Search Results

Schedule: Week in the Life June event consists of two back to back events - the Weekday portion begins on Wednesday, and players may arrive any time after 12 noon. This event runs through to Friday afternoon at 12pm, when we will have a soft lay off. Some players may remain in game between the soft lay off and lay on for the weekend event, which happens at our typical time of 10pm. Soft Lay Off Friday: On Friday there will be a soft lay-off starting at 12pm until 10pm for players to bring their cars onsite and set up for the weekend. You may still roleplay and play as you like, but some folks will be out of game. Arrival: For the weekday portion, when you arrive, come to logistics to check in and complete your safety waiver as normal. James may be present to do check-in directly, but if he is not, his phone number will be publicly posted, and you should call him in order to complete your check in. Check in will run as normal for the Weekend event. If you have already checked in for the Week and paid for the weekend, you will not need to come back to check in again on Friday. Combat: During the week portion of the event (from Wednesday until Friday lay on at 10pm) there will be no roving combat nor combat mods. Combat will be allowed only in the context of specific “games” (Trollball, Tiger Ball, etc). Alcohol: Alcohol consumption will be allowed on camp for players over the age of 21, during the Weekday portion only. The goal of allowing alcohol consumption at this event is not to encourage heavy intoxication, and we encourage responsible consumption. We will not be limiting the amount of alcohol nor types of alcohol you can bring, but reserve the right to ask you to stop consuming if your behavior is indicative of heavy intoxication. Alcohol consumption should end well before the beginning of the full weekend event, no later than Friday at 2pm. Our zero tolerance policy for alcohol or recreational marijuana use or possession on camp will be in effect on Friday at 10pm, unless these substances are stored in your car for the remainder of the event. Marijuana: Marijuana for recreational use will be allowed on camp during the weekday event, but you must follow the same guidelines as we set forward for alcohol (no extreme intoxication), as well as our guidelines for smoking if applicable (please only smoke or vape in outside areas, away from building entrances and other people). Fire Safety: Continue to adhere to our fire safety guidelines, including making sure someone is always attending a fire until it is put out and the embers stop smoking. Logistics: Whenever you have need of logistics for gathering components, bank transfers, or anything else that needs to be handled immediately please seek out one of our roving logistics coordinators - this will definitely include James and Drew, and may include others - we’ll announce a finalized list closer to WITL. If we cannot handle it immediately in the field we will set a time to meet at logistics to resolve any issues. This will apply only during the weekday event; logistics window will function just as normal during the weekend event. NPC Shifts: Players will not be responsible for NPC shifts during the weekday portion, but will do shifts as normal during the weekend. Learning Skills: Skills, Abilities, and Points learned during the extended portion of the event are considered learned for the second portion of the event. This includes using skills learned as a prerequisite during the first part, which may be used to learn new skills during the second portion. Food Service: There is no formal food service during the Weekday portion. Please plan accordingly. Bar Crawl: We will not be hosting a game run bar crawl this year. Players are still invited to host their own events with food and alcohol (only provided to players of legal drinking age). We ask that any event that does provide alcohol make sure to provide non-alcoholic options as well. You expressly cannot charge anyone out of game money for alcohol, and we will look closely at setups which include “suggested donations” in exchange for alcohol, so as to remain fully within legal parameters. Build/Cards/Paying/Patreon: For purposes of payment and of your character card, Weekday and Weekend count as separate events. To attend both, you will pay for both events, each at the base cost of $50. (Attending both events will be $100.) Patreon subscriptions of Tier III or higher will cover one of the two events, but you will need to pay separately for the other. You will earn the build you pay for (base or higher) separately for each event. If you attend both portions of the event, you will only be issued one card for both events (for learning skills and other instances that alter your card, note when it occurred, Part 1 or Part 2). Other announcements from James, applicable to WITL and ALL events: Throwing Food Trash in the Garden: We sometimes find that people have thrown compostable leftover food in the flowerbeds. While we understand why some people might think that this is OK, we need to spell out that it is not. We have constant weddings and the gardens need to be presentable for weddings. One week is not enough time for food trash to decompose or disappear from critters. Recreational Substance Use: We would like to remind everyone that Knight Realms has a zero tolerance substance use policy at events whether it is legal or not. This past event we were informed that the upstairs of the Dragon’s Claw had smelled like marijuana. The only instances we permit the use of mind altering substances is if they are medically prescribed and noted in a player’s medical notes. Otherwise, alcohol or legal drug use is only permitted during the Weekday portion of the Week in the Life. Medical use of marijuana, if consumed by smoking, must follow our guidelines for tobacco smoke products (staying away from groups/buildings/etc.) Parking: The area by logistics is not the parking lot. Unless you have been given express written permission for your car to be there for specific reasons (this is limited to the event runners, on call safety lead, the officers, Steve, and James, along with anyone given specific permission by James), you must use the front or main parking lots. Secondly, do not park on the road beyond the fire hydrant. The lot in front only goes as far as the gravel. If this is full, you must park in the main lot. Blood on the Posting Board: We found a stain of some kind of fake blood on the posting board in the Inn. It could not be cleaned off properly and now we need a new board. Please only post up clean paper on this board. The main hall is used for weddings and we do not want these kinds of stains around the areas that they use.

