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, and 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 Scarlet whatever you please), a tag (exactly 3 plain letters or numbers, with no color codes; the form will say so rather than quietly eating them. It must be unique across every Club, and it is 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 opens the treasury, which starts empty, in the way that treasuries do. 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, whether 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.

The Message of the Day

Every Club has a Message of the Day, the same pinned notice the House common rooms have: rules, meeting times, standing grievances, the list of people who have not paid into the treasury. It sits at the very top of the Club page, above the tier, the treasury and the chat, credited to whoever last set it, so it is the first thing a member sees on arrival and remains so whether or not they read it.

Its virtue is stubbornness. Chat scrolls, and old comments are pruned by the ordinary workings of the world; the MotD is not chat and nothing prunes it. It stays exactly where it was put until an officer changes it, which is either the greatest strength of the feature or a warning about how long a typo can live.

Officers and the President may set it, via Update MotD in the Club menu. Color codes work, up to 4,096 characters, of which most Clubs need about forty. Saving an empty box takes the notice down. Anything resembling markup is displayed as plain text rather than obeyed, the school having learned to be firm about that sort of thing.

Ranks & Governance

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

Rank	Can do
Recruit	Belong. Deposit. Talk. 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 them 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 not a room you walk into. It used to be, briefly, and the arrangement was a small disaster: there were two conversations happening in the same club, in two places, neither of which knew about the other, and a door out of the building that led into an estate agent's window. The clubhouse is now simply what your Club is, which is to say it is the Club page: the tier, the capacity, the treasury balance, the upkeep bill, and the talk, all in one place, which is where they were always about. Its coffer and the club treasury are one and the same pot, managed 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.

The tiers now shelter as well as house: members of a Manor enjoy a permanent +2% to attack and defense, and members of a Castle +4%, on the understanding that it is easier to duel well when one has slept somewhere with functioning windows. The perk is suspended while the club is behind on clubhouse upkeep specifically — comfort is a subscription, and the goblins hold the receipt. (Unpaid Hogsmeade dues are a different failure with a different consequence: see Sovereignty, where the penalty is losing the territory itself.) The club's public page now also carries a Trophy Case — season championships, the war record (draws recorded as draws, the ledger being scrupulous about other people's mediocrity), and any Hogsmeade holdings — which renders nothing at all for a club with nothing to show, a kindness nobody asked for and everybody appreciates.

Presidents may also repaint: a new club name color and a separate chat tag color cost 500 donator points apiece, from the Club Colors page. Clearing back to the default is free, restoring the club to the dignity of plain text at no charge.

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 is dated and carries a name, 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, whether 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. A Club that goes quiet for a month does not come home to a clean slate: the goblins keep a ledger of every week the clubhouse was neglected, and bill the backlog on your first day back, capped at the same grace window rather than the full stretch of your absence. Vanishing is not a billing plan.

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. The two halves keep different hours, which is worth knowing before you dither: the right of conquest is not a coupon you may hoard, and lapses a few days after the war ends (72 hours by default), the moment having passed and the moral high ground with it, while the raid waits as long as you like. A club may therefore sit on an unraided victory indefinitely and still find, one morning, that the land it meant to take is no longer available to it.

Claiming either spoil is an Officer-or-President act (or a member carrying the Warlord role), the same rank that declares the war and the same rank that spends treasury gold on an ordinary claim. Everyone else sees the result and none of the buttons, which spares the club the traditional argument.

Where to find it: on the Hogsmeade Sovereignty screen, any location held by the club you beat is listed as yours by right of conquest: claim cost free (war spoils) instead of showing a price, and the only action offered for it is Conquer (war spoils, free). The ordinary paid Claim button is withheld on that location on purpose: the treasury should not be able to buy what the club already owns. Should you contrive to reach the paid path anyway, it declines your gold and points you back at the free one. The Wars page and the raid confirmation screen carry the same option, and they offer it only when it will actually work: if the loser has been shielded, has run out of territory, holds nothing your club is still permitted to take in a district it has outgrown, would push you past your three-location allotment, or the 72 hours have quietly elapsed, the page says which of those happened rather than promising a conquest that Hogsmeade will not honor. (District law does not bend for victory: winning a war against a smaller club does not entitle a larger one to move into the smaller one's neighborhood beyond the one foothold described below, and the raid remains available for exactly this disappointment.)

