A Big Weekend

As I announced in my last report, 2025 is the DB's 30th anniversary. We plan to celebrate it all year with themed releases, starting with the new logo in January and continuing this weekend to coincide with May 4th. In this report, I'll outline the things you can expect to see launch over the next few days, beginning with the thing we do every May 4th: Seals of Loyalty.

You get a seal, you get a seal, you get a seal!

Every year on May 4th, we award Seals of Loyalty to members nominated by the DC and Consuls--typically one per DC, two per CON. Normally I would have asked for those nominations last week, but this year we're doing something different. In November 2015 (we used to do SoLs twice a year), eagerly awaiting the release of The Force Awakens, Sarin awarded SoLs to all Clanned and positioned members in the club. This year, we're taking a page out of Sarin's book: every member of the club who has logged into the website between January 1, 2025 and May 4, 2025 will receive a Seal of Loyalty. That this club has not just lasted but thrived for 30 years is a remarkable testament to our community, the leaders at all levels who have kept the ship on course, and especially our members who keep engaging year after year. Thank you and congratulations, everyone!

Heraldy Goodness

Now this is just a tease... Bale and the Herald Staff have been working on some 30th Anniversary themed dossier graphics. Expect to see those this weekend. He also has plans for some other very cool, special graphics that you'll all get to see later in the year.

New Possessions Items

A couple of months ago I asked Thran to work with his team on a special booster pack for the 30th Anniversary. They ran with it and came up with more than 30 new items, some of which are themed on DB lore and events of the past: my personal favorite is straight out of Red Jac, Blue Jac for those old enough to remember. They'll all be available for purchase this weekend!

Season 1: Parabellum - Cycle 2

Not technically a weekend event, but the second Cycle of our first Season launches Monday! This Cycle will be longer than the first, so to the extent that you thought the first Cycle was too short, you'll have more time to work on event-long entries for this one: about a month each for Phase 1 and Phase 2, with a month in between. Atra will have all of the details for you soon!

Nightsisters

Last but certainly not least, today we will be adding Nightsister Force powers to our character sheet system. Idris will put out a report with all of the details, but I want to just take a minute to explain our process on this. People have been asking for NS powers basically forever, and thanks to shows like Ahsoka and the Star Wars Jedi games we have a lot of new canon examples of their powers.

We considered various options for how to add them to our system. The initial idea was to create a NS discipline with a special feat that would unlock access to the NS powers and lock the regular Force powers, but given how our CS tool works it would have been a clunky system requiring members to save and reload their sheets to toggle between NS and regular powers. Ultimately, that wasn't a great solution. We were then split between two main alternatives: treating NS powers as ordinary Force powers available to Sith, Jedi, and Force Disciples alike, or creating a new NS Order and restricting the powers to characters in that Order.

After long discussions among the DC and with input from Voice staff and the Star Chamber, I decided that the hassle of creating a new Order wasn't the right approach. Even just a few years ago, our Orders had a lot of Order-specific traits that made their differences more meaningful, but we've chipped away at those with things like Traditions and especially Honorifics. It would also be much more limiting to restrict the powers to a single Order than to let people mix and match as they please, and we've always tried to prioritize member freedom in building their characters and telling their stories. So in the end, we decided to add NS powers as regular Force powers available to all Force users, along with a couple of NS disciplines. I'll let Idris go into the nitty gritty details, but here's a list of the powers:

• Gravitation
  
• Ichor
  
• Item Conjuring
  
• Necromancy
  
• Possession
  
• Pyrokinesis
  
• Teleportation
  
• Transformation
  
• Weather Control

We've tried to balance these with our other powers, and we'll certainly be looking for feedback once you all have a chance to play with them. I want to thank Idris for his hard work and patience through this whole process; it's been a lot of work drafting the powers and then putting up with my endless questions and revisions. You'll be able to see the results of his work very soon.

I hope you all have a great weekend and enjoy what's to come!