Quest Friends! Concludes its Emotional and Endearing First Campaign
One billion years in the future, the world is a strange place. Societies have risen and fallen, including our own. Technology has gotten so complex and advanced that there aren’t really a lot of people who understand it anymore. All the food is familiar but just a little wrong. When an old-but-new calamity rears it’s obsidian-clouded, spider-filled head, it’s up to four strangers to save the day.
Quest Friends! is an actual play podcast created by five friends that was launched in 2017. The show concluded its first campaign in September 2021, with over 90 episodes of story and other bonus content. On their website and press kit, Quest Friends! compares itself to shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Owl House, and Castle in the Sky. These comparisons are well earned, as the show is a mix of the dramatic lore building through personal character journeys.
Actual play is a genre full of shows that use the same game system (the one with the dragons and the dungeons) so it’s refreshing to see a show that utilizes a different game. Quest Friends! is told using Numenera, a system made by Monte Cook Games. Numenera is set in a technologically advanced world a billion years in the future. The world is built on the ruins of eight different societies, all of which have left behind random bits of technology for players to find and exploit. Numenera is a game that encourages weird world-building and fun, engaging storytelling.
The main selling point of Quest Friends! are the friends themselves and the well developed main cast of player characters. Ari Tena plays MISHA JARVIS, a nano who starts the campaign off with maybe a few days of memories, a curious mind, and a kazoo. Emily Strawn plays Elee Badge, a tough old adventurer who has crudely fused her flesh with metal so that she can never be hurt again (except emotionally). Thomas Pitkin plays Xoc, the self proclaimed Wizard of the East who is really just a good kid with awesome magic. Hallie Koontz plays Hopper Scotch, vigilante accountant and roaming hero who often holds the only brain cell of the group.
Koontz also plays Ness, Xoc’s robot companion who is a late addition to the party. I’m a sucker for when actual play podcasts have cast members play NPCs, so I immediately fell in love with this terrible little robot gremlin. Ness is the kind of character who would cut my car breaks if I didn’t dedicate a small paragraph to him, so here’s that.
Rounding out the cast is the game master, Kyle Decker, who plays all of the NPCs and directs the direction of the story. Decker strikes the perfect balance of making sure the stories center around the player characters while also spending time developing the NPCs in the story. It helps that the cast takes the time to get invested in the NPCs, making their development feel natural. I’ve seen other shows stumble in getting caught up in the lore or character development the GM couldn’t fit into the actual play, so it’s refreshing to have another positive example to point to on how to avoid that.
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My arc with listening to Quest Friends! is a series of me saying, “Hell yeah,” on an upward slope with increased hype. Every arc introduced more ideas and concepts that were just so fundamentally my shit. I was incredibly excited when the first honest to god musical number started. Any time something has a surprise musical number (which Quest Friends! has several of), I just hoot in delight.
(The Best Disclaimer Ever Put On Discover Pods: Discover Pods contributor Cole Burkhardt provided additional voice work for the “Crime and Countship” arc. Specifically, he sang one of the musical numbers for this arc. I don’t think we’ve ever had the opportunity to link to a musical performance in a disclaimer, so this is a fun treat.) (Editor’s note: Can confirm that this is a first and also is a fun treat. –Editor Wil)
The main plot is set up through the “Turingtown ”arc, a deceptively simple “you meet in a tavern” style mission that quickly snowballs into the main hook of the campaign. Through the next arc, “The Clockwork City,” the show finds its footing, as the cast becomes more comfortable with their characters and the world.
I’m going to talk a little more about the other arcs in broad strokes without getting into specific spoilers. The first two arcs are good, but things really clicked for me during the “Questionable Measures” arc. A visit to a criminal paradise leads to the party dealing with their individual baggage. The arc culminates with a thrilling heist that goes wrong in all the wonderful ways that heists can go wrong.
The following arc, “Crime and Courtship”, is hands down one of my favorite arcs in any actual play podcast. The initial premise, a visit to a flying school, becomes something wonderful: a murder mystery dating sim that is also prom. Quest Friends! shines with it’s NPCs, so this setting brought in some of the best NPCs in the series, as well as more development for fan favorites. The dating mechanics and mystery mechanics were also fun, with a lot of clear thought put into how much progress would be made on either front depending on how much time players spent progressing in the mystery or in their romantic arcs.
“One Neon Night” deals with some heavy lore implications as well as a confrontation with one of the lingering villains of the campaign (the one who isn’t, you know, a giant cloud of spiders). It’s also a courtroom drama where the trials can be determined by an elaborate Mario Kart race. This solidifies the thing I love about Quest Friends!, in that it just always presents a delightful surprise turn when you get excited when you realize what the next few episodes are going to look like.
The final arc, “The Obsidian Cloud,” has the gang getting ready for the final confrontation with the Big Bad. While a lot of the more specific details of this whole thing are in the realm of overt spoilers, Quest Friends! does something that I absolutely love seeing in any campaign or actual play podcast. For two full episodes of the finale, the show dedicates time to show how the friends and allies of the main characters band together to help fight against the big bad’s forces to support the main characters. It says a lot about how fully realized the NPCs are in this show that it felt so satisfying to see them all help out in the fray, whether they’re one of the more serious fighters or they are Salad Raptor. It also helps that it doubled as a finale for the show’s side series, “The Cookie Crew”.
Speaking of “The Cookie Crew”, it is a vital part of the show’s worldbuilding. Originating as a miniseries for Women in Gaming Month 2018, “The Cookie Crew” follows the adventures of The Brackleberry Brigade, an elite task force of the Brackleberry Royal family. Follow their adventures as they deliver cookies, go to school, cater a war council, and intentionally start fires. GM’s by Koontz, the BB’s deal with lower danger threats of political importance as opposed to the main campaign’s ground level fight against the apocalypse. It’s a really fun view into a different part of the world and helps expand the version of the Nine Worlds the show is set in.
Between the main arcs of the campaigns, the show also released two part backstory episodes for each of the player characters. These episodes consisted of Decker sitting down with the player in question and running them through a one-on-one session set in their character’s past. Each one of the backstory episodes tries something new and experiments with the form, as well as sets up certain plot hooks for the upcoming arc. Hopper’s backstory episodes follow a child detective solving the first mystery of his career. Elie’s episodes explored the fact that she is the oldest member of the party, telling her life story bookended by the two loves of her life. MISHA’s plays around with the patchwork memory of an AI and features an incredible uptick in the editing. Xoc’s backstory episodes blend together actual play and scripted audio drama to tell a larger story then you would first expect.
(Disclaimer: Discover Pods contributor Tal Minear contributed additional voice work to the audio drama segments of “Xoc’s Memory.” They don’t have a fun YouTube song for me to link to, so their disclaimer is separate from Cole’s. Folks, these writers get around.)
Quest Friends! finished its first campaign on September 25th and will be followed by a few games run by other cast members and their third Halloween episode. They’ll be launching their second long term campaign early 2022, so if I haven’t convinced you to start at the beginning of the first campaign, that might be a nice starting point as well. With a strong cast of players, memorable NPCs, skilled editing, and situations that can be as comedic as they are dramatic, Quest Friends! is an absolutely delightful show that you owe it to yourself to listen to.
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