Introduction

It’s been a busy few weeks over in Arch-land and this report covers some ground, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. We’re covering two things today: new content and staff, and a review of how 2022 went for the SA.

New Stuff

New Praetor

I received four applications for P:HM and, although I’m confident that any of the four could have done the job well, I ultimately chose Zuza Lottson.

My sincerest thanks to everyone who applied, and congratulations to Zuza!

New Courses

As most of you will know, Zuza and I have been renovating the DB Fundamentals courses and the Essentials series was the last bit left to cover. The old series was seven courses and, while they covered a fair amount of ground, I think a lot of it was not especially helpful for brand new members. The first course, for example, dropped them straight into the lore of Kane Vader and the Exodus and ended with GJW XIII. Now I like history as much as the last nerd, but when was the last time you had to care about Kane Vader? Is that really the very first thing someone joining the club needs to learn about? Or is that something better left to dedicated history courses in the Lore department?

So I’ve attempted to condense and refine the content to what’s necessary to go from the sign-up page to participating in the club as quickly as possible.

Essentials 101: Welcome to the Brotherhood is something of a directory. It outlines the types of things we do here and where a new member should go to get started with each of them.

Essentials 102: Progression outlines what advancement looks like in the club. It covers the benefits of XP, promotions, credits, and society ranks and how those systems work. At a high level, it replaces the old Essentials courses on Societies, Ranks, and Medals, which were each separate exams before.

Essentials 103: The Brotherhood’s Galaxy introduces our setting: “DB Canon,” the Brotherhood, the Clans, and the four factions. Oddly enough, we didn’t really have something like this before. The old Essentials 101 covered some background but unfortunately if you joined in the midst of a GJW, the SA had very little on your side of the conflict and even less on the enemy.

Essentials 104: Structure of the Club covers everything from an out-of-character viewpoint, effectively replacing the old Organization course.

Essentials 105: Member Conduct is the only one in the series that was not a from-scratch new course. It’s the course previously known as Essentials 107: Primer on Member Conduct with some minor edits courtesy of our Right Hand of Justice, Kamjin Lap’lamiz. It was already a great course, and also the most popular in the series despite being designed as the last one a member would take.

Courses 101-104 are entirely new and thus nobody has credit for them, though if you’ve already taken 105 you will not need to retake it. The Pundit degree will be updated shortly, as it requires James to make a code change.

Upcoming Courses

There are also two courses that will be launching in the next few weeks.

First, I’m replacing Leadership Rewards with a new course written from scratch. We’re in the midst of a major overhaul on how we recognize members. The new XP system changes a lot about how promotions and medals work, and independently of that, CONs are now able to promote up to EL1. The systems and policies are all changing, and those changes aren’t all deployed yet. My goal for the new course (tentatively titled Recognizing Members) is that it will be a one-stop shop for how these systems work from both a practical and policy standpoint. Most of this is already written and I’m working closely with the MAA staff to ensure we’re on the same page. I hope to deploy it very soon after James finalizes the last pieces of the XP implementation, but I don’t have an estimate yet of when that will be.

Second, you may have noticed some stirring in the ACC. Although not specific to the ACC, our Professor of Writing (and Iddy’s Praetor) has completed a draft of a new course on writing combat. That should be live early next month.

SA Year in Review

Faculty

The transition between 2022 and 2023 seemed like a reasonable time to give the SA staff a review, and several of them received some Academy-specific recognition. The SA is a little weird in that we have our own private awards, namely the Service degrees. Like awards, they give credits and now also XP. Unlike awards, they are awarded outside of the normal MAA process. The Maven: Service is automatically awarded by the site after a certain time in an HM staff position; Zentru’la, Kanal, and Zuza got theirs shortly after I came on board. The Savant and Sage degrees are awarded solely at my discretion for long-term service.

Crysenia Orainn has graded 236 exams across her career, for which I have awarded her the Savant: Service degree.

Bentre Stahoes has graded 351 exams across his career, for which I have awarded him the Sage: Service degree. Benny also earned a Sapphire Blade just last month for his activity across however many jobs he has (it’s a lot).

Aldaric has graded 597 exams across his career, for which I awarded him the—quite frankly, overdue—Sage: Service degree. He was also promoted to EQ4 last week.

And then there’s Sanguinius Tsucyra Entar. Sang already had the Sage, but the thing is he’s done a lot of grading. Like, a lot. As in more than anyone else. As in more than the next three people combined. Sang’s graded 2670 exams, and he’s maintained an average grading time of 5 hours. I thought that deserved some sort of recognition, so Bubba and I talked it over and we’ve awarded him the Master of Dark Lore, a special SA degree that is only awarded to Headmasters. Oh, and he got his third Sapphire Blade this month as well.

Courses

2022 was not a banner year for brand new courses, although throughout Q4 there were several course updates in DB Fundamentals as well as the new version of the Writing Studies course. However, our two brand new courses were some of our most popular, so I’ll dive straight into our top courses of the year.

