Hogwarts Clubs

What a Club Is

A Club is a chartered group you belong to in addition to your House. You may belong to exactly one at a time — the database enforces this with a unique key, which is the magical equivalent of a velvet rope. A Club has a name (3–64 characters — letters, numbers, spaces, apostrophes, dashes, dollar signs, and color codes are all permitted, so you may render yourself the `4Scarlet whatever you please), a tag (exactly 3 plain letters or numbers — no color codes; the form will say so rather than quietly eating them — unique across every Club, and off-limits if it would collide with a House's own tag — GRY, HUF, RAV, or SLY are reserved for the Houses and cannot be claimed), an optional custom color, a motto, a roster, a shared clubhouse, a treasury, a power score, a governance model, diplomatic relations, and an unhealthy interest in beating other Clubs at things.

Your standing inside a Club is shown on your bio: the Club's name and tag, your rank, your loyalty tier, and any honorary title the President has decided you deserve. In chat, members show their Club's tag (in the Club's color) beside their name by default instead of their House tag — a preference on the Preferences page lets you switch back to showing your House tag instead.

Founding a Club

Founding is deliberately gated behind real progression — it is "reserved for the school's patrons," which is a polite way of saying it costs money. To charter a Club you must produce all of the following at once:

• 1,000 donator points (100 points = $1, so roughly $10)
• 500,000 gold — counted from hand and bank together
• 100 gems — hand only; the bank does not count here
• 7 Voldemort Encounters (VEs) minimum

That last requirement matters more than it looks. The gate is on Voldemort Encounters, not level. Level is experience-derived and resets every newday; VEs are permanent, accumulated proof you have actually survived the school. The code refuses a level argument on principle. You cannot grind a Club into existence between breakfast and lunch.

Before anything is charged, the charter office shows you a preview — your name, tag, and motto exactly as they will be saved, rendered the way the rest of the school will see them — and waits for a second signature. Nothing is spent until you confirm, on the reasonable grounds that 1,000 points is a great deal to pay for a typo.

A fresh charter arrives as a tier-1 Clubhouse with room for 5, and you — the founder — become its President, a title that is permanent and non-negotiable. The charter also conjures a real clubhouse dwelling and hands you the key. The first upkeep bill does not arrive until the following week — even goblins accept that a treasury cannot be in arrears before it has had a chance to contain anything.

Membership

There are two ways in: apply to a Club (its officers vote on you) or accept an invitation an officer sends you. Either way you arrive at the bottom rank, a Recruit, and pay the Club's membership fee on entry. If you cannot cover the fee, the join is silently rolled back — the Club is not a charity, and the database has no sense of occasion.

A Club cannot accept you if its clubhouse is at capacity. Capacity is set by tier: 5 / 10 / 15 for Clubhouse / Manor House / Castle.

Leaving is permitted, but it has teeth. Departing — voluntarily, or by disbanding your own Club — resets your loyalty to zero and bars you from joining any new Club for 48 hours. Being kicked carries no such cooldown, on the reasonable theory that exile should not also come with a waiting list. If a President leaves, leadership passes to the most senior remaining member; if there is no one left, the Club quietly disbands.

Ranks & Governance

Four ranks, in ascending order of being allowed to touch things:

Rank	Can do
Recruit	Belong. Deposit. Post on the board. Little else.
Member	The same, with seniority and a vote.
Officer	Invite, accept, kick, promote, manage the clubhouse, send newsletters, declare war, conduct diplomacy, withdraw from the treasury.
President	Everything. Permanently. Including things no one else can: governance, titles, disbandment, role assignment.

On top of rank, the President may pin named role bits onto individual members — Treasurer, Recruiter, Herald, Warlord, Diplomat — each of which grants one Officer-tier permission to a non-Officer. A loyal Member can be made Treasurer (treasury access) or Herald (newsletter rights) without being handed the full Officer key ring.

A Club runs under one of two governance models, set by the President:

• Appointed (the default, and the honest one): the President promotes and demotes officers by hand.
• Elected: members endorse candidates, one endorsement each, and the President closes the vote to seat them. The number of elected seats is one per 5 members (minimum one). Winners become Officers; everyone else who held a seat is returned to Member, and endorsements wipe clean for the next cycle. The President remains President regardless of how the vote goes, which rather settles the question of whether it is a democracy.

