Anders has been a cornerstone of Taldryan for a very long time, and one of our most valued assets. He has proven this time and time again, through his various stints on the summit of Taldryan. And while he has chosen to step down to focus on family and just be a regular member for a while, I can not let his efforts these past months go unrecognized.

His participation numbers are at the very top of the Clan. Since his last medal (5 months ago!), he’s organized 89 competitions and co-organised a further 11. He’s participated in 258 competitions, earning himself 134 Crescents (2 Diamond, 105 Ruby, 12 Amethyst, 7 Sapphire, 6 Emerald, & 2 Topaz). He earned himself a further 5 Clusters of Fire and 155 Clusters of Graphite. In fiction, he earned himself an impressive 234 Clusters of Ice. He wrote over 50.952 words across 33 fiction events, participated in a further 14 RP Sessions for an additional 38.194 words, and organized a further 4 RP Sessions for another 21.583 words. He also participated in 2 ACC matches (for another 5.590 words and served as judge for two other matches. He passed an SA Course, earning himself an SA Degree. On the side of Societies, he’s elevated his rank 6 times across the various societies. In the last 5 months, he’s earned the clan 1.884.410 credits. He is a consistently active member with a vast amount of reliably constant activities. For this alone we would be recognising him via a medal.

The paragraph above describes what Anders has done inside the XP System. What the XP system doesn’t show is everything else he’s been getting up to in the last 5 months as Proconsul of Taldryan. He has been an integral part of every aspect of the Clan in that time, imparting knowledge, calling out errors, offering up ideas and the like.

He has been an integral part of planning out storylines and setting up future plot points. Through long hours of discussion and debate, decisions were made and put to the membership in polls to determine what would be the optimal way to move forward in regards to bolstering activity and keeping everyone happy through utilization of those ideas. As such, he has been a constant thorn in my side, and the reason for my resolve when it comes to the good and bad parts of ideas, fleshing out details in regards to the finer details of various plot points and progression related decisions. He reviews events, helps prepare and perform setup for future events,

He was an integral part in setting up the Sins of an Empire event series story line, of which the prelude has recently finished. His efforts in this case will be felt for several years to come as we roll out the other events of this series. Specifically, Anders worked to flesh out several factions and organizations to be used in the Sins of an Empire. He co-created them with Alaisy and myself. While he did not create the specific wiki articles, he was instrumental in the creation of their content. Specifically, he assisted in the creation and fleshing out of six major factions: 1) The Anti-Human League, 2) the A.F.A. (Aliens for Acceptance), 3) various Weapons manufacturers spread out across the Dalicron System, 4) A representation of the Banking Clan, 5) the Ithorian Animal Group, and 6) the DEC (Dalicron Excavation Conglomerate) under the leadership of Stevenson Bozos. During the setup of this event, we kept a similar routine as the one we had when I was his Proconsul and he was Consul. After I draft and give the narrative and roleplaying framework to him and the team; he dives headfirst into them. He took on the task of proofreading the event fictions, which came to a total of over 2.000 words. He then also takes on an active part in setting up and running the events around the storylines that were set up. Taking on Co-DM status in our last two major RPs with Alaisy, creating spreadsheets or documents to organize competitions for our events; such as both Fortress Cloudhaven and Sins of an Empire Prelude, and including the Magistrates in the planning of those competitions after refining the framework structure. During the setup of the Sins of an Empire Prelude, Anders joined in on setting up and running the event. Together with the rest of the summit, he created 13 pages worth of competitions that were then run over the course of the event. During the event, the task of managing the competitions was divided evenly between the summit. When Alaisy resigned as M:CON near the end of the event, he stepped in and took on the burden of overseeing her slice of the event. In refining it, he looks at what the members have been enjoying in terms of competitions based on what was learned from polling the members through various methods, and focuses on drafting competitions around those particular types. Because of his efforts in focusing on that particular aspect, we saw roughly 38% and 53% participation between Sins of an Empire and Fortress Cloudhaven respectively; those particular events being a large portion of that percentage.

