Arx Minor
Exarch’s Office
40 ABY

“So the two of you were able to infiltrate the town, avoid detection by the Empty Eyes, get access to the mines, and disable the primary turret array?”

Marick Tyris Arconae calmly read off the mission debrief he had been handed. The Hapan’s glacial eyes were focused on the Zeltron woman. The Exarch’s expression remained devoid of any emotion, but he could tell that Nicfer Luthol was carefully debating the pros and cons of a long sullen silence and a mean comment. The only thing stopping her, he surmised, was that she wasn’t quite sure how or where Marick fell in the rank and file of this “Brotherhood” she’d been, by now at least, assimilated into being a part of.

She chose to nod once in affirmation. Marick nodded to her, politely, in return. His eyes then shifted towards Adem Bol'era. “You then proceeded to take out multiple hostile, enhanced droids including a...droideka,” he continued, reciting the data off his tablet without having to look down at it.

Adem nodded as well, trying his best to keep his expression as muted as possible. Marick actually smiled, small though it might have been, and bowed his head in respect. “It’s good to have you back,” he said simply before moving towards the armored Mandalorian that had been waiting patiently.

“Consul Korvis,” Marick continued, addressing the leader of Clan Vizsla. “It seems that your experience in the hunt was a boon for this operation, and led to the capture of the leader of the Empty Eyes.”

“Talks-a-lot-guy? Yeah. It was a team effort, but we were able to apprehend the target.”

“I’d say it was a lucky shot, but he had it coming,” Cole Farrow added coolly. Unlike Adem and Nicfer, the young mercenary didn’t seem to be tepid when addressing Marick. The Hapan nodded, then glanced back down at the datapad.

“But their pilot got away,” Marick slipped in the question as a statement.

“But the pilot got away,” Korvis repeated back.

The Exarch glanced over at Ruka, and the two exchanged a non-verbal confirmation that confirmed the validity of the report.

“Either way. The people of New Terris are safe and have offered their willingness to trade with the Brotherhood. And without Sylvian Blaine, the Empty Eyes are not more of a threat to the Galaxy. Thanks to your combined efforts, the Envoy Corps has successfully completed its first mission.”

“Consul, I’ll make sure the credits are delivered for your services. Same for the rest of you, you’ve earned your Marks today.”

“What happens to Sylvian?” Ruka gave voice to the question on the collective group's mind.

“He will be handled appropriately,” was all that Marick offered in response. His expression darkened, eyes hard as flint.

---

Check out the full RP transcript of Contract 001 here.

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Exarch Report 03

Hello and welcome to my third report as Exarch. The above excerpt is from one of our first prototype-attempts at running a structured, campaign-like Adventure RP themed around the Envoy Corps goal of expanding the Brotherhood’s influence into the wider galaxy in a positive manner. We hope to run more of these in the future, and to even tie in to the macro storyline with the blessing of the Voice and Story Group.

Otherwise, if it seemed a bit quiet in Exarch land, it’s because the team and I have been hard at work on hammering out all the exciting details and logistics of the Envoy Corps Rank/Rewards. And I’m excited to announce that we’re into the final steps of completing everything. So I’ll be using this report to outline that a bit in advance, and follow up with a formal “launch” post once we go live!

Table of Contents

• RP Spotlight
• Development
• Thank You
• Helpful Resources
• Closing

RP Spotlight

Before we dive into the backend project details, here is a quick spotlight on RP activity that’s been happening.

Envoy Corps Mission Log

My hope will be for the Exarch Staff to be taking point on running “sponsored” RPs that tie into the Envoy Corps theme at least once a month, similar to Contract 001 which you can check out in the link above.

I’ll be keeping track of these on the Envoy Corps wiki here.

Let me know what you guys think.

Featured RPs

While a bit late, I wanted to call out the Space ACC Space-based RP that Turel was able to run as a pilot (heh) RP. This was an example of a member (albeit a Councilor, but we don’t hold that against him) writing up a set of rules/guidelines, and then finding members to play test it. I think this is a key to our future and to offering new experiences, so I’m sharing this mostly to encourage others to follow suit.

Check out a log of the RP here.

You can see the new ruleset Turel used here and on the Roleplaying Handbook wiki.

RP “Starter” Kit

Something new I wanted to try building as part of Team Exarch’s efforts was a pre-built “Kit” that members could use when setting up an RP. To that end, I piggybacked off Contract 001 that I was running and took a crack at a template.

• RP Kit Template

I’ve found that Google Slides works really well as a Roll20-like tool to have a map and player tokens, which for me as a DM make it easier for me to explain what’s happening and keep things moving.

In this, you’ll find a few “maps” I found from googling that could be used to help create scenarios for your players. I also included some pre-made “tokens” I made and will try to populate in the future. You can actually find those here in the Exarch Resoruces google drive folder. You can also feel free to add your own if you want.

This is, of course, not required. It is just another resource we’re providing to help you get started if you’re not sure what to do as a first time DM/GM.

Development

The bulk of this report will focus on the development progress we’ve made. My hope is to get this all covered now, so that when we go live we can focus solely on the exciting user-facing stuff and less about the back-end.

Envoy Corps: Design Language

The task that the GMs gave us when creating the “RP Society” was to make something that was wide-appealing, not overlapping with our existing societies, and featuring a non-darkity-dark theme that was more light-leaning.

This led us in the direction of a public-relations mixed with altruistic “guild” type vibes where contracts and bounties could be handed out to members. This also organically aligned with the RP activity structure that allows for exactly these kinds of stories and adventures.

And so, the Envoy Corps was greenlit, fictionally. Next, we had to figure out how to create a reward-structure and build incentives to generate more RP activity.

