The Director Welcomes You

Operation — Stale Monsoon

#cb6646

Location

Cloudy, Cloudless Australia

Time of Day

13:31

Extraction Point

54 Miles SSE

Time to Complete

14 Hours

Spy Deputies,
As you can see you are trapped inside the top of a Hidden Carnival . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Drowsy Roc" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A shrine is nearby at the Stone Circle". Your mission was intelligence, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Heavy Brush hidden on you.

— The Tablet of Stone you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Eva Burton

Alias

"Drowsy Roc"

Features

4' 4"

Amber eyes

Large moles / Right eye

Organization

The Crew of Horny Basketball

Emotions

Hopeless

Personality

Searchingly Shapely

Motive

Take over a government to be left alone

Bodyguard

Daniel the "Hot Python"

Physical Size

Minute

Story

Additional Locations

The Stale Island

Hidden Palace

Exuberance Business

Random Events

Midwife is loose

VAT of Broth Crashes slowly

Meteor Spontaneously disintegrates

Chauvinist arrives in the mail

World

Stores

Bella's Bible Productions

Lambert's Candle International

Graham's Diary Creative

Hunter's Bed Labs

Traps

Crushing Room

Chain Lightning of Disaster

Objects

Bible that is glowing

Diary that has been hollowed out

Secret Candle

Hidden Necklace

Targe of Disaster

Wand of Wonder

Any fires now burning within 10 miles provide no light

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Beau Lambert "Plump Legs" Merchant Cartography Batteries
Mariah Graham "Gross Feet" Mole Tissues Dice
Alan Wong Drunken Photography Socks
Bella Kennedy Surgeon Cooking Sharks
Katherine Hunter Fortune Cookie Writer Lions Octopus

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).