This is going to be a longer report so I tried to put the shorter and more timely sections up front and move into the long and abstract stuff further down.

It’s a longer report for a few reasons. My last real, substantive HM report was in early June. Amid all the excitement of the GJW and GM and DGM and JST appointments, I hit my one year anniversary as HM on 23 September, so I wanted to do something of a progress report anyway. But I also want to address some of the discussion about SA courses and the ACS that I’ve seen around Discord since my last non-GJW report. I don’t think anything that came up was really new, particularly if you’re the kind of person who reads HM reports. People want ACS ranks and the other bonuses that come from completing degrees, they’re pretty railroaded in terms of what courses they have to knock out to get there, and there’s a handful of bottleneck courses that aren’t very popular and/or are a lot of work that most members hate dealing with. I’ve spoken to all those points before, but I’m going to lay out my current projects in more detail than I would usually to throw a little more light on that situation. So if you've gotten vague promises about not having to do the Poetry or Freighters exams Soon(TM), and you're wondering when the hell Soon(TM) is, I've got something for you... after a word from our sponsors.

Contents:

• Surveys
• New Course: Lightsabers
• Deprecated Courses
• Scrolls of Foundation for Art
• I’m quitting lol
• SA Modernization Project Update
  • Staff Changes
  • Writing
  • Galactic Studies
  • Brotherhood Studies
• Vague Foreshadowing and Changelog

Surveys

First, take some surveys! The GJW Survey is open now. I know some members suspect this feedback goes straight into the trash, because over the years some Council members have not received feedback gracefully and/or not altered their behavior based on the feedback they got. Well, all I can say is that while we were planning GJW XVI, the results from the GJW XV survey were pinned in DC chat and linked to in the master planning Google doc.

In particular, the Council got a lot of feedback about disqualifications last year, and so the DC wrote up a Vendetta Competition Guidelines doc outlining how we were going to avoid those problems this year, Bubba shared it with the CONs in October and March, and it was pinned and reposted in DC chat during both competition planning and grading. I think this year went much more smoothly but that’s something you can decide for yourself and express through the survey.

Additionally, this is the last call for the Art Platform Survey. We’ve got enough responses to work with, but if you want to be counted, this is your chance. Nora and I will be using this information to inform how we develop the future art courses.

New Course: Lightsabers

We had two courses on lightsabers already. Lightsaber Studies covers a bit of lore from sources like Path of the Jedi and the visual dictionaries, but the exam hits on Herald policies and possessions. Lightsaber Combat is more focused on the various Forms, but it’s one of those courses that’s just an exam without substantial notes. We were missing a one stop shop for how lightsabers work in the DB. This course provides that. It covers possessions, custom graphics, and the CS system without any extraneous detail.

Without further ado, here it is. Thanks not only to Eleceos, but to Idris and Zxyl for working with me on the recent changes to their systems and to Gui, Wally, Reiden, and Atty for offering art for the course notes.

It wouldn’t be a new course if I didn’t say something wrong and stupid somewhere, so if you catch anything, please let us know.

Deprecated Courses

As I’ve mentioned in previous reports, there are some courses that have been superseded by newer content, but that I can’t remove without rendering degrees and ACS ranks inaccessible. I’ll be updating the descriptions for those courses to indicate that they’re officially deprecated.

What does this mean for you? A few things. It means I’ve determined that the course content is outdated or otherwise out of step with the standards for new SA courses. These courses will not be receiving updates, not even through the troubleshooting form.

It also means that these courses will be deactivated without further warning at some point in the future, hopefully within the next two months or so. So if you really want to finish them (or the associated degrees) before they’re archived to the Wiki, you should probably get on that. A little bit further down I’ll discuss both which courses are deprecated and what needs to happen before they’re officially replaced with new content.

University of Arx Online, but Make it Fashion

One of the things I’ve tried to do with new courses is make them prettier, specifically by including art made or commissioned by DB members. I’m pretty happy with the results so far, but I am noticing it’s the same handful of people who have responded to my requests in #art-chat. To thank my contributors and to hopefully incentivize more people to submit art, I’ve cleared it with Howie that we’ll be awarding a Scroll of Foundation (i.e. 25 XP and 100 credits) per course contributed to.

