The Sword's Edge

Issue 20: 9th September, 2017 - In Ferro Veritas

Welcome to issue TWENTY of The Sword's Edge! Our members are gradually all returning from summer vacations, and ramping up towards going back to school and going back to work after some well deserved relaxation time - activity in game has been a lot of fun, and it is great to see since the launch of SW:L that many members interest in playing and teaming together is not waivering.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing to helping keep our cabal fun and active in-game, and of course to everyone who has contributed to this months issue of our newsletter!

Interview with...

By Helixia

This month, Helixia caught up with Penelopiad!

Helixia: Hello Pene. You have been with Nine Swords for a little over a month now, and you were involved in activities all over the place. How are you enjoying it?

Penelopiad: Hi, Hel! :) I’m still having an absolute blast in Nine Swords! The people here are unbelievably nice and whenever I’m online I will find someone to play with. I couldn’t really ask for more.

Helixia: Is there a story behind your character's name?

Penelopiad: Yes, there is indeed one, but I’m not so sure if it’s a particularly interesting story hehe. So when I started playing TSW in February of this year I struggled to find a nickname for my character because virtually every reference for a name that I could think of has already been taken. I grew a little bit frustrated about that and started gazing over my book shelf where I saw a novel – “The Year of the Flood” by Margaret Atwood – which I once had to read for a literature class. Rather than skimming through a few pages, my lazy self looked up the plot summary on Wikipedia. Although I had no luck finding a cool name there, I spotted a novella called “The Penelopiad” on the author’s Wiki page. I instantly thought that it was a pretty unique name and fortunately no TSW player seemed to agree with my assessment. So that’s how I ended up with that name for my character.

Helixia: What is your favorite thing to do when away from the computer?

Penelopiad: This is actually a tough one because my favorite activities revolve around sitting in front of a computer. :D When I don’t do that, I like to visit the movie theater or read a book once in a while. I must admit, however, that my unread pile of shame has grown to Babylonian heights and with SWL devouring most of my time, this is not likely to change in the near future.

Helixia: Do you have a favorite TSW/SWL memory?

Penelopiad: One memory that I can think of right now is seeing the cutscene before the final boss in the Polaris dungeon for the first time. I got legit goosebumps when the Ur-Draug suddenly appeared next to the chopper, as I always looked forward to that encounter since seeing the loading screen with him. H.P. Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors so that moment definitely gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Helixia: What is your favorite in-game activity?

Penelopiad: But there are so many! I can tell you my least favorite which would be running E5 dungeons because that triggers my Dark Souls-PTSD. If I had to narrow it down though, I would say any running lairs which is actually astounding to me, since I always saw myself as more of a lone wolf-type of player.

Helixia: Is there anything you would like to see happening more often in the Cabal?

Penelopiad: Generally I’d like to see more scheduled events in the events calendar which looks awfully empty as of now. I’m aware that organizing events can be time consuming and not everyone has the motivation to do so, but last month’s busy schedule was one of the things that really impressed me about Nine Swords and I’d love to see that again in the future. Also, a very important request – social gatherings such as Sharpening the Blades. Those are so much FUN! :)

Helixia: If someone would ask you why should they join Nine Swords what would you tell them?

Penelopiad: If you are looking for a group of genuinely nice and fun people that care for and help each other, they should definitely check out Nine Swords. You will be representing a cabal that embodies the principles of cooperation and courtesy that makes the SWL community hands down THE best gaming community I’ve ever seen and I’m not even exaggerating when I say that.

Nine Swords Relaunched – A (Legendary?) Summary!

By Durendal

It’s now almost three months since we have all decided to take the leap from an old cabal in The Secret World to a brand-new start in Secret World Legends. I wanted to take this opportunity to summarize what this meant to us, as well as to give some inspiration on how to move on from here.

The most defining difference for us as a cabal, besides differing game mechanics and a new business model for the game, was the incredible amount of fresh blood and innovative ideas that shook up our community. It’s both really refreshing, as well as slightly scary to have an evening with 35 other people online in the cabal, where we were normally used to field a raid of 10 people on the days where something was scheduled on our calendar. Topics like how to effectively share the cabal bank, identifying communication tools as well as structural shakeups to the divisions were also keeping many members and leaders busy and engaged in discussion. We also shouldn’t forget the heaps of work and getting used to those new avenues of information sharing that our website relaunch brought on.