In regards to member engagement, he has not been idle. Due to his early morning routines, he has become an integral part in engaging our European and early morning crowds with announcements, updates, check-ins, and so on. With a large number of our members being European, this has been absolutely invaluable and has even reminded a number of members about participating in those competitions, having either forgotten or had been unaware. This engagement is by all accounts a large part of our increasingly positive participation levels. Additionally, he presents on a nearly daily basis the “Taldryan Questions of the Day.” This is generally character focused, but sometimes it interweaves real life and DB life, which results in a fair amount of discussion and interaction from the members; creating activity on a social level, and encouraging comradery and engagement. Sometimes these questions can even be geared towards that to solicit thoughts; if members are enjoying it, have issues with it, or have things they dislike about it. Overall, his high visibility with the countless messages tossed into the various discord channels each day. He had a tremendous impact on how a vast majority of our members experience the Clan on a day to day level.

In addition, he has been helping in maintaining various pages on the DJBWiki, proofreading fictions and aspects, reviewing Character Sheets and offering input for anyone who asks. Assisting where possible in RP Sessions, dragging people into cooperative competitions.

He has also been active in overhauling various landmarks and locations within the Taldryan Dominion, from major cities to smaller sites. He modernized some, added onto descriptions of others, and prepared text descriptions for insertion into the relevant articles when they were updated later on. This work has proven invaluable in ensuring swift updating and publication of various wiki articles.

Zappy is not only a great influence on the Clan, he is an integral part of why we are where we are now. Our achievements in recent years are inescapably linked to his guidance and leadership. Taldryan would not be the same without him in it. It is because of this, and his consistent effort and dedication, that I am proud to recommend him for the Emerald Dagger. Thank you for everything, and while I'm going to miss you being on the summit, I look forward to everything you have yet to bring to both Taldryan and the club at large.

Sage Cassandra Oriana Taldrya, 2024-07-26 18:15:16 UTC

Since his last medal, Arch has taken on the enormous task of supervising and modernizing the DB wiki. Just this year, he has made over 1000 edits to the Wiki in addition to some behind the scenes work like reviewing hundreds of uploaded images to determine whether they are actually linked anywhere on the Wiki or just used for storage, and developing a comprehensive vision for DB knowledge management.

He has also kept up his more traditional HM workload in the Shadow Academy, ensuring timely grading, regular course updates, and keeping his staff pulling in the same direction. Among other things, he launched revamped Writing and Character Development Maven degrees and new Writing Savant and Sage degrees, and has been working with his team to implement "wrong answer hints" that James recently added as an option. He also writes the best reports in the DC. Congrats!

Lord Dacien Victae, 2024-07-08 14:47:27 UTC

Aiden has worked as Magistrate to the Herald only for a short three months, yet in that time, they made themselves an indispensable part of the team. Working alone, they have completed 1 solo robe, 9 accessories, 1 regular warbanner, 1 custom warbanner, 8 basic possession items, 1 custom graphic, and approved 8 avatar requests. In addition, they collaborated with fellow staff members to create 2 more custom robes and 1 custom weapon. Their work has generated a total of 84 unique images. His crowning achievement was his brilliant contributions to the June Accessories release. He took my idea, ran with it, and made it better. It was his idea to create accessories for clan titleholders and he brought it to fruition with talent and enthusiasm. The results speak for themselves.

Aiden, thank you. No task is too big or too small, and I am immensely grateful for your continued involvement. You are always ready to take on a good challenge and I truly appreciate your entrepreneurial spirit. You’re a hard worker. You take initiative. You’re friendly and helpful. You’re downright relentless in your pursuit of improvement and I find that invigorating.

The crazy part? I speak only for the Herald’s office. Your level of activity beyond our tight-knit team is just as impressive. I’ll let your Consul list your achievements, but color me impressed.

Congratulations on your Emerald Dagger, my friend. Here is to many more artistic projects!

Mal

Bale Andros, 2024-07-04 00:09:20 UTC

Mune has worked as Praetor in the Master at Arms office for years now, and their contributions come just about every single day. The MAA Office is a little different from other DC (that's right, DC!) offices, our large projects (or even any projects) come once every few years (looking at you XP!) – and little projects are once or twice a year.

The real work of the MAA Office comes in the day-to-day work of approving and denying medal requests, processing appointments and resignations, managing competitions (and manually editing competitions) – and knowing the nuances of our database to make competitions work (for instance, switching competition archetypes to allow manual addition of participants, and then switching it back).