The Clubhouse

The clubhouse is a genuine dwelling — you can walk into it, chat by its fire, and hand out keys. Its coffer and the club treasury are one and the same pot, managed entirely from the Treasury page — one interface, one set of rules, one ledger. It comes in three tiers, each a step up in capacity and grandeur, and each a step up in what it costs to ascend. Upgrade costs are paid in donator points (by the upgrading officer) plus treasury gold and gems:

Tier	Capacity	To reach it
Clubhouse (1)	5	Founding: 1,000 pts + 500,000 gold + 100 gems
Manor House (2)	10	2,000 pts (~$20) + 900,000 treasury gold + 250 treasury gems
Castle (3)	15	3,000 pts (~$30) + 10,000,000 treasury gold + 500 treasury gems

Upgrading is an Officer-or-better act, and the Castle is the ceiling — once you are a Castle there is, as the game puts it, "nowhere left to climb."

A clubhouse can become cramped if a downgrade ever leaves more members than the tier can seat. Cramped clubs suffer a defense penalty (a 0.9× multiplier by default) and cannot recruit until there is room. No one is ever evicted to fix this — the game would rather you all stand uncomfortably close than throw anyone out.

Treasury & Upkeep

The treasury is the clubhouse coffer — the same pot, and the Treasury page is the only door to it. Any member may deposit gold or gems; deposits are tracked per member, and the biggest contributors are immortalized on a leaderboard for the benefit of everyone who isn't. The Treasury page also keeps a ledger of the last fifteen movements of money in or out — deposits, withdrawals, war aid, upkeep, liens, raid spoils — each entry dated and with a name attached, because nothing in this school stays anonymous for long.

A solvent clubhouse gives back, too: every Voldemort Encounter a member survives pays them 100 gold × the clubhouse tier out of the treasury — provided the coffer can actually cover it, and doubled while the weekly cooperative goal's buff is running.

Withdrawing is harder, by design. You need the permission (Officer rank or the Treasurer role) and "earned bank access" — a freshly promoted account must reach loyalty tier 1 before it can touch the coffer, which neatly defeats the time-honored scheme of funneling a Club's gold into a disposable alt. The President is exempt, because the President is the one most clubs were funneling toward anyway. Withdrawals are capped: 3 per member per day, up to 50,000 gold and 10 gems per transaction.

Upkeep is the quiet menace. Every week the clubhouse bills the treasury 10,000 gold × its tier (gem upkeep is zero by default). If the coffer can't cover it, the bill escalates: first a Gringotts lien on the banked gold of officers and the President (richest rank first), then, if that fails too, arrears. While a Club is in arrears its perks are suspended — notably, members stop receiving treasury payouts for Voldemort Encounters. Carry arrears past the grace period (2 periods) and the clubhouse is repossessed one tier: Castle becomes Manor, Manor becomes Clubhouse. Members are never deleted; the building just gets smaller, and so does everyone's elbow room. Arrears are not, however, a life sentence: the instant the coffer can cover what the clubhouse still owes — replenished by deposit, incoming war aid, or raid spoils — the goblins take exactly that (no more, no less), the arrears lift, and perks resume the same breath, no waiting for the next billing day.

Wars & Diplomacy

A Warlord (or any Officer) may declare war on another Club — but only within your power band, defined as any club within ±40% of your power. Picking on something far smaller is, in the game's words, "both fairer and less embarrassing." You score war points by defeating enemy members in the Dueling Club. The Fair-Fight multiplier (1×–3×) rewards beating equal-or-stronger foes and gives almost nothing for swatting the weak; a daily attrition curve makes each successive win that day worth less, so one heroic farmer cannot carry a war alone. Each member can contribute at most 100 war points. Wars resolve when someone hits the lead target or after a 5-day hard cap, and a Club must wait 48 hours between wars. Read that roster carefully before you accept an invitation: club war overrides PvP Immunity, so for the war's duration every member on it is fair game to the enemy's Dueling Club, whatever peace and quiet you'd otherwise signed up for.

Win a war and you earn the right to raid the loser's treasury. Raiding is mercifully bounded: a vault floor protects 65% of the defender's coffer, a raid takes at most 25% of what's left, 15% of the haul is "destroyed in transit" (a sink, so raiding is not free money for the economy), and the defender gets a 16-hour shield afterward to recuperate, sulk, and count what remains.

Diplomacy offers two kinds of paper:

• Non-Aggression Pacts — up to 3 at once. You cannot declare war on a NAP partner without first breaking the pact.
• Confederations — up to 3 at once. Confederates can send each other treasury aid and fight in each other's wars.

Proposals do not sit unread: an incoming pact offer sends an owl and posts a notice at the village gate for anyone with diplomacy rights, exactly the way pending membership applications do — so "we never saw it" stops being a usable foreign policy.

Both can be torn up, and the game remembers. Betraying a confederation brands your President a Marked Traitor for 7 days (a defense penalty of 0.75× while marked), inflicts an alignment hit, and freezes you out of new pacts for 72 hours. Breaking a mere NAP is cheaper but still costs alignment. Treachery, the news ticker notes, spreads "to nobody's lasting surprise."

