Greetings Tarenti!

This month has been an important month for Tarentum. Activity picked up with Rial, Rax, Farrin and Hades all bringing in lots of CoFs. Rial earned a whopping 630 (if my arithmetic is correct) and Rax was awarded an astonishing 6 Pendants of Blood. Rial had 3 PoBs of his own approved today as well. Garloaf, Rax, Shujiru, Lev and I all earned crescents for competitions as well. Keep up the great work, guys!

Rax earned himself a Grand Cross of the Dark Side early in the month for undertaking a massive project for the VOICE to index and organize seven years worth of Dark Brotherhood fiction. It's great to see our members stepping up and doing important work like this. We have a long history of Tarenti becoming Dark Councilors and helping out in nearly every office, and so I am very pleased that we can continue that tradition. Just today Rax became Quaestor of House Dinaari over in Taldryan. I am proud to see him taking on a new position of leadership, but I am definitely sorry to see one of our most active members leave for another unit. Good luck Rax!

It was a big month outside of awards and activity as well. The new Summit members are all getting settled in their positions and beginning to tackle their projects. I put two new policies in place that they know about, but I haven't shared publicly so far.

The first new policy is that every leader from BTL to QUA will be running at least two competitions each month. They don't have to be huge; a caption competition or trivia definitely counts. The goal is to have a lot of options for everybody to choose from and a lot of variety. In the last few years we've suffered at times from a lack of competitions, which in turn promotes a lack of activity, which creates an excuse to not run competitions... I want to put a stop to the cycle and make sure there's never "nothing to do". I'm also encouraging Summit members to try running a DB-wide competition from time to time, and to co-organize competitions with members that have ideas for competitions they'd like to run. Running competitions can help you toward your next rank and it helps out the House as a whole, so even if you're not in a Summit position please consider bringing any competition ideas you have to one of us so we can help you make it happen.

The second new policy is a monthly award review process. The entire Summit is involved to help ensure that everybody gets the consideration they deserve, and we don't overlook any awards that should go out. In the past we've had some issues with inconsistency or just plain not awarding awards when they should have been. By turning this into an explicit monthly process we can avoid a lot of that inconsistency in the future. You still have to do the work if you want an award, but we now have a more organized process to ensure that your work will be recognized.

With both policies in place we are attacking the activity problem from both sides. We can be sure there is always something for everyone to do, and we can do a lot better than we have been to make sure everybody is rewarded for their efforts. I am committed to making sure we don't fall down again on either of these things going forward.

Tarentum has been a tough place to be for a long time. We've had some successes and some failures along the way, but overall our situation is improving. We still have a long road ahead of us and there are likely going to be more missteps, but I'm in this for the long haul. I'm looking to build this House up with others who share my vision of a strong House full of committed members.

We will be strong again. We will be competitive again. We will be a Clan again. The way to get there is to actively recruit and retain members. We do that by starting with the fundamentals: competitions, activity, awards and a well developed theme that offers something no other unit has. Stay tuned for more on that last one next month.

Tarentum Momentum! Long live the Sith King!