Mune has also been invaluable in keeping the Master at Arms Office up with its impressively short turn-around time for requests that come into the database, or that come in as emailed requests (when people remember to email him!). In that, he's processed hundreds of competition, medal, and promotion requests. Since the deployment of the XP System, things for us have changed - but...only somewhat. We have the whole new beast of trying to define what non-site XP is, what a member has contributed outside of our enormous fancy-ass database, and Mune has been instrumental and helping me, Halc, and ultimately all of us navigate this strange new XP world.

One of the most important, and generally unstated roles of a DC Praetor (especially in the MAA world)? Reality checks, or something like that. Mune has offered opinions on policy choices, or recommendations that are sometimes in line with my own to verify my own lack of senility. Sometimes though, they demonstrate that I am off my game – or I have not considered a position or opinion. Or sometimes? Sometimes I am just flat out wrong – and Mune points it out and corrects me. For all of that? I am forever grateful.

Mune has done well for the Master at Arms Office over the past twoish years, and I have full confidence that things will continue, and ultimately improve for the benefit of all our members.

They remain the nice one.

Congratulations on the green stabby thing!

Howlader Taldrya, 2024-06-19 23:23:38 UTC

Oh, hi. It's not every day I get to give someone a Ruby Scepter and Emerald Dagger back-to-back, but here we are!

Turel's last few months as Fist have been busy. He planned and launched a very popular revamp of the GMRG and has kept abreast of new games and changes to existing games, making sure that extremely popular (and unexpected) hits like Helldivers 2 received rapid approval, adding the new The Pit activity to Diablo 4, and adjusting cluster values of Diablo 3 greater rifts despite some vocal opposition. Fist is probably the most difficult job on the DC by ratio of salt to power: GM, DGM, JST are often responsible for making unpopular decisions, but we are often more insulated from criticism by virtue of being another level removed from most decisions and (except for DGM) having tenure built in. The Fist is on the front lines. Turel has to keep tabs on the rapidly changing interests of our gamers while ensuring that CF awards remain relatively balanced between many disparate platforms--and gamers are a notoriously salty bunch. It isn't an easy job, and we've had Fists in the past who just couldn't cut it. Turel has done a difficult job with enthusiasm, diligence, and an overriding care for the experience of our members.

On top of his gaming-specific duties, Turel has also been one of the most active participants in DC discussions. DC debates can be intense, especially for newcomers, but he has never shied away from disagreeing with me or anyone else. Anyone who knows him knows that he isn't afraid to speak his mind, and I value his opinion quite highly. He has had an impact, direct and indirect, on many of the decisions I have made as GM (and DGM before that). This Emerald Dagger is a token of my appreciation for his hard work and dedication to this club. Congratulations, Turel!

Lord Dacien Victae, 2024-05-28 14:25:42 UTC

Zuza has been Arcona CON for almost half a year, but this medal has nothing to do with that. In fact, I just gave her an RS for all of that stuff like two weeks ago.

Zuza is receiving this because she is ridiculously active. Since her last medal (again, a Ruby Scepter two weeks ago), she has participated in 55 comps and won 38 crescents. Just since her promotion in April, she's done a whopping 184 comps. Hell, since she joined she's participated in nearly 1,000 comps and won 173 diamond crescents (she's now the all-time leader in Cr-Ds despite only having been a member for three and a half years). Most of those numbers aren't really relevant to this particular award, they just illustrate how unusually and profoundly active Zuza has been.

Congrats, Zuza. You earned this!

Lord Dacien Victae, 2024-05-28 13:51:11 UTC

Never thought I’d be main rec on an ED, especially for all XP. But from what I’ve heard and seen, “that’s Warp.” There’s more XP behind this one too, so splitting up where it all came from is impossible. But I am glad that we can recognize your past activities and reward you for it. Congrats!

General Socorra Tenebrosa Nhar’qual Erinos, 2024-05-22 22:26:45 UTC

TuQ'uan Varick di Plagia is going to have to change his nickname from "The Hat" to "The Man" after this. Where to start with this guy? In short, he's been an entirely invaluable part of the Plagueis summit team since his last award for general and leadership activity within the Clan last year. He's amassed a ton of activity, as both Imperial or Metric values (take your pick). He's done amazing work from the standpoint of his own personal activity while exceeding all expectations and thresholds from the perspective of leadership.

