Announcement: The Search For Magiq Interactive

From C.J.
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Hi Mounties, happy Monday!

As some of you may know, The Secret Society is drawing to its resolution and you might be wondering, well, what’s next?

And I’m here to tell you!

The Book of Briars will be out by the end of summer (Thank Cags) but @Catherine and I (along with an immense amount of brainpower and creativity from Leadership) have created an immersive, interactive narrative that will take us through the Spring and Summer, and it’s called:

The Search for Magiq

“The Search For Magiq” will be something a little different. Think of it as a hybrid of The Monarch Papers and some of the monthly challenges and activities the Leaders have been creating on the forum. Monthly “episodes” that will require your interaction, creativity, and initiative, but in return, you will be rewarded with new characters, lore, and a whole new narrative!

Also, we’re trying out a new structure for our interactive story that I think will make it all more exciting, challenging, and rewarding!

These episodes will move along and even end, with or without your participation. Yeah.

Whereas The Secret Society’s progression was largely reliant on the availability of its participants, The Search For Magiq will be a moving train, and it’s up to you to work together to meet the challenge and unlock the lore that we’ve hidden behind some (we think) really cool narrative and world-building before it moves on.

We have a story in place, and lore we (REALLY, REALLY) want to reveal but to “unlock” it all there will be a necessary level of interaction. If that level isn’t met, you might fail or you might unlock some but not all of what we have planned. The good news is that these episodes are community-based, so responsibility will never rest on the shoulders of one person.

This isn’t to punish you (though I don’t NOT enjoy punishing you now and then), but instead, it’s a way for us to up the stakes of the stories we tell and also it helps us build a story that won’t come to a grinding halt and kind of blow our plans out of the water if things slow down or people get busy. We 100% understand you all have lives outside of the Magiqverse (unlike myself), but our mental health here at AGP depends on us being able to plan and structure things months and even years in advance, so we’re trying to find ways to balance our plans and also herd all you hacker cats.

Okay, are you ready to hear a little about the first episode? It will begin on or before April 1st.

That’s all I can tell you. :cjtea:

It may overlap a little with the final act of Secret Society, but things at AGP never go according to plan. SO… you’ll hear more from us about Ackerly Green’s searchformagiq in the next few days, but until then, please reply with questions and thoughts!

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Without trying to pry too much into the behind the scenes of this.

If the leadership helped create the challenges, and the leadership seems to represent the bulk of the active people on the forum, doesn’t that really narrow down the field of people who can work on these?

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Leadership knows 0% regarding the narrative, complications, lore, or characters.

Leadership helped define the months “SFM” would encompass this year, just like we’ve done for Fitness, Nepenthe, etc. and helped brainstorm the kinds of projects that could connect with the Search For Magiq narrative.

And later in the campaign, they have some projects they want to introduce, think in the vein of @Revenir’s Uncharted Territory last year (being vague as to not give anything away.) Where AGP, behind the scenes, will connect the story we have planned to the community’s involvement in those projects.

But Leadership will never have access to narrative or lore that the wider community doesn’t. It’s not a special club, their responsibility is just to help us at AGP help connect with the community while we also run a publishing house. And I’d be dead without them. :cjheart:

When I announce the first episode, it will make a lot more sense of how this will work.

EDIT: Also, we’re about to launch our first reader magnet ads since the ones that brought you all into The Monarch Papers so Search For Magiq is also a way to show new readers what we’re all about and how this all works, so they’re not just reading about things after the fact, they can join in the community and get involved on day one, just like TMP worked.

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This sounds absolutely awesome! But I noticed it’s starting on Steve’s Day so I’m ready for your tricks! :wink:

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awesome! its gonna be neat to see viewers get drawn in by those magnet ads again. Still cant remember for the life of me how i even found this, maybe ive always been here? >w>;

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It all sounds a bit like a more interactive version of Guild Wars’ 2 Living World (where the plot is issued as small free DLCs that push the story forward every couple of months) and I actually can’t wait!

What you said - we’ve got our own lives aside from forum which might sometimes have a positive impact on it and sometimes detrimental (that’s why I disappeared for the last couple of days). Hope I’ll be able to jump this train a bit more than just the hype wagon :cjheart:

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As a leader I can confirm that I have no clue what is going to happen narrative-wise. We came up with ideas for month long “challenges” and such, but have no clue how this connects to any sort of story.
We might step in to help manage certain details of the challenges themselves if it turns out CJ has a busy schedule, or one of us has specific skills that would help a project. In the past, examples of this have mostly been like
“Hey convenient leader, can you post this announcement for me? My wifi is unreliable.” Nothing too confidential. So we don’t know much more than the rest of you.
Honestly, when we have secrets to keep, they’re usually just “Some unspecified thing will happen this week and we need to keep forum activity up so people see the new thing.” It’s rarely more specific than that. CJ is very careful that the leader’s lodge doesn’t become an exclusive club and is careful to make sure we get to enjoy the unfolding story at the same time as everyone else.

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i…definitely need to push myself to be more creative, and the magiq-verse has always done that. maybe with this, i’ll be able to get better about actively pursuing my creative impulses.
like making up my grimoires, working on short poems and such, and finally getting that stuff out to CJB i promised him a while back!

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