Greetings my fellow Nomads,
A rundown of this week's TFO meeting for Nomadic Gaming members. Full details as always can be found in the TFO forums, should you wish to dig deeper on anything mentioned below.
Leadership News
Ken has stepped down from his top-five leadership position. Real life comes first — a work promotion turned into a two-hour commute each way, and something had to give. He's heading back to a Lifetime member role for now, with hopes of returning closer to leadership once his schedule allows. Thank you, Ken, for everything you've put into this community.
With that opening (plus the existing one from Deathwing's earlier departure), expect some reshuffling at the top five in the coming weeks. Nothing's happening today — official announcements will go out when moves are finalized, so nobody's caught off guard.
Karen has been promoted to Army Commander. Congratulations and a big hoorah goes out to him!
Recognition & Awards (AKA - The Obituaries)🎖️
Severed Astro was approved for Lifetime Achievement — one of the rarest medals TAW hands out. Sponsored by Steeo, recognized for years of leadership support across multiple teams. "https://taw.net/commendation/198070.aspx", Big congrats.
Akai and Chris (Sentinel) — five-year service medals.
Tsar promoted to Colonel (max DC rank) and Squeak promoted to Lieutenant Colonel (max DO rank) — both after 400+ days of TFO service.
Chris promoted to Colonel for combined service as Sentinel Division Commander and Squad DC.
RPG Unit (Vanguard): medals awarded to Aki and Astor Bish, plus a special mention for Warm (Warcarwater) for his foundational work standing up the unit.
Astro Bish was promoted to TFO for the RPG unit — congrats on the new rank (poor guy never saw it coming).
If you see any of these folks around, give them a shout and a hug.
Community-Wide Opportunities
30 Days on Spawn — a new community challenge from MRC. Contact Crazy Joe directly if you want details or want to get involved.
TAW Battle Brawl (September) — Army Command is looking for new game suggestions for this TAW-wide tournament. If your division has a game you think could carry a tournament, message Mama Bear, Pai, or Rowan directly. Heads up: whichever division proposes a game is expected to help teach it to the rest of TAW, similar to how Marvel Rivals ran things last year.
Core Updates
First Core (includes Nomadic Gaming): Running smoothly overall. Recruiting is the same slow grind everyone's dealing with right now. Big item for August: Hell Let Loose is adding a Vietnam update, expected around August 13th. If you play HLL, keep an eye out for events tied to the launch.
Second Core: Marvel Rivals has strong attendance and a new field specialist getting up to speed. Battlefield has a DLC drop generating interest, though recruiting remains a challenge there. DCS has leaned hard into content creation and social media, and it's paying off with real growth on both EU and NA sides. DayZ is seeing great summer attendance and has started cross-playing Valheim as a group. World of Warships is quiet — small, stable group of 6-7 regulars.
Third Core: Mostly holding steady through the summer lull. Army (The Forge) sitting at 20 stable members with a few new recruits in the pipeline. Star Citizen is picking back up after a rough patch, drawing renewed interest. Recruitment is soft across the board but expected given the season.
Vanguard: Closing out the Dead by Daylight team as leadership steps down. Looking for someone to revitalize the Arc Raiders team — reach out to Vanguard staff if interested in leading or trying new games.
New Team Launch: RPG Unit 🎉
The RPG unit has officially launched out of Vanguard and transferred into First Core, accepted by Chris. This wasn't an overnight effort — huge thanks to the whole founding crew (Astor, Warg, Carbo, Water, Linda, Kevdesar, Airy, Moon, Maltese, Stone-Sinu, Sindos, Gingy, Warlearn, and Aki) for building a genuinely strong D&D/RPG community from the ground up, proving digital tabletop play can thrive just as well as in-person. Congrats to the whole team.
Big Announcement: Genre Group Restructuring
Karen laid out a major structural shift that's coming to how TAW spins up new games. The short version:
Right now, Vanguard alone handles spinning up every new game team across all of TAW — and it's a lot of risk and effort for one team to carry, especially with how fast games rise and fall in popularity.
The plan is to move that responsibility into three genre groups (replacing First/Second/Third Core as we currently know them): roughly Milsim/FPS, Strategy/Adventure, and a third grouping still being finalized for off-branch games like Nomadic Gaming, RPG, and survival titles.
Nothing changes day-to-day for most members. You keep your tags, your division identity, your leadership. TFOs and CCs within each genre group will work together to spot promising new games and spin up teams faster, with admin work shared across the group instead of falling entirely on Vanguard.
Vanguard isn't going away — it'll likely shift into a consultation role, handling the trickier parts of getting a new team off the ground.
This is early-stage and rolling out gradually, group by group, starting with a pilot once team placement is finalized. More concrete details expected by the next TFO meeting.
Questions or concerns about this are welcome — Karen's explicitly open to feedback and encouraged people to raise anything in the TFO forums.
On The Open Floor
No unresolved items were raised.
A full transcript and audio recording of the meeting has been made for anyone interested in going through the whole meeting! mp3 Full Transcript
Caaran [CC AC]General of TAW — 12:07 PMSunday, July 26, 2026 12:07 PM
@Task Force Operations - I'll apologize up front for the ping and any feelings resulting from this post.
At today's TFO Meeting, we will be talking about TAW's shift in direction for our overall structure to Genre Groups to create efficiencies and utilize our resources to get TAW into the future. We will go through the sales pitch, implementation, and future plans. I'll address all questions/comments/concerns at the TFO meeting. Below is some literature to get us working on equal grounds. TO CALM YOUR NERVES!! Here are some quick 'Don't freak out' notes.
For 97% of your team, nothing will change or notice anything happening at all.,
You will keep your division tag and agency, as we are essentially renaming Army Corps and lumping "similar games" together.,
The main change will be how we bring in new teams into TAW.
The pitch
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bbr4n6mNcYneKhqqzFHI2mszyPUWD0ggOkXo4j1PZM/edit?usp=sharing
Soft Implementation Plan
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ykCckM278OetlZ8VEf2sCl99LlQqf73rLUYms89nQwg/edit?usp=sharing
Summarized breakdown of functionality
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ao_ACBJFuR97bgjTakq_VOQZJtYFZ3cvvdQBIY8r2wA/edit?usp=sharing