After a recent string of successful interviews at home, the higher ups at the WRITE daily handed a much harder assignment for our intrepid reporter - Zenlith.

The land of Pendragon, a fascist country.

An interview with a leader of Pendragon known as the Mad Purger. Every reporter had passed on this one. Zenlith accepted the assignment stoically.

And what an interview it is. Full of interesting details that one could ever never expect, Zenlith captures the life in Pendragon lands better than any Writer ever before. It amazed us at the Write headquarters, so without further ado, we present it to you.

Zenlith - Journeying through the Pendragon lands was a novel experience. I was flown in, with special permission from both the embassies. There was a tense moment when our visas were almost denied. But finally, we got through.

I had visited these lands once before, when it was called Scribble, so I had an idea of what to expect. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong. These lands, once full of artistic and optimistic people were gone, replaced by a mass of silent and cruddy ones. The name wasn’t the only thing that changed, it seemed.

Concerning Aucis Josh, I knew him from before. But with that nickname now, he was a different person. I had resolved to tread carefully.

After I reached the meeting point, they put the bag over my head, and led me to their capital with a jeep. It was a four hour long nauseating ride. Aucis greeted me as soon as the bag was taken off.

“Hullo, Zen..” He was sprawled over his throne, his red eyes focused on me. “Want a puff… of peace?”

His subordinates, or those who surrounded him at least, chatted away merrily, with no concern. The interview wasn’t going to be private. “No, Josh,” I replied. “I am here about the interview.”

“Of course…” Aucis seemed unconcerned. “Ask away.”

Gathering my courage, I asked the first question, the one that everyone demands an answer to.

Aucis Josh, you’re known as the demon recruiter and the purger. Why?

A member of Pendragon broke in, before Josh could even utter a single word. “No one calls him the demon recruiter, he calls himself that. We gave him the title Josh The Purger because he purges the chat so often.”

Finally he got the chance to speak for himself. “I'm called the Purger because the command to delete chat is ?purge and i use it often. Causing a lot of different situations, hence the nickname.

I call myself the demon recruiter because I'm able to recruit new members extremely fast and very efficiently.”

So how do you do that?

Once more, the members spoke before he could. “With his one post” they chimed in.

Josh gave them an annoyed stare before he himself responded. “A magician never reveals his secrets... but I'm no magician, I wait until someone has interest in groups and pm them discussing groups and/or invite them to Pendragon. As you see, they join.”

Immediately the members around him chimed in once more. “You didn't do that for me

You just let me join that's it.”

Why did you choose this aggressive recruitment strategy?

I'm not aggressive, I just invite and find good members. To add everything I do is allowed and in group guidelines.

Why have you chosen to do it this way?

I invite users and I believe them joining helps them, which it does and has.

Someone else chimed in. “to be honest it’s pretty good for helping with writing skills.”

With @The Yandere Darkling’s great teaching skills their quality goes up greatly. They also help each other by giving constructive criticism and feedback whenever another member asks.

Another PenDragon member chimed in once more: “also everyone is good at helping with stories overall.”

How do you feel about the workload of being a leader?

I am currently able to handle it but without my fellow leaders it would probably burn me out a lot faster, and because of them the work is more distributed and because of that wherever they specialize making things look better and work better for the group.

So which duties are the toughest? And which duties do you enjoy the most?

The hardest is keeping my members in line. The part I enjoy most is the recruiting, it's always good to see new members and the old members welcome them.

At this point the the other members broke in. “Hey

I'm not that bad” one yelled, adding “Only a little.”

Another chimed in with a long stare. “what’s so hard about me?”

Josh addressed the two “Your plans of rebellion and always making a mess in the house is hard to clean up.”

A third member chimed in “JOSH. WHAT'S HARD ABOUT KEEPING ME IN LINE

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS KICK ME” with one of the former members agreeing “He does kick us a lot.”

Which Josh responded to with the words “That is not true I've kicked you twice.”

Okay, so do you have anyone in sight for moderator position in PenDragon?

“Hmm, I do have a few people queued up but i'll see how they handle things.”

Once more, another members chimed in. “oh, that's simple. Number 1, not being me. Number 2, not being any of the two others”

To which Josh responded “you were actually a queued person”

“But then I showed my true colors” the member retorted.

So, what qualities are you looking for in new mods?

Im looking for someone skilled in leading and able to do any forum stuff needed. I also need people who are very loyal to PenDragon

If you had to describe yourself with one word which would it be?

