Hi all! Welcome to the Scholae Palatinae End of Year Consul Report! It's been a great pleasure to have been able to serve as your consul for the entirety of this 2018 calendar year. 2018 has seen Scholae Palatinae slowly expand its borders across the moon of Ragnath up until the major event of the year, the Rite of Supremacy. In this report I'll analyse our performance in the RoS, 2018 as a whole, give updates on positional appointments, and release a short fictional update.

Rite of Supremacy

So you'll all have heard by now we finished third out six. So what does that actually mean? Is third good?

Honestly I think third is about our level. We've come third in the last 3 GJWs. I was hoping we could make more of a push to break the top two of COU and Arcona, but I think if you ask most people for their objective predictions prior to the RoS they'd have put us in third and we did that. I'm not going to go into the whole 'if this that and the other happened we could have got second' because frankly I think such speculation is stupid, every clan will have had things that went well and things that went badly.

What I'm very happy with is the level of clan camaraderie and teamworking skills, and some exceptional individual performances. Everyone that was active in our clan RoS chat, supporting other members of the clan was really great to see. Compared to the GJW, we had a lot more people entering all of the bins, with Darth Aeternus, me, Shadow Nighthunter, Jorm (The Jester) Na'trej, Alara Deathbane, Kadrol Hauen entering all available bins and maximising participation points. Also, shoutout to Reiden for entering the most competitions in the clan.

We earned a lot of novae between us. Reiden showed just how good he is at puzzles and writing with a gold and silver in the puzzle competitions and a gold in the Possessions Item design competition. Shadow also won a bronze in puzzles. Jorm won a bronze for designing dbb0t aspects. Alara won a bronze in propaganda. Aylin won a gold in graphics and alongside me and Bale won a silver for our run-on.

Finally, Bale's performance was ridiculously good. While only entering 8 competitions, he placed third in the entire event due to absolutely outstanding quality in everything he submitted. This result is proof that you don't have to spam half-baked entries to do well in a db-wide competition, even one that is weighted more heavily towards participation. He earned novae for 4 of his 8 entries, with a gold and a bronze in art, a silver in fiction and a silver for the run-on.

Overall, I'm happy with our performance, especially with respect to how we all came together as a clan and encouraged each other, the completionists, and the novae-winning performances. Rewards for this will hopefully come by the end of the year, and when I know exactly how many credits we'll be winning for this, we'll look at how to spend them, but my aim is to try to add an ISD to the clan military by upgrading one of the VSDs. This will require a large amount of money, but could potentially be achieved by selling off our mercenary force, the Nayaman Auxillary Second Army (NASA). I reiterate that I believe the military to be a fictional resource not a fighting resource, and as NASA has seen basically zero use during 2018, it represents poor cost-effectiveness regardless of how much military sense it makes. Let me know what you think in the comments.

2018 in brief

This makes more sense at the start of the report but kind of wanted to open with the big news in the RoS results.

• 2018 saw the creation of a new battleteam founded by Jorm, Vindictae Immortalis. Shortly after, we ran the Battleteam cup, a 4 way event to reward general everyday site activity, which was won by the new team under Jorm's leadership.

• The CSP event Expansion saw us expand the borders of our territory to the Nethal Archipelago, and found that our main enemy, the Meraxis Empire, had allied with the Collective. This clan-wide event won by Derek.

• Battleteams and houses were given militaries in May to allow for further fictional development and to give each unit a base to work from.

• In July a second Expansion driven event was won by Mako, which fictionally saw us expand our territory north into Meraxis-occupied Maqor. However, our previous allies Elaya took a claim to the territory we wanted for ourselves, claiming Meraxis land was fair game.

• In September a small task force set to work on our military appearance, designing custom aspects and images for the most notable units in the clan possessions system. Santa Claus.

• The year concluded with the third place RoS place.