Hello! For some time now, James has been mulling over how alignments are represented in Knight Realms. While the current dynamic works, it is not what currently matches what he wants for the game. He's been working with a team to reframe the nature of alignment and how it fits with the cosmology of the game to be something a little easier to understand, and fit more with what he envisions. With the release of exalted lists coming out, he felt this was the best time to make this dynamic shift, as many players will be working towards new directions because of those classes. While it may not currently be reflected in the exalted classes as they will be shown to you immediately, this change should be coming out some time next week. To give a brief synopsis, the forces of Good and Evil are a sliding scale that increase in potency the further along you get on the scale. One side of the scale ranges from Order all the way to Good, and the other side ranges from Chaos to Evil. This is, of course, a very oversimplified explanation and a more in depth look will be made available soon. But he wanted to make you aware of this coming change. 🙂

Hello everyone! With the Exalted Classes release coming up for Week in the Life we need to start coordinating so that players can get to explore learning and playing with all the new classes we have to offer! Firstly, I would love to direct everyone who wants to learn an exalted class to fill out this form (Note only characters with all of their master classes learned, with at least one purchase of all 3 skills from each class are eligible): Exalted Class Form If you do not fill this form out, you will likely miss any chance of getting to experience anything at Week in the Life. If however you don’t, or you can’t attend Week in the Life, don’t worry as this won’t be your only chance. As James said in his post, not all classes are going to be ready. A list of classes that ready can be found in this link: Viewable Exalted Classes This folder will get continuously populated in the coming weeks as classes finalize, but please don’t ask the team when a specific class will be ready as there’s no reasonable answer we can give you other than “soon”. In all cases of being allowed to write into a class, or being scheduled to learn one, someone will be reaching out to you directly in the email you use in the poll. I know everyone probably has lot of questions, and I would ask that only the most urgent ones be directed to discord at: The Exalted Q&A Thread You will also find a list of a FAQ there on discord. Bear in mind the more time we spend answering questions, the less time we will have to finalize everything for the event, and I can assure you we are all working almost around the clock every day.

On the calendar, Week in the Life is listed as beginning on Tuesday June 6th on both the KR Calendar and the Camp Calendar. This is an error. WitL will be starting on Wednesday June 7th. We apologize for the mix up!