One war, one prize, taken once. Conquering forfeits the raid and raiding forfeits the conquest, the instant either is claimed; both options then vanish and the Wars page states which spoil your club took. Clicking twice in a hurry does not produce two locations, two raids, or one of each: the ledger is settled before anything is handed over.

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.

The same courtesy now covers an ordinary loss on the open market. A club whose location is bought out from under it by a paying rival gets a shorter 8-hour ward over whatever it still holds — brief enough that the market doesn't seize up, long enough that the same rival cannot simply buy it straight back the moment the gold clears. A warded club's remaining locations are not for sale to anyone until the ward lapses, full stop; the Sovereignty screen marks them warded, not for sale yet rather than showing a price.

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). It then 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 a champion is crowned per Hogsmeade district and enshrined permanently in the Hall of Fame (see Seasons, Sovereignty & Titles below for the three thrones); your personal progress never resets.

Sovereignty lets a Club stake a claim on real Hogsmeade locations — and Hogsmeade, it turns out, is zoned. The village is divided into three districts by Club power: the High Street (the Three Broomsticks, Honeydukes, Zonko's, the Shrieking Shack, the Hog's Head; base cost 50,000 gold), the Side Streets (Madam Puddifoot's, Scrivenshaft's, Gladrags, Dogweed and Deathcap; base 25,000), and the Outskirts (the Station, the Owl Post Office, Dominic Maestro's, McHavelock's; base 10,000). Your Club's district is set by its power — specifically its season peak, the registry having met Clubs that misplace half their members the week before an auction and find them again the week after. A Club may always claim upward into a grander district than its own, ambition being legal. Downward is mostly barred but not quite entirely: a Club that has outgrown a district may still hold one foothold there, by claim or by conquest, on the theory that even the mighty are allowed a single sentimental attachment to somewhere smaller; a second attempt in the same district is refused outright, the registry noting exactly how many footholds the allowance permits, and the weekly land audit below leaves that one foothold alone. No Club may hold more than three locations in total, a number the land registry describes as "a portfolio" in the tone other people use for "a problem."

The lines between districts are surveyed fresh every night, not chiseled into the map. The registry looks at where every active Club's power actually sits and redraws the High Street and Side Streets thresholds to match, so the boundary rises when the server as a whole is thriving and sinks when it is not, rather than sitting fixed while the population grows past it or shrinks under it. The redraw only ever creeps, a fraction of the distance each night rather than the whole way, so a Club near a line drifts toward its new district over a run of nights instead of finding its address changed all at once.

Prices move in two directions, on schedules. Each time a location changes hands its claim cost jumps 50%, so a fresh conquest is briefly expensive to take back — the new banner gets a honeymoon. But every week, each location's cost also settles 10% of the way back toward its district's base, and a further 40% at each season's end: fortresses age, and the market has the attention span of a niffler in a vault. The longer a champion sits on a throne, the cheaper the throne gets for everyone else — this is not a bug, it is the whole constitutional arrangement. Grander ground also pays more: each location earns season points per day scaled by its district (Outskirts 5, Side Streets 10, High Street 15), so a small Club that stretches for one grand address is making an investment rather than a mistake. Weekly dues continue as before (1% of claim cost per week, escalating per extra location, clubhouse bills reserved first, three unpaid weeks and your priciest location returns to the market at a discount). The registry also performs two acts of redistribution, on the record and without an appeals process: weekly, any Club holding more than its one allowed foothold in a district it has outgrown releases the excess back to the market at repossession pricing, priciest first (growth is celebrated, then billed, but the one sentimental foothold is spared); and at season's end, any Club holding more than three locations has its most expensive ones returned to the market until it is back at three, the registry's view being that a portfolio is a privilege and a monopoly is a filing error.

The season now crowns a champion per district — three thrones, three Halls of Fame entries, three sets of members wearing the champion's badge — so a small Club racing other small Clubs is racing for something it can actually win, which the philosophers of Hogsmeade agree is the kind of race that gets run hardest.

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.