The requirements are pretty straightforward:

• You must have the right to use the art for non-commercial purposes (i.e. no stealing other people’s art off the internet).
• We will not accept AI art.
• I need to know who/what is in the image and who created it. If it’s a commission, include a link to the artist and tell me who commissioned it.
• In cases where one member commissioned art from another member, I will need permission from both parties and both members will get an SoF.
• In cases where the image depicts multiple members’ characters, I will need permission from every member but only the commissioner/artist will get an SoF.

See below for a list of courses we’re creating or revising to get an idea of what we’re looking for. I can’t guarantee I’ll use any given submission and SoFs will only be awarded for images actually used in course notes.

Submit via email ([Log in to view e-mail addresses]) or Discord DM (@archenksov). Bigger/higher quality images are preferred so I can edit them down as necessary.

I’ll be going through the courses released or updated with member art over the past year and awarding SoFs to contributors as appropriate this week.

Whoooooooooa, We're Halfway There

When I took this job, I decided that I would step down after two years. I’m not worried about the exact day: if I hit a good stopping point at 22 months or I need to stay on a little longer to get something over the finish line, so be it. And, as it happens, right now it looks like that will be excellent timing due to some upcoming RL changes. I’m bringing this up for two reasons.

First, I view it as my job to make sure that whenever I leave, my bosses have several good options to replace me. I think there’s at least four or five people who are eyeing the HM job, including some people working with me currently and others watching from outside the SA. I want them to have some idea of when their next shot will be, and specifically I want to talk about various aspects of the job over the next year’s worth of reports so that they know what they’re potentially getting into or, better still, can think of ways to do things better. Hopefully, that won’t just benefit the next HM, it’ll also prime the pump for future Praetors and Magistrates and random proposals. I’ll probably keep doing the occasional Q&A, but consider #AskArch open indefinitely if there’s anything you’d like to know about the job.

Second, the subject of term limits has been coming up here and there recently, including in Bubba’s GM confirmation Q&A. I think there are several good arguments against requiring them, and those have been raised. But I also think that the arguments for term limits don’t get a lot of daylight, not least because a lot of people seem to view the concept as a backdoor way to fire people. So I figure if I’m doing this, and if I’m announcing it anyway, I should probably talk about my reasoning.

This is my fourth job reporting to the GM. Exarch was very project-centered so I don’t think Evant and I discussed it, but I went into Consul and Combat Master committed to serve at least one year but not more than two. I don’t think the lower limit is controversial; you really need a year in these jobs to get anything accomplished. But I’ve found a few benefits to deciding early on when I’m going to bow out.

Given the context, we’ll start with continuity planning. I know I have about a year and then I’m gone and someone else will need to be able to do this job. I tried to be a bit comical in Zuza’s promo, but in all seriousness, she’s getting a crash course in everything I’ve had to learn since last September and I know she’s willing to step up—whether as P:HM or HM herself—to keep the ship aright. If she weren’t, then no matter how much I liked her, I would be hiring a new P:HM right now because I don’t have time to put that off for another year. Bubba, Zuza, and everyone else have a year or so to think about and prepare to replace me without it coming as some sudden shock, and to do it while I’m still around and able to help out and answer questions. I have time to put together, or have someone else put together, documentation and SOPs. I was able to do smooth handoffs for CON and Exarch and I regret not being able to do likewise for CM.

The pro I do see mentioned often is new blood and new ideas. I think people tend to interpret this as “I don’t like how the current person is doing things and want somebody else, namely me, to come in and do it differently.” In other words, as a polite but thinly veiled way of saying you suck and should get out of the way. Well, I like to think I’m a pretty good HM, but I am a very specific person with a very specific vision, approach, and way of thinking. As long as I’m HM, that’s what you’re getting. I’m not going to add a lot of courses other HMs would approve, I’m not going to redo the society or run a bunch of tangentially related comps like Ciara and several of our predecessors did, and I am going purge prerequisite requirements and “invent a thing” essay exam questions whenever I can. I’m going to hire staff that align with my vision. Proposals and ideas that I don’t like will die in the cradle and people will eventually stop bringing them up, unless they become a meme like playable Hutts.