Breaking down the counting numbers since June 8th of last year when he earned his Ruby Scepter is a bit insane. He has participated in 580 non-container competitions and earned the following placements: 1 each of the three forms of Vendetta Novae (Gold, Silver, Bronze) to go along with 17 Diamond, 76 Ruby, 139 Amethyst, 101 Sapphire, 30 Emerald, 13 Topaz, and 6 Quartz crescents for a placement rate of 66%. He's grabbed 62 Clusters of Fire, 57 Clusters of Ice, 383 Clusters of Earth, and 84 Clusters of Graphite. He's picked up two Scrolls of Foundation along the way and was awarded a Seal of Loyalty this May 4th. He earned 26 Seals of Transcendence for last year's Vendetta as one of Plagueis's most active members. He's generated 22,840 words between fiction and RP sessions (the latter as both a DM and participant). He's seen 11 society rank ups all told as well in that time. Additionally, he's also organized or co-organized 200 competitions. I've seen folks not do as much over the course of years, let alone months.

The contributions that TuQ makes to leadership in Clan Plagueis, however, are even more valuable while being harder to quantify. He has published his report monthly like clock work, with the exceptions for months when major events such as Vendettas or Pro Bowls were falling during competition time when we focus on one to one engagement. Speaking of that, TuQ has done an amount of that engagement that almost puts the sites auto generated emails to shame as far as the amount. He is muchly responsible for the Clan's overall second place finish during the most recent Great Jedi War as well as stellar participation ratios in that event as well as the last Pro Bowl and our recent Ascending Conflict event. He had been sending out a weekend update for his House in order to connect members with activities for their weekends, something that he has expanded to the full Clan since taking over as Proconsul. Plagueis and his House have never failed to meet or exceed a 66% participation rate in every major competition event during his tenure, and our continued success as a unit has been as much due to his work as anyone's. I feel like I keep writing the same recommendation for TuQ from time to time, which really speaks to the continued excellence of his contributions and efforts.

TuQ'uan Varick di Plagia, the Clan is honored to have someone who does as much on staff. He ascended to the ranks of the Elders last year and did not slow down even slightly in everything that he has done, not content to sit back on his laurels. He continues to push forward with a level of excellence that none can match, and the Ascendant Clan is all the better for his contributions. Congratulations, TuQ'uan, on this Emerald Dagger. May you wear it with the thanks of a grateful Clan.

Master Selika Roh di Plagia, 2024-05-14 01:09:46 UTC

Man, where do I even begin with Thran?

It’s hard to decide, to be honest. With Thran, there’s no question about what he did. It’s how much he did. The answer is usually? A lot. Thran has become a staple of the Regent Staff since I first hired him many moons ago, and continues to perform above par and expectation as my Praetor. Every single discussion, Thran is there. Every debate, every decision, Thran plays a part. He may not always like the part, or the decision, and we do disagree fairly often, but we always come out on the other side fine and one thing is for certain; Thran does the job and the job gets done.

Right after my last reward, Thran finished and practically solo-launched our Capital Ship Upgrades project, inputting, stocking, and doing quality control on all 102 different upgrade prototypes - that he has been previously rewarded for pretty much solo developing - putting in several hours of work to ensure that these were deployed with minimal issues and opened up swaths of new avenues for the Clans to tell their fictional stories. Whenever you’re deploying slotable upgrades, however, you need to add sub-item slots for those prototypes to the items in question, requiring Thran to navigate several pages over and over and over to add this new sub-item slot to every clan capital ship in the system, and then do a quality control sweep over all that work before announcement to ensure minimal errors during launch. Any deployment is a massive undertaking, one such of this especially so, and Thran muscled through it entirely on his own.

Thran was a big part of our discussions on what to do with the Celebration Store, which we felt was serving dual purpose and gatekeeping the most lore-intensive items that members might want to acquire more than once a year to tell their stories and really build their characters. As of last May, the Regent Staff massively changed how this store worked (previously stocking both heavy lore-related and special edition items, now stocking only special edition items).

For the last two years, we’ve run our Life Day Celebration Series on November 17th to commemorate the near real-life Star Wars holiday of Life Day. Each year, this guy plays a big part in the discussions and making sure it goes smoothly, helping organize competitions and ensure a smooth experience for the Regent Staff’s annual event. While he only ended up running a single competition this year (through no fault of his own, sorry man :P) Thran helped with the Life Day Celebration II item launch, stocking all of the prototypes and performing a quality control sweep with various corrections - even working up two prototypes of his own during development.

