The Director Welcomes You

The Harmony Excitement Incident

#43cbc1

Location

Stormy, Windy San Marino

Time of Day

1:0

Extraction Point

135 Miles NWW

Time to Complete

20 Hours

Shadows,
As you can see you are trapped inside within earshot of a Underwater Carnival . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Left Seal" is responsible and they sent us this message - "The group finds a random cow at the Golden Fire". Your mission was black ops, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Clandestine Paint hidden on you.

— The iPod you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Maddox Byrd

Alias

"Left Seal"

Features

5' 1"

Blue eyes

Stretch Marks / Left leg

Organization

The Crew of Swollen Meat

Emotions

Inferior

Personality

Yearly Ambitious

Motive

Take over a country because they straight up craycray

Bodyguard

Nicky the "Bruised Fairy"

Physical Size

Miniature

Story

Additional Locations

The Arid Suburbs

Compact Masquerade

Sanitation Pond

Random Events

Delivery Guy explodes

Princess Salutes the adventurers

Hoard Gets their hand chopped off

Feminist Adopts a nearby child

World

Stores

Maddox's Paperweight Consulting

Reynolds's Footlocker Cosmetics

Watkins's Skeletal Animal Wardrobe

Hall's Clamp Industries

Traps

Rolling Rock

Bear Trap of Excitement

Objects

Paperweight with a False bottom

Skeletal Animal that has been hollowed out

Secret Footlocker

Hidden Notebook

Collar of Excitement

Wand of Wonder

All within 50 yards develop an acute fear of wood

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Ivan Reynolds "Little Dumplings" Merchant Children's Stories Easter
Thomas Watkins "Mad Dumplings" Mole Painting Trucks
Julian Leonard Technician Glitter Cellphones
Maddox Chapman Pharmacist Paper Dice
Emerson Hall Chef Broccoli Drinking

Cipher



                

                
 
                

                

                

                

                

                

The Fuck Is This?

After years of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I decided to make a variation where everything is improv. The DM knows as much as the players and you tell a story together - sitcom style. We use this site as a quest starter, think of some characters, and see how much we can make each other laugh.

It's designed to be simple, portable, and dependent on being creative & inventive. I wanted a framework to guide the plot forward but let us find the story. This page is just a guide to help the stories become too redundant - take as much as you want, ignore as much as you need. If you want to follow along with our adventures or read some examples, check out my personal story notes.

This concept and site was crafted by Andrew Maruska with linguistic help from Evan Stark

But how?

The Most Important Rule

Be Silly. The goal is to laugh not to have a normal adventure. Someone wants to go to the moon? Fuck yeah they do and we're going to do it with medieval technology.

Set Up

Give the players a home base, a year they want to play in, and some general ownership of the setup. It's more successful when everyone has helped create the world because when a player makes suggestions it's easier to integrate them without feeling too precious. It helps to have a figurehead that assigns the quest to authoritatively start.

Characters

90% of creating a character here is a funny voice you're forced to talk in for 3 hours. I typically have people pick one trait they want to be good at and give them a slight advantage when using that - and the same for a negative trait. Don't overcomplicate it. They wanna be a skateboarder who can't feel love? perfect. +2 to cool & -2 to social acceptance.

Rolling

This can be whatever you want but as a general rule I use d20's as a graded scale. Sometimes, I craft the roll to mimic the action i.e. if they are walking a tight rope then might need to roll a 10 because 20 & 1 make them fall to one side or the other. Rolling in D&D got boring so make it fun again.

Dungeon Master

Your goal is to say 'Yes and...' but realistically it's 'Yes and roll to see if you can actually do that triple backflip down the cliff to mount the attacking phoenix...' - It's okay to make them fail, just don't tell them no. This guide is to help you be 1 step ahead of the players but it can't know the vibe of the room, have some empathy and play to the crowd.

Ending

No one can tell you this. The guide is to help you get 1/3 of the adventure set up and the rest will be created by the adventuring party. Have fun with it and try to tie up some loose ends at the end (or don't and bring them back for another adventure).