Mallow Hallow's OOC Community

All right, folks. AC/HMD for October has ended -- and if I was going strictly by that, we'd be down to seven characters who both replied and made AC. As it is, we are as of today at a grand total of fourteen characters currently in this game. The question has become, where do we go from here?

The fact of the matter is, Mallow Hallow was never really a large game, but recently it has become an tiny one, with not a lot to show in way of activity. We mods have tried to drum up some interest, but very little appears to have happened. So we leave the question up to you: What do you want to do about Mallow Hallow? Shall we continue on as more of a musebox/dressing room setting? Are there any further changes you think we can make to encourage the game to grow again? Should we just continue on as we are for now and see if things improve in the coming month? Please respond with what you think. It would be much appreciated.

All right, everyone, we've got an event for you, to run through all of October! This one's a bit different from the ones we've had before. You see, this doesn't take place across all the districts. You remember that one district that disappeared, somehow? It should be there between Mallowhallow and Whitewood, except there's nothing here, almost like nothing ever was there?

No? It's okay, not everyone does. But they'll have reason to notice it now.

You see, it's back on the map. For the two people anyone who's been paying attention, it seems that overnight, the place has become a little less empty, and a lot more physically present: it's now the size of another district again, and covered in a very thick fog.

Orion and Tronctor get to explore it first, to see what's returned from wherever it wasn't, and then they'll send out a post on the network. After that, it's up to your characters to disobey or fail to hear about it in the first place and head in.

About that fog? It's not normal. It fools with technology's ability to scan it and scan through it, so any tricorders are next to useless in it. It's so thick, you have a ton of difficulty seeing more than about ten feet in front of you. What could that shape be, coming out of the fog? What is the scenery like?

Those sorts of questions are ones that only your characters can answer... except, it isn't likely to be something they'll be able to deliberately answer. (We think this post may help to explain this, and if anyone has questions about what's going on here, they're welcome to ask, here in this post!) People walking into a fresh area in the fog will have the most impact on that area, and otherwise are able to see places others' minds have left behind. It isn't just possible, but likely, that they'll come across shadow-things in the fog, and be able to interact with whatever creature or person it may be.

Please note that shadows are not actually that person or thing. They simply conform to expectations about what people perceive them to be. So while someone may run into their arch-nemesis, said arch-nemesis won't actually be an NPC in the sense that they're plotting behind the scenes; it takes the other characters being physically around them, to dictate their behavior and speech, puppeting them without realizing it.

However, this doesn't mean that a shadow can't gain a mind and become an entity of its own. It's possible that you might come across a notsoscaryshadow in the fog world at some point. And wouldn't you know it (and most people wouldn't, so it's okay, really!) there's been a shadow among you this whole time here in Mallow Hallow: Doll. That's right, hollowbutnotempty is a shadow-creature. Doll originated in a foggy dimension like this lost district has become, and was a product of others' minds, now a product of its own. Take what Doll says about things with a grain of salt, however: simply being a denizen of someplace doesn't mean you fully (or even mostly) understand everything about it. (If it did, all of us muns would be experts on all Earth subjects already, right?)

The fog event will begin Wednesday, October 2nd, and end Saturday, November 9th. And just a reminder: ICly, it's still about mid-summer.

There's a bonus to this big event, besides perhaps turning your character's own expectations against them: the area is so unstable that toward the end of the event, say about the last week of October and the first week of November, (Oct 27th to November 9th) it's entirely possible for other people's characters to get sucked into Mallow Hallow from wherever they were before.

You read it correctly: the last part of this event is a 4th-wall affair! Let all your friends know! We'll be letting characters in who have their own journals: canon characters, OCs, and just about every shade of in-between. We'll put up a sign-up page when it gets closer to the date, to approve characters joining us for this; we ask that characters joining us for this event have a post in their journal, or a link in it to a page somewhere, which has info about that character. (After all, it's nice to know a bit about the character you're playing off of!)

This could be a good opportunity to invite your friends in to test the waters, or even just have a few good threads in a fun setting. Potential applicants are welcome to jump in for this; what better way to test the waters than to play in the game itself?

There's also an extra bonus to this event: potential boss fights! There will be enough shadow-energy and shadow-material built up by the end of October that larger, more powerful shadows may appear in the fog. If anyone's familiar with Persona 4, they'll understand what it means for a character to find their own Shadow in the fog, and if they're not, don't worry: we'll put up a post that covers that, closer to the time for it.

We hope you'll have a ton of fun with this, since we're certainly looking forward to it!

Activity has been lacking a bit around here as of late, and I'd like to do something to try and encourage people to post more. There have been some suggestions as to having an actual activity requirement for the game to encourage posting. I've considered this before, and my current feelings on an activity check for mallowhallow are as follows:

-->One post in either mallowhallow or mallow_logs a month
AND/OR
-->One comment thread in either mallowhallow or mallow_logs a month

I figure something like this is easy to do, well-suited to our "one week IRL = two days IG" schedule, and still ensures that our current roster of characters would be doing things in-game. However, I'm open to comments and ideas! (Mainly about the comment thread -- should it be a specific length? Should it be longer if you don't have a post from your character in either main comm?) Any thoughts on activity requirements (even "I hate them, noooo") are welcome.

Thank you for your assistance!