The Director Welcomes You

The Ball Dark Incident

#e5c51d

Location

Arid, Breezy East Timor

Time of Day

7:54

Extraction Point

122 Miles SSW

Time to Complete

20 Hours

Silent Negotiators,
As you can see you are trapped inside the bottom of a Ancient Forge . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Left Owlman" is responsible and they sent us this message - "Tracks of wolves can be seen at the Field of Wildflowers". Your mission was black ops, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Invisible Vise hidden on you.

— The Tinder Date you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Scarlett Sparks

Alias

"Left Owlman"

Features

6' 10"

Amber eyes

Stretch Marks / Left leg

Organization

The Fraternity of Defamatory Catamaran

Emotions

Embarrassed

Personality

Awkwardly Smelly

Motive

Take over a country in pursuit of knowledge

Bodyguard

Jimmy the "Delightful Leprechaun"

Physical Size

Meager

Story

Additional Locations

The Weak Lodge

Expensive Spring

Secrecy Manor

Random Events

Potato runs over an infant

Demon skins a cat with his teeth

Renaissance Faire Salutes the adventurers

Carcass Spontaneously disintegrates

World

Stores

Paige's Key Arcade

Shelton's Armoir Emporium

Hansen's Stairwell Couture

Craig's File Consulting

Traps

Camouflaged Pit

Swinging Block of Dark

Objects

Key made of heavy metal

Stairwell that has been hollowed out

Secret Armoir

Hidden Glasses

Blindfold of Dark

Wand of Wonder

One of target’s legs and one of his arms shrink by 50%

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Mckenzie Shelton "Violet Throats" Merchant Contracts Glitter
Dawson Hansen "Four Legs" Mole Chocolate Rocks
James Wong Old Timer Fire Squirrels
Paige Gallagher Engineer Tea Snowglobes
Londyn Craig The Body Acorns Harmonica

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).