He moved through the old stone halls, the rapid click of his bootfalls a metronome for his search. The duracrete and metallic compounds of the reconstructed Temple had been gone two levels ago, and everything he saw was older than anything he could think of. He wanted to pause, wanted to reach out and touch the carvings, the hieroglyphs. Duty drew him deeper into the depths.

The glowlight cast an eerie pallor across his vision, shadows running from each turn of his head, each doorway. He fought the urge to stare at them, to growl at the movement as it caught his eye, but his mind told his fear to stay calm, that it was just tricks of the light. The man was here, hiding in antique dust and the voices inside his head.

Mirus could almost feel him.

He thought it was a good thing. If he was concealing himself fully, there would be no telling what he would do. He paused and lowered the glowlight, holding his breath for a moment as he reached out with his senses.

Mirus dropped to a knee, knuckles pounding the ancient stone in the old gesture. "What is thy bidding, my master?"

The Lion turned toward him, eyes as dark as the cavern sliding over the praetor. "When do you dream?"

Mirus raised his eyes, confused. He thought for a moment, then decided to get to the point. "Lord, you are needed..."

Vacuum throbbed in his eardrums and Mirus had to grimace, his eyes slamming shut against the underpressure. It felt like those moments between ships launching into space from a capship, the hiccup of containment fields exposing the void to them. Mirus scooped up the glowlight and swept it in front of him, finding nothing but a swirl of dust and the smell of ozone.

He had come down here for a reason, deep beneath the Dark Hall. The man never did anything without reason, he knew that. He sat, and felt along the world. Hidden from the myriad strings, dozens of requests and work to be done, pulling his attention in every direction except what he had wanted. Yet there was a quiet here. There was nothing but his breathing, down in the dark.

Nothing except himself.

And the Force.

Of course, the biggest news this week is the release of the Teaser for the new Star Wars film. I'll post a link so that you can all watch it a seventeenth time. It is rather interesting to watch the dichotomy of Star Wars fans: those who completely work themselves up in excitement, and those who obsess over so many of the details and love to hate it.

I'm in the first camp. Rather than do a blow by blow of the scenes in the trailer, I'll just say that I am more excited about this film precisely because of the fact that we don't know what they are going to do. This plays into Disney's call to say that the official canon was films only (and clone wars/rebels)... because if it was just scenes of the Thrawn Trilogy or of the (insert your favorite book here), we'd all already know what it was going to be about. Yeah, we'd probably all go and see it a few times anyway, because hey, big screen star wars...but it would lack the excitement of it being something new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOVFvcNfvE and yeah, you know you want to watch it. Also, kinda funny are the variants with excess lensflare (star Trek Abrams style) and the lego ones. Heck, even the 'add more cgi, George Lucas' style ones are good.

Hey, that's not a Jangotrooper! Who is that dude flying the X-wing (is that an x-wing?)? Who is the girl, and why is she driving a shipping crate? Who is the stumbly bad guy with the light-claymore?

If it was just scenes of a chiss in uniform standing around with a ysilimari on his shoulder, there would be less questions, less excitement. My two cents, anyway.

In relation to that, I have gotten a few questions about where the DB fits into this all. The difficulty is that the new films are coming right into our timeframe, so with it being about a year away from the first of three new films, we have no way of shoe-horning a few thousand sith into their universe without us knowing a LOT more about it. So the hard and fast answer is that we are going to stay in our corner and operate much as we have been for twenty years until we do know more. Pravus and I have discussed a few awesome ways to get us into the film continuity/timeline, but without us knowing a lot more about what they are going to be doing with the films, we don't want to pull the trigger on that, yet.

There are a couple big projects that I expect will be seeing release in the next thirty days or so. There will be some pretty major consequences on a couple different aspects of our club, and from what I have seen, people will be pleasantly surprised.

They are, in no particular order: Lightsaber combat guide 2.0, Clan and Order Force Powers, redacted 1, redacted 2, Dark Brotherhood alchemy guide (the fictional stuff, at least, the functional bits will be a possessions 2.0 launch), herald style hanukah, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Add all this in with a new TOR expansion that comes out on the second, and I'm probably going to forget what my bed feels like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj23dwWHukY

If You haven't already seen it, click here for Super-Power Beatdown's Darth Vader vs Batman. Normally, I hate these things, because they factor out who wins based on popular vote, but this one (and a few others that they have done) got a pretty good treatment. (also notable, they did Wolverine vs Predator, and Batman vs Deadpool...both of which were pretty awesome as well...but do not watch Darth Vader vs Gandalf. Suck City.)

Ask the GM Time!

Solari asks "Muz... Episode VII Saber for EQ4 and above?"

I will not be commenting on any of the awesome goodies that I or the herald team are working on for this year's herald style hannukah. ;)

Keirdagh asks "Did you participate in Movember, and if so, will you include your start and end photos in your report?"

Actually, I did. I don't have any beginning pictures, but I am rocking a beard so full and monstrous by now that it is somewhere between Hobo and Wizard. My boss says I will have to start selling duck calls soon.

Misium asks "Can I be declared GM but not have the responsibilities?"

Hell no. If you want to be able to god-mode, you have to go trhough the responsibilities and suffer like the rest of us do. :P

Misium follwed up with "If Muz Ashen entered a WWE arena, what would his entrance theme music be?"

At first, I wondered what that was, because I am old, then i googled it. As far as entry music, it would probably be something like Teargas and Plateglass - Plague Burial.

Furios asks "Assuming everything goes as planned, how soon can we expect full integration of the new guides with the possessions?"

I'll pass that along to the codemonkey extraordinaire, Jamez. Short answer: Eventually. That's a lot of code to work out. It's a free game, essentially, without any pay to win, so we're operating ona negative budget and getting something together that is super badass. In the graphics field, we used to joke about how you can have cheap, good, and fast, but only ever two of them. We chose cheap and good, so fast is not happening.

Furios followed up with "Muz, what would it take to get a JA mini level made where we can fight the antagonists of our Vendettas?"

Actually, once upon a time, we did this. The problem is that those sorts of levels are hard to create, and can get mighty buggy, even when done by utter badasses. That and our members have come to expect perfection in all things (see comments about the trailer above) and we end up with a lot of people complaining to people that selfessly put up a lot of time and effort to create something that decided to not subject themselves to that abuse anymore for the sake of such an old game. So there's that.

Rhiann asks " I need a book to read. Suggestions?"

Is this where i shamelessly plug the book I've written? No? Okay, well, there's a few new Star Wars books out, but Rereading the Hobbit before the third and final film comes out in a week or so is a solid.

TL;DR
• Teaser!
• Busy Month for Releases • TOR Revan expansion comes out tuesday • Batman vs Darth Vader!