Look, you can’t challenge me with alliteration and not expect me to follow through. And in case you were still expecting Arch here, I regret to inform you that they have since moved on to take on the role of Headmaster. Instead, you’ll be stuck with me going forward or until Evant gets tired of me or I’m canceled.

Introduction

Hi. I’m Wally and you’ve probably heard of me. I like swords, dogs, and especially dogs with swords. I formerly served as Combat Master and Voice of the Brotherhood, where I had a heavy hand in writing, designing, and implementing a lot of the current Character Sheet system and its integration with our ever-growing Possessions system. Since retiring, I’ve served as a Battleteam Leader for Clan Arcona (#voidbreakers) and most recently as a member of the Exarch Staff.

From a Brotherhood perspective, I’ve kept up with Star Wars and Brotherhood lore and have previous experience working with the Story Group and penning three years worth of macro-level fiction updates for the club. Idris and co. have done an amazing job since taking over and expanding on all of that, and I’m excited to formally work with him again . Likewise, I hope to continue to leverage my friendship and experience working with Arch as they tackle their next challenge with the Shadow Academy.

Most importantly, I look forward to getting to work with more members across the wider club, especially those I’ve unfortunately not spoken to quite as much since stepping out of the leadership spotlight.

For anyone that doesn’t already know me, I go by Wally even though my dossier identifies as Marick Tyris Arconae. The three characters that I play are: Marick, Wyn, and Zig.

Outside of the DB, I’m the Director of IT for a marketing tech company. I currently live in New York City with my two dogs (Auri and Flynn) and my girlfriend, and spend my free time gaming, writing, and most recently getting a lot more into tabletop gaming sessions thanks to the advancements in the combined technology of Discord, Roll20, and other tools!

I’ll end my introduction with a blunt admission: I’ve never actually run a campaign for a tabletop game. I didn’t play my first game of Dungeons and Dragons (5e) until maybe a few years ago after listening to the first season of The Adventure Zone. Since then, however, I’ve been lucky enough to be included in some fun one-shots, some ongoing campaigns, and most importantly witnessed the powerful potential RP has a Brotherhood activity.

I helped Arch with the initial proposal to the Council to get RP activity validated for Clusters of Ice. I have been involved in some manner of speaking since that humble start, and am very excited to build on everything that Arch has built and grow that framework into something really special.

For my first report, I will put out a call for some new staff members, outline my vision, and provide some tips I’ve found helpful in starting up and running RPs.

Vision Board

To start, I’m a pretty open person and know that I don’t have all the answers. I want to listen, learn, and grow and ultimately deliver the best possible “product” for members of the Brotherhood. In line with that, I’m comfortable sharing my application for Exarch. If you’re curious about my vision and ideas for the role and clubs RP aspirations, feel free to check it out. Otherwise, here is a quick overview.

RP Culture and Engagement

I think the part of my application that Evant liked the most in our conversations was the idea of engagement. Our goal, really, is to get people to run/participate in RP activity. We’ve seen this be a boon to our fictional efforts, and the potential for tying more into the macro Brotherhood-wide plot of the club (The Children of Mortis for example) is definitely something we want to try and get going.

In short, the ultimate goal will be to have RP activities be a draw for new and returning members.

Recurring “Scenario” Prompts

Similar to daily Character Questions I’ve run in the past, the goal here is get members talking about their characters and their sheets. Our characters are often the heart of our experience here in the Brotherhood, so what better way than to learn about how they’d react in certain scenarios!?

An example from this week:

Your character finds themself off duty on their respective home planet. Maybe it's on the way back to your clan-provided housing, maybe it's your own housing. Maybe you're on your way back to your ship.

But you were just out getting some supplies and foodstuffs. You do not have your conventional armor, but are likely armed in some manner if that's how you operate.

Passively, you notice that you're being followed. Through either the Force, or passive perception and awareness, you are unable to tell if there is any ill intent, but you know for sure you're being followed...

What Do You Do!?

Mex, our resident Verpine, had a great response.

If you think these are fun, or have ideas for prompts, please let me know! Eleceos actually wrote an in-character response that was pretty cool.

RP “Game Modes”

One of my first goals, as mentioned in my application, is to come up with some standardization in our nomenclature (how we name things). To help standardize, we can break RP sessions down into 3 “activity types”. These names are in no way finalized, but should serve as a starting point. The details included below are just suggestions and RP organizers will still have the power to implement any kind of structure they want and won’t be beholden to these containers.

