It’s me, hi. I’m the Exarch, it's me. It’s been a few months since my last report, but I have been available/communicative over Discord so hopefully no one is wondering what’s going on with the Exarch Team. I will use this report space to cover some updates, projects, the latest leaderboard, and highlight some activity we have going on.

Table of Contents

• Updates
• Development
• Activities
• Leaderboard
• Helpful Resources
• Closing

Updates

The Exarch Staff

So, for those that might not be familiar with who/what the Exarch Staff is/does, I figured I’d use a quick section here to highlight them.

These are your Exarch Staff team members and how to find them on Discord:

• Atty (@attyabbeyattiferann)
• TuQ (@benay029
• Hector (@hector_von_ricmore)
• Anders (@anders0060)

These are your champions of RP. They are all very friendly, approachable, and happy to help if you need anything. If you want to tag all of them at once, you can also just use @Exarch Staffas well.

I’m highlighting this to remind members that the Exarch Staff is here to help. They are leading their own individual efforts to run RPs targeting the larger Brotherhood (not isolated to Clans/sub-units), but are also here to answer questions, provide assistance, and help out however you need. They are also the ones approving the RP’s after they’ve been submitted for either “Regular” or “DM-less” sessions.

So, a quick reminder on this:

Finalizing an RP

When finalizing an RP, it’s a good practice to let the @Exarch Staff know if it was a regular session with a DM/co-DM or DM-less, meaning no one was really DMing.

We have this policy detailed here in the Roleplaying Handbook.

By default, we will process all RPs as “Regular”, but it never hurts to specify when you’re about to complete an RP.

By contrast, DM-less RPs are usually going to cover 1-on-1 character driven stories or vignettes you set up, but they will also be used for Fiction-like activities (Co-Op Fiction or “Run On”) that don’t have any one person DM’ing, but need someone to create the session and submit it.

Adding a Co-DM

Adding a Co-DM requires alerting someone from the @Exarch Staff and having us use a bot-command to add your Co-DM to the session. This helps with the automation we have in place for finalizing RPs. If you do not alert us, and we do not use this command to add the co-DM to the session, the co-DM will not get their Golden Envoy Mark as credit.

This is covered in the Roleplaying Handbook: Co-DM Policy as well.

Community Highlight

At the current moment, I am not looking to rotate any staff, but I wanted to make sure that anyone interested in getting involved with running RPS can do so without being on staff. A quick shout out to our resident Bril-ionare / All about the Briljamins for brainstorming some ideas for Envoy Corps related story ideas and missions and jumping into the DM seat for them. This is a great example of a community effort to share RP with others and grow our community and sandbox lore.

Development

Development projects have been a bit quiet. This is mostly my fault, as my bandwidth was absorbed by the ACC Tournament. Here is a quick overview of what I’m working on with the team.

How To Run an RP Shadow Academy Exam: 70%

This is mostly written. My goal with it is to give resources and a broad, general overview of “how to run an RP for the DB”, and less “How to be a good GM/DM”, which is complicated, hard to pin down in a single page of paper. This will be system agnostic, and more best practices on “how to herd catsplayers” and create a fun experience.

Voice-based RP: TBD

The more I look at this, the more this seems like actually breaking this off of Envoy Corps trophies is the way to go. We have the metric for how to award “points” or “marks” for doing a Voice-based RP session. It would be session-time based (2 hour, 3 hour, 3+ would be a bonus).

Instead of trying to craft a whole set of awards/outcomes, my thought would be to make it just an ascending trophy that just awards a fixed amount of credits/xp (small) as you go. This would essentially allow people who want to play live table-top style games using Roll20 + Discord / whatever tool you like, and get “credit” via the DB website.

My hope there, then, would be to be able to possibly lure in members who are really into Roleplaying, but might not like writing specifically.

We’ll see. I’m trying my best here, but as it involves borrowing time from James to accomplish a lot of this, it’s kind of a chicken/egg situation for me.

