Follow the plan, or follow your heart…
Now that Microscope Explorer is out, the Oracles are free online, and all but a few of the advanced backer rewards are done, should I take a vacation? Should I put my feet up, sip some coffee and rest on my laurels?
Well yes to the coffee, but no to all the rest.
I’ve been hard at work on the next game. Several games, actually, but after jumping back and forth between them (so difficult to choose!) I’ve decided that right now I want to go forward with Follow.
Follow is a game about working together to achieve a common goal. Slay the dragon. Cure a disease. Get your candidate elected. Can we stay united and succeed or do our differences tear us apart?
Follow is designed to be a very simple game. A ready-to-go-at-the-drop-of-a-hat game. A game that’s easy to pick up and play, even if someone handed you the book cold. But I also wanted it to have *a lot* of replay value. Those were my two goals: a game that is easy to learn, but which is also a dependable tool in your arsenal that you are happy to whip out and take for a spin over and over again.
I’ve been working on Follow since before I finished Kingdom. Some Kingdom backers got a sneak preview in early 2014. After many, many unplayed drafts, I finally hit a formula that did what I wanted. The name has changed and a lot of the approach has evolved, but the core concept is the same.
“God favors the Bones”
How far along is it? Well we’ve played Follow a few times, and while there are still tweaks and adjustments that I think are critical, the spine totally works. We’ve been pirates, gangster-era train robbers, and teen rocker-girls trying to make it to the top of the charts (Lazer Kittiez 4ever!).
For now I’m going to play it more (a lot more), but I’m looking towards a draft that would be ready for playtesters. More details later.
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Adam, have you seen this post about temporary Kingdoms? I think it could definitely work for things like heists, etc.
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/572/temporary-kingdoms/
Follow is designed to much easier and accessible than Kingdom. I loves me some Kingdom, but there is definitely a learning curve as you see how the roles all interact, how Crossroads resolve, etc.
I appreciate your honesty about now being able to play it, but never fear, I suspect the delay between playtest and release will be a lot shorter than my other games. I worked on Follow a ton behind the scenes before going to playtest, so I think it’s quite far along already.
This sounds quite interesting. Oddly enough I was recently thinking about using Kingdom for almost exactly this idea, using the mix of cooperation and competition that the engine often encourages to play a fairly conventional RPG scenario with a small group, in something like a heist.
Though Kingdom is obviously not intended for a small group(in universe) in the way that this presumably is. It should be interesting to see a proper game intended for exactly this. Though I would love an early look at the rules, I would be doing you a disservice to take a playtest slot, as I am currently not really in a position to play as much as I would like, especially not with a new system.