Our big project this year has been the Crafting System, the beast that keeps rearing its ugly head in Thran’s direction. We consider this project to be our whale, given it involves over a thousand different prototypes and many different nuances that normal item development doesn’t have - such as crafting materials, their cost, the overall item’s cost, its additional perks for being crafted vs purchased, etc. He’s been my main go-to man on this project, sharing insane ramblings amongst back and forth and debating - endlessly, I might add - all the little tidbits and inner workings of the project while slaughtering a massive amount of the work. He’s worked on countless aspects of this project from its initial inception of Masterwork Possessions to its transformation into a much more development-heavy Crafting System, devoting tens of hours to bringing a new system that (when polished and fully deployed, instead of our little lightsaber and corvette beta test) members will hopefully enjoy for years of come. He was integral in discussions for our what we should work on/launch first, and insisted on a “small scale” launch that we could use to get feedback on the system for additional tweaks and polish.

His tenacity has paid off, and after launching craftable lightsabers and member corvettes (which he did a quality control check on, which included checking all lightsaber crafting materials, lightsaber prototypes, and the crafting blueprints recipes) we were able to gather important member feedback that we can use to improve the system for everyone, offering his own ideas on how we can make crafting more enjoyable and give it a bit of more “oomph”/a larger dopamine hit for the member.

Even with the dozens of hours that Thran has put into his club just doing project work just as my Praetor, that still wasn’t enough. He’s been consistently keeping an eye on existing and new launches from the team, and has been making numerous quality of life improvements/fixes to prototypes in the system that stretch as far back as possessions’ inception under Evant and had been missed with numerous sweeps by the Regent Staff and non-staff members over the years. I could try for days, and I could still not put into words how much Thran does behind the scenes for every member that uses possessions (re: pretty much everyone but Howie) and for me personally as my Praetor.

I knew from the moment I hired Thran that it could take him a while to adjust to Regent Staff thinking from Clan leadership thinking (you need to have a certain level of disconnect, i.e. we don’t control what clans do in the sandbox, we just help fill it and give them the toys to make their sand castles). It did. But I also knew that I was going to be getting an impeccable work ethic, someone that I could rely on to always push me or play devil's advocate, and someone that (like me) was a bit of a redemption story and was going to be better for it. All of that turned out to be true. When the day finally comes that I retire, I know that the then Grand Master and Deputy Grand Master will open applications for Regent. They’d be stupid not to; you always want to see what kind of interest is out there, what kind of ideas…. But they’d also be stupid not to hire Thran. And that says pretty much all it needs to on its own.

This is by and far probably the longest recommendation I have ever written. I could keep going. There are so many little intricate things that are required for deploying a release of any type, or so many different things that can occur in one of our days-spanning conversations, that if I were to type out every little thing a staffer had to do over and over on every single deployment, and really break it down, my recommendations would be so much longer. There’s a misconception (how common, I’m not sure) that being on the Regent Staff is hard, or daunting. It’s not. It’s about organization, being thorough, and most of all pacing. When you’re dealing with (consistently) almost a dozen different fields on several different pages for a single prototype, and that’s just during deployment, you really need to control your pace to avoid burnout during development and deployment of a Regent Staff Project. Thran aces it.

Thank you for everything you do.

Anubis, 2024-04-29 20:17:01 UTC

Since his last medal, Kamjin has served 9 months as CSP CON, 7 as M:HM, and 3 as Justicar. While CON, he organized 29 competitions, including contributing to the most recent Pro Bowl, and has participated in an impressive 170 comps in the last year. He left CSP behind in October to take up one of the club's most important roles, Justicar. In the short time since he was confirmed to the role, he has overseen one expulsion trial, a Covenant Amendment to reform the process for banning members from independent units, and participated in essentially every discussion the DC has had (which is really quite a lot, we've been busy.) He has also shown considerable efforts in researching items we solved 6 years ago, so thanks for that.

Even before his became JST, Kam acted as an informal advisor for me, and I have come to trust his judgment and seek his opinion on important decisions. His conduct as JST for these past three months has been exemplary, and I'm happy to award him his first real Emerald Dagger.

Lord Dacien Victae, 2024-01-07 19:43:40 UTC