So Long, Farewell, Amen

Hello yes, this is Arch. Welcome to the last Sunrider report.

As most of you will know from Revak’s CON report, the clan will be undergoing a bit of a restructure. Sunrider will be closing to make way for some more nimble and focused houses. I’ll be talking about that in a bit more detail below.

This will also be my last report as a member of the COU summit, at least for a while. I’ve been scooting closer to the door for a while now, and the transition to new houses seemed like the perfect time to pass the baton. The clan and the summit are indisputably different from my first tour in 2016-2019, but at its heart Odan-Urr remains the beautiful and welcoming community I fell in love with when I joined the DB. Thanks to Blade for giving me the opportunity to work on the summit again, and to everyone I’ve worked with for making it a pleasant job to have.

Anyway, enough with the mushy crap. There’s a lot going on and a lot to cover, so let’s get down to it.

The Times, They Are a Changin’

There are a few pretty significant changes everyone should be aware of, on both the DC and the clan sides. At the club level, there’s been some shuffling about and several reports, but two things that I think really deserve highlighting.

First, Howie has changed the rules for crescents. You can find them on the wiki. But the short version is that puzzles and flash games no longer award lower-tier crescents, and competitions with high participation will award crescents for 4th or even 7th place. This means more shinies and more credits for everyone.

Second, if you participate in the COU RP sessions on the weekends, you can now earn Clusters of Ice for them per the Voice. This is a temporary policy and it doesn’t apply to old sessions, but going forward you should be able to get recognition for coming to RP sessions. This is going to be especially helpful for some of our newer members who were struggling to tick off their promotion requirements. Some jerk will be working on transitioning us to permanent recognition, but in the meantime everyone say ‘thank you’ to the Voice.

On the clan front, there’s been a trend towards smaller houses, with both Scholae Palatinae and Plagueis recently moving to two houses that are each a great deal smaller than Sunrider. We’ll be doing likewise. If you haven’t already, respond to the survey to help us set it up.

So as those of you who’ve been keeping up with reports and done the survey know, we’re basing the new structure around the old Guardian/Sentinel/Consular split. Those are the Jedi classes in the KOTOR games, they were reused for SWTOR, and they were how light-side orders worked in the DJB for the first half of Odan-Urr’s history, so they’re very familiar. They’re specific enough to make it easy for unit leaders to develop themed content but general enough that almost any character will fit in at least one of them. While we hope to open all three eventually, we’re going to start off with two to make sure they’re big enough to build up some steam.

Sunrider has been something of a holding pen for the active members of the clan, while Hoth and Shan had loose identities that changed often between different QUAs and changes to the clan story and the DB. We hope this subunits will give people a more focused experience and really make you feel like you’re part of an experience.

Blade asks: how goes the house survey results and can you tell us anything more about upcoming events?

We have 8 folks who want to be Guardians, 6 who want to be Consulars, 2 that want to be Sentinels, and another 8 who would be happy with more than one of those. So right now the plan is to open a Guardian house and a Consular house that serves as cover for our Sentinels. Both houses will be led by a solo QUA to start off. Revak will be announcing more details on that shortly.

A QUA should be able to run these houses solo, since they’ll be responsible for fewer members and their focus will be on content that fits the unit theme while Revak and Turel handle more general stuff for the whole clan. But, because they’re houses, that means they have an AED slot available. The plan right now is that, once the houses are up and running, AED will be a term-limited job that opens a few times a year. I think of it like an internship. If you want to try out leadership, it’ll be a great opportunity to go in, get really specific guidance, and come out of it with an activity note and hopefully an award or promotion without you or the summit having to commit to the job indefinitely. Then when we need to hire permanent positions in the future, we’ll have a cadre of people who’ve done these AED stints and have documented experience. Or at least that’s how it works in my head.

News and Reviews

Activity and Recognition

We’ve had a lot of awards and promotions lately.

• Takota Okami was promoted to Elder!!

• Aurora Ta’var earned an Amethyst Kukri!

• Draxion Durk was knighted!

• Elyon de Neverse was promoted to Ranger

• Bexa Nalrella was promoted to Padawan and earned both an Anteian Cross and a Dark Cross

• Gui Sol earned a Sapphire Blade

• Raziel earned a Grand Cross

• Ryan Hawkins earned a Steel Cross

• Jon Silvon earned a Steel Cross

• Zeon Blacktooth earned an Anteian Cross

• Kah Manet earned an Anteian Cross

• Sa Ool earned a Dark Cross

• Tassk Adroc earned a Dark Cross

• Lynnyaria Meraudstar earned a Dark Cross

Competitions

There’s no shortage of things to do as everyone gets their post-vendetta groove back.

Fiction

• Inklings: Use one poem to write another. Running through the 28th.

