Introduction

Happy June! This month I’m unveiling three new courses, providing some status updates on a few more, and babbling on about why I can’t simply delete the cap ships course.

But before we get to all that, I’d like to thank the Academy—specifically the Academy RP series run by Ood Bnar. I criminally neglect the in-character side of the SA, but Ood has stepped up and is currently hosting his third SA-themed open RP session. If you’d like to join, just head over to #rp-lobby on Discord and type /rp list and smash that like join button.

New Courses

A lot of folks will be pleased to hear that we will be phasing out the three starship courses. As I’ve said in past reports, our goal here is to move away from providing general Star Wars lore and towards empowering members to use the lore they already know and love in our systems.

The first step here is Personal Starships. This is the eventual replacement for Starship Studies and Freighters/Transports Studies. The old courses were a mishmash of different information, covering everything from squadron callsign conventions to tactics to the history of different manufacturers. The new course zeroes in on one specific need: you want your character to have a cool, unique ship like the proper Star Wars badass that they are, and this course exists to show you how to find, buy, and customize that ship.

Personal Speeders has a very similar format because it’s ultimately doing the same thing, only for speeders, walkers, and tanks instead of starships. It will eventually replace Land Vehicles.

Thanks to Eleceos Araave, who wrote these and contributed most of the art. Additional thanks to Essik Lyccane for submitting an image of one of his ships that he commissioned from Sulon Tiful for Personal Starships.

Our third course this month comes from Zentru’la. We have some existing courses on how to create a character and represent them in our systems (see CS 101, CS 102, and Character Wiki), but Character Development focuses on how to make those characters really shine in any particular story, as well as how to develop your supporting cast. Additional thanks to Atty, Zuji, and Moro for responding to my call for art in #art-chat and allowing us to show off a variety of character relationships in the course notes.

Degrees, Delays, and Deprecations

You may have noticed I said some things about eventually replacing courses and nothing at all about what degrees the new courses contribute to. So let’s talk a little about where I want to take things and then loop back to how that affects the roll-out of new courses.

A while back I sat down and drew out a plan for what my ideal SA would look like, including several sage degree paths, and when I hired the new crop of magistrates they reviewed that plan and we tweaked it. It’s still not really final because we can and have changed things as new ideas have emerged, and it’s realistically more than I can get done during my term. Nevertheless, even before Eleceos started work on Personal Starships, we knew that would eventually be part of a maven degree that covers all sorts of possessions vehicles, whether they belong to an individual member or to a unit or faction. In turn, that will feed into a savant that covers “cool stuff” that your character can have and use. And finally, that will contribute to a Galactic Studies Sage: galactic studies covering the ways we take the whole universe of Star Wars lore and incorporate it into our club.

The tricky thing is getting from here to there. Not just writing the courses, but deploying them in a way that doesn’t break anything else. The SA degree system is a bit like a house of cards: sages require one or two savants, savants require a maven or two, and mavens require 4-5 courses or 3 courses and a practical requirement. So, for example, the Combat Maven currently requires 4 courses. If I take Land Vehicles out, it won’t meet the minimum requirements for a maven degree anymore. If I take the Combat Maven offline, the Tactics Savant and Warfare Savant both become inaccessible.

So what? Well, advancing to ranks X-XII in the Aurora Collegium requires five savants. We only have seven to start with, and two of those require long-term service in a staff or leadership position, so only five are accessible to the general membership to begin with.

These are going to be new courses so they will contribute to new degrees, allowing even veteran members to earn more credits and XP. So I’m a little hesitant to just plug them into pre-existing degrees as a stopgap, especially since I’d probably have to change degree requirements every 1-2 months and confuse the hell out of everybody in the process. But if I don’t, I either have to leave the obsolete courses where they are for a while or I have to redesign the ACS requirements or I lock people out of advancement in the ACS.

I don’t like any of those options, but currently I think that just leaving the obsolete courses intact for a few more months is the least crappy path forward. This is something I’m interested in hearing your opinions on, and something that I might change tack on.

Staff and Projects Update

In addition to what I’ve mentioned above, we have several courses in the works.

• Societies: Aurora Collegium (Zuza): Those who’ve been subjected to my rambling about course design know that I view the course notes as the most important part of any SA course. And for the SA’s own society, well, there aren’t really any course notes. So Zuza is not only transferring some content over from the wiki, she’s designing a format that we’ll reuse as we freshen up our courses on the other societies. Zuza’s got a first draft waiting for my review. Once we have this squared away, we’ll be updating the existing society courses and creating new ones for the Envoy Corps and the new ACC society.

