-> _ _ Gather 'round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown

And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone If your time to you Is worth savin'

Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'

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I thought our old friend Bob Dylan would be a great way to start my first report as Voice of the Brotherhood. The irony of being a four time Dark Counselor and proclaiming change is not lost on me, but some old dogs can be taught new tricks. I'm under the impression that you; like me, have been caught up in the recent infectious enthusiasm sweeping the Dark Brotherhood. This renewed energy is in no small part due to our Grand Master's excellent decision to make Raken the Deputy Grand Master. If Raken does not get you fired up, then you don't have a pulse.

So here we are. A new Deputy Grand Master, a new Dumbledore, and a new Voice. Time to get this report started.

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My Story: I have been a member of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood for well over a decade and I love our club. The Dark Jedi Brotherhood and Star Wars are my hobbies and they have offered me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people. Beyond that, I have had the great fortune to serve our club in various leadership positions ranging from Aedile of Oriens Obscurum to Grand Master.

In real life, I'm an active duty Major in the US Army with three combat tours down range. I married my college sweetheart and we have two awesome kids and one bad ass dog named Lord Tyrannus. Surprisingly, my degrees are in Philosophy and English Literature, but don't tell anyone.

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Vision: The Dark Jedi Brotherhood is and will remain a fiction oriented organization. Fiction has dominated our club since the fall of XVT/XWA and has penetrated all aspects of activity to include each and every leader report. We are a fiction club, yet our Voice has remained a relatively unimportant member of the Dark Council. The root cause of the problem is the same problem that debilitates our club across the board. Leaders accept the status-quo, leaders are not willing to implement change, and as our DGM recently pointed out in his application, leaders fail to deliver products that entice and encourage activity. My plan as voice is not revolutionary in its originality, but it is revolutionary in that I seek to live up to the Voice's duty description. The Dark Jedi Brotherhood should not be just another Star Wars fiction club, we should be The Star Wars Fiction Club. Our immediate plan:

1.Competitions: Competitions will no longer consist of random topics that offer members little to no incentive to participate. Our members will write because they are writers, but we owe them more than that. Next year we will see three unique competition designs aimed solely at enticing member participation and improving our club.

a.Fiction Tournaments: The Great Hunt will kick off in January of 2013. This competition will launch with a fictional invitation for the Dark Jedi Brotherhood's greatest assassins to join a tournament of champions.

b.The Fiction League: The Fiction league will begin next year and include all writers who participate in Dark Jedi Brotherhood Voice sanctioned events. These sanctioned events would follow the current Dark Jedi Brotherhood Storyline and provide members an opportunity to fill in the gaps between major Vendettas.

c.Dark Brotherhood Canon: Our club has one of the most detailed and well versed fictional backgrounds on the internet, but there is room for consistent and continued improvement in many areas. Official Dark Brotherhood Canon competitions would identify a current DJB fictional area that requires updating/creation and would offer members of our club the chance to write it. The winning teams would then have the opportunity to have their fiction used as that Canon, pending Voice/DGM/GM approval. We will be looking for projects on par with The Antei System.

1. The ACC: The Antei Combat Chamber remains one of our most unique and unexploited areas within the Dark Brotherhood. Creative writers, gamers, and fiction nuts have played Play by Post Role Playing Games since the early 1990s on University Forums, Yahoo's Ayenee, and message boards across the web. This unique fictional realm offers our members the competitive environment they seek and allows them to continue their personal character stories. This being said, the ACC must be better than what it is today. What are the core tenets of the ACC that we want to promote, what can we do to make it more user friendly, and what can we do to improve upon our existing systems? We will be looking at a comprehensive review of the ACC over the next several months in an attempt to better serve the members.

2. Role Playing Games: The Dark Jedi Brotherhood is a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Bottom line, everything we do in our club should have a role playing aspect to improve upon our characters and their fictional universe. I have been a Star Wars role player for nearly two decades and own the entire West End Games and Wizards of the Coast Star Wars libraries. Table top does not apply well to the Dark Brotherhood, but our club can incorporate the best aspects of SWRPG. Prestige, possessions, grind paths, acc fictional battles, acc live, and our character sheets are all forms of the encompassing forms of our club's RPG. We need to unify these systems and continue to support their development. The Voice staff has to ensure that the systems we design fit with the overall vision Muz and Raken have for our club's larger game. We are going to kick off this process over the next several weeks with a review of the character sheets and starting next month we will launch the Voice's first series of Forum hosted RPG run-ons with Shadow serving as the Game master. More to follow.

