The Sword's Edge

Issue 23: 09.01.2018 - In Ferro Veritas

Welcome to the first issue of The Sword's Edge for 2018! We could not be more excited about what lies ahead for our cabal in 2018 - so many of our members have been sharing ideas and goals to set ourselves, that it is clear we are all looking forward. Some of these ideas and goals are outlined in this issue of our newsletter alongside a summary of our New Years 2018 Museum Reception event.

December saw some promotions into our divisions, and we are already seeing those members actively contributing to the day to day things happening in our cabal. I have no fear about sounding like a broken record - I shall keep singing this from the roof tops - Nine Swords will continue to be successful and have a strong and positive future ahead as long as we do this together. Our cabal is not driven by any one person, and not even just by our leadership team. Every single member in our cabal contributes to our successes!

This months newsletter is kicking off with something new for us - 2018 sees our newsletter team gain input from outside Nine Swords with Cordelia “Cordite” Harper ( @lilcordite ) coming on board to contribute guest writer pieces. You can read her article, as well as a fantastic short story from Mellified, a TA-DA moment from Kagehonoo and lots more .. just as soon as you grabbed your cuppa and biscuits!

~ Katelin

Our New Years 2018 Museum Reception

Yuriksha invited all of our members to attend the yearly Nine Swords Museum Reception and Tour, hosted once again at his British Museum of the Occult. It was a light social event where we not only had a good chat together, but we were able to walk around and look at the Museum's extensive exhibitions that have been established so far and of course take lots of pictures!

It was a great event and we enjoyed the turning of the year together and thinking about our 9S New Year’s resolutions, which we all agreed was a perfect opportunity to consider and develop new goals and ideas for our cabal. 

Career Week Summary!

Career Week was held in the week starting the 13th November 2017 from Monday to Sunday. The plan for whole week was to outline in mini sessions things that we have going on in Nine Swords - where we could use help, and where our members could think about whether they want to help out. The sessions enabled information to be shared and very open discussion. The following topics were addressed over the week:

• Promoting our Cabal
• Researching for our cabal
• The Sword's Edge
• Teaming in Nine Swords
• Events Division
• The Academy
• Recruitment

Although a lot of division joining information is shared within our Sharpening the Blades sessions - what Career Week identified was that we have a lot of ideas about specific projects going on in Nine Swords. It is definitely an event I am interested in holding again to gauge interest in areas, and allow us to develop new ideas in the future.

If you missed the event, Swords - then you can always review what was discussed in the catch-up thread. If topics appeal to you and you want to discuss how you could get more involved in something, then contact me (Katelin) or Durendal. Both of us are happy to listen to your ideas, point you in the right direction if you want to join one of our divisions or even make suggestions as to how you can use the skills you have to help our cabal.

Forum Profiles & Our Roster

Incase you missed it - Gebbeth is running a promotion this month and all you have to do is go and update Your 9S Website Profile (Roster) so that you have at least a character pic, your time zone, and what role(s) you play. Once you’ve done at least that much, meet Gebbeth in-game for a 6-pack of Free Beer! That is for EVERYBODY during the promotion period (If your character doesn’t drink, he will respect that – we can do diet Bing cola or something).

There is so so much you can do in your profile pages, just use the Edit menu button at the top. Katelin has developed a full set of instructions in the Directives to help with the UI (Your 9S Website Profile). 

SWL in the Real World

By TSE guest contributor: Cordelia “Cordite” Harper

This issue’s highlight is the real-world lore behind the Innsmouth Academy mission ‘To Sir, With Love’.

 

Journal and Buzzing entries reveal that as a boy, headmaster Hayden Montag unwittingly unleashed a Yazidi death curse that killed a dozen innocents, including his own mother — and summoned from “the realm of the Peacock King” a wraith known as ‘Mal’un the Accursed’.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish ethnoreligious group, based primarily in northern Iraq, that has endured centuries of persecution due to perceptions of their religion, Yazidism, as devil worship. This stems from the manner in which the Devil figure of the region’s other religions is treated in Yazidism.

The monotheistic Yazidism shares aspects with Zoroastrianism and the major Abrahamic religions; like the latter, it features a high-ranking angel who defied God and fell from grace. Unlike the Satan and Iblis of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, however, Yazidism’s equivalent — Melek Taus — was reconciled with God after millennia of repentance. Further, Yazidism reveres Melek Taus as a benevolent angel and a symbol of redemption, believing that evil comes not from some cosmic being but from the hearts and souls of man. It is not difficult to imagine how this interpretation could be construed by outsiders as worship of the Adversary.

