The Director Welcomes You

The Year Darkness Incident

#34fbbb

Location

Dark, Hot China

Time of Day

8:44

Extraction Point

65 Miles NE

Time to Complete

36 Hours

Undercover Emissaries,
As you can see you are trapped inside within a Archaic Citadel . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Orange Pheonix" is responsible and they sent us this message - "The earth shakes briefly at the witch's mound". Your mission was black ops, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Feminine Guitar hidden on you.

— The Tape recorder you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Lyla Bishop

Alias

"Orange Pheonix"

Features

7' 4"

Gray eyes

A second belly button / Crotch

Organization

The Authority of Panicky Fang

Emotions

Embarrassed

Personality

Jubilantly Sour

Motive

Take over a country to cause catastrophe

Bodyguard

James the "Consensual Pixie"

Physical Size

Tall

Story

Additional Locations

The Bad Jungle

Polluted Carnival

Fragility City

Random Events

Butter Shipment Integrates silently into the group

Odor explodes

Whore Is hurled at the adventurers

Cookie Bounces oddly

World

Stores

Amaya's Window Atelier

Goodwin's Cutting board Threads

Campbell's Music Box Hole

Chavez's Stamp Set Discount

Traps

Rolling Rock

Arrow of Darkness

Objects

Window made of heavy metal

Music Box made of heavy metal

Secret Cutting board

Hidden Bow

Fork of Darkness

Wand of Wonder

Target’s weapon heats to 1,000° the next time it draws blood

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Miguel Goodwin "Obese Lox" Merchant Chocolate Hamsters
Abel Campbell "Four Falafels" Mole Broccoli Trucks
Adeline Wade Spirit Paperclips Soda
Amaya Miller Frazzled Peanut Butter Dinosaurs
Caleb Chavez Drummer Lamps Soccer

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).