The Director Welcomes You

Worldwide Royale

#e5bf35

Location

Cloudy, Rainy Kazakhstan

Time of Day

0:40

Extraction Point

127 Miles N

Time to Complete

12 Hours

Operatives,
I have sent you to climb a Ancient Festival to look for a suspect by the name "King Bear". This mission is black ops. Their recent activity is concerning and we need you to deactivate their resources. We don't know much about their goals but we've intercepted this cryptic message – "A vagrant asks for money at the Flooded Crystal".

We're low budget this mission – I've packed a Polished Audio Cassette in your kit to help.

— The Tinder Date you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Rowan Mclaughlin

Alias

"King Bear"

Features

6' 7"

Blue eyes

Stretch Marks / Crotch

Organization

The League of Squeaking Frame

Emotions

Hurt

Personality

Tenderly Mastadonic

Motive

Take over a government to cause catastrophe

Bodyguard

Terry the "Disruptive child"

Physical Size

Gigantic

Story

Additional Locations

The Tropical Park

Expensive City

Destruction Port

Random Events

Lactose Intolerance Attempts to rob a bank

Majestic Painting Salutes the adventurers

Bear Is throwing a BBQ

Skeleton screams at the top of their lungs

World

Stores

Beau's Pan Worldwide

Stewart's Watch Bureau

Chan's Crock Factory

Pierce's Candle Beauty Stop

Traps

Rolling Rock

Suspicious door with lock of Reservation

Objects

Pan that is glowing

Crock made of heavy metal

Secret Watch

Hidden Throwing Dart

Frying Pan of Reservation

Wand of Wonder

All trees within one mile drip with blood

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Elliot Stewart "Casual Pastrami's" Merchant Rock n' Roll Chickens
Isla Chan "Black Lox" Mole Dinosaurs Music
Catherine Ramsey Restless Glass Chocolate
Beau Hughes Teacher Trees Soccer
Mya Pierce Consultant Flashlights Ice Cubes

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).