamin Bloomfield, and The Entertainer, by Chris Sawer, both for the Mutopia Project; Entry of the Gladiators and Funiculì, Funiculà from public-domain files on Wikimedia Commons, the second from an engraving by Bbaker516.

The Parting Glass came from Bruce Olson's collection of old songs, which states no licence either way. The tune is traditional, printed by P. W. Joyce in 1909, and if that transcription ever needs to go, Joyce's is the one to write it out from again.

ShareAlike applies here too. The tunes we wrote out from a CC BY-SA source are shared under that same licence, the way the class emblems are. Drunken Sailor, Greensleeves, The Irish Washerwoman and The Infernal Galop were written out by hand, so those are simply public domain, mistakes and all.

The noises in the cellar

Down the cellar stairs, everything you hear was recorded by somebody else and given away. Every one of them is CC0, which again means nobody is owed a word. Again, they get several.

The everyday noises come from Kenney, who has spent years making game sounds and pictures and handing them out for nothing. Three of his packs are down there: RPG Audio, Impact Sounds and Interface Sounds. Your footsteps on the flags, the blade going past, the blow landing (on it, and on you), the clink of a potion bottle, the small sad noise when you roll a one and the coins counting out when a luck is spent are all his.

The rest came one at a time from people on Freesound:

And one from OpenGameArt: the mace or the staff landing, from Thwack Sounds by Jordan Irwin (AntumDeluge), which is ten recordings of him hitting things. We didn't ask what.

The music and ambience in the cellar

Two of these ask for a credit and two don't. All four get one.

  • "A Darkness Opus" by Alexandr Zhelanov (soundcloud.com/alexandr-zhelanov), from OpenGameArt.org, under OGA-BY 3.0. The long, slow piece, about ten minutes of it. The game's settings (Esc) carry its credit too.
  • "Dark Dungeon Ambience" by Machine, from OpenGameArt.org, under CC BY 3.0. Its author says it's meant to capture "the grim, dark, and hopeless nature of a dungeon", which, having been down there, is fair.
  • "Dark Theme" by JaggedStone, from OpenGameArt.org, CC0. The shorter theme that takes turns with the Opus. It was written for a project that got abandoned, so it's had a second life down a cellar, which is more than most abandoned things get.
  • "Forgoten tomb ambience" by kindland, from OpenGameArt.org, CC0. The chains and the dread. Its author suggests playing it quietly, and we do.

The bell when it's your turn is ours. It's two sine waves and it shows. The door on the way down is the tavern's own front door, so going down sounds like coming in.

The sounds of the tavern

  • The crickets outside, on the brighter nights, are "Crickets At Night - Clean sound" by Defelozedd94 on Freesound, CC0: a summer garden, with the storm that was going on behind it taken out.
  • The murmur of the room is a recording from Pixabay, under the Pixabay Content License, which asks for no credit. Voices are the one thing we couldn't fake.
  • The front door, which is also the cellar door and the sound of a chest opening (it's one door, it gets around), is "Chest Opening" by spookymodem, by way of Freesound and Pixabay, under the same licence.

The crackle on the fire, the rain on the window and the thunder are made in the browser as you listen, so nobody recorded those. Wire's strings are above.

What's ours

Not the artwork. What is ours is everything else about a coat of arms: the shapes, the divisions, the tinctures, and the rules about which of them can be told apart from which. That part is geometry rather than drawing, and it's why a coat of arms costs you nothing to own.

We got this wrong

Until August 2026 this page claimed the class emblems "were drawn for this project and are ours." They weren't, and they aren't. Nobody was misled on purpose — the line was written from memory rather than from the commit that imported them — but a credits page that gets a credit wrong is worse than no credits page, so it's recorded here rather than quietly corrected.

What this means for you

Nothing, practically. Wear whatever you like. The licences bind us, not you — we're the ones redistributing the artwork, and this page is us doing the one thing they ask in return.