Hey everyone, this month we will be starting our influence system. The lands and some guilds and organizations will have an Influence task sheet. Completing activities on the task skeet earns influence points for the land, guild or organization. When those points accumulate those lands, guild or organizations may spend those influence points on benefits for their vassals or members. Soon we will also be adding a personal influence reward list that a character can purchase from for themselves. Players will have multiple ways that they can earn individual influence points in order to buy from this list! Details for this will come out after the event. In the first phase of this, the six lands, the rogues guild, the mystics guild and the Guard/inquisition will have task sheets. In the second phase we hope to add the church, a fighters type guild and a guild that represents the crafters. We will be working with players and already existing guilds to see if they want to move things over to this system. A third phase might allow for other groups to join this system but we are contemplating the details of what that would look like if we allow it to expand to encompass more than what is rolled out in the first two phases. - James

May 2023 Online Announcements Earliest arrival time on Friday will be 12pm. Check In will begin at 6pm on Friday. Opening Announcements and Lay On will be around 10pm Friday at the Inn. Layoff will be called at 2pm on Sunday. During cleanup on Sunday, please prioritize moving any of your belongings out of the Inn, especially the first floor! Sleeping Assignments have gone out, so if you have not received an email, reach out! Camp Advisory Please be cautious of ticks! Use an appropriately tick-repelling bug spray and check yourself thoroughly after being outdoors! Food Service There will be no official dinner tavern service this event. Breakfast will be served on Saturday. New Player Training New Player Training will be at 7:15pm Friday Night under the pavilion and there will be a new player tour mod going off at 11:30 am Saturday morning. First event new players should meet at the Inn before hand! Pre-Game Workshop There will be a joint workshop from Lore and Atmosphere at 9pm on Friday under the tent on “Freeform Roleplaying”. Reminders from the Atmosphere Team this month! -Roleplay your combat and sell your blows. It makes combat more fun for everyone. -Please stay in character. If for some reason you need to go out of game, please do so away from other players as to not impact their immersion and gameplay. Please do not interrupt a scene for an OOG comment unless its necessary. - Please do not openly use your phone. We get that there are times when you may need to check the time or check a rule, but please try to do these checks with your phone under a table or away from other players. - Please be mindful of your trash. Canned Food Drive The community Managers will be hosting a canned/nonperishable food drive during WiTL! You can drop off your items throughout the JUNE event into specially marked tubs in logistics. Donations given will be rewarded 1.5x the amount normally given. All the food will be then donated to the Sparta Community Food Pantry! (https://www.thespartacommunityfoodpantry.com) With everyone's help we can make the community that hosts our LARP a better place! Announcement from James on Exalted Lists In case you missed it…. https://www.knightrealms.com/post/exalted-release-announcement Rules Updates for May 2023 https://www.knightrealms.com/post/rules-updates-for-may-2023 Card Lead Office Hours Card Raptor Mara will holding Office Hours at game during the following hours: 11a-1p Saturday, and possibly Friday before lay-on/during Check In (if you see her around Logistics or the Inn before lay-on, feel free to approach about Cards topics!). With Exalted Lists starting to come out during June, if you have any pending card issues/questions/etc that you keep forgetting to discuss with her between games, now is your chance! She will have her computer with her to handle all those things she always tells you we can't handle during a live event. Lore Lead Office Hours Lucian will be holding Open Office Hours at game during the hours of 10AM to 1PM Sunday outside of Logistics. This is a great time to come talk to him about things like backstories, pending Lairs/Lineages/Novelty titles, unique/restricted races and other such miscellanea! He will have his laptop with him to facilitate looking at write-ups if necessary and having a writeup link ready to go over is encouraged but not necessary! Additionally if you see him outside of Logistics at any other time with his laptop there can be impromptu discussion as he's likely just doing work for the game then anyways! Reminder from Kitchen Lead Please do not use kitchen sign off as a NPC shift unless you have spoken with James, Drew, Alice or Rob. Reach out to Rob (or the Officers or James) with any questions about what might qualify someone to use bar service or food service in lieu of an NPC or Marshal shift.

Exalted Release Announcement Hello everyone! I have some incredibly exciting news for you all! We will be releasing the Exalted Lists for play at the Week in the Life June event! What does this mean? There’s going to be a bit of a hectic schedule going on soon because of it, and in order to minimize the amount of trouble to those working on getting this done, I’m going to go over exactly how I’ve instructed this to be done. First and foremost, not all of the exalted classes will be released at this time because some of them may still not be complete. This project has been a mountain of work, and the people working on it have already devoted untold hours to it. So what classes are done will become available at week in the life, and any other classes or branches of classes will be completed later. Do not harass any of the people working on this release if a class you want isn't ready for the first release or if you are not happy with the class. Later on after the lists have been released and players have played them for a while I will consider updates if