NMCF 3 - Preparing to be Night Monarch

Support team

 

Have a team to help you with tasks and plot. Bring Sable in on that team.

You’ll be overwhelmed at times. You’ll need help with tasks and scripts.

You’ll need someone who’s been there as a mentor.

Consider having a running mate or two for the election.

Find someone with strengths that compliment your weaknesses. If you are an introvert, find someone who has a lot of social energy. If you struggle with RP, find someone who can help you with that and represent the Horde for you. If you struggle with organization, find someone who can help there.

At least 1 former night monarch should be on your team too (whether or not they start undead with you).

NMSS (Night Monarch Support Server)

  You'll have access to a candidates section where you can ask for help, chat with other candidates, and get and give support. This is more than just support for you, it's also to build a bond with all the candidates—which can decrease the pressure and bring about an atmosphere where everyone cheers each other along.
  You may be surprised to see candidates helping each other behind the scenes. It happened with the 2025 election and we'd like to see that continue.
  When you win the election, you'll have access to the whole server.
 

Stress

Destress Tips

You will face a tsunami of messages most days. (See notes below on organization to help with this.)

Don’t leave Discord open all day. It will drive you crazy.

Find somebody you can vent at. This is not badmouthing or being a bitch! But if you keep it all in all month, you will explode and/or snap at people. It can be a doc. It can be a person. It can be a pet. Allow yourself to feel the frustration and let it out. BUT! This has the danger of getting tangled in your emotions and convincing yourself to be more angry than you need to be. Be mindful of that.

Night Monarch Support

We can be what you want us to be. But you have to ask us. We aren’t mind readers. Tell us if you need us as debugging duck, as dramaturgy detectives, or just as a shoulder to cry on. If you don’t, we might answer in a way that adds stress.

Sometimes it’s going to feel like my whole job is to be a pain in your butt. It’s not. It’s my job to balance the needs of the game and the players, and you! I can be frustrating. I can get testy when I’m overwhelmed and stressed. I can be defensive and sometimes not even know why right away. But I want to work it out with you.
  The buck stops with me, and my NO is final, but I don’t like saying no. I’d rather try to make it work. Be patient with me too, since I’m not perfect either. Okay?

— Sable

Over the Month

As the month progresses, stress will build. Expect:

To feel overwhelmed at times and need to step back for a day or so

To feel more touchy/defensive about things as the month nears an end

People to not understand your POV or your character’s POV

People to not understand where you are going with the plot, even be concerned that if the undead win that the GoT world will end in darkness forever

Lore

Have a general idea of what lore you’ll be going for and get it approved by Sable before the November event starts. The sooner the better.

If you are directing the lore and coordinating the scripts, expect to spend at least as much time coordinating as you do actually working on the lore and scripts. The coordination will multiply as each house falls and another script opens up, because you get more people on both sides to work with.

You may not need another big project for the month.

Coordinating scripts counts as Light Edits for wording.

Ask House Leaders how they want their House to fall and prep a short sketch of your response and things you really want to happen. Work with the Leader(s) to make a fuller sketch then invite the rest of the House members.

Please don’t just expect Sable and the Production Team to take care of everything for you. This is a lot of work. We need your help. Work with us and do what you can!

If you started too early, people will not have read your outline or if they did, have forgotten most of it already again. People have differing levels of reading comprehension and memory for detail, too, so they may have forgotten things or misunderstood them. Offer times to go through the doc with them and answer questions/work together. Yes, it is frustrating, doubly so if people try to be polite and say they have read it if clearly they have not. But people have lives and other priorities. (Amazon starts every meeting with 15 minutes so everyone can read the agenda, and there is a reason for that)

Temporary House Leader

You will become a temporary House Leader. Be prepared to work with the House Leaders. You will see all the things that happen behind the scenes and it will be eye opening to say the least.
 

If you have jobs in GoT, please ensure you have backups/helpers for those roles so things don’t get dropped as you get busier with each House fall. And coordinate how you hand off and if you retake those roles. If they are in lore (like leading the SCM) - coordinate that too.

You will almost certainly not finish all the lore in November realtime. You will be expected to keep working on it until it is done, however. Sometimes that will take years, even if you’re tired of it. Like writing a novel. And you will have to do it when your collaborators are also ready to work on it. Keep reminding them gently, but don’t expect that people will be able to drop everything to help you immediately when you have the time/energy. If you have to, consult with Sable and ask the opinion of your team about when it’s time to cut something or give up on an idea.

Interpersonal Stuff

Bring your humility with lots of extra helpings. (Shy has had to apologize more this month than ever before! Lol!)

As a leader in a decent sized organization you are pretty much guaranteed to see some drama. You may even be in the middle of some of it. Are you capable of dealing with drama with grace?

Ask for help! The NMSS and GoT moderators can help resolve conflicts.

You will need to encourage the Horde and help keep them motivated. Chat with the Horde, keep it fun.

Sometimes people decide to stop writing if they are in the Horde. But it happens some with the living too. The other House Leaders and your team will support you in trying to encourage people to keep going.

Organization

Master Doc

Have a master document that you put everything in. If it’s all in one place you can find it again. (At first, It’s not hard to keep in your head, but as lore and plans build and people volunteer ideas that could be used, it grows quickly beyond memory capacity.)

Put the links to all scripts and lore docs in it so you can access them all from one place and share with your support team.

Make tabs for different subjects that you need (scripts - one for each house fall and the final battle, your lore plans, Hero Forge links, Canva docs for animation (if you’re helping to animate or do HFs for the video scripts, filks, etc.) and a general one you can just dump stuff into and sort out later.

Shy created a template to get you started.

Taming the Tsunami of Messages

Do what you can to reduce the feeling of drinking from the firehose.

Ask people for the TLDR because a flood of messages in DMs and on the servers is hard to parse. A TLDR allows you to go back and read the full messages more quickly.

The NMSS is there for YOU. We’ll help adapt it to your needs.

We hope that the Night Monarch Support Server will help alleviate some of the overwhelm because topics can be broken out into channels and forum threads to keep track of things more easily.

If you need to, use threads and forums or request a section on the NMSS or GoT server with a forum to help parse topics so it’s a little less like drinking from the firehose as you try to parse multiple conversations and keep track of what’s important.

Forward Discord messages to the place you need them. (People can be very chaotic putting things where ever they happened to be and thought of an idea. We can help here, easily.)