(re)Introduction

Greetings members of the club,

I’m Turel, you may remember me as the tiger enthusiast who was Fist like five minutes ago. It’s actually been just shy of a year, but who’s counting? Something I picked up from my Fist mentor Drac is that experience is an asset and sometimes a second (or third in his case) act can be better than the first. Before my term as Fist I’ve been around the club in various offices like the COJ, ACC, Regent and as a unit leader. Very recently Seals said one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me in an award, “He carries the weight of experience without ever making others feel small.” I hope I can live up to that as I step into this new role.

I would like to thank Bubba and the council for placing their trust in me (again). Actually, fun fact, Headmaster Bubba hired Jedi Knight Turel for his first DC staff job as a Professor way back in 2014. Funny how things tend to come full circle. Headmaster is one of the oldest and most storied offices in the club and I truly stand on the shoulders of giants. None in the pantheon of HMs stands as tall as Arch, whom I owe a tremendous debt to. As Arch said in his (latest) goodbye report we’ve known each other for a decade of some highs and lows and almost all my ideas for Headmaster have been hammered out over years of us shooting the breeze in DMs on how to improve the club. Arch has not only set me up for success but has graciously agreed to stay on as a special magistrate to help out behind the scenes. I’m also immensely grateful to have powerhouses like Korvis and Tarvitz at the SA and Wiki, respectively with the rest of the staff keeping things running.

Core Philosophy

Before I get into my ideas on how to bring the Shadow Academy and wiki forward, I wanted to give some core principles that will guide my decision-making:

• Every leader in the club, at every level, should be fully committed to providing the best possible member experience. We should strive to create an environment that makes people want to stay and bring their friends to.
• The SA/Wiki Staff’s primary mission should be helping members of all walks of DB life find useful information on all aspects of club life from systems and policies to lore. This involves breaking down barriers and making information as accessible as possible.
• Every DB activity should strive to foster community and member-to-member connections, which are essential to retention and the club's long-term health.

I tried to break down barriers and address pain points in our gaming systems when I served as Fist and I commit to bringing that same purpose to Headmaster. There is so much information in our club on our various systems and expansive lore. It can be overwhelming for new and returning members alike. My primary goal is to break down the barriers and make all that information as accessible and digestible as possible so members can get to all the fun stuff the club has to offer, whether they are just joining us or a veteran member trying something new.

The “Whiteboard”

You might be thinking, “That’s a nice philosophy and all, but what will you actually change?” Well, I’d like to share some ideas from my application. It’s important to note that these are just whiteboard-level ideas that will need to be workshopped and approved prior to implementation. These will likely change in the process and some might never see the light of day. With that caveat out of the way:

Knowledge Center (Name Pending)

The name can be workshopped but the club desperately needs a central page, be it on the wiki or built into the main site, where members can find key information and get their questions answered. The main wiki page is not designed for that purpose. Information is scattered across pages and Shadow Academy courses that are inconsistently categorized and require members to know a lot of our DB-specific jargon like how if you want something graphics, you need to look at the Herald pages. We currently have no centralized point where members can get their questions answered. We have gotten better as a club by putting pages like Gaming Information, Policies, and the Fiction Center on the site navigation bars. But even those can be difficult to navigate.

What we need and what I propose is a central portal where key policies and pages are organized with clear, newbie-friendly categories, stripped of DB jargon as much as possible. This would be a labor-intensive project involving the SA, Wiki and other DC staff offices. The final categories would need to be worked out but here is a quick mock-up of what the knowledge center could look like

So, using gaming as an example, since I’m a former Fist and intimately familiar with their policies, the gaming link would go to a second page which has all the major policies and SA guides linked in the most accessible language possible.

Even this small example for gaming just shows how scattered the information on the club’s key systems is. Building and maintaining this portal would require systematically categorizing the key policies, written guides, content pages and shadow academy courses of each of the club’s major pillars and offices. Each entry in the running index of sorts would have the actual title, DB office, portal category and a newbie-friendly summary of the page. A related task would be collecting the most frequently asked questions or tasks for each DB office in order to guide building the category pages.

DB Help Desk

As a club, we are very stuck in the past regarding how we handle members’ questions. If a member has a question we expect them to look it up themselves on the website, ask in a public channel that’s hopefully patrolled by the relevant staff or summit member or email the relevant staff group email. It’s 2025, members live on Discord. Asking in public channels can often be hit or miss because while most of our members are trying to be helpful the information given out to publicly asked questions often contains outdated or wrong information. The official staff answer to the question sometimes gets drowned out. Asking questions in a public forum can be intimidating for some, especially if you are new to a community. Staff group emails are a good tool for getting correct information and we’ve tried to encourage them for years but 1) it requires the member know which staff to ask 2) requires the member to know where to find the staff email and 3) requires the member to be comfortable using email.