desired by the players or needed. I will solicit feedback over the coming months in a productive and effective manner, intent on a fast turnaround time. Please keep criticism productive instead of throwing around any generalized negativity in the community. Step one of this process is that we will be releasing a poll on Tuesday at the earliest for you to tell us specifically which classes you will be purchasing at Week in the Life. This will only be for those who can open their classes at that event. This is so we can prioritize making sure as many of those are complete as possible. Alongside this, we will be publicly releasing every class that is currently completed with their lore and achievements, and requirements. Feel free to look at this before submitting your answers. You should only be submitting for the classes you are 100% certain you will be picking up at that event. Step two is that we will be building a schedule of when/how the class teachers will be coming out to make sure everyone is taught the lore correctly and manage the expectations of how they should be playing these classes. More details about this step in particular will be posted later. In addition to this, Lucian will be posting a form about how to drop your 20th Anniversary alignment, if that is something you want to do in order to qualify for a different class. However, doing so will come with some amount of consequences. If applicable, classes will be taught during the weekday portion of the event as well. I want to take a moment to be very clear about this situation. I do not want to hear anyone yelling at or berating or getting upset with the people who have been working tirelessly on this project. It was my decision to formally release these classes this way because I would much rather get out what we have than wait longer for everything to go all at once. The project as a whole will get done when it gets done, there is no hard set deadline on that. If you are hard set on a class that is not immediately available when they are shown, just fill out the form to express your intent to get the class and the team will endeavor to have it ready. I am requesting that until after July, please do not do things that would require extensive attention from the Lore and Atmosphere Leads or Rules Dev until after July. We are excited to be able to finally allow some of this to go live and we hope that you can enjoy the advanced rules content we put out there! James ;)

Rules updates for May 2023! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ugl4dke0pCQlHnrovQ0I6shq0SRNLrd9aiRKrPIVFSE/edit?usp=sharing

This message is copied over from the previous forums for posterity. This is a public address from the director, James Kimball. After much thought, I have decided that it is time to share an extremely large brain dump with you as well as make some changes around here. I am going to share with you my most vulnerable but real thoughts on many different subjects including controversial ones, explain what I believe are aspects of the organization that have gone sour, and what is going to be done about that. This post may leave some of you cheering, but some parts may be uncomfortable to read as I intend to say things that some may find hard to swallow. This is going to be a very long post but honestly is something every Knight Realms player should read to completion. My Personal Situation For the last 25 years, running Knight Realms has been my full-time job. Until recent years, it was my only income. Because it was my only source of income, the loss of even a single player, let alone the loss of a group of players, affected my livelihood. About eleven years ago, I miraculously was able to take out a million-dollar loan to buy a permanent home for the game, dramatically improving its atmosphere and quality of life to a degree almost impossible to achieve by just renting a campsite. Existing under the massive weight of this loan exacerbated my dependency on having a high quantity player base and needing to not lose many players. Under the dynamic of this dependency, I feel as if I allowed myself to be bullied and even worse allowed the community to foster some really bad habits. Since 2020, my financial situation has changed dramatically. Knight Realms now makes up a very small amount of my income and the uncomfortable truth is that if Knight Realms folded, I would make more money. Thankfully I really don’t need to make more money and Knight Realms is in many ways like a child of mine so my connection to it is more about love and less about income. Because of this shift in my dynamic, I finally feel free. I feel free to not allow myself to feel bullied or held hostage. I feel free to stop fostering the communities’ bad habits even if needing to be harsh costs me players in the process. I feel free to do what I want to do, which quite frankly after investing my entire adult career and well over a million dollars into it all, I deserve. When I say that I feel free to do what I want, I'm not talking about abandoning feedback, criticism or reason. I am more than fine with criticism and feedback, it is in fact an extremely vital part of the process. I always have and still do take lots of feedback and criticism. At some point decisions need to be made and topics need to be met with resolution one way or the other. Doing what I want means that I don't have to feel pressured or even worse, bullied into making decisions I still don't believe in after weighing all the feedback . I have also heard the comment drifting around that because I no longer make my living from Knight Realms, I will be discarding it to the side and not putting time, money or effort into it. That sentiment could not be any farther from the truth. Because I no longer need Knight Realms to survive I am free to tell people when they need to get their act together without survival related fears. This one dynamic alone will herald a big improvement. Without nebulous red tape systems in place I will push out positive updates to the game without fuss. Because I am a wealthier person nowadays, I can spend money on things