Hey Friends! I know we’ve been quiet for a little bit, but that’s because we’ve had our heads down working tirelessly on this new update. It went through 3 big rewrites while in alpha, but we’ve finally gotten it to a point where we’re happy with it, and we think you will be too. This Quests and One-Shots update completely reshapes how you and Franz build adventures together.

Previously, if you wanted to share the adventure in your head, you could only do it at the table you GM, or you’d need the resources to write, publish, and distribute a book. The new Friends & Fables Quest system is a familiar, but completely new way for you to create, share, and experience stories. Our new Quest Editor allows you to build complex quests, with scenes, paths, and outcomes, giving you granular control of which characters are in each scene and what happens. It allows you to plan for various scenarios and branch your quest depending on what the players do.

Quests in Friends & Fables have gone from being simple structured context for an LLM to being a new creative medium for storytelling. We hear from a lot of people about how AI is diminishing human creativity, but in our experience, giving people tools like this just empowers them to create even more. We’re excited to experience all of the amazing stories you all have to tell!

We’ve also put together a Youtube video in case you prefer that:

Quests

The big problem with our previous quests system was that it left little room for player agency. This new system allows you or Franz to script must-hit beats, decide when and where to reveal key information, and give players ways to solve things in their own creative ways. Franz can still fill in the gaps and improvise when players try to go off the rails, so quests feel flexible and natural instead of rigid.

The other issue was that world builders and players could not edit or create their own quests. Now, world builders can plant quests throughout their world. You can level-gate quests, so the same NPC will give you one quest at level 3, and another at level 5. You can also chain a series of quests together with quest prerequisites.

A Brand New Quest Editor - Unleash your imagination!

At Friend & Fables, we’re all in on our World Builders. Despite how amazing we think AI is, to us it is just a tool to help support and share human creativity. With all of the work we’ve put into this quest editor, we think we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

This new quest editor is made for you to plan out and author complex quest lines, so you can easily see the shape of your quest, as well as easily rewire steps and paths as you see fit. We really can’t wait to see all the crazy stuff you guys will make.

Anatomy of a Quest

Steps

Steps are the main building block of a quest. Think of a step as the main scenes, objectives, and plot points of a quest. A step contains the following pieces:

• GM Instructions: These are instructions for how Franz should run this step of the quests. i.e “Describe how the room is made of stone and is quite cold. There is a circle of stones in the center of the room. If a player decides to touch a stone, it should burn them and then blink with a red glow 3 times”

• Location: Select a location for the quest

• Scene information: You can update a POIs images and descriptions, as well as set NPCs, monsters, and items. When a player arrives at the selected POI, the scene will be set according to how you set it up.

Paths

Paths are associated with steps, but have their own distinct properties. Paths are ways for quest authors to give players choice, resolve steps, and help determine what the next step should be. Each path has the following:

• Trigger: This is the condition or trigger. If the campaign engine determines that the trigger was met, it will take you down that path.

• Outcome: What should happen if the player triggers or chooses this path.

• Scene information: You can also set the scene on completion of a path.

With paths triggers and outcomes, you can do interesting things like:

• Player Choice: Which starter Pokemon do you want to choose? (Your starter might lead you down a different path). Path A: Charmander, Path B: Squirtle, Path C: Bulbasaur.

• Skill Checks and state updates: You can set the triggers of paths to things like “Path A: Succeeds check - Players find a silver locket” “Path B: Fails check - NPC tells players to get out, players accidentally drop 5 gold as they are rushed out”.

• Traps / Secret Passage Ways: Path A: … the main quest line, Path B: If the players touch the green book, a door handle reveals itself from the wall.

• Scripted Dialog and Character Development: Write a clever zinger for an NPC to say at the perfect moment or have them reveal something about their past. You now have the tools to make NPCs feel very real. Make them lovable, helpful, or murderable!

• and much more! We’ve designed this system to be flexible, so we’re actually not even sure of all the different techniques that will be invented. Once we’re learn more about how you all will use the system, we’ll publish an official guide.

