Q: How do you decide who goes into what clan and has their job inside that clan?
A: This is not an easy task. As we’ve been fixing the wiki, this has been a question that has popped up many times. Well in forms like: Why the hell is he the Archivist? or Who the hell is going to be the Scientist!? And WTF is he doing in Australia?
Sometimes it’s easy. Van Helsing as Lead Hunter yeah that’s simple. Finding a Lead Hunter for Sanguen – you would think would be easy except for the fact you need one that has been around a while, since Sanguen is the 3rd oldest Clan. Can’t have a modern guy as a Lead Hunter without explaining where the old one was. It took a bit but yes we did find one.
For something like Clan Psychologist we try to find actually characters or historical psychologist. Now considering this is a newer addition to the Clan structure and it’s a modern science, there can be moments of well who would ‘grow’ into the role for Clans like Medjai or Sanguen.
This works for all the Clan Positions. We’ve had moments of character easily falls into the position, Jack McCoy – Legal Advisor and others where it’s searching for someone to fill the spot, Eowyn – Clan Doctor.
Now as for how someone just ends up in a Clan. That depends on if the character is a historical figure, the show/book/movie a character came from, and sometimes tossing a dart at a map. Crocodile Dundee – Oceania. Javert – Passion Clan. Ahkmenrah – Medjai. These were more the obvious ones.
An interesting twist on how to figure out which Clan – while working with the Kin Clans we looked up one of the historical characters and realized he would be better in Medjai instead of where he was, because he had a long history of exploring Africa over living in Switzerland.
Actually one of the more nightmare situations was dealing with the Medjai – as many other characters had moved from Medjai to other Clans, we ended up with the oldest clan with the youngest members. Which had to be adjusted and much research into the ancient world. This was an example of using more historical characters instead of shows/movies as we personally don’t know Egyptian/Middle Eastern movie industry, and if you research movies based for Ancient Egypt you get Lawrence of Arabia, Ten Commandments, Cleopatra and The Prince of Egypt.
Believe me there have been times in the past year (whimpers at how long working on the wiki) where we’ve done the WTF OMG WHY? We’ve moved people around, wiped them out, changed dates/sires/mates and even images. And once the wiki is finished and revealed you’ll see the work done on it. Though I personally have to admit, I know more about certain histories and cultures I never thought I would. So it’s been a learning experience.