• Chapter 1: Lost Ruins: The first in a series of prompts where you have to incorporate a word bank into your story. Running through the 30th.

• Humble Beginnings: Tell the story of how you joined the Brotherhood. Running through the 31st.

• Protection Duty: Defend a non-combatant from kidnappers. Running through September 4th.

• CDW: Introspection: Get to know your character better by taking them through a key decision. Running through September 13th.

Art

• Nightmares: Depict your character’s, uh, nightmares. Running through the 25th.

• Styles: Masters of the Universe Edition: Show off your character in He-Man style. Note that this one does not accept stick figures. Running through the 28th.

• Venomized: Show you character as if they were bonded with the Venom symbiote. Running through September 3rd.

• Body Pillows: Draw your character as a waifu body pillow. Some of you will have to think about this more than others. Running through September 11th.

Gaming

• [FIST] August 2021 GMRG Competitions This month’s GMRG comps cover SWTOR and HotS. Both contribute to the quarterly leaderboard for members ranked GMRG X or higher. Running through the 28th.

• The Microsoft Jewel-Off! This is basically Bejeweled, except by Microsoft, except probably not because I didn’t have to pay anything. Running through the 25th.

• Targets on Takodana - Star Wars X-Wing Fighter Did they update this game or am I just going senile? I don’t remember powerups. Running through the 28th.

• [Diablo 3] Solo Great Rift Run Cause there’s Grifters and then there’s GRifters. Running through the 31st.

Misc

• Did You Even Read the Syllabus?: As promised in Sunrider chat, develop the syllabus for your character’s course at the Praxeum. Running through September 10th.

• On a Consular Mission: A puzzle running through the 19th.

• Night of the Sentinel: The follow-up to On a Consular Mission, running from the 19th through the 26th.

• Clan Possessions Trivia!: A trivia comp running through the 25th.

• Brooklyn 99: A member hunt running through the 28th.

• A Big Bowl of Star Wars Trivia: Four trivia comps running through the 28th.

• Second Wiki Trivia Hunt Galore!: A series of very tough trivia comps running through the 29th. COU’s competition is live now.

• Mandalorian Summer Puzzle Series: Do one now, the other beginning the 22nd.

• Uncle A-Aru's Big Load of Puzzles: A puzzle every two weeks for the next year. Good lord. You don’t usually get promoted just by doing puzzles but this could be the exception.

• 2021 NFL Pick 'Em: I don’t know, man, football? It runs through football season.

Closing Thoughts

So there’s two things I need to talk about before I call it quits. First:

Turel asks: What advice would you give up and coming leaders who are applying for or entering positions for the first time?

So if you’re just bored and looking for something to do, or if you’re looking to check off requirements for awards and promos, I recommend staff work. There’s a bunch of positions supporting the various DC offices out there. There’s also project work. They’re mostly self-paced, you know more or less what you’re getting yourself into, and in a lot of cases there’s a set completion date.

For unit leadership, I think you really need to go into it because it’s what you want to do. Nobody has time for it. You have to make time. You can drop a project for a month when RL gets hairy but a unit really suffers when the leader goes missing. We’re pretty good at compensating summit members but a lot of the real work isn’t quantifiable in a way that will get you an award. My leadership positions have ultimately been very rewarding, but that’s because of the relationships made and the work accomplished more than the sacs and EQ promotions.

Many moons ago I wrote about what I looked at when staffing my summit as CON. That’s the ideal to aim for, I think, but at the end of the day, giving a shit and being nice to people are what’s really non-negotiable. A well-rounded summit can work around a lot of issues, at least for a little while, and you have a bunch of people who can help you develop the skills you don’t have yet. But that requires you to be self-motivated, and the one thing a summit can’t compensate for is if you’re nasty or abusive to any of your members.

The other thing I want to talk about is the elephant in the room. In addition to Sunrider QUA, I’m also the Right Hand of Justice. In the past month and change, I’ve had to prosecute two of my clanmates. Odan-Urr has generally had a very clean record, and this is not what I was expecting. There are two points I want to make.

First, if it feels shady, don’t do it. If you’re not sure if it’s kosher, don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Ask Creon and Gui if you don’t believe me. No crescent or nova or title is worth more than your integrity and your reputation. Being an Odanite isn’t about #winning or your career opportunities. It’s about coming as you are, accepting your clanmates as they are, and building a community together. Do that and the rest will follow.

Second, punishment is the Justicar’s job. Punishment has been dealt and that matter is closed. I’m not going to tell you how to feel about either of these cases, but in the coming months those members will demonstrate through their words and actions that they either learned their lesson or they didn’t. You’ll have to make up your own minds about if and when to start trusting again. But COU has always prospered by taking people in and, without ignoring their faults, recognizing that they are more than their mistakes.

Hugs and kisses,
Arch

Alethia Archenksova
Quaestor, Sunrider