• Brotherhood History I: Becoming the Brotherhood (Arch): Our existing DB history courses are five years out of date and very heavily focused on names and dates. I want to not only bring them into recent history, but also to highlight bigger themes throughout our history. The DBs of 1995, 2005, 2015, and today felt like very different places, in- and out-of-character, and I’m hoping that I can make something that represents the breadth and scale of the history that members have to draw from without overwhelming them with minutiae. This is a lower priority for me than the editing, staging, and deployment of the courses

• Art Fundamentals Series (Nora): This is in active development but probably won’t see publication for a while yet. Nora’s got the draft finished for the first course in this series, but we agree that this really needs to be a coherent series. This series is intended to

• From Member to Leader (Kamjin): This is intended to be the foundation course for our revised leadership curriculum, basically laying out what leadership in our club looks like and the many ways that members can give back to the Brotherhood and their fellow members. Kam made me a PowerPoint on this a while back (yeah, it was pretty hot) and is working on the course notes now.

Eleceos and Zen are already working on their next projects, but I’ll stay mum on the details until we get a little bit further along on those.

Be Gay But Don’t Do Crime

Like several of my predecessors, I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of busy work in SA exams. If there doesn’t need to be an essay, there shouldn’t be an essay. If we’re actually asking you to write something, it’s because we believe it’s important for what the course is trying to help you with. Look at the new courses, for example. The starships and speeders exams are short and autograded, because they’re there mostly to direct your attention to the key points where we thought you might get stuck in the process. I’m not asking you to write me a treatise on naval tactics or design a new walker, because that’s not what the course is for. On the other hand, Character Development is just open-ended questions, because Zen and I are trying to give you a space to work through some exercises. Those exercises are, like the rest of the course, intended to help you improve as a writer.

Recently, we had an exam submission that the grader and I agree was most likely generated using ChatGPT or a similar large language model AI.

Using AI, or really any source that isn’t you, to generate your exam answers undermines the entire point of the SA. And it is a serious risk for you as well. As the Cov defines it, “Cheating means the use of any dishonest or unfair act for the purpose of gaining an advantage.”

We cannot with complete accuracy tell if a given exam submission was written by an AI tool. Atra will not issue charges because I have a hunch, nor should he. But when we encounter an instance of suspected cheating, we will report it to the CoJ and work with them to compare that to your other submissions in and beyond the SA. Consider this the first and last warning.

Cheating makes Jennifer Coolidge cry, and what kind of monster does that during Pride Month?

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or Archenksov#2230.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Activities 103: Graphics
- Added Image Credits section. Thanks Bale and Vyr!
Activities 104: Roleplaying
- Updated to reflect the new /rp list command
Activities 105: Vendettas
- Reworded a question to be more clear and less of a gotcha (Eiko)
- Added Image Credits section. Thanks, Kris!
Essentials 101: Welcome to the Brotherhood
- Added Image Credits section. Thanks again to Koda, Noobi, and Aylin!
Essentials 102: Progression
- Added Image Credits section. Thanks to Aylin and Noobi!
Essentials 103: The Brotherhood's Galaxy
- Adjusted based on an issue with faction documentation (Eiko)
- Corrected a broken link (TuQ)
Comms 101: Website Navigation
- Corrected an exam question based on changes to one of the factions (Honsou)

CHARACTER CREATION & DEVELOPMENT
Creatures & You
- Fixed images to use site assets instead of Imgur (Eiko)
Wiki Basics: Character Creation
- Updated the wording of two questions for clarity

COMBAT & WARFARE
Lightsaber Combat
- Altered language in the exam for more consistency in how lightsaber forms are named (Qormus)
Ranged Weaponry Studies
- Removed references to deprecated feats
- Fixed broken links (Qormus)
Personal Starships
- New course by Eleceos! Special thanks to him and Essik for submitting art for the course notes.
Personal Speeders
- New course by Eleceos!

WRITING
Character Development
- New course by Zentru'la! Special thanks to Zuji, Moro, and Atty for submitting art for the course notes
Poetry Studies
- Updated an exam question to use the more common term "acrostic poem" instead of "line poem" (Zen)