Hello there! I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season and is ready for an awesome 2020. This report features some quality of life and clarification regarding some Voice-related policies. It also includes an overview of an update to our lightsaber forms.

Fiction Competition Policy

For a while now, the Voice staff has been enforcing a “soft” requirement of a 500-word minimum on all fiction-type competitions. This has been changed to an official hard minimum for fiction competitions. Per the updated competition guidelines:

Fiction competitions have a requirement of a five hundred (500) word minimum. This allows participants to earn at least one Cluster of Ice. Fiction competitions that have a less than five hundred (500) word minimum should be run under the Other competition type and are ineligible for any Clusters of Ice.

After review of the last year of competitions run, only a handful ever attempted a lower than 500 word count minimum. This update also means that all “Fiction” subtypes, except for poetry, are now expected to earn a participant at least one (1) Cluster of Ice.

Lightsaber Skill - Bolt Deflection and Reflection

Up to now, all blaster bolt deflection (knocking a bolt away from your body) and reflection (hitting the bolt towards a target) has been tied to the different forms. All forms could deflect and only a handful could reflect blaster bolts. This factor has been removed from the forms and tied to the Lightsaber Form skill.

Deflection and Reflection have been used by pretty much every lightsaber wielder across the SW canon. It was decided this was more tied to being a Force User to do reliably than any one individual form. As such, the ability to deflect and reflect bolts scales up with higher points in your lightsaber form skill. The higher your lightsaber skill, the easier you deflect bolts away and the better you get at reflecting.

Lightsaber Form - Hilt/Grip Restrictions

Alongside the deflection/reflection change, the form restrictions on hilt types and grips have been removed. As the new SW canon has developed and evolved, there have been changes to what forms illustrate different grip types and hilt types. Several of these conflicted with the previous restrictions.

At the end of the day, our overall goal for lightsaber forms is that they are a fun useful way for members to give to flair to their characters, and a jumping-off point for how they write combat in fiction. We want more fun writing combat and less time worrying about the realism of hilt/grip types for members. There is already a lot of things to keep track of regarding realism, and at the end of the day, this level of restriction isn’t needed for members to write or judges to think about when scoring.

This is not a change that completely ignores principles of realism for lightsaber combat. Merely it means if you want to reverse-grip dual-wield lightsabers cause it sounds super cool, you can go and do so. Just don’t try to fly with them.

CS Change Log

• Primary and Secondary Lightsaber Form Skill updated to include deflection and reflection
• Technocrat feat had Endurance updated to Stamina
• Pulling. It. Off. feat marked as inactive
• Just The Two Of Us updated to Skill Feat from Force Feat
• On The Run removed the duplicate appearance of “managed” that appeared based on member gender selection
• Nullify updated to clarify it is suppressing the target’s connection to the force in the target area
• Juggernaut discipline - Surge skill had Endurance updated to Stamina

Important Links

• Fiction Resources
• Fiction Center
• Voice Feedback Form
• [Log in to view e-mail addresses]

Thank you for reading. As always if you have any Fiction related questions, concerns, comments, snide remarks, feel free to message me on Telegram: @IdrisAdenn or send me an email [Log in to view e-mail addresses].