Tyrants,

I hope you all are doing well and enjoying the last weeks of summer! I want to take a brief moment to remind you that the Aliso Summer Festival is currently running and we’ve just entered Week Two of the week. There are quite a few quick events you could bang out between trips to the beach and in total Week One’s events only took me 28 minutes to complete all four of the events. So go grab a mojito to sip on while you sling through this great event!

However, with that drink let’s please collectively toast our former Quaestor. As you may have read in Slagar’s update, Khryso has unfortunately stepped down from the role of Quaestor and my words alone can’t convey how great a loss this is for the House. As an old-timer who is passionate about this club, it’s been great to see new faces rise up and deliver excellence under the Plageuis banner. Khryso has done such a great job in establishing Tyranus as a pillar of the Plageuis community it will be hard to follow in such footsteps. However, I’m sure we are all glad to see that Khryso remains a member of our tyrannous team and thereby will remain a notable leader even without the position of Quaestor.

As we move forward, I want to illustrate the importance of what we are doing here. Just as our namesake, Darth Tyranus, was instrumental to the downfall of the Old Republic; House Tyranus is an instrumental pillar of Clan Plagueis. As you may have seen in the DGM’s report, the fate of our House system is being tested and I wish to showcase their importance. Each of our individual actions will dictate our collective success and I’m excited to serve in a capacity to assist those individual pursuits. Below, I intend to outline how I can be of service to you all and what you can expect from me.

An Introduction To My Ethos

As Slagar’s announcement stated, I have held many roles in the club over the decades here. Each had its own sets of duties and responsibilities attached yet, in my experience, I’ve always found that as one moves up the tier of positions the further one is distanced from the membership. While the mark of a good leader is making sure that they are connected with all those in their charge, each step up the tiers makes it a harder reality. When you have five members under your charge, you can commit more time to each individual compared to being responsible for fifty people. Especially when we all serve in a volunteer, part-time capacity.

This is why Battleteam and House positions are so important for the overall club structure, as frontline positions dedicated to serving the membership directly. It is a bridge between membership and higher-tiered positions, fitted with a dual nature of being responsible for encouraging the activity as well as sharing with the summits above what direction the membership wants to take. This is why I personally believe these positions benefit by being served by veteran members who can champion the issues of those they serve. This is how you can expect my term as Quaestor to be run so I encourage you to use me as your confidant, your advocate, & your ace in the hole. I’m committed to being your first responder for engagement with the club.

Moving forward I hope to use my experience and passion for this position to continue Tyranus as a staple under the Plagueis banner, however, I certainly can’t do this myself. You may have noticed I referred to summits as positioned members or leaders. This isn't an accident. The most important thing to know about my views and leadership beliefs is that I view leadership as being more than just a position as Battleteam Leader, Quaestor, or Consul. People can be leaders without a title, just as there can be positioned members who aren’t in fact leaders. Obviously, the second should be avoided but more importantly; the first should be encouraged, celebrated, and promoted. As with any club, there is only going to be a finite amount of positions that exist in the DJB but that shouldn’t prevent people from contributing to the unit, making a name for themselves, or creating merit/consideration for the next time they are up for promotion or a position opens up. Therefore, I’m committed to using this position to create as many opportunities for achievement as we can, while also recognizing these successes in a timely manner.

Finally, a topic I can’t stress enough is the importance of including everyone in the development of our space within this club. While we do have to recognize the contributions that a positioned member makes, they really are a minority in the club. So our themes, our lore, our activities, and our commitments should be to the membership as a whole. Yet, we can’t do that if the membership isn’t involved in the conversations. Going forward; know that I wish to hear from you, know that I want to empower you, but also know I need to count on you to share what you are looking for. It really is a two-way street and, as such, I’m committed to providing an inclusive environment that will help share the road so long as you guys attempt to drive on it.

With the above shared, I hope you all have a good sense of what kind of Quaestor I intend to be and how this will serve you. Not only is this an opportunity for an introduction of myself but I intend to use it as an opportunity to get to know each of you. Let’s start with a shared passion we all have; this club.

What this club means to me:

For the past two decades, I have (mostly) gone by the name Raiju Kang. My real name is Brett, and before I rejoined the club as Raiju Kang; I was known as Warhunter back in the days of Clan Satal Keto and the early days of Plagueis. Over fifteen years ago, after my MSN Gaming Zone club, Corellian Knights (CK), disbanded; I was searching through the Battlestats.com (BSC) website looking for a new Star Wars club to join. For the previous four years I had been a top contender in Jedi Knight and through CK I learned of an earlier SW game; X-wing vs. TIE Fighter. These two games are what lead to my passion for all things Star Wars and they are what lead me to start reading the Expanded Universe, which in turn led me to begin writing fan-fiction. At the time I didn’t know there were clubs for this, but as I was searching through BSC I found this funny image of Fox McCloud with a lightsaber - likely which was an early concept design of our former Grand Master; Firefox.

