The Director Welcomes You

The Great Princess Occurrence

#715d94

Location

Bright, Balmy Venezuela

Time of Day

5:4

Extraction Point

179 Miles SE

Time to Complete

18 Hours

Informants,
I have sent you to the bottom of a Hidden Park to look for a suspect by the name "The Owl". This mission is black bag. Their recent activity is concerning and we need you to discover their location. We don't know much about their goals but we've intercepted this cryptic message – "A roll of thunder at the Garden of Bears".

We're low budget this mission – I've packed a Colorful Socks in your kit to help.

— The CD player you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

King Reyes

Alias

"The Owl"

Features

6' 11"

Gray eyes

Large deep scar / Right foot

Organization

The Order of Feisty Splint

Emotions

Guilty

Personality

Ultimately Wooden

Motive

Take over a government to inspire a rebellion

Bodyguard

Jack the "Edgy ghost"

Physical Size

Gigantic

Story

Additional Locations

The Great Suburbs

Overpopulated Business

Fragility Park

Random Events

Woman Attempts to rob a bank

Water Vessel is robbed

Panhandler Adopts a nearby child

Crowd screams at the top of their lungs

World

Stores

Jordan's Candlesticks Properties

Wade's Potted Plant Department store

McCarthy's Tea Pot Couture

Reid's Coat of Arms Industries

Traps

Rolling Rock

Reverse Gravity of Oblivion

Objects

Candlesticks made of heavy metal

Tea Pot children's replica

Secret Potted Plant

Hidden Club

Bracer of Oblivion

Wand of Wonder

Caster engages in a long, heated debate with the nearest tree

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Jonathan Wade "Golden Pretzels" Merchant Broccoli Lipstick
Alice McCarthy "Wild Lungs" Mole Cellphones Robots
Daniel Hayes Phantom Batteries Notes
Jordan Cannon Judge Peanut Butter Christmas
Teagan Reid Engineer Death Death

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).