Yazidi religious iconography depicts Melek Taus prominently as a peacock, his name translating as ‘Peacock King’ or ‘Peacock Angel’ — ‘melek’ being an Arabic loanword for ‘king’ or ‘angel’. This, then, is the ruler of the dimension Headmaster Montag’s spectral assassin came from, and if mission text is anything to go by (“blood calls for blood” in that realm, and Kirsten Geary describes “smoothing it over with the Peacock King” as a “PR nightmare” worth paying her “the big bucks”), Funcom’s vision of him and Yazidism might just turn out to be rather less benevolent than the real-world version!

As for Mal’un itself, the wraith’s name is likely drawn from the Arabic ‘malun’ for “one who is bereft of God’s grace” — accursed indeed.

Cordelia “Cordite” Harper
Twitter: @lilcordite
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Mom’s Kitchen

By Mellified

The Scene: Henry’s Hotdog Stand, NYC - early evening

Jules: “OK - lemme have another stab at it. Lemme see if I got it straight …”

Darius: “Hand me the pickles first”

Jules: “Knock yourself out”

Darius: “No, not those ya dope. Those are the incorrect condiment to be applied to hot dogs. The other ones. The ones with the red screw top. Who do you think you are? Some kinda fucking nouvelle fucking gourmet fucking artisan? I mean, fuck. Anyway - shoot “

Jules: “OK - this is how I dig the scene daddy-o: After we split and got straight outta Kingsmouth, the blonde with the eyes and the legs - the one that picked up that tank and tossed it down the alley like she was a pitcher for the Mets - she was some kinda northern european broad who had the hots for the dude in the shredded Camaro who crashed into the Secret Service guy who had his Toyota Prius serviced at the same garage as the dude’s old man. The Secret Service guy was on the radio to the White House about that seriously grim old book that had been passed down to the dude after his old man had been wasted by the martial arts expert who had been trailing the book since his organisation had found it on Iwo Jima and had put it on a troop carrier which had been sunk by some badass ugly as fuck underwater nightmare and it had floated round the world to the east coast of the USA like some bad case of the clap and been found by the dude’s father who was a dock worker.”

Darius: “I am finding no fault with your grasp of this seriously screwed situation thus far. Keep going bro - pass the mustard”

Jules: “Now get this … the blonde tracked down and creamed the nasty ninja and so acquired his sword which had some kinda history involving Norse myths and I dunno, Ikea, but she got jumped on her way to the laundromat by a long haired hippy flake who had scooby doo powers well exceeding his pay-grade and had knocked off the sword and then used it to slice and dice the Camaro and the dude and get the book. The flake then tried to complete some kinda airy fairy ritual in Times Square using the book but the Secret Service guy crawled into range and tried to rain on his parade with a rifle and then the dude from the Camaro appeared pouring blood and all kinds of guts and slipped on the book and kicked it into this motherfuckin’ huge hole that just appeared in the Times Square sidewalk. Then the big guy with the tentacles and the suckers popped up to say Hi and we helped to take him out with supremely extreme prejudice using our awesome handguns. Blam, blam, blam. The end, bar the cleaning up - and you’re sure gonna need more than just one pair of Marigolds for that mess I can tell ya. That’s all folks. You have dripped mustard down your tie ya clumsy fuck - ruining your customary sartorial elegance”

Darius: “A masterful retelling of our scenario. Did I ever tell you what they call frankfurters in Japan?”

What's in a Name?

To kick off this feature for 2018, one of our newest recruits Kagehonoo shared the reasons behind why he chose his in-game name

I'm very excited to meet you all. My name is Kagehonoo for the last 12 years at least. How the name to be, I was enjoying LoTR and this giant creature appeared and I was like WoW! that's cool. Everybody in the movie was screaming and running around in circles screaming Balrog! Balrog! and I was like nice!. Afterwards I found out that the name means something like born from shadow, fire and darkness. So my light bulb went on BING! when I next had to create a new character in some game, and TA-DA! ShadowFlame was born. Didn't live for very long because mostly everyone uses some form of this name so decide to translate it in some other language for some reason randomly decided to japanese so, Shadow - Kage and Flame - Honoo and Kagehonoo was reborn.

And he lived happily every after drinking the blood of his enemies, because he is totally not a vampire from Transilvania in real life.