Category: Follow Quests

Posted by Marc

With the new free version of Follow and Caroline’s The Farm quest hot off the presses, I decided to take both for a spin at Story Games Olympia. And it was a blast!

I sat down with four Follow newbies and we dove in. Our first task was to customize our farm setting. How did we all end up here? Turns out there was a magic rock in a field that sort of “called out” to us all, and we just wandered in and decided to make a farm around it. Nice. Next question: what makes our quest to revive our farm difficult? Well, probably all our experimental magical farming techniques. And bad soil. Lots of rocks.

Next we made characters. I held off until last to see what everyone else made and fill in any gaps. We had a cook, a botanist, a poet, a local kid… but no farmer, so I grabbed that one. Our cook Cap’n was all about becoming famous for his cuisine. Local kid Rosemary just wanted everyone to believe she really could talk to rocks. The botanist Coriander wanted to create magical seeds to sell, and our poet Eloise wanted to connect with others. As for me, the farm owner Josie? I wanted to escape my dark past as some kind of evil wizard. Y’know, get back to nature and all that.

Rocks, weeds, and ghosts – oh my!

First challenge: clear the land. We struggled against weeds that put themselves back in the ground when you weren’t looking and an overeager Rosemary who insisted the rocks weren’t happy about us moving them. Finally Coriander suggested we “scare” the weeds away by planting Boo Berries (a Scaregrow was also floated as an option). We planted a ton of bushes, drew our stones, and… failed the challenge. We lost a farmhand (minor character) and tried to figure out how we’d screwed up. “Oh no,” I said, “we planted all these boo berries, and they drove off the weeds… but now our farm is covered with ghosts!”

Sure, the ghosts were cute and chubby. Sure, they only played minor pranks sometimes. But we had a farm to build, and we needed them gone. Challenge two: deal with pests. We hemmed and hawed about maybe making a soothing herb garden or using enchanted crystals… but then Josie went ahead with a dark banishment ritual and roped Coriander and Eloise into helping. We awaited the draw… and succeeded!

Our play time ran out, so we called that the end and did some epilogues. All told, I loved playing the Farm. Caroline managed to capture the “cozy” element quite well. The many roads untraveled in how we set up the farm and the characters made me want to play again right away, just see how it could go differently. Thanks to my players and good work Caroline!