The Director Welcomes You

Operation — Prehistoric Stepmother

#be5029

Location

Gloomy, Rainy Estonia

Time of Day

24:19

Extraction Point

184 Miles NNW

Time to Complete

43 Hours

Agents,
As you can see you are trapped inside the bottom of a Abandoned Peninsula . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Obese Cockatrice" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A shrine is nearby at the Skull shaped island". Your mission was anti-surveillance, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Beautiful Wrench hidden on you.

— The Messenger Pigeon you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Grayson French

Alias

"Obese Cockatrice"

Features

4' 11"

Heterochromia eyes

Small mole / Right thumb

Organization

The Firm of Serpentine Wizard

Emotions

Exhilarated

Personality

Loudly Depressed

Motive

Take over a government for scientific discovery

Bodyguard

Tim the "Infantile Abominable Snowman"

Physical Size

Sizable

Story

Additional Locations

The Prehistoric Creek

Ancient Villa

Reservation Port

Random Events

Vagrant emerges

Bunny runs over an infant

Spectator Protests

Chauvinist Strikes the church bell

World

Stores

Teagan's Wingback chair Threads

Ayala's crutch Worldwide

Garcia's Bottle Cosmetics

Avila's Bonsai Supermarket

Traps

Fusillade of Darts

Fusillade of Darts of Contentment

Objects

Wingback chair made of heavy metal

Bottle with a False bottom

Secret crutch

Hidden Chastity Belt

Watch of Contentment

Wand of Wonder

Caster has an out-of-body experience and can’t find his way back

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Gael Ayala "Indigo Pastrami's" Merchant Essential Oils Bears
Annabelle Garcia "Casual Eyes" Mole Washing Machines Jigsaw Puzzles
Arabella Kennedy Stressed Lamps Acorns
Teagan Webster Stressed Contracts Octopus
Richard Avila The Body Water Technology

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).