One of the design goals for Seasons was to provide some of the high level content you’d get from a Great Jedi War or Rite of Supremacy, but to do it in a lower stress format: spread out over the course of a year, with no expectation that you have to do every single thing for maximum rewards. But I think we in club leadership have failed to really lay out what we do expect people to do for full completion, and as a result, several of us on the Council have been hearing complaints from members that they’re overwhelmed by the number, length, and format of Parabellum comps. What I’m going to try to do in this post is clear some of that up and get everybody on the same page before Cycle 2 wraps up.

Bottom line up front: I can't give you a specific number or percentage of comps because a few of them are worth a lot more than others, but hopefully I can take some of the edge off your FOMO

Remind Me: What the Hell is a Cycle?

A season covers the full year’s worth of Council-run events around a general theme and plotline. This season is Parabellum and it started on 3 February and is scheduled to run through the end of March 2026.

The season isn’t running all the time. The content is broken up into four cycles with a break between them. Cycle 2 runs through this weekend, then Cycle 3 is scheduled to start in September.

Within the cycles, so far we’ve borrowed the Phase I, Phase II, Event-Long structure from GJWs. In other words, we run the high effort comps for the entire cycle, but do half of the remaining comps in the first half of the cycle, and the rest in the second half.

Finally, in Cycle 2 you’ll see three “Pillars:” Fiction, Gaming, and Graphics. We’ll talk more about those in a sec.

What Are the Special Seasonal Rewards?

Every competition awards the normal XP, credits, crescents, and clusters for a first-level competition of its type. But there are three sets of bonus incentives. In order of least complicated to most:

1. Bonus Clan Credits

At the end of each cycle, each clan gets 15 million credits. If at least 35% of the clan’s members participated in the cycle, the clan gets a bonus 5 million credits. These are clan credits, used for clan possessions, and individual members aren’t rewarded or penalized based on how their clan performs. But hey, 5 million credits is enough for your Consul to buy enough transports to name one after everyone who participated in the cycle, so there you go. That’s not bad for one press of the Button per cycle.

2. Pillar Novae

Remember pillars? This is what they’re there for. Each cycle, we’ll award novae to the top three performers in each pillar. The Cycle 2 competition has the breakdown, but tldr we award points for participating in and top 3 finishes for comps within each pillar, and the people with the most points get novae. This is the only special reward for placing in the individual competitions, otherwise it’s just the normal crescents.

3. Parabellum Trophy

This is the trophy we’re using to award individual bonus credits, possessions, graphics, etc. This is probably what you care about.

OhGodOhGodOhGodThereAreSoManyComps WhatDoIHavetoDotoGetMySpecialTrophy

Let's find out together.

As Thran laid out way back in February, there’s a trophy that tracks your seasonal points, and each rank in that trophy gets you fabulous bonus prizes.

Trophy Level 1 (1 pt) gets you an accessory possession.

Trophy Level 2 (5 pts) gets you 1000 credits.

Trophy Level 3 (15 pts) gets you 5000 credits and an honorific to use on your dossier.

Trophy Level 4 (35 pts) gets you 15000 credits.

Trophy Level 5 (55 pts) gets you 25000 credits and a functional possession.

Trophy Level 6 (85 pts) is maximum effort and gets you 40000 credits and a special robe to use on your dossier.

These are all cumulative, so level 6 gets you 40000+25000+15000+5000+1000 or 86 thousand credits. These are also season-long. In other words, if you want maximum rewards, you’ve got from 3 Feb 2025 through 29 Mar 2026 to get 85 points. If you somehow end up with 85 points at the end of Cycle 2, then you wouldn’t need to do any of the next two cycles.

You get 1 point for doing normal comps and 3 points for doing comps that we think take a lot of effort. It doesn’t matter if you place, you just need a valid entry. If you look at the main Parabellum competition you’ll see what trophy level you’re at now and your progress towards the next level.

This is where I’m at. I’ve unlocked level 2 and I’ve got 7 out of the 15 points required to unlock the next level. I barely remember February but apparently I didn't spend it doing all the things.

There were 12 competitions in Cycle 1:

• The Cluster Race, Run-On, and Security Footage competitions were “high impact,” meaning they awarded 3 points each.

• The other 9 competitions awarded 1 point each.

There were a total of 18 points available for cycle 1.

In Cycle 2, there were 19 competitions:

• The Small Team RP, Cluster Race, Chamber of Justice Sketch, and Language of the Undercity award 3 points each.

• The other 15 comps award 1 point each.

There are a total of 27 points available for Cycle 2.

If we run the same number of competitions for Cycles 3 and 4, then there would be a total of 99 points available across the whole season.

So if you do everything, at the end of Cycle 2 you’ll have 49 points and be most of the way to Trophy Level 5. You’d need about 20 points from each of the two remaining cycles to get full marks.

If you do about half the stuff, you’ll have around 25 points and be halfway to Trophy Level 4. Assuming we run the same amount of comps for Cycles 3 and 4 that we did this time, you’d be within spitting distance of Trophy Level 5 if you only do half of the stuff.

So What Does It All Mean?

Assuming nothing changes and we run two more cycles just like this one and don’t adjust the trophy thresholds:

• You can get the maximum award without doing all the comps. If you do all the 3-pt competitions, you’d be able to skip 14 other competitions throughout the year. If you skip the high-value ones, you have to do more comps in total.

• You can get the next best tier doing fewer than half of the total competitions, assuming you’re hitting those 3-pointers. In fact, if you did all the 3-pt competitions, you’d only need to do 10 other ones throughout the season. That’s not bad for 46k bonus credits, in my opinion, but it is a lot less than the maximum effort tryhard tier.

Again, these estimates assume we run two more cycles with 4 high-impact comps and 15 other comps. I bolded that for a reason. The feedback we’ve been getting from you is that Cycle 2 is just too many competitions. And if you feel like you need to do all of them, then yeah, I think you’re right. But the flip side of that is that if we run fewer competitions, you have less wiggle room to miss any and still get those higher trophy levels.