the game needs without hesitation. The game will not suffer from my lack of necessity for it, it will benefit from it. Politics, Religion and Bigotry We have always told people to leave their politics and their religion behind when they are dealing with our community. We are here to play the game and not to get wrapped up in the drama of strong political or religious beliefs. This includes using your own political or religious beliefs as a moral compass for others. It is unreasonable to require that your fellow gamers, larpers, and KR members share your political or religious beliefs and it is absolutely unacceptable to treat them like garbage if they do not. This may sound bizarre to you if you equate your beliefs as the standard of human decency or high morality. The truth that is hard to swallow for some is that your beliefs are simply your personal beliefs and not a standard that everyone else must agree with or suffer the punishment of being labeled a bad person. Without question, there are overarching topics that the Knight Realms business itself has labeled as unacceptable. Racism, bigotry, bullying, abuse and hate speech are all examples of things that Knight Realms, as a business, takes a firm stand against and does not condone. However, there are other topics that become more nuanced in their discussion and discernment. Political affiliations such as Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Libertarian, Communist or religious affiliations such as Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, or Mormon do not label someone as a bad person. We don't condone statements or behavior that shame fellow members for being a part of any of those groups. In the same vein, the topics revolving around the ethics of Vaccination status, of AI art, or whether or not you can pay for and enjoy a product that has controversial shareholders, CEOs, or creators behind them are all too nuanced and emotionally charged for Knight Realms to take a stance in. We don't condone statements or behavior that shame fellow members for taking either side in those topics. It is possible you are knowingly or unknowingly friends with someone, possibly very good friends with someone, who has a differing opinion about these topics. Having a differing opinion about these topics does not automatically make someone a bad person or uncaring of their friends within the community. This community is not the place to try to force someone to feel like garbage about their opinions. Simply put, leave it out of the KR community. Things that we can all agree are unacceptable behavior include: not respecting an individual's requests about their own identity, such as purposefully misgendering people or purposefully deadnaming people, making derogatory statements about a person’s sexuality, making derogatory statements about the color of a person’s skin, heritage, culture, or economic class, or making derogatory statements about a person’s culture, religion, or political affiliation. Commentary, statements, or beliefs like these are completely unacceptable in Knight Realms and I will be the first to tell you that we do not want you in this community. I was going to say that we are not the thought police, but we are the thought police. If you think being gay is a disease we don't want you in our community. The thing is that we as an organization have a line to cross in which your thoughts and beliefs are unacceptable to the organization. Some of you have a VERY different personal line. Along with everything else on our line, we also do not blanket discriminate based on stereotypes. We do not engage in blanket guilt-by-association behavior. When it comes to levels of association, there is a huge difference between high fiving a self proclaimed clansmember and just wanting to eat your chicken sandwich of choice in peace. You can boycott stuff to your heart's content, but you cannot force someone else to boycott something and label them as a bigot if they are just not at all into boycotts. When you are in our community you need to be respectful of OUR line and you cannot insist that people in the community live by YOUR line. It is OK for you to have your own personal line, but it is not OK to criticize other people's lines and bully them in the process. If this form of bullying feels good in your head, keep it in your head and out of the community, because we don't accept any form of bullying here, including bullying that you may incorrectly label as righteous. I want to emphasize the point of this section is that we want Knight Realms to be a safe neutral space for all our players to feel comfortable in. We are all here to play a game and escape reality for a while talking about and playing in our fantasy world. We are not here to suffer the pains, struggles and fights of real life. Being a reasonable person has to matter and I am getting to a stage in my life where I am growing tired of tolerating unreasonable behavior. The Rules When I originally wrote the Knight Realms rules 25 years ago, I wrote them with the philosophy that whatever is the most fun is what the rules should be. Our original rules might have been fun to many but were wildly disbalanced and unstructured. Over the years people who care about game balance and structure as well as the fun would chime in and get involved with the rule process. In some iterations of the rules the game balance and structure seemed to have a natural side effect of reducing the fun of the rules. All of the rules authors have always had the best intentions in mind and it more or less came down to trying to tip the scales in one direction or the other, finding a balance or not finding a balance. At the end of the day we learned several times the hard truth that you can never make everyone happy because different people enjoy different rules. Feelings and emotional reactions around the game rules have at times been wild and bizarrely unacceptable. People who have worked on the Knight Realms rules have oftentimes been treated like absolute trash by their peers and in the most extreme cases I recall the occasional death