Hello Scholae Palatinae! It has been an exciting month with the running of the Independence Games. I hope you all had a good time participating in them, I know I did. Plus it show cased some of the fancy coding James and the Seneschal staff have been working on with the fancy new competition set up on the staging site. Anyway there are a few things I want to cover, especially about the continuing of the Dark Crusade coming up.

The Dark Crusade Raken outlined and discussed several important things about the upcoming phases of the Crusade. There are two important things here I want to cover.

First is the scheduling of the crusade. Obviously April was a fully off month from the Crusade due to the IGs being run. Because the IGs have just ended, the next chapter of Phase One will be starting in a few weeks, running at the end of May. So mark down the _17th - 31st _ of May on your calendars for the return of the Crusade. Several of you have really been bringing it to this crusade, but it would be great to see even more of you come out and participate. Especially those of you APP-DJK. These events count as competition participation and are an excellent way to earn merit medals and work toward your next promotion.

Following the end of this next chapter of the Crusade we are going to have all of the month of June off. Then when July comes Phase Two begins.

Phase Two is going to have a little different set up than these first three chapters of Phase One. Phase Two is going to have "special forces" teams from each unit. These are the best of the best and will face only against the special forces from the other units. This team of 8 will be chosen by myself and the rest of the HSP summit as we go into Phase Two. So make sure to really bring your A game in Chapter 3 if you want in on this team. This also means our "general forces" will only be going against the general forces of other units. This increases the amount of possible novae that are up for grabs! This will be an excellent chance to snag some of these illusive awards. I hope you are all as excited for this as I am.

Independence Games

Talk about an overwhelming amount of stuff going on the last two weeks. There were over 60 events to participate in the last two weeks. I saw representations of pretty much EVERYTHING in these games, from flash games to poetry, fiction to graphics.

I want to have a few quick shout-outs to Arch, Mayda, Dante, Xantros and Natth for doing very well both in terms of participation and placing. Of course as of now there are still many events not yet judged. I also want to doubly thank Mayda for both creating that awesome and helpful gdoc of the events running for quick reference and for sending out daily emails highlighting events. I found this incredibly helpful both in seeing different events to do and for being able to quickly sort through all the events run. So thanks again Mayda!

I also want to highlight the ACC news from Raken's DGM report. They've been working really hard on updating the CS and the ACC so please go check out the awesome sneak-peek of it in the report. It looks really fantastic.

On the house front, our wiki team is now well underway on going over the house articles. It is going to be a long road to completion but in the end it will be worth it. As part of this wiki revision, we are also looking at returning old Scholae Traditions and creating new ones for you all to enjoy. As part of this we are working on getting a good system in place for the honorary of Dark Paladin to return to being used. Hopefully in the coming months you will be seeing it, and other things becoming staples of Scholae Tradition once again.

As always if you have any questions, concerns, comments, salsa recipes or snide remarks my inbox is always open and I can often be found on IRC in #scholae. Until next time!

For the Empire!

tl;dr * IGs are over! Great work everyone! * Chapter 3 of the Crusade in the last half of May. * Get ready for a Special Forces team in Phase Two, starting July * Check out the ACC news in Raken's DGM report * Wiki project moving forward, Dark Paladin returning in the coming months! * Be active!

Xen'Mordin Vismorsus Quaestor of Scholae Palatinae