Ranks 12+ for Player Trophy: 60%

I’m just waiting on some more data to help with the math here. We want to design this so that it’s both achievable, but not easily breached. We have to try and design around the highest RP performers, the regulars, and the casual/infrequent ones, to make sure we have a balanced progression.

We do have some cool awards and ideas on tap as well. I’m pleading negotiating with the new Regent on how we can both provide cool, desirable rewards but also keep it balanced.

When I have more, I will share, but this is likely the project I hope to finish before my Exarch time is up.

Thanks again for everyone's patience.

Activities

There’s a few activities I wanted to talk about.

Pro Bowl Co-Op Fiction

If you’re taking part in the Pro Bowl, you likely saw the Event Long “Roleplay” competition. The details in the competition are fairly straightforward and similar to how TuQ and I have run these kinds of competitions before.

While the event is being graded by the wonderful Zuza and Rayne — my two favorite Consuls (sorry Wolfe) — myself and the Exarch Staff are here to help if you run into any trouble setting up your RP sessions.

As a general tip/reminder: this format is still more like writing fiction than an RP. You can still work in Google Docs and copy/paste into the RP thread itself, we’re just using the really cool infrastructure (discord threads/coding) we have in place for RPs to help make sure each writer gets credited for their contributions to a collaborative writing competition!

An Envoy Corps RP Competition

RP Competition: Bounty 005

Braylan W’ray is the owner of the “Devil's Dandy” nightclub on Corellia. Along with his crew — the Devil’s Fangs — W’ray is a Hunter and Entrepreneur found to be dealing technology and weaponry to the resurging Collective. This alone would not be worthy of interest, but the Devil’s Fangs have also been double-dealing with the alleged remnants of the Severian Principate, which is in violation of the accords between the Principate and the Brotherhood. Despite their best efforts, Inquisitorius Agents have failed to apprehend the Mercenary as the security around the Devil’s Dandy is tight. It will likely require more than brute force to gain entrance.

The Envoy Corps has been tasked with bringing him in ALIVE for interrogation.

So, for anyone curious. This competition is my way of trying to DM without DMing. I've provided a set up for everyone. You can simply treat it like a text prompt. Or you can take a look at the assets (map, NPC token) and use that for visualization. You can use dice, or no dice, or rocks, paper scissors, whatever you want or don't want.

The goal in short is to form a small team of 2-4 members, create an RP, and then you had 3 weeks to write as much or little of a story/adventure with your team.

The minimum requirement is 100 words from any participant. That's it.

My secret hope is to get more people comfortable using the RP infrastructure for creative outlets. And I have some ideas for how these could be recurring competitions, with a longer-reaching score/leaderboard.

This is also experimental. Hopefully this makes up for me not running my usual structured RPs.

With two days left to go, we do have a small number of entries to this. While I will chalk this up to timing, I was really hoping to get more engagement out of this, and create some fun recurring competition/scoring scenarios similar to the old ACB Contracts I used to facilitate.

If you’re still interested, but didn’t have time, make sure to comment below or hit me up on Discord :).

Leaderboard

Since I’ve missed the past few months with my reports, here are the last three leaderboards. It should show a nice, healthy, competitive spread and subtle shifting of our most active RPers.

Again, this is just for fun, and a way for those who max out at Rank 12 in the Player Trophy to feel a bit of healthy, competitive spirit while we figure out the Rank 12+ awards/trophies.

You can see the latest leaderboard on the Envoy Corps wiki page here.

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

I wanted to use this section to drop a quick reminder to all members of our community that enjoy Roleplaying. Please remember that organizing an RP, whether it’s as simple as creating it and dragging someone in, or weeks-to-months of planning, that we always need to remember the golden rule: Don’t be a dick. Always try to be empathetic to your fellow players. Also make sure to thank your DM, and if there was something you didn’t like or an issue you had with how they ran a session, reach out to them and let them know constructively. Constructive criticism is a great way to help them improve, but again, everyone is different so at the very least ask/communicate.

I promise this will solve more issues than it ever will create, since we all just want to have fun writing our characters and telling stories together.

That’s all for now.

-W