The hologram crackled before the channel solidified, the logo of the Brotherhood coming into view, spinning in three dimensions. All across Brotherhood space, rooms full of Dark Jedi quieted. Commissaries and cantinas hushed. Few knew what the announcement would be about. Some supposed it would regard the Horizon's Plague, others wondered if another Dark Councilor would be returned to their clan. Bets were taken in some houses.

When the sable eyed Dark Lord appeared, he wasted no time.

"After years of fighting little petty squabbles between the clans over bragging rights under the auspices of sharpening ourselves, after years of being the prey rather than the predators, it is time that the Brotherhood seizes destiny by the throat." Muz's voice was deep, smooth.

The hologram changed, a miasma of nebulae and broken planets that most were familiar with, if only from through the shuttle windows on their way to Lyspair. The Stygian Caldera. The Brotherhood called it by it's ancient name: the Shroud. It swirled in monochrome, the grave dust of dead stars giving way to the map of an ancient, oft-forgotten sector of space.

The Sith Empire.

"Over the next year, we will descend upon those worlds and remind them who they belong to. We will crush all opposition. We will restore our dominion, our legacy, one planet at a time." There was gravity in the words.

"We will retake our birthright."

REPORT TIME

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February will mark the start of a new Vendetta Cycle. Raken is calling it the Dark Crusade. We will seize the planets of the ancient Sith Empire, from Khar Delba to Ziost, from Dromund Kaas to Korriban.

We will do this by focusing on a few planets at a time. The summits will be able to choose which planet that their unit will be deployed to for that month, and that will dictate what set of events that will be on offer for that month. Our success in taking these worlds will be dictated by participation, and personal glory will be richly awarded. Months will be divided in two: the first two weeks will be the actual runtime of the planetary campaign, with the rest of the month set for grading and setup of the following month.

This campaign will take us through to the Great Jedi War, currently scheduled for late in 2013.

The first leg of this campaign will be to seize the planet Krayiss.

We will move to engage the planet in February.

The next month will be used to prepare ourselves, to ready our fleets. The Master at Arms has been advised to deny any local competitions in lieu of competitions and training exercises hosted by the Dark Council. These competitions will allow members the chance to accomplish feats that will go down in Brotherhood history as well as discover things that won't be released publicly, but lend a greater understanding of some of the intrigues of the Brotherhood.

Secrets will be revealed. Heroes will be made. Things won't be the same.

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Horizons has ended, and the post-Horizons feuds are on wrap-up, albeit a little later than some of us would have liked. As we have been doing recently, we've run a survey after the Vendetta to get a feel for what stuff people liked and what things people didn't much care for.

There was mixed reaction to the multi-unit requirement on many of the events. Some people really liked it, others were a fair bit leery of having to play with people outside of their own home units. While the reaction was generally favorable, and I am happy to see that people are capable of putting aside the old snarkiness and hatred of other units like we have had in the past, it's not something that we want to use exclusively like in Horizons.

Another thing that was brought up was where we let some of the DC play in events that they weren't grading. In general, there were questions about those DCers being able to divorce themselves from the process and grade other events impartially. While I'd like to think that the DC is mature enough to sort it out, I can completely understand the concern. Going forward, the hard and fast (shut up) rule will be that DCers will only be able to do gaming events.

Something that was brought up (kinda outside of surveys) was who gets used in Vendetta storylines. In general, we have tried to get various leaders in the club cameos in the comic and story. This has proven to be kinda problematic because the long tail on these projects can mean months between the writing of the story and the actual release to the public. A good example of this was where we had to retcon why Tsainetomo (Sadow, at the time) was giving a speech in the GJWX comic. By the time the event launched, Sai had left the position of consul. And sadly, that's not only restricted to leadership cameos. For instance, Anubis (of Taldryan) had a sweet little cameo in the Horizons comic, but he was long gone into activity by the time it released. The same could be said of a number of members and their cameos. This makes it terribly difficult to run cameos for people, because we have to kinda roll the dice to see who is going to still be around when the event launches. And using actual members is generally a fun thing for everyone, from the feedback we've gotten, so there's no real reason to stop doing that.

Connected, but somewhat different, some people were cranky about how the storyline centered on the DC. For the same reasons listed above, it's difficult to make stories that center around non-DC members. A point of clarity, though... The stories behind the Vendettas have all been DC-centric. GJW6 was about Trev working to defeat an ancient Sith Lord's legacy and Jac proving to firefox that he was affected. GJW7 was about what would happen if the DC was divided by a cloned Jac. GJW8 was about the Vong forcing the DC to abandon Antei, and GJW9 was about Sarin's drive to see Antei reclaimed at all costs. GJWX was about Halc killing his brother. Are these overly simplistic distillates of the story? Sure. They were much larger in scope, and involved many subplots to get the clans involved. That's something that we try to do.

