Consul Address

I’d like to take this moment to first pay tribute to the incredible amount of work that Xen put into the role of Consul. 6 years is an insane amount of time to hold one position, especially in a volunteer club. Xen led the clan through some of its most difficult times and has left some massive shoes to fill. I’d like to thank Pravus and Mav for giving me the chance to work with CSP in this new role and hope you enjoy the remainder of this address.

After discussion with Pravus, we agreed on Braecen as Proconsul. Braecen has a wealth of experience at this level of position, but is relatively new to the current summit team so will bring a balance of new ideas to the table while being already familiar with how we work. Further, Braecen's knowledge and experience of the gaming community neatly covers gaps in my area of DB expertise. As Alara has done great work in the Aedile position of Excidium there is no reason not to shift her up to the Quaestor spot and I’m excited to see how she tackles this new role. News on Excidium’s Aedile position will be announced by its new Quaestor.

Plans for the Clan

Recently, Mune ran a feedback survey to try to gather clan opinions on how things were and how they could be improved. This gave some very valuable feedback that forms the basis of how we can move forwards as a clan and tailor the focus of the summit team towards what the members find fun. While the remainder of this report are my plans for how we can move forward as a clan and are essentially what was in the CON application, I'm receptive to new ideas and would encourage anyone to come to me with any ideas / concerns about anything related to the clan.

Member Involvement in Clan Events

I think a change is needed in how we view the purpose of the clan fiction updates. Previously, we have always seen it as a story we write for the membership to enjoy. Recent feedback has shown that you don’t want to be the end consumer of the story, you want to be involved with the writing of the story and this is definitely something we should explore as a unit moving forward with future events. Your feedback will also be sought after every clan event so we can find out what went well / wrong and seek to tailor future events to your preferences. In Daybreak, 17 people were involved with the writing of the opening story.

Our system, with its dynamic political structure, puts us in a place where we have so many options to move the clan story forwards. This is an opportunity I think we can all take forward together, with the clan members as the protagonists of the story. In the following weeks I’ll try to take the time to talk with everyone individually on their thoughts on the clan story and where they think it should go. I’m hoping to run a major clan plot update event every other month and use the off-months to plan how we can do the next one better.

Design Your Emperor

Elincia is not a suitable character to lead a Dark Jedi Clan. The character was designed to be in a support role, more of a Tyrion than a Daenerys, but I’ve sort of written myself into a corner, she’s become very awkward to write and I don’t want to burden the clan with that. Fictionally, Elincia will not take the title of Emperor. But I will not make a new character either. WE will make a new character. The fictional character that leads Scholae Palatinae and takes it forwards will be written by the clan, for the clan, and be the property of the clan.

Firstly I need your feedback on what makes a good fictional emperor of Clan Scholae Palatinae. Gender, species, backstory, etc. Then, once that skeleton of a character has been nailed down we can work towards fleshing it out further as a clan. I've created a survey below to get your thoughts on this. Future competitions will flesh the character out further.

Design your emperor

This character will officially be an NPC owned by the clan. Impetus / Elincia will be my player character but will not play a major role in official clan fiction. Note that the Emperor’s choices on political targets will heavily influence clan political direction. The NPC Emperor is essentially an instrument of your will on the decisions the clan should make.

A Living Political Map

This is an idea that arose a while ago from a discussion with Jorm. The political map of Seraph and its moon Ragnath will constantly adapt to choices you make as a clan. With an NPC as the Emperor that follows your will, CSP’s movement on the map (expansion) will be heavily influenced by what you think the clan should do. The other countries’ movements on the map will be a response to these decisions, and also on how the clan members pull the strings from behind the scene.

Above is an image of the political map of the planet Seraph. We have an equivalent one for Ragnath and these will be used to document CSP's growing influence over the system. With every change a log will be made of how the borders shifted and the clan member(s) responsible to document your personal influence over the political landscape.

Wiki Clean-up

This will be a big project done over many phases but one I want to begin planning immediately. There’s a lot of out of date information on the wiki, a lot of things that refer to the Cocytus System, to leaders that resigned long ago, among others. I plan to consolidate the wiki into something smaller and more manageable, but I want an all hands on deck approach to this. All clan members will have a chance to get involved with the project. Those less experienced or less confident with authoring wiki articles can be paired with a more experienced author. The plan is more or less 4 stages:

1. Plan what pages we actually need and how they connect to each other
2. Audit what pages need to be deleted, created, and edited and create a task list
3. Apply all changes that need to be made
4. Repurpose the plan into a living list of pages which we can use as a record of all pages maintained by the clan

This is a long term plan and one that we will plan in more detail before rushing ahead with it. Much of this, especially part 3, will likely take place after the GJW.

Closing Thoughts

I’m really keen to get as many people as possible involved with how the clan runs. Transparency is vitally important in a club like this. At the end of the day our job as summit members is to make sure you enjoy your time in the clan as much as possible. I want the summit team to be as transparent as we can be, but transparency needs to be a two way thing. We need to hear your concerns so we can address them. I need everyone to know that they can always come to me at any time about any concerns they have about the clan and how it's run.

AskTheEli

Alara asks: congratulations! What will be your first step of business

I'm hoping we can get more involvement from everyone on all clan matters. It's something I emphasised quite a lot in my application. I think the development of the Caperion System skeleton was something that needed to be done behind closed doors but moving forwards I'd like more involvement from all members of the clan on a wider variety of clan matters.

One of the really big things I plan to commence work on ASAP is a wiki audit of all of our stuff, accounting for every page, and giving all of our membership a chance to get involved with the project

Alara also asks: Will you be accepting PCON applications or appointing someone?

This has been addressed at the start. Also congratulations :P

Reiden asks: Will you be continuing the tradition of taking on a Tyrant name? If so, what will it be?

I will open this up to the clan to decide in due course, but the new emperor, whoever the clan decide they should be like, will have a tyrant name

Raiju asks: Can we get your thoughts on transparency? How's this going to impact the other positioned members under your term?

I want as much transparency as possible and I will be including the members as much as I can in directing the clan forwards. But my thoughts on transparency are that it should work both ways. I'm very happy to be as transparent as possible on our side and involve everyone as much as I can. But I also need people to come to me with any concerns they have about how things are going. The focus should always be on the members of the clan being able to have fun as much as possible and if there are things that you don't find fun, or things that you think would make things better, I'd really like to hear about them so I can look at integrating them in to what we already have.

Thank you for reading this big wall of text. I'll try to design some graphics for the next one.

Elincia Rei

Consul of Scholae Palatinae