The Director Welcomes You

Furniture, Pump, Digestion, Spy.

#b47b7b

Location

Icy, Overcast Russia

Time of Day

1:28

Extraction Point

10 Miles NE

Time to Complete

3 Hours

Examiners,
As you can see you are trapped inside descend into Hidden Castle . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Violet Imp" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A vagrant asks for money at the Snowy garrison". Your mission was anti-surveillance, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Mechanical Spoon hidden on you.

— The Burner Phone you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Aubrey Barnes

Alias

"Violet Imp"

Features

7' 2"

Brown eyes

A second belly button / Left foot

Organization

The Office of Fulsome Digestion

Emotions

Scornful

Personality

Frenetically Fried

Motive

Take over a government to better Humanity

Bodyguard

Philip the "Victorious Ghost"

Physical Size

Scanty

Story

Additional Locations

The Broad Carousal

Rundown Forge

Skill Chateau

Random Events

Bag of Lemons Salutes the adventurers

Softball catches on fire

Swarm of Bees skins a cat with his teeth

Toilet Lunges at the group

World

Stores

Miles's Shelf of alcohol Collective

Porter's Trinket Wardrobe

McBride's Statuette Productions

Mack's Bell Threads

Traps

Ghoul Touch

Blade Barrier of Oblivion

Objects

Shelf of alcohol that has been hollowed out

Statuette made of heavy metal

Secret Trinket

Hidden Diary

Banana of Oblivion

Wand of Wonder

Caster no longer perspires

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Karter Porter "Right Elbows" Merchant Sailboats Music
Ruby McBride "Orange Boy" Mole Bracelets Drinking
Hudson Love Optimistic Sun Glasses Butterflies
Miles Walters Dead Tired Doves Painting
Elizabeth Mack Librarian Sticky Notes Coffee

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).