Here’s an example of Franz running scripted dialog:

Franz Generated Quests

While our main focus in this update has been making it easy for world builders to create interesting quests, we still want Franz to be able to generate quests on the fly. This is important so that sandbox campaigns still feel cohesive, and things make sense when you run into an NPC who needs you to save their cat.

To have Franz generate a quest on the fly, you need to find yourself in a situation where an NPC offers you a quest or job. Once you confirm with the NPC that you are willing to take on the task, Franz should generate a quest on the fly and you will see a notification that the quest has been accepted.

One-Shots: Highly Crafted Adventures

Where Quests give you an open canvas that any party can encounter in a world, One-Shots are your chance to deliver crafted stories around specific characters. One-shots are designed to be a great way to drop players into an exciting story and get them immersed in the world.

Under the hood, a One-Shot is a Quest, except for a few key differences:

• Fixed Party Characters - One-shots are designed to be stories crafted around specific characters. For one shots, players are limited to choose from characters that the author selected.

• Special Packaging - One-shots get special display pages and sharing links (similar to worlds).

• Briefings - One shots also get a UI layer when someone starts the quest, to quickly brief players on the characters and world they are playing.

One-shots offer players an easy way to jump into a game and play a complete story. These adventures also do not need to be the end of a story, but can be the start of a one. For a world-builder, one-shots are a fun way to incorporate your vision into the game you've created. Instead of hoping for a player to stumble across a storyline you've built, you can feature it. One-shots can also allow world-builders to set up a game that is meant to revolve around a single character or group of characters in order to build a world crafted to tell a single epic tale.

I think one-shots are going to be a great way to onboard new players into Friends & Fables, as well as your worlds. I also think it’s going to be very fun for you all to create and share one-shots with each other!

A Glimpse at Our First Official One-Shot: Scent of Ruin

Set in our original world of Odrun Fell, this one-shot tells a tale of crisis, pursuit, and retribution for deals made in the dark.

Say hello to Cassian Virelle, the illusionist, heartbreaker, and scene-stealer. Once a rising star in the velvet-draped theaters of the Sprigs, Cassian spent years memorizing monologues and basking in glamour-charmed light. But somewhere between the ghost lights and the scripted drama, he uncovered a truth the Promissory never meant for him to see. The real stage was the city itself—its streets, its secrets, its shadows. So he stepped past the velvet curtains and began chasing something unscripted. Something real.

Now, his story turns personal. Fresh from a grueling delve into the Greatclub tunnels, Cassian returns to the Bentroot Exchange for a quiet visit only to find smoke curling through the air, glass shattered underfoot, and his sister bleeding beside her ruined stall. The scentcase she carried, strong enough to draw tunnel horrors from the depths, has been stolen. She needs him. And someone is going to pay for what they’ve done.

Play it here!

Fixes and Improvements

• Improved performance when cloning or starting campaigns from large worlds to fix time out errors and reduce time.

• Fixed an issue in combat where NPCs were not using their cantrips.

• Reduced false positive block messages on mature content.

• Fixed an issue in combat where health reductions were not applied correctly, leading to ‘dead’ NPCs taking turns.

• Fixed an issue in combat where surprise rounds where incorrect.

• Fixed an issue in combat where sometimes damage was not applied on hit.

• Fixed an issue in combat where damage roll modifiers from custom attacks were not applied.

• Fixed an issue in combat causing incorrect modifier values when rolling for initiative.

What’s next?

If you’re still reading, thanks for making it through this huge post! While we’re really excited about Quests and One-shots, there is still a lot of work to do. We still need to put in quest syncing and a handful of small updates. We’ve gone through a good amount of alpha testing, but I’m sure you we’ll have a lot more things to update once you all start taking cracks at it.

We’ll be spending the next couple of weeks tuning quests and fixing some other bugs that have piling up. Once that is done, we’ll finally turn our attention to the lore update. We know you guys are eager for that one, so we’ll get to it as fast as we can!

Thank you so much for playing Friends & Fables, we can’t wait to see what you guys create.

— Will