After this initial rush of activity, I can already see the first signs of things settling down a little and new routines being developed. The recent game update bringing the New York raid back is going to take us back into the saddle of regular raiding, and we have groups that frequently head out and make the lairs safer from monsters. What’s quite important here as that we all are involved in getting those things done. Katelin already wrote about joining divisions in the last edition of this newsletter. The follow-up message I would like to convey here is that those members that do decide to join a division, and who then take on the job of organizing activities that others in the cabal can participate in, are what ensures both our activity as a group as well as the enjoyment of everybody’s time spent online in the game.

TSW in the Real World!

By Helixia

The Iele

The iele are one of the most fascinating entities in Romanian Folklore, their legend being carried over generations for hundreds of years. While not malevolent, they are creatures to be avoided, getting involved with them having a high probability of ending in death for the unfortunates that encounter them.

It is said that they are creatures of the forest, living in the deepest parts and only coming out in groups of 3, 5, or 7, dancing in forest clearings under the moonlight, most of the time completely naked or clothed in transparent veils. Their dance will burn a circle in the earth, leaving the entire area barren, plants will stop growing and animals will avoid the zone.

They are associated with the wind; Dimitrie Cantemir a Romanian prince in the 17th century, but also one of the greatest writers of his nation in that period considers them "air nymphs", that humans should always avoid. According to legend, those that encounter them are becoming extremely ugly, they are losing their minds or simply vanish. Their preferred victims are young men, that are easily seduced by their beauty and are easily convinced to join their dancing circle. However, this is the last mistake the victim will do, since it will be impossible for them to get out, the unfortunate soul dancing until he meets his end by exhaustion. Always, as the sun goes up in the morning the iele vanish, transforming themselves into wind.

The meaning of their name is also ambiguous. The most common explanation is that it is a variation of "ele" , which is the feminine form for the pronoun "them" in Romanian, while some folklore experts consider their name borrowed from the word "yel", meaning "wind" in the cuman language. However, everyone agrees that common people should avoid calling their name out loud, because this attracts them and bad luck soon follows.

They also have a good counterpart in the Sanziene, another group of young women that are linked with rebirth and harvest and are celebrated on the day of Summer solstice. It is said that on this night, people will dream their fated one to be married with and that if you don't respect the traditions, for example you do housework, the Iele will notice and they will come for you.

New ideas with quick solutions!

By Katelin

As a cabal leadership team, we strive to ensure that all our members have an idea of what is going on, how they can get involved with things and that our communication is maintained at a high level both ingame and via our forums. What we do notice though, is that some of our members need extra help finding things on our website or in our forums. Therefore, an idea was born.. and with the flexibility of our new website and CMS, a quick implementation was possible.

Nine Swords Info Cards

The new idea that was born this last month was the Nine Swords Info Cards. Primarily considered as a resource idea for our Academy team - it was quickly seen that the idea could actually be adapted for all our divisions.

InfoCards are clickable text links in game that we have created for our cabal members that provide information on topics that our members struggle with. The Infocards provide a quick reference for information such as Roleplaying, Voice chat, and website features. The scope for what we can include as information via our InfoCards is really open - our main goal with them is to help our members have information quickly and easily. 

All Nine Swords members have access to read our InfoCards. They can be found here in our directives section of the website. If you are not sure how to use Scripts in SW:L, you can also refer to the fantastic Scripting Guide in our Knowledge Base.

If you have an idea, but no content for the InfoCard - you can contact our Dussack Division (A&D). They will help you get in touch with the right people depending on the idea for the InfoCard.

If you want to write it yourself and just need it implementing into the website. You can contact me (Katelin) directly via PM with the script content. I will then create it into a new directive page for you so it is available for all our cabal members to use.

What's in a name?

Tazetta stepped up this month to share with us why he chose the name he did for his character! Why "Finella 'Tazetta' Baldenhall"?

