TRMN:Membership Handbook:Foreword

Welcome from the Admiral of the Fleet

Welcome to The Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association, Inc and all of her sub-groups as we continue our 10 year journey. We are the Official Fan Association dedicated to the Honorverse by David Weber. As such, we may be a bit different than other groups you have belonged to in the past. One of the nice advantages of the Honorverse is that so much is laid out for us and all we have to do is kind of plug-and-play. There are of course some areas where we have freer rein to expand the group, such as The Royal Manticoran Army, but for the most part, we stick to what David Weber and the good folks at BuNine, a consulting group who works with Mr. Weber, have given us.

One of the ways that you will quickly notice a difference is that we train our leaders to actually be leaders. One of the main ways we accomplish this is that we don’t have elections for our Royal Council. The First Lord of the Admiralty serves at the pleasure of the Prime Minister of Manticore, and appoints the remainder of the Royal Council. In addition, our Academy courses are set up to teach people from the ground on up how to actually lead. I have been in fandom for over 20 years now, and one of my biggest complaints was that no organization ever managed to effectively teach its leaders how to lead a group. Oh, they have promoted people, and occasionally they have promoted a good person, but in many cases, these leaders have had little or no prior experience before they were thrown to the wolves. A twenty question multiple choice exam just won’t teach you how to lead.

As we place such an emphasis on leadership, you will find that we also offer resources to help you grow as a leader, including a first class mentoring program which starts at the very top of the organization and flows down through the Royal Council to the various Fleet and Echelon Commanders to the Unit Commanders. In a sense, think of it like the mentoring Raoul Corvousier imparted to Honor Harrington in the early novels. It is our hope that this program will help grow our leadership corps and also help to increase enjoyment in the group.

We are a group wrapped in the cloak of the Honorverse, yet at the end of the day, this group is what you make it! We will have policies in place to explain this cloak, especially in regards to things like Peerage, Rank, Chain Of Command and other administrative things, but at the end of the day, we are a Fan Association and that means the fan aspects and the fun are most important. As you get more involved and join us either through Chapter activities or Convention activities, you will discover that the fun is never far away, and we hope that one day, you will step up and help to lead that fun.

In Service to the Queen,

Sir Martin A. Lessem, KSK, GCR, GCE, DSO, CGM, GS
Admiral of the Fleet, RMN
First Lord of the Admiralty,
Duke New Scania