An unlikely trio met on Tuesday night to swap stories about kings, battles and the last defense keeping those kings alive: a woman who designed Jaime Lannister’s golden hand, an artist raised by swordsmiths, and a museum curator who keeps an armorer on staff.

At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, artist Miya Ando and Met curator Pierre Terjanian considered questions like whether the Greyjoys stink of fish oil and what it’s like to fight in 100lb armor, as they treated a small crowd to their thoughts about the arms and armor of history and fiction.

Just as George RR Martin crafts baroquely detailed worlds in the novels adapted for HBO’s most popular show, Clapton described how making the armor of Game of Thrones requires a meticulous attention to subtleties of history and character. Her team not only makes armor but breaks it down, ages it and patterns it, cherrypicking historical references and tailoring every detail to match the story of its bearer.

For Theon Greyjoy, for instance, Clapton and her team slashed the sigil of the kraken on to his armor to reflect his homeland’s vicious culture, waxed its leather because of his island origins – and to give it the look of something soaked in fish oil. For Joffrey Baratheon, a spoiled boy who never fights his kingdom’s battles, ornate, gold lions and “hardly aged at all, because he doesn’t use his armor very much”. For Jaime Lannister’s golden hand, Clapton designed it thinking of the woman who gave it to him – his sister and lover, Cersei, who would want him to have a hand that “looked like it wanted to caress” and whose beauty hides the deformity that she sees of his arm.

For the Unsullied, the eunuch warriors of Essos, Clapton said she faced a different challenge. They wanted armor that “no matter who you put on it would create the same strength” and finally settled on a variation of what Martin describes in the books: wrapped plate and a helm with a curved point and a mask-like face. Without visible faces, “they became a total army,” Clapton said – but the design had unintended consequences on the cast. As soon as the 300 young men playing warriors donned their helms, “they start behaving as a pack, because they think you can’t see them!”

“They were terrifying. They were fighting, so we finally we had to tell them ‘you mustn’t put your helmets on until you get to the set.’ They’d say things like ‘It wasn’t me,’ and we’d say, ‘Well, it was you.’ It actually was quite strange for what it evoked in the people who wore it, it’s like they became untouchable.”

And just as the real history of the War of the Roses and continental civil wars plays into Martin’s novels, Clapton’s designs reflect history. Terjanian gave examples of the rivalries medieval armorers had with each other: one blacksmith, for instance, forged armor that showed his competitors fleeing from a rooster, the symbol of his family crest. For Game of Thrones, Clapton tries to dramatically vary the armor that comes from the metropolis of King’s Landing, where armorers compete in earnest, versus that from Winterfell where “there’s probably one armorer … using local pieces, there’s not particularly trade, so theirs becomes much more functional.”

Terjanian was full of the kind of anecdotes that Martin paraphrases from history to pepper his novels. The curator talked about how swords, with names like “Joyeuse” (Joyous) and “Shorty”, sometimes attributed with magical powers, which were sometimes actually forged long after stories first appeared about their owners. He told the story of how noisy armorers annoyed their neighbors and nobles’ gifts had messages for kings, and of how the five-year-old monarch Charles V received a bullet-proof suit, “almost like a tank” and “completely unwearable”.

He also described how the Met keeps an armorer on staff, and how he once tried on a suit which despite its weight he found surprisingly flexible – “like a lobster” . Both Terjanian and Clapton talked about how fitted armor could be quiet and swift, and a video, filmed in the 1920s or 30s, showed Met volunteers testing armor by stabbing and kicking each other. (Another video shows an armor-clad man doing somersaults, Terjanian said.)

Ando described her own experiences as an apprentice to “a master in metal” – “they have you do something over and over and over … I know how to file pretty well.” She talked about the ways that blades, metallurgy and armors contain meaning in their colors and patterns. And she too had stories to tell, about her family’s long history of crafting weapons in Japan, the “national treasure” of a sword her ancestors forged and the way she’s merged a samurai’s armor with the messages of a kimono.

Clapton struggled to answer the panel’s last question, about why arms and armor from centuries ago continue to fascinate. But she did manage a telling summation of one reason people keep coming back to Game of Thrones:

“I think the whole point, and I’m part of a very big team, but it’s to try and tell the story. I know it’s just a TV show, but we all put a lot of thought into it so that it does make sense, so that if you go back and look at it another time you might actually see other messages in there. It’s just not a one-watch sort of show.”

Clapton’s understatement went a long way for everyone on stage: the Met’s galleries and Ando’s exhibitions aren’t one-watch shows either – they’re full of stories and messages, layers and surprises, all good reasons to keep coming back.