The Quest Friends!, from left: Thomas Pitkin ’14, Hallie Koontz ’14, Ariadne Peñalva Tena ’15, Emily Strawn Decker ’17, and Kyle Decker ’15
Quest Friends! is an award-winning podcast about friendship, family, and apocalyptic spiders. Or it used to be, before its second season. Now we’ve moved on to ghosts.
When Kyle Decker ’15 proposed starting a podcast in 2017, it was largely an excuse to make a creative project out of something our Cornell friend group was already doing. One of the ways the five of us—Kyle, Emily Strawn Decker ’17, Ariadne Peñalva Tena ’15, Thomas Pitkin ’14, and I—kept in touch after graduation was through online tabletop role-playing games (RPGs). Kyle, in particular, loved the stories we told together. So he pitched recording those games and releasing them as episodes, edited for time and pacing.
With an RPG, players make their own character, and the game master (GM) designs the setting and all the non-player characters (NPCs) who inhabit that world. The GM then presents the players with a problem or a call to adventure, and the players decide how their characters react—what they say, what they do, and how they talk to each other. Because the players don’t know what the GM has planned and the GM isn’t sure what course of action the player characters will take, RPGs involve a lot of improv and surprises. Kyle planned to run a complete adventure in one session, and he created a whole town with five separate locations we could investigate as part of the mystery.
That whole first adventure took four sessions, and we visited one location.
All in all, the entirety of season 1—“Flashback Future”—took 82 episodes, not counting the 30-ish bonus episodes we recorded, to complete. But the story’s not over, which is why there are ghosts now.
We played that first season using Monte Cook’s Numenera, an RPG system near to my heart because it’s the first RPG I ever played (in a blocks-long campaign run by Thomas back in our Cornell days). For the second season, “Hereafter,” we created our own RPG system: Under the Neighborhood, which is meant to emulate tropes and archetypes common in Saturday morning cartoons. We agreed that we wanted season 2 to be more mundane, down-to-earth, and slice-of-life focused, which is how we ended up in a world where ghosts, zombies, and skeletal Pokémon knock-offs called Necromon live alongside some spunky Necromon duelists, a skeleton of indeterminate age with the ability to con so effectively he can change the fabric of reality, and a reporter recovering from a midlife crisis who can summon not just one but two mascot suits at will.
Seven years into the podcast and 10 years into these friendships I am beyond fortunate to have made, I can’t imagine where I’d be if I hadn’t met these people at Cornell. At the risk of schilling my own podcast, give Quest Friends! a listen—it’s long-lasting college friendships at work (and play).
Hallie Koontz ’14 is a writer and editor based in the Chicagoland area. She likes mystery novels, pineapple on pizza, and tabletop role-playing.