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SOCIAL

• Suggested size: 3+ players
  
• Suggested run time: 1-4 weeks
  Optional: Voice Session (2-4 hours)
  

Social RPs can be set up in a cantina, an event space, or any venue, really. They are usually treated as casual sessions, and are a good way to get as many members involved as they tend to be more free-form and less structured. They’re also great for focusing on interpersonal character drama and not getting bogged down in mechanics, turn orders, or awareness of Star Wars/Brotherhood lore. While dice rolls are not required, they can be used to help play games that make use of “drink points”, or casual attribute checks such as arm-wrestling, darts, billiards, etc.

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ADVENTURE

• Suggested size: 3-6 players
  
• Suggested run time: 1-2 weeks / 2-3 Hours
  Optional: Voice Session (2-4 Hours)
  

Adventures function more like a conventional TableTop/DnD session. There will usually be a venue, an objective, and a more hands-on structure set by the DM and an overarching plot/story. While dice rolls are not required, they are what most TableTop players are accustomed to and tend to help keep members engaged and with more indication of what they can/can’t do.

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CHARACTER

• Suggested size: 2-3 players
  
• Suggested run time: N/A
  

Character focused RPs can be anything that focuses on character development and interactions with other characters in the Brotherhood. These can range from an overdue conversation between two characters meeting at a given location, to a slice of life outing, to sparring or training matches, and even for duels. The idea with Character RPs is that there is no impetus for scheduling or a DM, and the onus is placed on a small group of members to self-manage and enjoy writing together in RP format.

“Sponsored” Exarch Content

Another big push I’m going to be personally heading up is running with the hopes of being able to pass that off to other interested parties and DMs. These would mostly be demonstrating what "could" be done with the hope of providing a template for success for others.

Editor's note: When I say monthly in these ideas, I mean “recurring at a somewhat consistent interval”.

Monthly Contracts — These would be similar to “Bounties” where an NPC would be created and members can sign up to tackle this “one-shot” short adventure with a small team.

A good example of this was the Bounty session I got to run with a few members of Clan Vizsla. Shout out to Kanal, Korras, Von, and Juda for being awesome players in the play-test. You can read the log of the event here.

Monthly Social — We pick a Brotherhood venue, and then allow an open-door rotation for members to come through. While it would only last a few weeks, it would help members from different clans possibly interact and meet without the stress of a major event.

Monthly Live Session — This one's a bit more ambitious than the others. My short-term goal is to keep these simple, but show a valid use-case for these to be run. The challenge will be in how we “reward” for these sessions, as there is very little writing involved. Eventually, this will be solved by having an RP Society that awards points for organizing/participating in these kinds of activities at some kind of scale.

My long term (ultra-stretch) goal is to see if live voice sessions can work, similar to the vein of popular actual play podcasts/shows. But the theory would be to run a Brotherhood-lore tie-in that featured characters with players that are comfortable having their voices recorded and possibly published. While I doubt we’d ever have the “Brotherhood Critical Role”, it could be something that does actually work as a recruiting mechanism to draw new members into the club. Shoot for the stars, I guess (and accidently blow up a moon).

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Again, with any standardization, it’s important to make sure that the intent is for the possibilities to be endless, and these guidelines are meant to guide, not restrict.

The other key thing I want to focus on, through all of this, is that RP can be small groups with short sessions, short sessions with large groups, and large groups with longer sessions. There is no one-size fits all formula, and what we’re building is a combination of structured guidance, with built in freedom to run what you want.

Exarch Staff Applications Open

So, how am I going to accomplish all of this? I’m glad you asked!

Teebu has agreed to stay on and I’m excited to keep working with him, but I’m looking to bring on additional staff members to help achieve my goals and vision as Exarch. I’ve updated the Exarch Wiki to contain an outline of the expectations of the role, which you can check out here. If you’re interested, please submit an application to: [Log in to view e-mail addresses].

What I’m looking for in an application:

• Have experience running or organizing a tabletop or virtual gaming session before, or a willingness to learn how to do so.
• A brief introduction of yourself and your experience in the Brotherhood.
• Demonstration and acknowledgement of the Staff Expectations and Responsibilities.
• Your ideas for helping run, engage with, and get more members to organize in and/or participate in roleplaying activities.
  
• Wiki editing and formatting experience is a plus.
• If you’re comfortable doing so, share what you do outside of the Brotherhood- whether it be for work or recreation, especially if you think the skills are transferable like running a Warhammer 40K campaign or a professional cat wrangler/herder.
• I don't care what rank or experience level you are: if you're interested, apply!

I want to get moving on my plans sooner rather than later, and don't really believe in waiting around for very long when it can be helped. Please have all applications in by: Sunday, 10/30 around end of day EST(whenever Wally goes to bed).

Development

In this section, I’ll cover the projects and work that’s going on for the Exarch team, some of which I’ve already started and others that will kick into higher gear once we have a full team locked and loaded.