3. Fiction Repository (From Shad's application!): Star Wars fan fiction is easily one of the biggest types of fan fiction on the internet. People write stories about canon characters, their own characters, different genres, what ifs, etc and post it up on the internet for all to see. As Raken pointed out in his report, the Brotherhood is almost exclusively a fiction-based club. And yet, how many of the fictions our members write ever get seen by more than a handful of judges? How often do people write fiction that isn't directly linked to a competition or event these days? This used to be the staple of Brotherhood activity. People didn't create stuff just to be judged, they created it for the pleasure in doing so and for others to see their work and to sharpen their skills doing something they enjoyed doing. The Voice staff will be working with the code monkey's to determine the easiest and best way to design our club's fiction repository. More to follow.

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Voice Staff: Fortunately for the Dark Jedi Brotherhood, Shad and Timmy wrote bad-ass applications for the position of Voice. Rather than waste their epic ideas, we are going to put them to use by appointing them both to the Voice staff. Effective immediately, Shadow will be the new Praetor to the Voice and Timmy/Mirado will serve as Magistrates to the Voice. I will be adding another magistrate over the next week based off of the slew of emails I have received.

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Congratulations: Mirado has performed superbly over the past few months and I felt my first act as Voice should be a nod at honoring his service. From the recommendation: The Sapphire Blade is awarded to members of the Dark Brotherhood who have shown consistent and long term service. This award is often reserved for members of the Dark Council, Dark Summit, and those who excel during Vendettas. It is uncommon for Praetors to receive the Sapphire Blade because their work takes places behind the scenes and is only known by their specific Dark Councilor. Mirado Pepoi L'eonhear; however, is a different case. Mirado has not only served as the Praetor to the Voice, but has also served as the acting Voice for several months due to Vodo's internet woes. During this time Mirado served at a level significantly above and beyond any other Praetor within the Dark Brotherhood. Mirado published his amusing "Not the Voice" Voice reports to continue advertising Voice competitions and to announce the winners of past competitions. Additionally he created and judged monthly fiction topic competitions to include the highly popular "Load the Cannons" series. It is an honor to recommend and award Mirado Pepoi L'eonheart the Sapphire Blade.

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Competitions: The Voice staff is proud to offer you three competitions to finish of 2012. 2nd and 3rd level crescents are available to those who place as well as the promise of seeing your name enter official fiction updates in the future. We encourage each and every member to compete in the following:

1. I Dark Jedi: A First Person introspective look at how your character is coping with the results of the Horizon Plague.

2. Attack of the Claus: A mad Jedi Master haunts the north poll of Hoth and seeks to destroy bad Dark Jedi. Can you take him?

3. Armageddon: The Dark Jedi Brotherhood has been turned upside down. Zoraan crushed our fleets, the DC has been lost several members, and Clans are struggling to hold it together. This 2nd Level crescent competition runs until the end of the month and offers you the chance to write about the major changes the Dark Brotherhood has experienced.

I may have mentioned something above about random competitions, but hey, we need to finish the year off and these are all pretty cool :p

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Polls: I have placed two polls up in the Dark Brotherhood polling center. The first poll focuses on the frequency you would like to see plot releases and the second poll related to your satisfaction with the ACC. Please take the time to log in to your dossier and provide us your thoughts.

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Close it out: No fiction in the Voice report? Yeah, you are going to get enough fiction from me over the next several months. Muz and Raken have a lot of exciting projects planned for next year and the Voice staff will be busy working through them in turn. I'll be looking for volunteers to help us with several stand alone projects in the future. If you are interested, shoot me a note.

I also encourage all of you to look at the new an exciting ways to participate in our club. Google Hangout Trivi and GM Shots, yes please. WhatsApp on our phones to communicate effectively while away from the keyboard, yes please (and photos of shot roulette!). Don't get stuck in the rut of email and mIRC, we have a lot more tech at our hands and the more interactive our community, the better.

I would like to thank Clan Arcona for hosting me over the past 14 months. Arcona was my first Clan over a decade ago, but it has never been in better shape. Wun/Wally and the rest of the Arcona team are ahead of the power curve in pretty much every area I can think of and I have truly appreciated their dedication to making our club a better place.

Finally, I'd like to thank Muz and Raken for the opportunity to be back in the game and I'm excited to be working with all of you.