And the members chimed in. “a rebel” two of them yelled at the same time, while a third uttered the word “Revolutionist”

Josh took action, as the yelling from the sideline was getting out of hand. “You guys are being rather rude, please be respectful of our interview. That's your only warning.”

This seemed to quiet them down a little, if only for a moment.

“I'd say, Busy. I'm always working and trying to better things for my life and pendragon. Sadly i'm not that appreciated irl or here.”

Can you elaborate on how you're not appreciated?

At this point a couple of members chimed in once more. “I appreciate you Joshua,” one said while another put the appreciation in quotation marks.

“Irl i'm not paid that well for my job. Here on PenDragon i'm always getting a little banter over stuff yet i put a lot of work into this group. Even though i'm constantly dealing with these guys, i know they don't mean a lot of things but it does hurt sometimes. “

Seeing an opening I pounced on it.

So what jabs is it that hurt?

The other members went wild, flinging around stories like “there was this one I think I said it like this "If you add a couple letters and move some more around, Aucis becomes Autistic"”

and “We call him 5 years old”

along with “Josh is the type of person to sue a restaurant for giving him 19 oz of drink in a 20 oz cup… and actually win the lawsuit”

“I don't feel any hurt from that,” Josh said in response. “The constant talk of rebellion and different things especially about me purging chat. I only do so because they break the rules, or some other reason bettering the chat and group, which is misinterpreted and causes a lot of problems which make me slightly upset.”

An awful lot of banter ensued, making it nearly impossible to conduct the interview, with questions having to be repeated.

Then the chat filled up with Mutes.

PenDragonMember#1 has been muted.

PenDragonMember#2 has been muted.

PenDragonMember#3 has been muted.

“Ill unmute you 3 stooges when you calm down” Josh said, decisively ending the hail of remarks from the sidelines.

So, let's see where was I at. Oh yes, what drives you to be a leader despite the resistance you meet here?

I know they don't really mean rebellion. This is also my home, I have been in PenDragon so long and have been a leader for so long I would never dream of giving it up. If enough people wanted me to step down I will but until then i'll be the best leader I can.

So what does PenDragon mean to you?

ok let me see

PenDragon means so much to me if i ever lost it I would probably go in a very deep depression, I've been here so long and have put so much into it. I would probably be crying for the first time in 2 years.

So where do you see PenDragon in 2 or 3 years?

I see PenDragon being a major group and i have a few plans that will shoot us places I’did never dream about before

Speaking of the future, let’s talk about the past for a bit. So, why did you arrive at Royalroad in the first place?

I first came across it while reading the LN Overlord being translated on skythewoods site, after reading i got hooked did some digging, found MLS then that lead to RRL.

Did you start writing before or after this?

I hated writing in school but after reading the cool stories I started getting my own ideas and i wanted them on paper (screen) so I sat down and posted my first fiction on my wordpress site. It was terrible and has been dropped for a long time. After that I started my first fic on RRl, RE:God. This is something me and Who cares? have in common, we both started with a RE story.

So, you have no less than five fictions on royalroad, how many of these were after Re:God and why did you decide to start so many?

They were all after Re:God. I started them because I had ideas I needed to share and have done so, sadly they aren't that popular. Ive now only got 2 main fictions, Re:god which iver returned to after being on hiatus and a fic not yet posted called The Forgotten One (TFO). I had a main fiction for a long time called The King Of Avarice (TKA) but I couldn't keep up with all the litrpg aspects and game system details so I have put it on hiatus after finishing book 1 and publishing it on amazon.

So what made you put the books on hiatus?

The 2 others, Memories in Purgatory and Metior were only one shots so they weren't put on hiatus. I may return to them later but I have no plans to do so right now.

So why did you put re:god on hiatus?

It was just a joke fic and still is so I left it to focus on my main one at the time was TKA, after i put TKA on hiatus i grew attached to Re:God again and picked it back up.

Very well, now I'd like to talk about some of the groups you've been in. You were a moderator of RRL, how did you acquire this role?

They were recruiting and I always enjoyed being staff so I applied and was already friends with Wing so we talked and I got accepted. I was later demoted because we had to little work and too much staff.

So, what was your experience like as a royalroad moderator?

Hmm

It was great, I was decently liked on the chat and dealt with many people (I banned more users than most mods do their entire time in the months I was mod) I wish I was staff still, and i might be again depending how things go.

