Contract 002: Complete

A report came in from the planet Gonda, a small out of the way planet, that professor Jonz’ind’iana had gone missing while investigating a newly discovered temple on behalf of the Shadow Academy. The Envoy Corps had been contracted to find out what happened, locate the professor and bring him back to the shadow academy to continue his research.

Upon arrival at the mysterious temple, the Envoy team quickly discovered that things were not as they seemed. An ancient Rakatan temple, a missing research team and the camp in disarray. After thoroughly investigating the scene, the team discovered a patch clutched tightly in the cold hand of a dead researcher. The team’s next stop was a small unnamed village nearby looking for leads on who the patch belonged to. A pair of confrontations led to a pile of dead pirates and a chance encounter with a street urchin willing to help the team and lead them to their final destination, her family's farm. Making a stealthy entrance, the team picked off the pirates one by one through blasters, mind control, hand to hand combat and more and after avoiding a hostage situation they were able to rescue the professor, his research and a Rakatan crystal skull.

See the Envoy Corps mission log here.

Exarch Report 08

Welcome to my 8th report as Exarch. While I want these to usually be monthly, I don't usually start my months off in a foreign country for a week on a work trip. But we're here now, so.

Table of Contents

• Development
• Helpful Resources
• Monthly Statistics
• Closing

Development

For this section, I wanted to highlight some of the data tracking I’ll be doing as Exarch to monitor the progression of RP activity in the DB. It’s not much, as I’m doing most of this manually and by hand, but it should give us insight into health and progression as time passes.

Wally’s Guide to Running an RP

The name is a work in progress, but I’m currently working on a Shadow Academy exam that will be a general guide to running a Brotherhood RP activity. This should not be seen in any way as a definitive “this is what you must do” and like the Pirate Code is more of a guideline based on what I’ve seen work and create fun, successful RP experiences. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll be sharing what I end up doing with a few DMs I’ve seen step up and get their hands into the possibilities. This is something I work on in my spare time which is getting more limited these days.

New Features

RP List Function

Thanks to some wizardry by James, if you want to know what RPs are currently open/available, you can use the new command: /rp list. This will now list all RPs that were broadcasted to a specific channel (usually but not limited to #rp-lobby) and were set as available to join. The message will show just to you, from dbb0t, so you don't need to worry about clogging the channel.

As a reminder, if you don't advertise an RP (which you are not required to), no one beyond Exarch Staff (we have a backend admin channel for tracking things) will see it or be able to join it unless you @mention them. If it has not been advertised, it will not show up when you use /rp list.

Button approval for completed RPs

Thanks to James’ continued genius, we now have an automated way to easily process RPs once they are completed.

What does this mean for you? Not much other than we’ve saved Idris’ inbox from puns and constantly bothering him to do manual admin. Automagic for the win. And your Golden/Envoy Marks should appear right after we finalize on our end as Exarch Staff.

If you have any questions about Exarch Staff and what we do, feel free to hit us up.

Monthly Statistics

While the hope is to have real, better analytics in the future (Arch promised me he asked James about it), I keep manual track of data I’m able to see. My goal with this data is to see the growth/engagement of the RP Society and its associated activities. For those unfamiliar, Players Gonna Play (PGP) is the trophy earned from Envoy Marks earned by participating in RPs. You Can Certainly Try (YCCT) is the trophy earned from Golden Envoy Marks, which you get by being a Dungeon Master (DM) or co-DM of an RP.

June 2023

• We had an increase in rank ups across the board, going from 23 →31 RP Players trophy rank ups, and 9 → 12 RP DM trophy.
• We continued to see a healthy number of First-time rank ups, which usually tracks when someone either runs or participates in their first RP! We always want to see this number, because it means RP is growing!
• While less RPs were started, nearly double were completed!
• Which puts our RP completion rate at an increased 44%

Editor's note: Wally went to art school and shouldn’t be doing statistics/math.

Race To The Bottom

I just want to point out that I did not make these memes. I also would like the record to reflect that I don’t believe in bullying, and that the metric tracking shared herein is entirely voluntarily from Kamjin and Sagitta.

With that said, here is the tracker that Jenni has been keeping, in comparison to what I’d logged from Kamjin previously.

So, it seems that Jenni has...won the race that wasn’t a race to having really bad luck with rolls.

Exarch Commentary

As a reminder: while this is hilarious all in good fun, Jenni and Kamjin are very good sports about this. As a community, I want to remind everyone that roleplaying is about having fun while being creative, and ultimately being supportive of one another.

Which leads me to another talking point. The Brotherhood has been around for a very long time. And while we’ve seen some really amazing progress in terms of new friends being made, characters meeting one another that never would have met otherwise, we are still all human, and some of us have known each other for a very long time. We talk to each other, and at the end of the day, we each have our corners/sandbox/clan/friend groups that we organically go back to.

RP is for everyone. There is no place in it for gossip, hearsay, or shitalking. Period.

Be excellent to one another.

Lastly, Roleplaying activities in the Brotherhood fall under the Exarch’s purview. This means that as Exarch, I likely see more than you think, but I know less than you assume. If you run into any problems, or see something that makes you uncomfortable in how people are talking to one another, how a DM is leading or how a player is playing, let me or my staff know immediately so we can step in and take a look. We honestly haven’t had this happen yet, which makes me happy. But just remember that we’re here to help.

That also goes for help with setting up your first RP, help with how the bot or the functions work, or even just some old fashioned cheerleading/encouragement!

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
• Envoy Corps Trophy Rank Rewards Table
• Envoy Corps Items
• Envoy Corps CS Feats
• Character Sheet Reference Tool
• Roleplaying Handbook

Closing

That’s all for now.

-W