Shocking to admit but TSW/SWL was not my first MMO - that honour belongs to LotRO. The first character I played in there was an elf and I spent a reasonable amount of time coming up with a lore appropriate name as I wanted to play on the RP server. So eventually I came up with ’Faerdhinen’ – which I thought roughly translated to ‘Silent Spirit’ or something like that – as that was the type of character I wanted to portray – I usually find it easier to roleplay characters close to my own persona. It was about my third LotRO toon that had the name ‘Finella’ (who was a very Fine Lady) and was shortly followed by my next toon a hobbit burglar. There was a trend to name hobbits, girl hobbits especially – but not exclusively! - after flower names. Of course, by now all the obvious ones - like Rose etc. had been taken. I got to thinking about various flower names and having a Welsh wife my thoughts drifted towards Daffodils – the national flower. That was taken but then I stumbled upon a variety of Daffodil called ‘Narcissus tazetta’ an ornamental variety which seemed a perfect fit for a small hobbit and ‘Tazetta’ was born. (‘Baldenhall’ just happens to be the place where I live.)

As I have drifted through various MMO’s I usually try to use the same names especially when migrating to games with group of friends. It certainly paid dividends when a very good friend of mine from LotRO bumped into me loitering in the gypsy camp in the Shadowy Forest. We had lost touch for a few years playing different games, but it was a special moment to meet up again…all because of ‘Tazetta’.

Sharpening the Blades - Your questions answered!

By Katelin

There are times at our workshops, during interviews to join the cabal or in this case, during Sharpening the Blades where questions are asked and the answers to the questions are things that can only be known by someone who has been really long time in the cabal .. or that really reads all of our forums! This was exactly the case at our US timeslot Sharpening the Blades in August - So Khaesia sent questions to me.

One of the things that many of our members want to know is ..

Where do the names for the Nine Swords divisions come from?

If any of our members look back through the massive backlog of posts we have in our forums - it is possible to see that prior to founding Nine Swords in TSW, we discussed EVERYTHING. Totally not an understatement, we discussed such a broad range of topics and possibilities for our cabal - there were even long discussions, with votes being cast for our cabal name. Why did we do it? Because our cabal being founded was important to us, and I am so glad we did take the time. The foundation that was built for Nine Swords has proven over time to give us a reason for being, all that attention to detail on naming things, considering our structure - deciding which colour our divisions should have *giggles* - well it has defined who we are. One of the discussions we had though started on Thursday 11th August and was entitled "The Departments".

It was during the pages of this discussion that we realised that Nine Swords could really be the nine parts of our cabal. That we wanted to draw on the number to provide a greater meaning for what we were setting up. Though it took us a little while to get to the point of realising the "Swords" part was just as important to us. The discussion actually started out with our divisions being given names like "Strike Team" for PvE, and "The Embassy" for Public Relations.. and for some reason "The Clergy" for our recruitment division. As we were starting out as a Templar cabal in TSW, we were very focussed on the Templars and also what type of game play we were interested in.

Then Pluto, one of our founding members, hit on the idea that each division could be named after a type of sword that would kind of denote the idea of the division it would be representing. 9 swords, 9 divisions of course ties everything together! The original idea he had was as follows:

• Leader: Sword of Justice (or executioner's sword)
• PvP: Khopesh
• PvE: Zweihänder
• RP: Gladius
• MC: Longsword
• Recruitment: Rapier
• A&D: Claymore
• PR: Cutlass
• Research: Pen (cause its mightier than the sword!)

As you can see from the listing, it was not all that far off from what we ended up with. And now you know who to blame when you cannot spell Zweihänder!!

By September, a few of our founding members managed to apply some reasoning for which Sword could be assigned where - and it was at this point that we were almost at the naming we have in place today

• Leader: Sword of State - the sword used by monarchs to symbolize the power of their state
• PvP: Misericorde - used to deliver the killing blow to mortally wounded knights
• PvE: Zweihander - big bad muthatruckin sword
• RP: Rapier -it's sharp and fast, something you have to be when roleplaying
• Recruitment: Hook Swords - it hooks and drags people in
• Public Relations: Estoc - no cutting edge, just a point
• Mission Control: Arming Sword - the sword used by knights, "without it knights would feel undressed"
• Advancement and Discipline: Dussack - a wooden training sword, a symbol for its use in advancing our members
• Research: The Pen - for it is mightier than the sword

The only change we subsequently then made, was for our leadership division. If you read the interview with me and Durendal in The Sword's Edge Issue 14, you may realise that the leadership sword that Durendal has as his avatar is based on his own name.

After finally deciding on the names of our divisions, we were very grateful that Beaubelle hand drew the avatars that we still have today for all our division members and leader avatars!