Course	Takers
Societies: Aurora Collegium	56
Comms 102: Discord	51
Creatures & You	36
Activities 104: Roleplaying	36
Essentials 107: Primer on Member Conduct	32
Character Sheets 101: Introduction	30
Comms 101: Website Navigation	30
Essentials 101: History	29
Character Sheets 102: Possessions & Loadouts	29
Activities 101: Fiction	28

What do these have in common? Quite a lot, actually. Eight out of the ten are courses that teach you how to do something: how to use Discord, how to participate, how to behave, how to use creatures in the possessions system, etc. The remainders are the now-deprecated Essentials 101, which is a reasonable place for any new member to start, and the new course explaining how the latest version of the SA Society, the Aurora Collegium, works and what it’s about.

Now here are the least popular courses, which is a list of 16 due to a lot of ties.

Course	Takers
Wiki Editing	3
Cryptography 102	3
ACC Qualification	3
Advanced Warfare	3
Obelisk Legends	3
Legends Galactic History 101: Formation of the Galaxy	3
Legends Galactic History 106: Wars of the Force	3
Legends Galactic History 108: Trials of the New Republic	3
Legends Galactic History 107: Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire	3
Legends Galactic History 103: The Ascension of the Sith Empire	3
Debate 102: Refutation	2
Legends Galactic History 104: The Great Sith War	2
Debate 101: Argumentation	2
Markdown 102	2
Legends Galactic History 105: Saga of Revan and Malak	2
Leadership Proposals	0

Again, there’s a lot of commonalities here. Most of the Department of Legends is in here (and the ones that aren’t on this list are generally just barely not). That makes sense to me; if you care about Legends content, odds are that you’ve either taken the courses before now or you don’t need to. But there isn’t really any benefit for a new member to take an SA course to learn about this stuff.

The ACC Qualification was removed midway through the year, explaining its low placement.

Wiki Editing, Cryptography 102, Markdown 102, and Leadership Proposals aren’t used by any degrees, meaning there’s no external incentive to take them nor is there anything reminding members that these courses exist. Debate 101, Debate 102, and Advanced Warfare are used by degrees, but there’s a fair amount of external gatekeeping for those degrees: summit service for Savant: Leadership and nearly maxing out the GMRG for Sage: Warfare.

Now being on this list isn’t great, but there’s a good amount of fluctuation in course popularity from year to year. The Legends courses, for example, were all 2-3 times as popular in 2021 as 2022. What I’m more interested in are the courses that are chronically unpopular, i.e. the ones that have been taken by fewer than 10 members each of the last three years.

Course	2022	2021	2020
Leadership Reports	8	6	5
Wiki Basics: Character Creation	7	5	8
Markdown 101	7	5	4
Starfighter Studies	7	7	9
Freighters/Transports Studies	6	5	7
Cryptography 101	5	7	4
Alchemy Studies	4	4	9
Cryptography 102	3	1	4
Wiki Editing	3	5	3
Advanced Warfare	3	4	7
Markdown 102	2	2	3
Debate 101: Argumentation	2	8	5
Debate 102: Refutation	2	7	5
Leadership Proposals	0	1	1

I think it’s safe to say that being on this list means the course has a problem, although what that problem is may vary. Sometimes that may be that the course just isn’t useful. Cryptography is neat but realistically it’s not an in-demand skill for Brotherhood members. Others may just need a rewrite; Starfighter Studies, for example, does not really acknowledge that members can purchase and use their own starfighters in the possessions system. We also probably don’t need four different Wiki courses, and yet we have them.

I don’t bring this up to end on a downer note. This thing is, the Shadow Academy is an odd beast. If I can overcome my embarrassment enough to tell people in meatspace that I oversee the learning system for an online Star Wars club, the response I expect is “Why does an online Star Wars club need a learning system?” I don't take the SA’s existence or usefulness for granted because, in my opinion, that’s a one-way path to making it useless and irrelevant.

The SA has a lot of great, valuable content—our top 10 courses are only the tip of the iceberg there. But we have other courses that are too dated or clunky to achieve what they’re trying to achieve. We have a few where I’m honestly not sure what they’re trying to achieve.

And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot the last month or two: what are we trying to achieve here? I hope to present a fairly comprehensive plan to answer that question in my next full report.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. I am not currently able to award you a Scroll of Foundation due to the medal freeze, but I am keeping a list for when it’s open again. Special shout out to Kadrol Hauen for spotting an error within a few days of coming back to activity and reporting it through the form.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or Archenksov#2230.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Essentials 101: Welcome to the Brotherhood
- Brand new course
Essentials 102: Progression
- Brand new course
Essentials 103: The Brotherhood's Galaxy
- Brand new course
Essentials 104: Structure of the Club
- Brand new course
Essentials 105: Member Conduct
- Renamed from Essentials 107: Primer on Member Conduct
- Minor edits
Essentials 101: History
- Course retired
Essentials 102: Societies
- Course retired
Essentials 103: Orders & Disciplines
- Course retired
Essentials 104: Ranks
- Course retired
Essentials 105: Organization
- Course retired
Essentials 106: Medals
- Course retired

SA DEGREES
Master of Lore
- Renamed from Master of Dark Lore as part of our continuing effort to be less edgy
All Maven, Savant, and Sage degrees
- Renamed from Dark Maven, Dark Savant, and Dark Sage
All Pundit degrees
- Renamed from Dark Pundit and abbreviations updated
Pundit: Essentials
- Requirements changed to the new Essentials 101-105