I think this has been a good year. We've made progress with the clan fictionally in terms of the slow expansion of our borders, and the dynamic political map thing used to document our progress has worked out well. This idea was inspired by Jorm, the map created by Xen, and further maintained by me throughout this year. An interesting side effect of repeatedly replacing the file on the wiki is that you can actually see all the movements that have been made by the edit history of https://wiki.darkjedibrotherhood.com/view/File:RagnathPolitical.png

I'd like to thank everyone on the leadership team for supporting the clan throughout this year. To name everyone that has contributed in 2018 would make this report rather long, but Mune has been an outstanding support on the clan summit for the entire year, and the efforts of Braecen and Raiju as Proconsuls were instrumental in getting things done around here. Jorm has helped further refine our military numerous times and will do so again when we get more cash from the Rite of Supremacy. Bale destroyed the RoS. Kadrol has been one of our most active and helpful members since joining.

Leadership Reshuffles

Some of this has already been announced but to re-iterate here: Raiju has resigned as PCON, replaced by Mune, Alara moves across to take the RM spot, leaving QUA open. Having reviewed some excellent applications, we've selected Bale as our new QUA of Excidium. Bale brings with him experience as well as immense talent and we're all excited to see where he takes Excidium.

Kadrol Promotion to Knight

Around the start of the Rite of Supremacy, Kadrol earned a well-deserved promotion to the rank of Knight! I'd like to publicly thank Kadrol for his participation in many clan projects since he joined us, and perseverance when things are not going well. Kadrol's always been around to help with any projects that need it, and he was also one of our RoS completionists. Scholae Palatinae would be much less active had Kadrol not joined us earlier this year, I'm very happy to have him in our ranks and delighted to have been his master through his journey to Knight. This is a bit delayed as the RoS took centre-stage, but belated congratulations!

Kadrol's knighting fiction can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fFkff_Kt8mDPqHy8W1Z3RcszGWGPvm--/view?usp=sharing This fiction also introduces a new location underneath Caelestis City for student trials to knighthood, so I'd recommend giving it a read!

Ask The Eli

Shadow asks: Will there ever be a House Feud again anytime soon?
Elincia: Really that depends on what the level of interest is in that sort of thing, or whether people prefer cooperative events where the clan works towards a common goal. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Bale asks: I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus. So I set Jorm on the <expletive>. Can we use your car trunk to hide his body?
Elincia:I've hidden him in this report, no-one reads these things anymore

Kadrol asks: Can I get permission to open a museum on clan land. If so, where?
Elincia: I actually think this is an interesting question to answer in general terms of 'can I have this thing'. Answer: why? Let's take this example, if you want this to be a part of official clan lore somewhere, I'm gonna be considering whether a museum really adds to our system lore, whether other people will use it / be interested in it, and if not, it'll just end up as clutter on a page somewhere. If I see this as something that could actually have fictional use, then I'm more likely to say yes. Also, if it's going to be your character's thing I'd want that to make fictional sense, if Kadrol's long been a purveyor of historical artefacts and that's a core part of his character, then it makes more sense than if he's combat oriented.

That was for if you want this thing to be a part of clan lore on an official basis. If you want to write, on your own page, that Kadrol runs this small business (a museum) in Caelestis City and that's your fictional justification for some of the money you have, I'm not gonna say no to that. But I'm not going to have things on clan pages unless they are of interest to the wider clan.

Kadrol asks: Rank the five worst national flags in the world (1 being the worst, 5 being the fifth worst)?
Elincia: My answers to that would upset people so I'll name my favourites instead. 1) Nepal for the shape, 2) Albania for the colours and design, 3) Eswatini for the shield and spear, 4) Wales for the dragon, 5 ) Qing Dynasty because dragons are still cool and I don't care if it hasn't been in use since 1912

Kadrol asks: Can you do my math homework?
Elincia: I'm sure I can. However, I will not.

Xen asks: Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
Elincia: If you had been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like, I would use anyone even to go look more to decide as far as you been. Am I doing it right?

Korras asks: how many bears can bear grylls grill before a bear grills bear grylls for grilling bears?
Elincia: Bear Grylls can only grill one bear because he's only got one bear grill.

Korras asks: what will we name our isd, when we finally buy one?
Elincia: The ISN Elincia Rei. Obviously.

Mark asks: I hear that Xen set CSP's official team to be Portsmouth FC. How does this sit with you?
Elincia: Have you heard about our lord and saviour Ralph Hasenhüttl!

Thank you for reading. Merry Christmas!

Elincia Rei,

Consul of Scholae Palatinae