I'll make it quick, but a few notes from the LH office:

With the start of the "For the Saber" messageboard campaign, we're venturing into uncharted territory also in terms of the commitment required from the membership. It will be interesting to see whether a setup like this - daily posts on a messageboard - is actually viable in the Brotherhood or whether ultimately IRC proves to be the better medium for an ongoing campaign. Either way, I have trust in those who have now signed up and if you guys play your characters, we should have one heck of an adventure out there while three light Jedi won't be able to be sure of their lives anymore. (Mike, you're still safe. For now :P)

What you don't see in the news is what happens behind the doors of a Dark Council office and that's often where most of the work is. Especially in a job like LH where the primary task is development, you don't see the effects on a daily basis. However, after overcoming some hardware troubles in the form of a faulty RAM module, I have managed to automate the experience calculations for members and can now sit down with Jac to tweak a few numbers before possibly releasing the numbers to the membership on a little teaser site. Looking over the version one lists has definitely yielded a few surprises - especially seeing which person of the KE/OE/SWL rank level has the highest XP was quite unexpected. It remains to be seen whether this is rather a sign of unbalanced numbers or if I just underestimated him/her... (the other ranks I checked were distinctly less surprising).

In parallel to clearing the XP I'm now starting to develop a prototype version of the character creation interface. Once I have that one halfway going, those of you with M$ Access (or the runtime) should be able to start thinking about what their characters might look like post-Rebirth...

Oh, and there just may be some surprise in there for you as we're approaching the 2005 Independence Games... I don't have final word yet, but if what I'm planning holds together, it will be something not done before. Stay tuned, you'll get the solution for this little teaser in about a month if it works out :P