threat being levied. When it comes to rules, almost everyone believes that they can do better than the person standing next to them and almost everyone wants to be involved in writing them. Letting that happen is a recipe for disaster and also pure chaos and perpetual gridlock. No matter who is in charge of rules at a given year in Knight Realms they usually become labeled a bad person with bad judgment who is biased, is ruining everything and does not know what the hell they are doing. They take this abuse all while literally spending most of their precious free time to try to make things better for the players. This dynamic is absolutely wild and also happens to be unacceptable. I apologize to the rules writers who have undergone such abuse in the past, I should have spoken out sooner on how wildly inappropriate some behavior is. It is fine for a player to dislike rules changes, even strongly dislike them; what's not fine is to verbally, emotionally or socially attack the authors behind those changes. I have also learned over the last two and a half decades that players often have a trauma response to having the rules change on them; this often happens regardless of whether the changes are positive or negative. Change itself can just be flat out jarring. Let me allay your fears and tell you that I have no plans to overhaul the rules again, even if I am not completely satisfied with them now. I am in fact mostly satisfied with them and from here on out I will only be making minor changes and only changes that I can feel confident will be well received by most. Most of these changes I will make on my own instead of using a dedicated rules team, just like the good ole days. I'll follow my gut instincts to make improvements where I feel they will do the most good. Staff Availability In the past, the staff, and especially the rules team, have worked a tireless amount of hours on Knight Realms, and at times to an unhealthy degree. Part of this is because of unrealistic expectations for deadlines, but it has also been because of players' demands and expectations of the staff’s time. Anyone who volunteers for Knight Realms as staff or marshal is just that: a volunteer. They are giving their time to work on the game, and while the game only expects a minimum amount of time committed, some players have demanded much more of our staff, so much so that previous staff were harassed for doing things not related to the game such as going to see a movie or playing computer games, and most unacceptably harassed for going to school or work or sleeping. Projects, system updates, and anything else will get done when they get done. We are past the days of trying to meet unrealistic expectations for these things to be put out at the expense of the staff’s well being. There are times that staff members will be unavailable, which may be for a day, a weekend, or even longer, and that must be accepted. They will get to your questions or comments when they operate within their decided Knight Realms working hours, even if they are physically available and even talking to you in the moment. Sometimes they may take time to think about how to answer your question and deserve patience when trying to come to that answer. I myself will often take at least a day or more to craft responses to larger topics and have seen, in real time, the aggression that asking for patience is met with. The staff are not workhorses or robots. They are human beings with reasonable limits and their work hours and their personal time needs to be respected. Staff and in-game leadership The staff of Knight Realms and the in-game nobility is supposed to be held to a higher standard of behavior than normal players. Despite this always having been the case, we have never really enforced this higher standard of behavior. Instead, we have had some staff members and in game nobility acting below that standard both in and out of game without consequence. Both of these things are going to have to be addressed immediately if we are going to push for a real improvement to the community. Staff members of all levels and nobility are going to be sent a letter describing what behavior is acceptable to perform while still holding their position and what behavior is grounds for removal. Having this spelled out in detail and very clearly, I will be confident in removing them for infractions. All of these individuals will be given the chance to read over the standard that they need to abide by and if they do not feel that it is reasonable to them or if they do not feel like they have any chance of abiding by them, they can immediately step down with no hard feelings. After anyone steps down, we will likely be posting an application process to fill any of the marshal positions for those who wish to be considered. I will also be assessing the state of our lands and large game sponsored groups. Some of them lack proper leadership, and I will aggressively be considering and refilling those positions with people I feel will be able to do the job by our standards. It is not a given that those replacements will be already affiliated with those groups although I will do my best to make sure I believe that the people will be compatible with their new leadership. Take responsibility for your own mental health and well being On some level you have to take responsibility for your own mental health, wellbeing and comfort levels. Knight Realms as an organization can and does help by giving players an OK check in system and the ability to walk off mods or encounters if the content is too much for them. We also have put some limits on content that is sent out. However if we continuously remove content possibilities because a player has any level of personal trauma about it then you all will be playing some pretty boring stories. We will remove the most egregious of situations from play. You will never have to encounter an NPC sobbing in your arms and telling you they were raped. It’s just too heavy a lift to ask when we are trying to have fun playing pretend. However, past that example, you will not find many other topics that