I like to think my approach is a good thing, maybe even an improvement, but my way isn’t the only way to approach this job and I’m not arrogant enough to think that I don’t have blind spots or flaws. If I stay in office for two years, my blind spots are neglected for two years, my decisions accumulate for two years, and we lose the benefits of any alternative approach for two years. Two years isn’t too long; my flaws and failures will be noticeable but not the only thing people see. I think the longer I stay on, the more the club gets diminishing returns on what I bring to the job, and the more noxious my flaws will become.

As you can probably tell from the number of concurrent projects in the next section, ADHD is a hell of a drug. So while I’d be disinclined to camp out in one position for a decade to begin with, having a set due date helps light the fire under my butt to get things done. If I had six years to get my SA revisions done, well, they’d probably take six years. I won’t get everything done in two, but I’ll make faster progress than if everything was open ended and I just had to look busy in front of my boss, which I would probably do by constantly bouncing between unfinished projects.

In my case, I think the biggest benefit is counteracting scope creep and forcing prioritization. Some of my colleagues talk about how they still have things to do before they retire from their positions. Well, I don’t know about them, but I can tell you very confidently that I will never run out of things to do as HM. Even if I could get the SA to what I think is perfect (a status well beyond what my current schemes can provide), I view my role as the club’s all around knowledge management and onboarding specialist. The Shadow Academy is a central part of that and the one I’m specifically on the hook for, but that mission touches on the Wiki, our site’s design, our Discord server, and every new DC project coming down the pipe. On top of that, I’m the kind of person who decides something is finished based less on whether or not I’m happy with it and more on whether or not I need to just shove it out the door so I can focus on something else, so I’ll always be able to find another problem to solve. That’s not the case for everyone or every position, and it’s not the same as sticking around to get a major project or event completed, but it is my situation.

So the knowledge that I don’t have enough time forces me to make hard choices about what I need to get done. I did not plan to spend my term focused on the SA—I thought I’d dump most of it on Qormus—but the first few months on the job made it clear that I either needed to focus on this or my other ideas. I chose this. I had think about all the possibilities and ask myself what wasn’t going to get done unless I did it, what I could only do in this job, and what was my best shot for being able to look back on my HM term with pride.

A lot of this is obviously personal, not something that can or should be applied to every leader in the club. But if you're someone who blows talk of term limits off as self-serving shade against the current leadership corps, I hope it's at least food for thought.

The Dork Crusade, Phase I

Forgive the bad pun, but I’m talking about a grand plan that’s going to turn into a year of sustained frantic effort, what I was supposed to call it?

My overall plan is bigger than I think is realistic to get done in the time I have, but barring any more GJWs, new GMs, massive club-wide award sweeps, surgeries, etc, this sprint should take us through to the end of the year and hopefully not much further. For each major initiative, I’m going to cover what’s happening, what needs to happen before we wrap it up, and the specific changes you can expect. They’re listed in rough order of how soon you can expect them to roll out.

Overall, when this phase is done we’ll have a net increase of three maven degrees and a savant, making those last few ACS ranks a little easier to get through.

Staff Changes

The HM/SA had the largest staff of any DC office, larger than clan summits. That was unnecessary based on the day-to-day workload, and it was a problem because that was more people than I can realistically manage. I’ve been pondering the best way to handle this for a long time. Ultimately, Professor positions will be reserved for departments where the courses are predominantly human-graded and where members will benefit from detailed feedback provided by a subject matter expert. For now, I think that’s limited to the departments of Writing and Leadership, Law, and Communication. The HM, P:HM, and M:HM will handle all other grading, and that should also get results to people more quickly, as you have 5 potential graders from the get go instead of just the Professor while everyone else twiddles their thumbs until we get close to the 24-hour grading deadline.

I hired three magistrates back in the spring for a six-month term, which expired right in the middle of the GJW. Kamjin has, obviously, moved on to bigger and better things. Eleceos and Nora are continuing to work on their projects and will be staying on another term. I moved Sang from Professor of Lore, which would be cut sooner or later, to the third M:HM slot to help us adjust to the new grading schema.

Crysenia, our Professor of Combat & Warfare, has a lot going on offline right now and was looking to step down anyway, so I simply won’t replace her. Aldaric will be staying on as the Professor of Legends indefinitely.

