Greetings all,

Today, I’m pleased to officially announce the upcoming Great Jedi War XV: Ascension! This post will detail the event start date and timeline and preview how we’re going to handle the Run On event this time around, given that Discourse has been retired.

Start Date and Timeline

We are on schedule to start the GJW at the end of the month: it will begin at site time on May 28th, which means it will launch on the evening of 5/27 for those of us in North America. Competitions for Phase I and the Event Long phases will go live at that point. The opening fiction may be released slightly earlier.

As always, this fifteenth(!!) Great Jedi War will award the top three Clans the titles of First, Second, and Third Clans of the Brotherhood! We will also award Hero titles to the overall top scoring members, and some of the other top-scoring members will be written into the closing fiction! Because this is a GJW, scoring will be weighted heavily towards placement, but participation remains critical! Every point earned for your Clan counts.

For those of you who have participated in the last couple of vendettas, the structure of GJW XV will look familiar: 1) there will be three Bins per Phase, 2) we will offer alternatives, or perhaps lowered requirements, for competitions to encourage participation and accessibility, 3) and we have extended the event timetable in such a way as to allow each Phase to cross 3 weekends (and avoid ending on the 4th of July).

The GJW will last roughly five and a half weeks. As with our past major events, there will be competitions offered in (approximately) two-week Phases, as well as in an Event Long Phase. We believe the number of Bins will be sufficient to provide ample opportunity for members to complete at least one competition in each Bin, even with limited time. Completing at least one competition in every Bin will earn you the maximum available participation points for your team. But we encourage everyone to participate in as many competitions as they have time for!

Phases will be slightly over two weeks, ensuring that each Phase occurs over 3 total weekends, with a one-week break between Phases I and II to allow people to focus on the Event Long comps and decompress a bit. In addition, because this event's end will overlap with Fourth of July Weekend, the second Phase will continue until the following Wednesday. As such, the schedule is as follows:

Phase I: 5/28 to 6/12
Phase II: 6/19 to 7/6
Event Long: 5/28 to 7/6

Rewards

In addition to Hero titles for the top three scoring members and the usual novae and credits, dossier art will be awarded based on the Herald Vendetta Dossier Skin Guidelines:

1st Place Clan: Robe & Weapon 2nd Place Clan: Robe 3rd Place Clan: Weapon

And all participants will receive one Seal per competition participated in.

Additionally, Clans will be granted Clan Fleet Upgrades from a pool of available upgrades. In order of Clan score, each Clan will get to select one item from the list. An item, once selected, will be removed from the list and not be available for other Clans to choose in this vendetta. There will also be a secret award for each Clan, to be revealed at a later date.

Run Ons in a Post-Forum Age

Discourse is dead, but Run Ons will never die. When the Dark Council made the decision to retire our Discourse forum without replacing it, we started considering options for how to make Run Ons work in the future. After some discussion with the Consuls, we’ve decided to use our fancy RP functions on Discord to support the GJW’s Run On event. Doing so will require some changes, so please pay attention and be sure to read the revised rules that will be released with the Event Long Run On competition.

Thanks to our first-ever Elder 4, James, the #rp-lobby chat on our Discord server can be fairly easily adapted to support Clan Run Ons. When the GJW starts, we will spin up one RP session per Clan and send a link to join the RP to each Clan’s war chat.

Each Clan’s RO session will include one [IC] and one [OOC] thread:

The [OOC] thread is exclusively for coordination and discussion:

All Run On posts must be made in the [IC] thread:

Now, there are a few things we have to do differently because of how Discord functions. First, we will no longer require a certain number of posts per member. Because of Discord’s per-message character limit we will now permit members to make multiple messages in a row in order to get their entire “post” up.

Second, we will now permit members to edit messages they’ve made, again because of the character limit. Clans should attempt to coordinate their posting order so that everyone is able to get a “complete” post up (including, as needed, editing for length and using multiple messages) before the next person posts.

Finally, the minimum participation requirement will now be exclusively based on total word count. There will no longer be a mandatory minimum number of posts per member.

On the Vendetta Transfer Ban

• The clan to clan transfer ban will be enacted one-week prior (on May 21, site time) to the start of the GJW. No members will be allowed to transfer between units at that time, but rogue transfers are still allowed.

• To quote the Vendetta Wiki Page:

To prevent abuse of the transfer system and to prevent the problem of people moving into clans solely for the purpose of participation in one large event, it is hereby ordered that all inter-clan transfers stop one week prior to any DB-wide event (including the competing clans during a Clan Feud), and continue that way until the event's end.

• Rogue members may still transfer into Clans during the transfer-ban-window, and may participate in the event as Rogues. Members participating as a Rogue will not transfer any points earned while a rogue to a Clan should they join a Clan mid-event. However, once a Rogue transfers to a Clan, any competitions the member enters while on a Clan roster will count for that Clan.
  

Remember what the Panda says: Have fun in the coming weeks, and do all the things!

A few additional notes

Finally, if you've never participated in a Great Jedi War or Rite of Supremacy , or perhaps not one in the modern era, you might want to check out our Vendetta course.