are completely and strictly forbidden to run as content. If content bothers you on an OOG level you have the right to ignore it and remove yourself from the scene or situation. At any given time, there is plenty of other stuff to focus on in an open world game. Disengage, decompress and then re-engage with something else that feels good to you. This sentiment holds true for non-mental health as well. If you do not drink water, sleep, take your meds, play safely, take precautions equal to your concerns, etc., you will be putting not only yourself at risk but others around you. It is irresponsible for you to not take basic care of yourself and put others in a situation where they must deal with it. Your friends are here to enjoy playing a game with you. They are not here to be burdened with your baggage or saddled with taking care of you. They may be really great people who are happy to help you, but with all honesty they did not come here for that specific purpose, and you are pushing that role upon them by not taking basic care of yourself. Don’t make people walk on eggshells around you If we are thinking about asking you a question or dealing with you in some fashion and we pause and stress out because we are worrying about your reaction or your delicate sensibilities, then something is wrong. Whatever behavior you have displayed to put someone else in a headspace of being afraid to deal with you is bad behavior. Your reaction might be to take things personally whenever you're approached, but you do not need to feed your paranoia, and you do not need to be defensive. At any point we are trying to reach a common ground, so it would benefit both of us if you make an effort to be less difficult, because I am not going to put myself and the staff through further undue stress. We are going to be more willing to let anyone with that kind of attitude go. It’s just not worth the stress that I and the staff suffer. I am simply asking you for a reasonable amount of respect. If you give it, you will get it back. You will receive back, whatever it is that you give out, in equal measure. If you come at me with no chill, I am going to give you no chill right back and you are not in a position to win that fight. There are many people who just need to display like 20% more chill. The Community’s Worst Bad Habit (Being shitty to one another) If you have made it past all of the other stuff, congratulations and I have saved the most important thing for last. We/I have been allowing the community to form the bad habit of being shitty to one another with little consequence. We need to make an immediate change and take a complete 180 stance. It’s the only way we are going to shift the community behavior in any reasonable timeframe. What we are moving towards is a zero-tolerance stance on being shitty. Zero tolerance does not mean that we are banning and suspending people left and right, it means that we are calling you out on your behavior in real time, on the spot or as close to it as humanly possible. We are not going to wait and bring your behavior up in a meeting and then decide whether to address it, we are just going to stop whatever we are doing, and pull you aside the second we witness it or hear about it and tell you to stop being shitty. Does this sound uncomfortable? It should. You should not feel comfortable acting like an asshole. You should be able to realize what you are doing, show remorse for your behavior, apologize and say that you will do better and then get back to the game. No one is going to begrudge you for the mistakes you will most likely make. What is needed is acknowledgement, an apology and a desire to do better. Most players can and will slip up, but as long as the player is showing awareness and improvement then we will be good. The issue will only likely dwell into the realm of suspensions if the behavior continuously persists with no reasonable show of improvement. Who will be doing this? It will be me alone who will be calling people out on the spot for their bad behavior. I’m not sure that it will work well at all if I allow others to do this for me. This means I may not witness every situation, but as soon as someone tells me about something that happened, I will find the people involved. You can attempt to calmly explain why you think you are being misunderstood in the situation. I will try to be calm with you as I explain why you need to do better, but keep in mind that my time is now being wasted because of your behavior and that irritation might come through. I warn you now, If I point out your behavior to you and your reaction is to fight me hard on it, I will not take that behavior from anyone. You will be benched on the spot and suspended from play until you can act like a reasonable person. The great news is that if you are a reasonable person who doesn’t get visibly mad and upset at other players and lose your cool, most of this probability will not apply to you at all! If you are the kind of player prone to outbursts, trash talking, bullying behavior, bad sportsmanship, or being mean to your fellow players then get prepared to have me talk to you several times an event and then suspend you if the frequency of this behavior doesn’t noticeably reduce. If I must, I will spend my entire weekend telling people they are dicks, and then in an effort to free up my precious time that is being monopolized by BS, I will start telling the worst offenders not to return to the game. I know this sounds intense… but it’s actually a VERY good thing. The people who are afraid after reading this and rethinking their attendance probably should be. The people who are cheering in their seats reading this can look forward to a healthier and more fun gaming environment. OK, but what will James actually be doing? Do I plan on screaming at you and bullying you? No. With most of you I have built up long-lasting personal relationships and I also have no desire to scream at people I don't know either. Whether I point out your behavior in public or in private is going to depend on some factors, but understand that my primary goal is not