Writing

Ok, now we get into the meaty parts. Modernizing the Department of Writing has been on the HM’s to-do list since well before I took it over. We have some courses that are extremely dated (e.g. Run-On Studies) and others that just need to be replaced. Erinyes started moving us in a better direction with Story Structure and Descriptive Writing, and Zen picked up that ball and ran with it, updating Introduction to Fiction Writing and the Test of Wisdom and adding Combat Writing and Character Development to the catalog. We have two more courses to go (for now), and then we’ll be able to overhaul the degrees and retire several of the less useful courses.

What will happen?

• Two new courses: Writing Dialogue (Zen) and Grammar and Style (Arch).
• Old courses will be archived to the wiki.
• The old Writing Sage, which has been mostly unattainable for a decade now, will be renamed so that the members who did get it somehow will still have bragging rights.
• New degree path: the Writing Maven will be revised to reflect the new course selection. We will add a Character Development Maven that includes some content currently in the Character Creation & Development department. The Writing and Philosophy Savant will go away, and we’ll add a new savant specific to writing. There will be a new Writing Sage that combines coursework and practical experience, but focuses on general fiction writing instead of including a bunch of unrelated courses or requiring you to focus on the ACC. The Tactics Savant and Tactics Sage will remain in place for now.

What needs to happen?

• Writing Dialogue’s course notes and exam are done. However, both the notes and the exam refer to scenes from Star Wars media. So we’re going to include the relevant scenes. We want to host them ourselves, so they don’t disappear on us, but we also have to include enough original/transformative content to ensure our video doesn’t get pulled off YouTube and Disney doesn’t come after us. Although the SA has been able to embed YouTube videos for literally a decade now, this is a first for us and there’s a bit of a learning curve.
• The other course, Grammar and Style, is still being written. I think a course that focuses on the mechanics of writing well is very useful, so I want to make sure we have this, but it’s also really tough to write a course like this that is genuinely useful. I have quite a lot of this written, but I’m still plugging along at it and it’s a slog. If we get Writing Dialogue launched and this is still nowhere near finished, I’ll leave one of the deprecated courses in place so that everything else isn’t waiting on this one course.

Deprecated Content

• Run-On Studies
• Fiction Studies
• Grammar Studies
• Poetry Studies
• Writing and Philosophy Savant
• Writing Sage - Not really deprecated since it was already unattainable, but I’ll be taking it out of the list.

Galactic Studies, Part I / Technology

“Galactic Studies” is my catch-all term for “Star Wars stuff we didn’t invent for the club,” which includes most of the departments of Lore and Combat & Warfare. As I’ve mentioned before, I want to reorient this stuff to spend less time telling Star Wars fans what they already know and more time telling people how to take the things they love from Star Wars media and use them within the DB. Eventually, we’ll get around to modernizing the history and lore content, but the big focus out the gate is on technology and possessions.

Since this will likely take a while, I’m attempting to make the starships exams less of a beast to get through as a stopgap measure. When I archive those courses, I’ll include the unadulterated exams for posterity.

What will happen?

• New degrees: Personal Technology Maven, Galactic Technology Maven, and Technology Savant
• Revisions/clean-up of Ranged Weaponry Studies and Personal Armor
• New courses: Droids, Slicing and the Holonet, Crafting Possessions, and one that really needs a better title.
• And then there’s the bad news: the Warfare Sage will become inaccessible if you haven’t earned the Warfare Savant degree before it goes offline. We will hopefully have that addressed before it becomes an issue.
• Relevant courses will move to their own Department of Galactic Studies

What needs to happen?

• Revisions/clean-up of Ranged Weaponry Studies and Personal Armor. Once these are done, the Personal Technology Maven can go live.
• Droids: Eleceos is working on the draft. Staging these kinds of courses can take a while because I have to spend a lot of time fiddling with the pictures to make the course notes look good.
• Slicing and the Holonet: I’ve got this outlined but haven’t gotten very far with it.
• Clan and Faction Assets: Eleceos and I are still trying to wrap our brains around the best way to approach this. Currently, clan militaries, clan domains, and factions’ possessions are all major club systems, but the average member has little interaction with them and there’s not a good overview of how or why you would want to engage with this stuff if you’re not a CON or RGT staff.
• Masterwork Crafting Possessions: This is in the planning stage as the system it’s meant to document doesn’t actually exist yet. If everything else is ready to go before crafting is live, then I’ll launch without this one.

