Steal back your magic and regain your power! After years undercover in the city’s magical law enforcement organization, you can finally break into their vault and reclaim what’s yours! Only…where’s the rest of it?
An Imp and an Impostor is an interactive historical urban fantasy novel by Athar Fikry, author of The Dragon and the Djinn.
You’re an undercover imp: as punishment for your past misdeeds, a powerful magical being known as the Mercy has forced you to live as a human in the city of Raqout. As an agent in Arkan, the city’s magical law enforcement organization, you spend your days busting unlicensed necromancers and negotiating with afareet and djinn. Your by-the-book partner doesn’t know who you really are—or that your nose for crime is actually a nose for magic. Your magic was confiscated when you were arrested, but you’ve regained enough to put you above most humans. And of course, you’ve got talsama, the magic that all humans can use; not to mention your wits, gadgets, and all of the inside knowledge about Arkan that you’ve learned.
Now, after years of preparation, you can finally steal back the rest of your magic from its vault…except when you get there, it’s missing! You need to find it—and more importantly, find the person who took it. Because, as it turns out, you aren’t the only one whose magic has been stolen—and people are going missing, too.
Unravel a tangled web of plots, betrayals, and hidden motives while you track down smugglers and kidnappers. Go on daring heists, cracking open vaults using magic or gadgets; and chase down your enemies in Raqout’s newfangled automobiles. Talk your way past bureaucrats, professors, necromancers, mobsters, afareet, and djinn; and poke into all of the magical and mundane corners of the city, finding things that most people would like to keep hidden—all while evading the Mercy’s vigilance.
And watch your back! You might not be the only impostor in Raqout…
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A few more notes:
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You cannot be testing two games at once. If you are already testing one game, send in feedback on that game before you apply to another. If you apply for multiple games at the same time, you will likely be admitted first to whichever game has testing slots open up first, and we won’t be able to admit you to the other one until you send in your comments for that one. (From an admin standpoint, it’s easiest if you don’t apply to more than one game at once – applying to multiple games makes it more likely that we’ll miss admitting you to one of them.)
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If you’re admitted as a tester but realize you won’t be able to send in feedback for that game, please let us know! You won’t be penalized in any way - we’ll just take you off the list of testers for that game. But if you sign up to test a game and don’t send comments or withdraw, it will affect your chances of being admitted to future betas.
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There’s no standard length of time for a beta testing period to last, and we usually don’t know exactly how long a game will be in beta when it opens. The best way to know how long a beta will be open is to follow the thread for updates.
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It’s fine to send multiple feedback emails, but if you have a lot of quick comments, it’s easier to keep track of them if you bundle them into one email.
Tips on How to Give Feedback
We’re looking for “high level” and “low level” feedback. Not mid-level feedback.
Low-level = typos and continuity errors. A continuity error is when a character’s gender flips, or someone comes back from the dead, or you run into a plotline that just doesn’t make sense (because it’s probably a coding error). For these low-level issues, screenshots are very helpful. If you see a problem, take a screenshot, or copy and paste the text that is in error, and email that.
“High level” feedback has to do with things like plot, pacing, and characters. “Scene A didn’t work for me because x, y, and z,” is useful feedback. “B character was entirely unsympathetic, because u, w, and v,” is also useful feedback.
“Mid-level” feedback describes things like grammar, style, word choice, or the use of commas. As I said above, I do not want mid-level feedback. In particular, DO NOT WRITE TO ME ABOUT COMMAS.
“I had a great time and saw only a few spelling errors,” is not useful feedback. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that results in you not being given access to future betas.
Some examples of useful feedback :
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In Choice of the Dragon, you get to choose what type of wings you have: leather or scaled. Someone wrote in and asked about having feathered wings. Great suggestion! Done!
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In “The Eagle’s Heir,” someone asked about Eugenie. They said that the romance moved too quickly–because she only appeared in the last third of the game–and wished they could have had an opportunity to meet her earlier. So the authors added an opportunity to meet her and start the romance earlier in the game (in a scene that already existed).
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In “Demon Mark: A Russian Saga” several people commented on how the PC’s parents were unsympathetic, so the authors added a choice or two to deepen the relationship with the parents in the first chapter, to help better establish their characters.
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Pointing out a specific choice and saying, “this is who I imagined my character was at this particular moment, and none of these options seemed right for me. I would have liked an option to do X instead,” is also really helpful feedback.
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If you choose an #option and then the results of that #option don’t make sense. Like, if you thought an #option might test one stat, but it seems to have tested a different one.