The Sword's Edge

Issue 29: 9th July 2018 - Forged in fire, tempered through wisdom, sharpened by resolve.

What a month!! And the fun just keeps on going with this week being the final week of the MEGAVersary events. Our community has been out in full force to celebrate the first year of Secret World Legends - and because of that, the anniversary was definitely much much more than collecting achievements and loot. It was about us being together, about us finding other things to do than what we are normally doing day in, day out. 

On top of the SWL Anniversary and the MEGAVersary events - we also celebrated our 6th Anniversary together as a cabal. It seems so long ago that a group of us came together with the ideas for Nine Swords. Durendal and I are incredibly proud that the cabal has got this far and developed as it has done. 

 

Assuming you are reading this between Talos portal opening or social events - enjoy your break, have a cuppa and enjoy the look back over this last month!

~ Katelin

 

Changes in our Leadership team.

This last month has seen two changes in our leadership team - 

Shin

As I already posted on our website news feed, Shin, stopped by the forums to give us an update. With his update, he also announced that he will be stepping down as a leader within Nine Swords. I know I am not alone in appreciating all the efforts that Shin has invested into Nine Swords not only within the PvE division where he was a leader, but with many things in the cabal - so please join with me in wishing him well and thanking him for being a great leader in our cabal.

Cherrie

Cherrie was promoted this last week at our Anniversary cabal meeting to leader in our Recruitment division!  Cherrie joined Nine Swords in November of 2017, and by the start of 2018 had joined the Recruitment division. Since then she took on her responsibility with gusto and has made an incredibly positive impact on the recruitment within our cabal. Therefore, we are very happy that she has accepted an increase in responsibility. 

 

Nine Swords celebrates 6 years!

With all the fun going on in game this Secret World Legends Anniversary, we decided to mark our own cabal Anniversary with competitions in our forums instead of lots of events in game. Though of course, we also upheld the yearly tradition of having a cabal meeting!

 

SWL in your RW! 28th June - 5th June

Only DigitalWraith took on the challenge for the SWL in your Real World competition. The competition was intended to complement the feature here in our Newsletter of how our game links with our real world. In the more recent issues, this has been drawing more on the lore in game and how this links to our own reality. I wanted to step things up though - and for our cabal members to look for things that they really see in OUR real world. I set the competition in our forums for our cabal members to submit a photo of something that they found near where they live, or somewhere they had visited.  DigitalWraith, as the only entrant, won the FULL pot of Container keys!! 101 Purple, 2 Red and 2 Yellow. Congratulations!! You can see the entry DigitalWraith submitted below this section!

 

Ministry of Silly Outfits June 25th - Sunday 1st July

For this competition, we wanted to see outfits! The objective was to dress up like your favourite SWL NPCs (In game!) and post a screenshot of yourself wearing the outfit. All entries posted were entered into a vote where all our cabal members could vote on the entries! Further to our members voting the top 3 entries were:

• Cherrie
• Saunabath
• Phanth

Congratulations - you win a Roster Profile Banner created by HolloPoint!

Create a new TAGLINE for Nine Swords! (By 4th July)            

We have had the same Tagline for Nine Swords since absolutely forever (Since we founded 6 years ago in fact). So, with another anniversary coming around - we decided to see if anyone could come up with a new Tagline for the cabal. The Tagline with the most votes wins: Tagati's guard dog

As you can see in the introduction piece at the top of our news letter, we already put the new tagline into use - The winning Tagline was: Forged in fire, tempered through wisdom, sharpened by resolve.

So, congratulations to Rokynn!!  

 

 

SWL in MY Real World

This month, Bane77 and HolloPoint shared the reasoning behind their name choices -

Bane77: My name is a combination from the D&D bane weapons and the 77 is what I use on most toons. I chose it because it makes it easier for guilds to know who they are dealing with!

HolloPoint: The story behind my name choice was that the name HollowPoint was taken. I thought I was being original... then it hit me like a flash, a character based on zeros and Ones... why not "Hollo" - Point! Inspiration! And bad spelling!

 

Secret World Legends is ONE!!