Shadow Academy Content

I'm excited to be working with Arch and co. to create our first SA content covering RP activity. There's a lot of potential here for content, but for now we're going to focus on the basics of setting up and joining a session. More to come.

I Want To Run A <insert system> Game

I’ve had many conversations with folks wanting to run a specific kind of tabletop-dice system. I’ve seen the conversations and threads that have already been going on and I am very aware that a lot of folks are “over” DnD’s setting or Fifth Edition's popularity despite its “simplicity”. The truth is that as long as we can bridge into Star Wars, any system can be used to run a Brotherhood RP activity. We actually want folks to run a Fate campaign. Arch even came up with a really cool framework for that. We just now need someone to run it.

My focus, personally, for running activities and trying to train/encourage folks to run their own will be to leverage the more popular/recognizable “D20/D10” style-systems. I think this will lead us to a higher adoption rate.

“Players Handbook”

I was recently shown how DnD’s Players Handbook (PHB) is the vanilla source of truth for 5e, but Wizards of the Coast (who publishes DnD/5e) also put out guides that were designed to expand on top of PHB (Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, for example). This got me thinking that, maybe that’s how we should approach RP from the Brotherhoods CS/Possessions system...since we already have it!

Where I hope people get encouraged, then, is in building out “expansions” to the “core” Brotherhood CS system. This should give potential DMs the ability to write up, code, and play different systems and styles and create branching guides that other members can take advantage of.

Building a Society

I was going to talk more about this in this report, but realize there is still a lot of “Work In Progress” and not much to share. Hopefully with some added staff on board, and some squirrel! focus on my part. We'll make some headway and have things to share soon. If you’re curious about the direction I’m hoping to go in, feel free to check out the ideas from my application.

puts on his robe and wizard hat

For this section of my reports, I’ll take some time to talk about some tips and tricks for running your RP activities, and highlight an example of an RP that’s finished up that I think is a good example to follow.

DM Tips and Tricks

As I mentioned before, I’m not really all that experienced as a technical-DM, but I have had really good experience with running sessions of various kinds. Anyone who’s been in my sessions (other than Kamjin, maybe) have had positive feedback. That said, here are my core-principals I’ll try to work into future DM Guides.

1. Try and find someone you trust as a co-DM. If you’re running a session that goes on for a week or more, inevitably you’re going to run into walls where you’re unable to attend to your players. Having a co-DM that “knows” what you’re planning can help with coverage.
2. Activity attracts activity. No one wants to join or play in a game where nothing happens. If there’s no posts for a day, try and engage 1-on-1 with some of the players. Everyone is different, so learn your players.
3. Too much activity can sometimes intimidate players, or make it hard to keep pace. It’s really important to provide summaries of what’s been going on or happened if a player has been inactive for a stretch of time.
4. If there is no movement or activity from your players, be confident in moving the action along. You can do this with jump cuts, fast-forwards in your planned story, or by using an NPC. Just make sure you @ your players in the thread.
5. Be patient. The goal is to have fun and play our characters.
6. Sometimes people just forget or are busy. Sometimes they might have been “waiting” for you to give them direction, even though you were waiting for them. Either way, a DM is responsible for probing and poking the players frequently. Very very rarely will an RP be self-driving, and it’s usually the exception to the norm.

Lastly, as I try to organize resources, we’re also creating resources to help with planning and running your sessions. One of these efforts I came up with as a staffer was the RP Planning Template.

Featured RP of the Month

So, I mentioned above that RP can be used for personal character development. Mune approached me asking if we could try a certain type of dice system and do a “Sparring” session between our characters since they are both Arcanist, and Marick is one of the more level-headed mentors around. Not only did we try out the dice system they wanted to try, we got to have a really cool character engagement that we...never would have had otherwise. If you want to check out how it translated into writing (happy to share some of the “rolls”) view the log here.

Helpful Resources

I will feature these in each report, but I will be working on leveraging the Wiki and SA to have a more concrete and easily accessible place to access these resources.

• How to Create an RP — A step-by-step guide with pictures.
• RP Starter Guide for DMs and Players — A good hand-out for new players or anyone looking to run their first sessions!
• RP Planning Template. — A good template (make a copy) to use for “setting up” your activity.
• RP Games — Some example games to use in your RPs, such as the popular D10 drinking game!
• r/Star_Wars_Maps/ — Finding maps for reference in a session.
• Cartographers Guild — A forum thread of cool maps for reference use.

Closing

If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, please feel free to hit me up on Discord, or my email inbox ([Log in to view e-mail addresses]). My door is always open, and I’m excited to talk with more people about this undertaking. Also, if you want to volunteer to make better headers or art for the next Exarch report, I’m open to real graphic designer help for improvements!

Until next time,
-W