case study: Quest for the Verdant Tome

What happened

A small group of The Wild Ones community came together to play a short fantasy quest. Their mission was to retrieve the Verdant Tome, an ancient book of knowledge, by navigating encounters, dilemmas, and hidden rules. Each participant stepped into a fantasy role — a druid, rogue, cleric, and mage — and the group had to work together to succeed.

While the story was set in a mythical forest, the real focus was on how the group managed energy, made decisions, and worked as a team under uncertainty.

Why it was designed

This quest was designed to surface three core leadership themes:

  • Wellbeing and boundaries – how people spend and protect their energy when resources are limited.

  • Decision-making under pressure – how confident voices influence group choices, and how alternative perspectives can change outcomes.

  • Managing tension – what happens when different characters, with different motivations or ways of being, disagree. And what happens when they get into tense situations with non-players characters.

The aim wasn’t just to entertain. It was to give participants a playful, low-stakes environment where leadership dynamics appear quickly and visibly, so they can be reflected on afterwards.

Key design features

  • Energy tokens – each player had a hidden pool of tokens representing their personal energy. Actions cost tokens, so players had to decide how much to spend or hold back. This mirrored real workplace dynamics, where we rarely see how resourced (or depleted) our colleagues are.

  • Layered challenges – encounters were designed to force trade-offs: take a risk or play it safe, speak up or step back, conserve or spend. Each choice came with consequences.

  • Fantasy framing – the use of characters, story, and myth created distance from real life, which gave people freedom to experiment with behaviour they might not normally try.

  • Time compression – dynamics that can take weeks to emerge in teams (like energy management, power dynamics, and trust) appeared within an hour.

Participant feedback and insights

In the debrief, participants shared what stood out for them:

  • Managing energy without visibility was challenging. People were cautious at first, unsure how much capacity others had - a strong mirror for the hidden strain we carry at work.

  • Confident suggestions shaped decisions quickly. The group noticed how easily they fell into following the first strong idea, until they consciously slowed down to hear other perspectives.

  • Intentionally diverse ideas led to better outcomes. When the group shifted from a default response to a more honest, collective choice, they achieved a more positive result.

  • The game revealed team habits in real time. Participants were struck by how fast their leadership instincts showed up — and how much reflection space the debrief opened afterwards.

Takeaway

The Verdant Tome quest showed that you don’t need weeks of observation to see leadership dynamics. In a single, playful hour, the patterns were clear: how energy is spent, how voices are heard, and how honesty shifts outcomes.

For the participants, the game created a mirror. For us as facilitators, it reinforced why we use games in leadership development: they make the invisible visible, quickly and safely.