Deprecated Content

• Lightsaber Combat
• Lightsaber Studies
• Freighters/Transports Studies
• Starfighter Studies
• Capital Starship Studies
• Combat Maven
• Flight Maven
• Warfare Savant
• I am on the fence about Advanced Warfare. I can see how the overview of military terminology and thinking would be useful to writers who don’t have that background but want to write characters who do. However, it’s one of the least popular courses in the catalog, and the main reason I think it gets taken as often as it does is the Warfare Sage degree.

Brotherhood Studies, Part I

Similarly, “Brotherhood Studies” covers everything that’s unique about our setting and would be new to even the nerdiest Star Wars fan when they first join the club. When I reviewed the SA course catalog, I was a bit surprised to realize what all we don’t cover about our setting. Spoiler: it’s a lot of the things that new and returning members want to know about. We’re going to start with our societies and Brotherhood history.

Next year, we’ll expand the effort to focus on the factions and—pray for me—the seven clans.

What will happen?

• New degrees: Societies Maven, Brotherhood History Maven, Brotherhood Studies Savant
• New courses: Brotherhood History I-IV, Societies: Envoy Corps
• Revised/rewritten courses: Aurora Collegium, GMRG, Inquisitorious, Shroud Syndicate

What needs to happen?

• Societies: Aurora Collegium is in editing
• Societies: GMRG is being rewritten by our lovely Fist staff.
• Societies: Envoy Corps is outlined but needs to be written. This one is the only required course to launch the Maven.
• Brotherhood History I and III have complete drafts, II is outlined and IV is partially written. These will all go into editing together to ensure consistency.
• I’ll launch the first maven whenever the underlying coursework supports it, and launch the savant alongside the second maven.

Deprecated Content

• Dark Brotherhood History 101
• Dark Brotherhood History 102

Closing Remarks

That covers the main projects, though there are a few other things moving forward on the backburner or with no definite ETA. Nora’s still working on the art courses, for example, and I have some ongoing coordination with the Fist office to take care of our gamers and with James to develop some quality-of-life changes to the SA interface. But most of what you should expect to see in the next few HM reports is covered above.

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

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

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Activities 101: Fiction
- Updated to clarify that most DB writing happens within the context of site-hosted competitions.
Essentials 102: Progression
- Updated to reflect FSPs

COMBAT & WARFARE
Capital Starship Studies
- Course deprecated
Freighters/Transports Studies
- Course deprecated
Land Vehicles
- Updated ambiguous langauge (Xantros)
Lightsaber Combat
- Course deprecated
Lightsaber Studies
- Added author tag
- Course deprecated
Lightsabers
- New course! (Eleceos)
Starfighter Studies
- Course deprecated

LEADERSHIP, LAW & COMMUNICATION
Leadership Competitions
- Removed outdated content
Leadership Management
- Added author tag
Leadership Proposals
- Corrected a typo in the exam (TuQ)
- Removed content from the GJW trivia

LEGENDS
Legends Galactic History 102: Origins of the Jedi Order Department of Legends
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 103: The Ascension of the Sith Empire
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 104: The Great Sith War
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 105: Saga of Revan and Malak
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 106: Wars of the Force
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 107: Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Legends Galactic History 108: Trials of the New Republic
- Removed prerequisite requirement

LORE
Atronomy
- Rewrote a required exam question to removed outdated content and redirect students to the Possessions-based Dominion system (Appius)
Dark Brotherhood History 101
- Course deprecated
Dark Brotherhood History 102
- Course deprecated
Galactic History 102 - Twilight of the Galactic Republic
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Galactic History 103 - Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Galactic History 104 - Ascendance of the First Order
- Added a section to the course notes summarizing the Galactic Concordance and the Military Disarmament Act (Zuza)
- Adjusted an exam question on the Galactic Concordance (Zuza)
- Removed prerequisite requirement
Regions of the Galaxy
- Added author tag

WRITING
Grammar Studies
- Course deprecated
Fiction Studies
- Corrected an exam question on where to find competition feedback (Work't)
- Course deprecated
Poetry Studies
- Course deprecated
Run-On Studies
- Course deprecated