So do you have any guess why you in particular was demoted, when it may as well have been someone else?

I was demoted for 2 reasons. 1. I handled certain mod things that aren't open to the public wrong and 2. They only kept 3 mods 2 have now left and 1 is only a chat mod now. J0nn0 was a different entity and was a super mod while i was a mod.

Very well, do you have any guess to as why J0nn0 became a supermod so quickly, while you remained a mod?

He was doing stuff on the forums a lot longer and is far more popular than me. He was also more skilled and was a mod before me.

Very well. So let's talk about Scribble, now Pendragon. When did you join? and why?

I joined 2 weeks after it was created. I was reading manics fiction at the time and saw the new group and got interested so dod some research pmed manic and joined.

And what made you decide to join?

The possibility to increase my quality, which it did. Also the group chat which has kept me going and in PenDragon for so long, originally we were a skype group until 3 months ago when we moved to discord.

So at what point did you become a leader? and why did you decide on this?

I think it was a month in after joining. Manic needed helpers and I took the job, I was the only leader after the initial creation that did most of the work so I just happened to take the main leader role. Now I have a helper @The Yandere Darkling and still await the return of the other leaders. Although @DarkGem does help and play her part in leading the group, especially helping members.

So at what point was it apparent to you that you had to take over from Manic?

When Manic went inactive. We were already aware he was going to be busy and offline so I just took the staff and continued doing my duties as leader.

So what events goes on in this group?

We have 2 major events

The pictostories which all the info will be found in the pin in #pictostory

2. This is member exclusive. We hold a session every week focusing on one person’s story as we all edit, comment, and give feedback on it. This can switch people as they come and go but we focus on one at a time.

So starting with the pictostory, how did you decide on holding this event?

So Write and PenDragon had a war. We chose a picture and wrote a short one shot on it. After the war old scribble took on that as a small competition we then left it for a short time later on when we finished moving to discord I started hosting the event. It’s now grown to this size.

So right now we have the reward for winning you become part of the council of five, we normally have five members but darkgem has been winning the last 4 pictostories. The last pictostories we’ve done darkgem has won. Because she’s been winning, normally we would have like if there was someone who won, they would get to choose who they kick off the council.

Otherwise I’d take the one that has been there the longest, but right now because darkgem’s been winning and we only have 5 we’ve been, the next pictostory darkgem doesn’t win we will have a new member in the council, but we’ve had the same council for the last 6 pictostories, and untill either gem stops winning or she doesn’t participate we’re not going to have a new council member for a long time.

What Josh didn’t know was that after the interview I asked my sources, who indicated that darkgem may have things on her hands in the near future, so we may not have to wait so long for a new member of the pictostory council.

Josh continued saying ”But I’m urging as many skilled writers as I can to participate, we want to see quality in this competition but I also want more members and smaller writers to come in too, because without them they don’t grow and they can get bigger.

If they want to pick [a picture for the contest] they can pick from the log, and anyone can put any picture they want in there as long as they are not R18, I just look through them and I remove those I don’t like.”

So let’s talk about the members exclusive sessions.

So how it works is, we get a volunteer or i do a random pick from any member, whoever has a fiction or is writing a fiction or has a chapter in progress we have them start writing, open a gdoc with editing rights and we all just comment on it and add what needs to be added, get them techniques, teach them how to write. It's kinda like a huge mentoring phase, or something like that.

How often do you do this?

Every sunday, we’ve missed a few since we moved to discord, and we rarely get them on skype.

On the skype we didn't have many active members so we kinda didn’t really have a chance to do them, but once we moved to discord we didn’t have many people in the beginning and then after a while we had members and we held a few, but after those i had to stop doing them, and at the time yandere wasn’t a leader with me, and when he became a leader as well he starting helping me do them, he held the last one when I was absent and hopefully if you can underrate I’d like him to take over it.

Yandere “It's kinda the members saying it and I’m there.”

Josh: “Just do it if i forget to do it.”

Yandere agreed to this.

“That’s the main reason, because I’ve been busy.” Josh reiterated.

How will it evolve?

I plan to make it more organized, for the future I hope we are able to have one volunteer and we are able to focus on them the entire time, if not we can go from person to person with more members, but it mainly comes down to me or another leader starting it, it really isn't their job because a lot of them don't read the rules which they need to do, but they don’t do that so it's up to us to tell them “hey we’re doing the session today come in help your fellow members.”