I propose the Shadow Academy run a Discord help desk channel where members, young and old, can ask their questions in a less public forum and get official answers without having to sort through the random grab bag of stuff they’d get in a public chat. I believe the best way to do this is to implement a discord-based help ticket system which automatically creates threads between member and staff. The SA staff could triage the tickets and tag in the appropriate DB office staff to get official answers. The member gets a hands-on, customer service-level response to the questions they have and club leadership gets records in the form of threads that can be analyzed later for problem areas that need clarification or FAQs to update on the knowledge center.

So imagine you have a question about some aspect of the club but aren’t sure who to even ask. You could just type /help or whatever command creates the help ticket. If you know which office you want to direct your question to the bot could automatically tag in the right staff to the thread. If you aren’t sure the SA staff can work with you to find the answers you need and route your ticket to the right office.

Live Tutorials

An underutilized resource we have with Discord is the ability to livestream and host tutorials and explanations. Leaders throughout the club use this feature sporadically to walk members through various site features or how to do something in a game. As a much younger member, I sat and watched Vyr do live Herald tutorials on things like creating lightsabers. This was pre-Discord on Google Hangouts. Vyr later uploaded some of these to Youtube. I know this is no small task for someone to put on but I believe the payoff for doing so makes it worthwhile.

I propose setting up a flexible system where the SA could sponsor members who want to put on live or recorded tutorials or guides and both teacher and student receive credit. This would need to be a more fleshed-out proposal subject to approval but I imagine members who host approved live or recorded tutorials getting credit toward SA service degrees or something similar. Participants could receive SA credit for practicum courses or specific degree requirements. This would need to be fleshed out and the rewards calibrated appropriately but I would like to implement more hands-on type courses and workshops for the Shadow Academy and this is a way to crowdsource it with the subject matter experts.

Here are some examples of how various offices could use live Discord tutorials and get SA credit for the instructor and participants:

• Envoy office hosts DM’ing workshops where students turn in a campaign plan for credit
• Summits or Wiki staff host workshops on creating character or clan lore wiki pages where students turn in draft or completed pages for credit
• Voice staff hosts NPC creation workshops where students turn in completed CSs for credit
• Selected leader mentors host awarding or leadership workshops where members turn in simulated awards, promotions or reports for credit
• Regent staff hosts guides on the possession system where students turn in completed aspects or draft items for credit.

New Systems Live Q&A Sessions

I would try to host live Q&A sessions in Discord stage channels to demonstrate or explain new or major updates to systems when they launch, such as Seasons/XP/Crafting/Etc. This would be in conjunction with the relevant councilor or office. Discord stages are more suitable for presenting to large audiences and hosting Q&As than regular voice channels because they are moderated on who can speak and there are no sounds interrupting when members enter or exit.

Newcomer Lore Guides

This is an aspirational project but the club needs tl;dr lore guides for newcomers and returning members. When I returned to COU after nearly 3 years on the council the COU novice guide I was handed was extremely helpful in getting me up to speed and engaged with the current events. It covered what the clan was about, a summary of the history and key characters. The Fiction Center is a good start for one for DB-wide lore it would just need a little bit of fleshing out. Ideally, tl;dr lore guides for the DB-wide lore and each of the clans would be posted to the knowledge center.

My goal would be to work with the unit leaders on sharing best practices on these guides and providing SA and Wiki staff support for their development. My goal wouldn’t be to pile on a work requirement to already busy summits but to help develop a resource that could greatly increase engagement within their units. The work would be mostly on the front end followed by periodic updating.

SA Course Revamp

Last and certainly not least is the traditional Shadow Academy course and degree revamp that is already in progress. I will be leaning on Korvis and Arch a great deal for this aspect of things as I’m essentially jumping onto a moving train. I would staff and update the existing plan with a few key points:

• Add Practicum courses in various areas that could be used to award academic credit for live tutorials
• Update Service degrees or create new Service degrees for members who host live approved tutorials
• Use Lore Newcomer guides to build and keep the relevant SA courses (clans, factions, etc) updated
• Add a Traditions Maven that covers the major character traditions available to members on the site.

Closing

Our M:HM 6 month terms are up this month so keep your eyes peeled for some likely job postings with retooled job descriptions. In the meantime, don't hesitate to hit me up on Discord or when I’m hanging out in voice chat, especially if you need help with something. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find you the person who does.

Until next time,

Turel

Headmaster of the Brotherhood