What FOLK is
FOLK is a weird indie sandbox MMORPG where you define your own journey. You explore a shared, persistent world, collect strange creatures called Folks, and build a home alongside everyone else playing in it.
There is town-crafting: terraform the land and raise a settlement from the ground up. There is combat: level your Folk, shape how their stats grow, and take on bosses for new attacks. There are dungeons hidden across the overworld, artifacts to haul out of them, a wandering merchant to sell to, and a Swap Shop for trading with other players. There are clans, if you would rather not do any of it alone.
It is free to play, in your browser, on Telegram, on Android and iOS, and on Windows, macOS and Linux. It is playable in English, Russian, Spanish and Italian. See every way to play.
Where it came from
The first commit landed in August 2023. Roughly four and a half thousand commits later it is still being built, most weeks, in the open. FOLK has never had a grand launch moment; it has had three years of things quietly appearing - dungeons, clans, a merchant who wanders off if you take too long to decide.
It began somewhere else entirely. FOLK started as a blockchain game: it won a TON Foundation hackathon, the creatures were minted as NFTs, and it did well by those measures - featured in the Telegram Apps Center, picked up by the Trending Apps channel and its 5.8 million subscribers, and listed among the top grossing games on Telegram.
We walked away from that. The reasons are set out at length in Requiem for the NFT, but the short version is that the speculation was never the interesting part - the creatures were. What is left is the game we actually wanted to make, free to play, with the ownership machinery taken out.
The pitch we keep coming back to: remember those classic RPGs, the ones made “the way grandma used to”? That is exactly how we want FOLK to be. Play, fail, learn from it, and have fun.
The Folk
There are many Folks in the game, and none of them are generic fantasy monsters. They are pulled from folklore around the world and drawn by hand: the yūrei of Japanese ghost stories, the Mapuche colo colo, the Hungarian lidérc, the tatzelwurm of Alpine legend, the American jackalope, and stranger things still - abraxas and yaldabaoth, lifted out of Gnostic cosmology.
Every one of them is a crooked, mystical creature born from an imperfect universe. Much like our own. Collecting them is most of the point.
The community
FOLK is played and argued about by a few thousand people. The Telegram channel has 3,000+ subscribers and is where new things get announced first; the chat alongside it has 1,000+ members swapping strategies and artifacts at most hours of the day.
You can also find us on Instagram and X, or read what we have been thinking about over in news. New to all this? The FAQ is the short version.
