While it's fun to just be in a clan, having likeminded players to talk with, making new friends and generally just making more of RuneScape, it's a lot more fun to actually plan things to do as a clan. There are a number of tools to help you with this, including clan forums, in-game Clan Chat, Clan Citadel meeting rooms and the event noticeboard at the Clan Camp.
Clan Forums and Chat
Once you have officially registered your clan, you will gain access to your own clan forums. You will have the ability to create private threads that only your clan, or even only certain members of your clan (based on rank), will be able to view and reply to. The clan forums are the perfect places to talk with your clan about anything and everything - future event ideas, strategies for Rated Clan Wars and other activities, off topic discussions or just to chew the fat about recent game updates. You are able to do more with your own clan forums than you can with the general forums, such as mark your own sticky threads and set permissions for who can edit them. You can even use BBCode on your own threads, which allows you to format them with bold, italics, smileys and other basic HTML markup! Please note that any threads on your clan forums that are inactive for 14 days will be automatically deleted.
If you'd rather chat in-game with your clan, then the Clan Chat system has been designed with these same considerations in mind, to allow you to target your in-game chat to only those players you want to. To talk in your clan's Clan Chat channel, simply type // before your message in the chat window. A clan's Owners and Admins are able to set who can see, talk in and kick from its Clan Chat channel in the Clan Settings interface.
You can also request to join in another clan's Chat Channel, by selecting this option and typing in that clan's name. Once joined, you can send message's to that other clan's channel by typing /// before your message. You are able to be in both your clan's and another clan's Clan Chat channel at the same time.
As you can only be part of one clan at a time, there is also Friends Chat, which lets you talk with large groups of players regardless of their clan affiliations (for things like Penguin Hide & Seek and Shooting Stars). For more information on RuneScape's various chat systems, check out the Controls - Friends and Clan Chat page.
Meeting Tent/Rooms and Noticeboard
The Clan Camp meeting tent
Smack bang in the centre of the Clan Camp is the meeting tent, which is a good place in-game for clans to discuss and organise their own events. If your clan owns a Clan Citadel, you can also use the meeting rooms and senate on the island. When you click to enter the meeting tent or citadel meeting rooms, you can choose to just enter the public area to talk with whoever is there, or you can set up your own private meeting - the ledger inside will give you options for who else is invited to join you in the area (including which clanmates from your own clan). Inside a private meeting area, there's also a voting box, which can be used to help make decisions for the clan or, well, anything at all that you deem a vote is necessary for!
A clan's admins are also able to set and edit official clan events using the noticeboard just south of the meeting tent. A clan can set up to eight different events at a time; simply pick when and where the event is to be held, who from your clan it's for (based on rank), and what type of event it is. You can also input a forum 'thread ID' (from one of the threads on your clan's forums), which can describe your event in greater detail. You can only display one thread ID on each event. Finally, there are a couple of check boxes to make the event mandatory and to set if it is a visible on your clan vexillum (i.e. a public or private event).
Rated Clan Wars
The Sergeant-at-Arms
For those clans who just have to prove their combat prowess, Rated Clan Wars could well be a good way to do so. For a clan to participate in a Rated Clan Wars battle, each clanmate must first collect an RCW badge from the Sergeant-at-Arms in the Clan Camp (or, alternatively, one of the clan's admins can distribute badges to the rest of the clan). Then the clan's leader will need to issue a challenge to the leader of another clan. Once a challenge is accepted, all clanmates from both sides who are in the Clan Camp and holding an RCW badge will be teleported to the Rated Clan Wars arena. The rules of the rated game are fixed so all clans are always fighting on the same terms, which makes for a fairer comparison of each clan's warring abilities in the clan hiscores.
The Clan Battlefield
Rated Clan Wars aren't the only method of settling combat disputes with other clans: if you want battles that can be customised to any requirements you may have, the clan battlefield on the Clan Citadels might be more suited to you. By talking to the Battlemaster, you will be able to access an editor that will allow you to change the geography, rules and obstacles on a battlefield, and you can then invite other clans, or members of your own clan, to join you in head-to-head battle.
RuneScape's Community Management team is regularly organising competitions and events for everyone to participate in, should they choose, whether they be individuals or clans. These range from things such as the growing tradition of the annual Jagex Cup, to one-off events like the Wildy Wyrm attack, and they even get involved in some holiday events, just popping up in-game to chat with players.
For general information about any such events, the Community Home forum is a good first point of call, followed by the Clan Discussion forums for clan-related events and the Events forum for non-clan-related events. Another good source of information about the clan community is the Clan Submissions blogs, which often report on upcoming and recent events, as well as having interviews with well known clans and more.
You don't have to wait for our Community Management teams to arrange events for the community either! If you have an idea for an event that others would be interested in, or even if you just want to arrange a Rated Clan Wars fight with another clan, you should consider discussing and arranging something yourself!
Clan Hiscores
You don't even necessarily need to arrange events to partake in competition with RuneScape's other clans, as the clan hiscores keep track of your progress as a clan, allowing you to compare yourself to all other official clans. Stats tracked for each clan include:
- Clanmates - this just notes how many clanmates your clan currently has.
- Total level - each clanmate's total level is tracked both added up into a combined total (all) and taken as an average of all current clanmates.
- Combat level - as with total level, this is tracked both as a combined total and as an average level for all current clanmates.
- Skill levels - skill levels can be compared individually, again both combined (all) and as a clan average, but also by total XP and by how many clanmates have maxed out a particular skill.
- XP total - this tracks how much XP in total all of your clan's clanmates have earned while being a part of your clan.
- Kill and Death totals - these track the number of kills and deaths that your clanmates accrue in the Wilderness. Kills and deaths only count between clanmates from different clans, and ergo only while both the one one killing and the one dying belong to a clan. There are a few other instances in which a kill or death may not be registered, but these should be minimal.
- Kill/Death ratio - simply the total number of kills divided by the total number of deaths.
- Clan Wars (free and members) - and this tracks your clan's efforts in Rated Clan Wars.
Other
Many clans also choose to host their own events without using clan tools such as clan camp or community events. Just using one's imagination thousands of fun activities can be created without even taking part in a minigame. Clans can be very diverse in what they do, which makes choosing your clan a very important, but exciting choice.