Something that few people recognize with vendettas is that it's not some easy, rosy thing to write clans in. Most of us here have written in the ACC or runons and got chastised or whined at about 'not getting my character right'. Scale that up substantially, and we're still not there. There was a point in the writing of GJW8, where Raken and I went to the folks in Tarentum about how we were intending to use Tarentum in that war. After some tweaking, Bloodfyre and Korras (the Tarentum Summit at the time) were terribly happy with it. a few months later, a new Summit decided that the way Tarentum was portrayed in that war was anathema to how Tarentum would have actually reacted, and tried to get us to retcon the story in impossible ways. Now, some of you would go 'Bah, Tarentum', but the thing is that this sort of thing has happened with every clan and house. So yeah, not easy as you might think, especially when we do stuff where the enemy and what is happening is kinda secret. And yeah, some secrecy is kinda needed. How much impact would it have been if we knew what was waiting for us on Antei? If we knew how bad the Vong were going to hit us? If we knew who was behind Odan Urr, or who was responsible for the Horizon Plague? So, under cloak of secrecy, we work with the units to try to get them right, to portray them properly... and usually we do all right. Could be better, and with events that don't require secrecy, it'll be easier.

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Before the end of January, my staff and I (and Raken) will be compiling data in preparation for a State of the Brotherhood report. We will be making the data public, because Raken and I both feel that people need to know.

This information will run for all of 2012 and will cover a broad spectrum of goals that I have had for the DB, from the number of knighthoods to activity levels across the forums, email lists, et cetera.

This will combine with Internal reports (Not again!) and an AWOL check that the MAA crew will be running to give us an overall view of the Health of the various units in the club. That information will help us tailor action plans on how to get every unit on the path to improvement.

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-> <- <p> Tarax asks: Muz, Question time. Aside from the ACC overhaul, will there be any other changes to facets of the DB? Such as gaming, other fiction, etc?

Certainly. The ACC is the first and most obvious changeup. Shutting down the ACC for retraining and revamping is a pretty big thing, as we shift the ACC to be a more member friendly place, with clearer rules and more understandable reasons and methodology for grading. (Combat Master is still open for applications, so if you want to get in on the ground floor of this, send your app in today). The Shadow Academy will go through a similar reconstruction under Solari, with the advent of the Grind Path and the shift in the focus on 'trivia' to more practical things, such as position training ('How to be a great Aedile' and 'When should a house add a new Battleteam'), skills training ('How to code in Ruby', 'Photoshop for the Brotherhood') and personal enhancement ('How to write fiction that people want to read'). The idea is to make the SA be a place for people to actually hone skills, learn new ones, and become better at what they want to do, not just a 'search for the trivia answer on the course notes while taking the test' place. Fiction prompts are going to change somewhat: making it easier for those who need less guidance to write fictions while providing enough food for thought for people who need a bit more to be able to write something that they are proud of. You're also going to see more opportunities to affect Brotherhood Canon.

Andrelious asks: What is the fictional status of Tau squadron, who supposedly stayed with Firefox? (But assumedly then became Jac's escort squad etc)

There was an attempt in Tarentum relatively recently to restore Tau to activity. They had some limited success, but I think with so few of the older generation around (or in Tarentum) to get back into it (notably, Reinthaler), it didn't seem to stay active for long. Fictionally, I assume it became manned with NPCs and still run escort missions for the DC fleet.

Shadow asks(Paraphrasing here): Why did we decide to allow new independent houses when we seem to have problems keeping enough members interested in the houses that we have?

This is a great question. We did have a general reduction of members willing to do stuff in the existing clans and houses. But where do we place the blame for that? Some would say that the Brotherhood has less overall members who are active, but the numbers don't actually support that. Sarin pulled some numbers from the wayback machine and compared them to now. Of course, there are different mitigating factors (like how back in the day, people ran AWOLs all the time, and many members were exempt from AWOLing regardless of activity versus now, where random joins might be on the roster for 5 months before a MAA AWOL check), but we don't have much difference between the numbers then and now. Some blame may be laid at the members boredom with the old clouses and concepts. There are stereotypes associated with the untis we have now, and there is certainly something sexy about being able to go and create something new. If creating a new hose is what we need to do to get people active again, then that's what we need to do. And to be fair, both of the new houses had a pretty respectable pile of members who were interested in taking part. House Odan Urr is certainly something different, and continues to offer something very different from the other units. Revan did so during it's tenure as well, but not as distinct as HOU does. So, the short answer is that we wanted to try something different.

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So that's about all for this time. If I can help with anything, feel free to shoot over an email or catch me on IRC.

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