I ended up going to the club it linked, found this amazing website with many different units (reminding me of the clubs TFA/TRA, who ran BSC), and discovered not only could I play my SW games but I could do fan-fiction with others as well. The concept blew my mind, I joined that day - being placed within House Kirleta of Clan Satal Keto. Within a week, there was this epic event known as a “Great Jedi War” and it was the first to be done in the DJB since some “Exodus”. The energy and hype lead to an incredible time and I was sucked in, there were nights I’d wait until my parents were asleep and then I’d sneak down to the family computer so I could participate - thanks to the DJB for keeping teenaged me at home and away from such things like drugs….or girls.

I like to think the above does well to pay homage to the Brotherhood that I started with and have since grown up with. This club isn’t just about Star Wars, or gaming, or writing fan-fiction. Often I speak to others about what we do here, and many just don’t get it. It can be a little bit hard to explain the value of pounding out dozens of matches of Jedi Academy, researching trivial pieces of lore, or staying up late to see if GJW scores have been posted - but these are just the surface activities of a hobby that has changed my life in many ways.

Since I joined the Brotherhood, I’ve;

• Taken informal lessons on a number of topics including conflict mediation, grammar studies, proposal writing, and programming
• Become knowledgeable about countries, cultures, and people from places I’ve never even travelled
• Developed my hard skills in areas like Photoshop, MS office, computer sciences, and writing
• Developed my soft skills in areas like teamwork, communication, debate, and leadership
• Been educated on literature, class struggles, and social minorities - having first met an openly homosexual person through our chatrooms and learning about some of the struggles
• Developed myself personally as an individual; growing from a bratty, unworldly country boy to a mature, contributing member of society
• Developed myself professionally; first learning here many of the skills I use as a business consultant as well as an owner

I share all this because I think it is important to know this club isn’t a passing fancy to me. I’m a product of this organization as a whole, who has been bettered by the time I invested in this club. I believe in the product we put out, and think that our time invested in this club is meaningful. So there’s a common connection we share and something we hold with high value the outside world may never understand. This is why we are fitting of the term; brotherhood.

I share all this because my role is to head the development of our little community here in Tyranus. I can’t do this if I don’t know what interests you in our community. Therefore I’m putting out a call to each of you: let me know what this club means to you. You can do this by:

• Chatting with me directly about it via DM
• Going to this survey I’ve created with some easier questions
• Jumping onto discord and responding to the thread I’ve created in the plagueis chat

I look forward to hearing each of your perspectives and then turning this into priorities for our house.

So for the past week, I have been busy reading a lot of reports, stats, & projects but I couldn’t tap into the greatest source of information: you folks. Since the announcement, this has changed and I’m now free to chat openly with anyone about this transition. This has already begun and I’ve reached out to Khryso & Sinya for their takes to ensure a smooth transition. However, I will be expanding this to the entire membership.

My goal is for September’s report I’ll release a House Address (a format Kir brought to Plagueis way back when) that will have action items created from the discussions with each of you. To be accountable, my format will be to release House Addresses every 6 months, with each monthly report providing an update on the status of the projects.

With this in mind, here’s a breakdown on August’s priorities to prepare us for this format:

1. Community Awareness Campaign (Progress: 2/7)
   • Create a Membership Survey to learn about members’ interests (Completed)
   • Post an introduction and invite the membership to discuss interests directly either via DM or discord thread (Completed)
   • Follow up with membership via DMs to ensure everyone’s perspective is included
   • Create a running list of membership preferences for the type of content, competitions, and other activities
   • Gain an understanding of membership preference for event delivery
   • Plan out House-specific events to trial before House Address #2
   • Use the successes to deliver a Tyranus-styled event to the clan by House Address #3
2. Lore Development Project (Progress: 0/6)
   • Review House theme with membership
   • Explore membership interest in creating a House nemesis to counter
   • Explore membership interest in Tyranus-specific points of interests
   • Discuss fiction development with Ventress QUA to avoid crossovers
   • Create Unit Fiction Update #1 featuring top 3 performers of Asilo Summer Festival
   • Introduce Membership to Project: Endgame
3. Prepare for the House Address (Progress: 1/4)
   • Introduce membership to House Address Format (Completed)
   • Complete Community Awareness Campaign items 1-6
   • Complete the Lore Development Project items 1-5
   • Create a kickass puzzle competition to be included in future reports
4. Aliso Summer Festival (Progress: 1/3)
   • Promote event in QUA introduction (Completed)
   • Send reminders to the House before each phase ends
   • Note the Top 3 performers so you can include them in the next House fiction

Conclusion

As you guys can see from the list above, we have quite a bit to work on and hammer out before my first House Address. However, I hope to not be doing this alone - please take advantage of the survey I mentioned above or chat me up on Discord. Over the next week, I’ll be sliding into your DMs as well so you have the most potential to be heard. Over the next three weeks, I will be sending out a series of updates on the House Mailer as well to address each of the priorities as we progress forward and develop our team.

For now, make yourself familiar with this introduction & the renovation list and I highly encourage you to check out the Aliso Summer Festival. Should you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding the material above, please contact me directly at [Log in to view e-mail addresses]