to shame you, I am trying to get us all used to adjusting our culture down a more positive path. If I speak to you in public my words might be tempered and if I speak to you in private they might be sharper, but that won't always be the case as the details surrounding each situation can be different. If I speak to you about your poor behavior, it is not a sign that I dislike you or that we are no longer friends. If I point out your poor behavior it's because it's my job to do so and also because it's far kinder to you to point out your shortcomings so you can improve, rather than allow you to think that it's acceptable to double down on them. The very second after I have pointed out your poor behavior and you have acknowledged it, I am ready to get back into the role of being your friend. Some of you may not react well to having your shortcomings pointed out to you either because of your ego, feeling defensive, or something else. This next sentence might sound hard, but it is true. While I may care about you a great deal, your feelings and your ego are not my problem at that moment, they are yours and you need to manage that problem with grace and wisdom or end up in an even worse situation. What we need to do is get used to a few new things. We need to get used to understanding that we have to be kinder to one another. We have to get used to the fact that some of us will slip up periodically and get called out for it. We need to be able to understand that even after those situations we are still friends who just want the culture to change for the better. I can tell you that you acted poorly and need to do better; and right after we can fist bump and fall right back into being friends. That’s where we need to be at, to make this work. The Purge For the last 25 years, almost like clockwork every six to eight years there has been an exodus of players. Sometimes they felt like all bad people who needed to go anyway and sometimes it felt like I was losing my best friends. I have learned that it is what it is and life goes on. When a large group of players talk about leaving the game, it is not my first rodeo, it’s like my sixth and I’ve gotten really good at staying on the bull and at this point I feel like a fucking rodeo master. I say this not to sound like I’m happy to lose people I consider my friends, but to emphasize that it has happened before, and it may very well happen again, but I am steeled against the disappointment that comes with it when it does. I really do love everyone and wish we could all play together, but it just isn’t always in the cards. With any social organization the larger it gets the more personalities get involved. The larger personalities will clash with other larger personalities and create waves in the lake and those waves will turn into a churning storm until enough water splashes out that the lake is calm again. It happens and it will always happen. I think what might be different from this point forward is I do not intend to let people get away with being shitty towards one another anymore. The purge will still likely happen like clockwork anyway but at least I will have the peace of mind to know that assholes are being told when they are being assholes. (plot twist – Assholes rarely realize that they are the assholes.) Personal Footnote: Something people may or may not know about my personal life is that my best friend committed suicide when presented with an ultimatum and a petition. I am not aware of very many trigger points for me personally, but this is one of them. I understand that sometimes people put together these ultimatum lists with what feels like good intentions to them at the time, but these lists do not work on me and have a very opposite effect. When I read a quit list, instead it becomes a fire these people list in my head. I will fire anyone in a position of authority in my organization that puts their name on a threatening to quit list. If you have a problem or dislike a policy you can bring it to my attention, just not in the form of an ultimatum petition. Whether one person has an issue or twenty people have an issue, the importance of that issue is all the same to me. You don't need to gather numbers for dramatic effect. Ending Thank you for taking this journey with me and reading this entirely too lengthy post. Some of you may totally get it and think that everything I said makes sense and some of you may perceive this as a crazy and unhinged rant. Some of you may have some in between thoughts as well. Whatever you think after reading this I am at peace and feel so much better after having said it and I am excited for the future no matter what it looks like. The practical takeaway from this should be: In order to create a healthier community for everyone, I am no longer putting up with poor behavior and bad attitudes. Zero tolerance. You will be spoken to every single time you do it and will be suspended or banned if you do not show improvement over time. We all need to act according to a higher standard, especially those in positions of authority. The most important part of this is being nicer to one another but it also includes not pressuring your fellow players into having to follow your personal standard of beliefs. The community will be a much safer place for everyone and a friendlier one and I look forward to enjoying it with you. - James

Please fill out the sleeping space RSVP and event RSVP if you plan to attend the May 2023 Knight Realms Event! https://forms.gle/hADx3xDf6FmWyeT2A Take a moment to read the notes at the top, as some of them have changed, specifically relating to non-combat sleeping areas. This form will close late on Monday, May 1 or early on Tuesday, May 2 and you should receive sleeping assignments via email on Wednesday, May 3.

Due to moving the forums over to the discord, we made a page specifically for posting important announcements and straight talk posts that would likely get cross-posted on the discord as well. Things might be a little bumpy as we transition. Thank you for your continued patience as we continue to update our social media presence!