Spoils of War: Conquest

Winning a club war earns you one reward, and you must choose which: loot the loser's coffer in a raid, as before, or march to Hogsmeade and seize one location they hold, by right of conquest, which is to say for free, which is to say the defeated club is not consulted. Not both. The writ authorizes a grudge, not a land grab, and it is not a coupon you may hoard: press your claim within a few days of the war's end (72 hours by default) or it lapses, the moment having passed and the moral high ground with it. The "Conquer (war spoils)" option appears on the Hogsmeade Sovereignty screen beside each location the defeated club still holds.

A club that loses its location is, in the parlance of estate agents, relocated. It keeps its clubhouse, keeps every member, and keeps whatever tier its donor points paid for — nothing is razed and no one is thrown out. It simply loses the location and pays a modest relocation fee from its coffer (a sum the same 65% vault floor that bounds raiding will not let grow ruinous), after which a protective ward settles over it for a day, sparing it from being farmed while it's down. While that ward holds it also defers a clubhouse repossession — though a club already deep in arrears (well past the upkeep grace) is repossessed anyway: the ward delays the goblins, it does not dismiss them. Seizing a location is also the richest spoil on the board, worth 60 season points to the conqueror (against a raid's 25). This is the universe's way of saying: sit down, have a think, and stop losing wars.

Rankings

Clubs are ranked by power, a single number that blends three things: the summed strength of recently active members (only those seen within 30 days count; each capped at 5,000 so no one whale dominates), roster size, and clubhouse tier (+250 power per tier). The Power Rankings page sorts the top 100 and paints them in percentile tiers — Gold (top 20%), Silver (next), Bronze (the rest) — and tells you precisely how much more power you need to overtake the Club one rung above you, in case you needed something to resent.

Loyalty & Perks

Loyalty accrues with tenure — at most one loyalty day per real calendar day, regardless of how many game days flicker past (and many do; the clock runs fast). Crossing the configured thresholds (7, 30, 90 days by default) advances your loyalty tier: Newcomer → Trusted → Veteran → Stalwart.

The headline loyalty perk is concrete and slightly cynical: treasury withdrawal access unlocks at tier 1. Loyalty, in other words, is mostly the system's way of making sure you've stuck around long enough to be trusted with the petty cash. Leaving resets it all to zero — which is itself the most honest statement the feature makes.

The big recurring reward is not loyalty but the weekly cooperative goal: a shared target — collectively depositing gold, winning fights, earning experience, or simply showing up — that pays milestone rewards along the way and, on completion, grants every member double Voldemort Encounter rewards for the next 7 days. The full mechanics of goal types, milestones, the shared buff, and the cross-club Season Ladder live on the dedicated Cooperative Goals & the Season Ladder page.

Seasons, Sovereignty & Titles

Clubs compete across monthly seasons. Season points are earned by winning wars (100), seizing a Hogsmeade location by conquest (60), crossing cooperative-goal milestones (10 each) and completing the goal (25), landing a successful raid (25), and holding Hogsmeade territory. The standings are ranked with points-to-overtake on the Season & Hall of Fame page; see the Cooperative Goals & the Season Ladder page for the ladder in full. Season scores reset each month and the champion is enshrined permanently in the Hall of Fame; your personal progress never resets.

Sovereignty lets a Club stake a claim on real Hogsmeade locations — the Three Broomsticks, Honeydukes, Zonko's, the Shrieking Shack, the Hog's Head — paying treasury gold (base 50,000). Each location held earns season points per day, and every time a node changes hands its claim cost ratchets up 50%, so contested ground becomes steadily more expensive to fight over.

Finally, the President may bestow honorary titles on members for 5,000 treasury gold apiece — a custom 40-character flourish that shows on the recipient's bio. It does nothing mechanical. It is purely so that someone can be officially named "Keeper of the Snacks," which is, when you think about it, the entire point of belonging to a club.

Strategy

• Don't found a Club you can't feed. Founding is the cheap part. Weekly upkeep scales with tier, so a Castle you can't fund is a Manor in two missed weeks and a Clubhouse in four.
• Hit the weekly goal before anything else. Double-VE rewards for a week is the strongest perk in the system and it pays for itself many times over in active clubs.
• Recruit for recency, not raw power. Only members active within 30 days count toward power, and each is capped — ten busy mid-levels beat three dormant legends.
• War down your band, not below it. Fair-Fight gives almost nothing for stomping the weak, and the matchmaker won't let you punch far down anyway.
• Confederate before you fight. Allies can reinforce your wars and send aid — but choose them carefully, because betraying a confederation marks your President a traitor for a week.
• Gate the treasury with loyalty, not just rank. The tier-1 withdrawal lock is your alt defense; promote freely, but let the coffer access earn itself.