The Director Welcomes You

Who is Jose Yak?

#5a9233

Location

Chilly, Overcast Myanmar

Time of Day

18:9

Extraction Point

117 Miles NNE

Time to Complete

25 Hours

Silent Negotiators,
As you can see you are trapped inside circle a Deserted Peninsula . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Tough Elves" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A mysterious key is found on the ground at the Ivory Gate". Your mission was anti-surveillance, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Clean Ballpoint Pen hidden on you.

— The Tablet of Stone you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Hazel Vazquez

Alias

"Tough Elves"

Features

4' 3"

Blue eyes

Large moles / Right eye

Organization

The Unit of Tertiary Paste

Emotions

Insulted

Personality

Offensively Heavy

Motive

Take over a country to become famous

Bodyguard

Jose the "Revolting Bat"

Physical Size

Immense

Story

Additional Locations

The Luminous Lagoon

Abandoned Castle

Prosperity Port

Random Events

Beggar Is hurled at the adventurers

Donkey strikes the ground

Deadbeat arrives in the mail

Herd of Chicken screams at the top of their lungs

World

Stores

Morgan's Stairwell Warehouse

Pearson's Kitchen knife Solutions

Fernandez's Toolbox Arcade

Lambert's Ceramic Crock Arcade

Traps

Tripping Chain

Fireball of Competency

Objects

Stairwell that is glowing

Toolbox that has been hollowed out

Secret Kitchen knife

Hidden Helmet

Key of Competency

Wand of Wonder

Caster’s spellbook is written entirely in purple crayon

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Jaxson Pearson "Fast Pastrami's" Merchant Water Toilets
Kayden Fernandez "Left Pastrami's" Mole Clocks Singing
Mila McCoy Statistician Cats Cousins
Morgan Greene Indifferent Writers Water
Alice Lambert Counselor Trucks Bells

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).