Trophies?

So, the biggest difference to the “RP Society” is that it will not actually function the way that the existing Societies do. Progression will be tracked based on two different trophies: a player trophy, and a game/dungeon master trophy. This allowed us to build two unique reward “paths” for playing in RP activities, and organizing RP activities.

We tried our best to be fair, and not “wall off” any reward, but ultimately if you want the rewards tied to the DM/GM trophy, you’re going to need to host RP sessions. If you want the rewards tied to the Player trophy, you’re going to need to take part in RP sessions.

Math and Stuff

A lot of math went into how we designed and calculated the trophy rank progressions. I’ll go into more detail in the launch-post, but from a design perspective, our goals were:

• To backlog activity that members had already done when it comes to Roleplaying their Brotherhood characters. While this means that not everyone starts from “zero”, we felt it would be negligent to the efforts, collaboration, and storytelling that has meant a lot to people over the past few years, even though we just recently finally got to a place where we this is a fully built out platform.
• We wanted to reward past and future efforts equally, and ran a few different data models (thanks to Teebu’s spreadsheet magic) to make sure that no one started at rank 12 out the gate. We also estimated how long it would take the average member (doing 1 RP a month) to reach maximum rank.

So, if you’ve already been getting involved or trying out RP? Your work will be tracked in the new progressions. If you haven’t started yet? Well, we hope that the incentives are enough to add a layer of motivation!

In all scenarios, XP and Credits will be awarded, putting RP in line with other activities we track as a metric, such as Gaming, Art, or Fiction competitions.

Envoys and Golden Envoys

Fictionally, there will be two branches of the Envoy Corps: Envoys and Golden Envoys. Golden Envoys are those that rise through the ranks by leading operations, while Envoy’s make up the bulk of members that go along and take part in the missions.

System-wise, this translates to members that are players in RP activities (Envoys) and members that run, as a dungeon or game master (Golden Envoys).

The title/inclusion of these distinction is, like the other Society titles, optional. You still can play your character however you want. You can still earn ranks, unlock items, and just forgo the theme/names of the Envoy Corps.

CS Perks

The first obvious place we looked at for rewards was the Character Sheet system. Our characters are at the heart of our writing, role playing, and storytelling efforts in the Brotherhood. So when designing feats, we targeted for a theme as well as an area that didn’t have a lot of related feats: Intellect and Resolve.

You can take a peek at the Aspects here, which will become available at different rank unlocks:

Possessions Items

Anubis and team have been doing some really awesome things with Possessions, so I’m happy that we’re able to build off that progress and add our own unique additions to the system.

Here is a sneak peak into the items that can be unlocked.

And here is my “concept art” refrigerator art that Socks was able to (thankfully) turn into these actual graphics.

I know, I know, I’ll stick to fixing computers.

Thank You

The Envoy Corps has been a labor of love and hard work; not just from the Exarch Team, but a whole cadre of Brotherhood leaders and admins that helped make everything come together and make our vision into a reality. Some callouts:

• Thank you to Noobis for helping translate my cooky item/possessions ideas into workable prototypes. And thanks for all the smaller back-end details that go into adding items to our possessions system.
• Thank you to Idris/Xen for going along with my ideas and not stilting my attempts at creativity and coming up with “cool” things. He has been an ally through this whole process and was quick and helpful with finding compromises on the Character Sheet related rewards that will be present in the Envoy Corps progression.
• Thank you to Socorra for being a superhero and creating all the Possession-item image graphics for us. She took my silly sketches and turned them into real graphics!
• Thank you to Arch for keeping the momentum he started as Exarch going and by being my sounding board/friend when I had moments of doubt and sharing a vision for something we started two years ago with a hopeful email to the GMs.
• Thank you to Rian and Kris, for helping get the logo, robes, and the Trophy graphics situated for us.
• Thank you to the Exarch Staff - who have been with me each step of the way, sanity checking me, listening to my rants, and helping be role models and actively engaged in crafting a positive image for RP in the Brotherhood. Mune, Shimra, Teebs, I appreciate you.
• Thank you to James, the #1 Hero and the reason we’ve been able to pull all of this off from a coding/logistics angle. His patience is unrivaled, and I continue to lack the words to express how this club just wouldn’t be the same without him.
• Thank you to Evant and Bubba...who took the time to read my proposal for “RP activity in the Brotherhood” and didn’t just write me off. They let us take the time to build and develop something that I hope will become a staple of our club's appeal to new, returning, and prospective members.

Lastly, thanks to all of you for being open minded and willing to give this new form of writing/activity a try. For those that have been actively doing it, I think you’ll be excited to see where you “start” once things go live.

And again, none of this happens without the member's interest. Your input and feedback lead to the GMs confidence in our efforts. We were able to use your feedback and crowd source two of the graphical elements we needed from the community.

We accomplished this with an open thread talking about potential rewards, and a lot of those ideas helped shape the rewards table. The Envoy Threads (Robes) item images came from the pool of member-created art entries (props to Rhylance/Eleceos for his work on these!), while the Envoy Corps logo design (since tweaked by our wonderful Herald) came from JS’s entry in the logo competition.

Helpful Resources

You can find everything you need in Roleplaying Handbook Wiki. This page hosts links to Exarch Resources such as maps, rulesets, system types, and information about Role Playing activities the Brotherhood.

Some useful pages to bookmark:

• Exarch Resources Google Drive Folder
• Envoy Corps Wiki
• Character Sheet Reference Tool

Closing

That’s all for now. The next post from me will detail in full the Envoy Corps trophy, ranks, and awards structure live on your dossiers! Until then,

-W