Did you already take on the Talos of Gaia in Secret World Legends’ first anniversary events? There was a healthy dose of daily event login rewards to claim, candy to grab from piñatas .. which of course we had to bash with wooden baseball bats - if we had shot it, may have exploded the candy!! We saw the exclusive Anniversary Cache come back and we collected all the yellows!! New lore is always fun. The celebrations began on June 20th and will continue to runs through until July 17.  It has been great to see so many of you log in during the event and share tips on the lore collecting, help each other get achievements via shem dancing, as well as Hatekeeper bashing and Talos defeating - all that alongside a ridiculous amount of upgrades going on in everyones museums - this anniversary event has been packed with things to do.  

 

MEGAVersary

If it was not enough already with what Funcom had in store for us this first anniversary - our community decided to add to the fun! Following some really great planning meetings and brainstorming- the idea for Megaversary was born.  With the main goal to be a fun packed, mega-awesome schedule of player run events … even though it is still on going at the time of publishing this newsletter, I think it is safe to say that the team, and those that supported the event idea achieved their goal. 

Megaversary has been jammed pack full with Mega Bosses, we’re doing Bike Races, Stories, a special ARG, Warping Songs, Retrospectives and many, many radio events! 

Although Megaversary happened because the community supported it - there is one person who really held the glue together for this event, and that is our very own HolloPoint. HolloPoint, you were pivotal in making sure that this event was well communicated, well attended and on schedule. I am proud of you and what you helped our community achieve. Definitely looking forward to holding more events together with you!! This cannot be the one and only Megaversary - we have to start thinking for next year already!!

 

In case you didn't hear it via the radio stations that were broadcasting it - a community Happy Anniversary message was recorded, you can hear it here: Link to Dropbox

 

SWL in the Real World

This issue’s highlight is some real-world background behind Sol Invictus, whose handiwork we see in Egypt, Transylvania and even under London.

Sun worship in the Roman Empire came in two phases, and experts disagree as to whether they were really one and the same. While the first, the cult of Sol Indiges, did not seem to have lasted long, the second did — emerging during the Late Imperial period and going on to thrive as Rome’s official religion. This was Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun.

Sol Invictus was strongly associated with Mithras, a Roman god thought to be of Zoroastrian origin. Mithraic worship was known for its secrecy and arcana — involving seven tiers of initiation, re-enactments of the god’s myths in underground temples, and literal secret handshakes (initiates were known as syndexioi, or ‘those united by the handshake’). The cult was very likely a male-only one, and enjoyed strong membership among the Roman army (an excellent dramatization of this can be found in Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic novel The Eagle of the Ninth), which explains the undead legionaries in SWL.

In-game dialogue and mission text tells us that Sol Invictus was “dissolved and scattered as Constantine christened Rome”, and that Sol Glorificus, their capital-in-exile in the Scorched Desert, was well established by 329 AD. This was 8 years before the death of Constantine I, who reversed his tolerance of pagan religions late in his reign. Interestingly, though the great Christian emperor’s change of heart led to the end of Sol Invictus and the cult of Mithras, elements of those belief systems can be found in their ascendant rival. The miracle of water from a rock, December 25 as a holy date, a sacred communal meal and chrismation rite — these and more exist in Christianity as well, although many scholars consider the coincidence a mere product of a shared cultural environment.

What hope remained to Rome’s sun-worshippers, rekindled by the religious reforms of Julian the Apostate (might he have been under Dreamer influence?), was finally extinguished with Theodosius I’s official proscription of paganism in 381 AD. Sol Invictus’s presence in ancient Britain and Transylvania was likewise all but snuffed out by this time, with Britannia buckling under barbarian invasions and Dacia already lost to the empire since a century before.

We will surely see them again. As Kirsten Geary said, the Illuminati have “disturbing reports coming out of Congo” that imply Egypt was not the final destination of the Sol Invictus exiles. Given where we’re headed next in Season 2, it is safe to expect a reprise of the cult’s unholy alliance with the Atenists — this time with some Filthy perversion of African tribal sun worship.

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

 

 

What's in a Name

This month, Bane77 and HolloPoint shared the reasoning behind their name choices -

Bane77: My name is a combination from the D&D bane weapons and the 77 is what I use on most toons. I chose it because it makes it easier for guilds to know who they are dealing with!

HolloPoint: The story behind my name choice was that the name HollowPoint was taken. I thought I was being original... then it hit me like a flash, a character based on zeros and Ones... why not "Hollo" - Point! Inspiration! And bad spelling!