The Director Welcomes You

Atelier Royale

#611bcd

Location

Rainy, Dark Tuvalu

Time of Day

15:52

Extraction Point

101 Miles W

Time to Complete

14 Hours

Meddlers,
As you can see you are trapped inside within earshot of a Pitch Black Private Jet plane . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Fat Vampires" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A mysterious key is found on the ground at the Grey Hollow". Your mission was black bag, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Fluffy Tissues hidden on you.

— The Microsoft Zune you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Juan Torres

Alias

"Fat Vampires"

Features

7' 6"

Gray eyes

Faint curved scar / Neck

Organization

The Clique of Scruffy Owl

Emotions

Calm

Personality

Questionably Damaged

Motive

Take over a country to lead a mutiny

Bodyguard

Mitch the "Modern Pig"

Physical Size

Cramped

Story

Additional Locations

The Flaky Suburbs

Archaic Shelter

Grave Consequences Castle

Random Events

Bum Strikes the church bell

Safe emerges

Soup Is throwing a BBQ

Dracula Spontaneously disintegrates

World

Stores

Clara's Letter Opener Atelier

Graham's Rubber Plant Creative

Wolf's Musical instrument Boutique

Buchanan's Easel Little shop

Traps

Flame Strike

Incendiary Cloud of Ice

Objects

Letter Opener with a False bottom

Musical instrument made of heavy metal

Secret Rubber Plant

Hidden Coif

Sickle of Ice

Wand of Wonder

Target has visions of the future involving no one he recognizes

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Caleb Graham "Casual Brains" Merchant Water Potatoes
Matteo Wolf "Orange Feet" Mole Tissues Eggs
Bryce Hodges Surveyor Tissues Trucks
Clara Tyler Frustrated Chalk Writers
Lilly Buchanan Banker Harmonica Photography

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).