The Director Welcomes You

The Product Well-being Protocol

#ba8708

Location

Windless, Windy Belarus

Time of Day

0:32

Extraction Point

189 Miles NE

Time to Complete

40 Hours

Informants,
This week should be easy. You are delivering a Footlocker made of heavy metal. Get to Belarus at 15:00

Good Luck.

— The CD player you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Lucy French

Alias

"Mad Bear"

Features

7' 2"

Hazel eyes

Large moles / Left thumb

Organization

The Union of Round System

Emotions

Ambivalent

Personality

Extremely Gregorian

Motive

Take over a government for pure destruction

Bodyguard

Jack the "Panicky Turtle"

Physical Size

Scanty

Story

Additional Locations

The Clacking Forest

Archaic Pond

Euthanasia Circus

Random Events

Rustler skins a cat with his teeth

Bag of Flour Finds gold in the water

Goblet Is being kidnapped

Bank Is throwing a protest

World

Stores

Faith's Footlocker Market

Blair's Iron stove Unlimited

Becker's Plaster Bust Mall

Christensen's Fireplace Solutions

Traps

Incendiary Cloud

Large Net of Well-being

Objects

Footlocker made of heavy metal

Plaster Bust that has been hollowed out

Secret Iron stove

Hidden Boiled Leather

Rapier of Well-being

Wand of Wonder

If caster is carrying food, he’s attacked by hungry hungry hippos

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Paisley Blair "Blue Waffles" Merchant Glass Rubber Stamps
Andrea Becker "Small Arms" Mole Bread Notes
Ryan Price Plumber Soap Jigsaw Puzzles
Faith Adams Chef Basketball Lions
Adeline Christensen Athlete Deodorant Squirrels

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).