The Director Welcomes You

Existence, Honey, Party, Spy.

#272583

Location

Dark, Cool Bolivia

Time of Day

6:19

Extraction Point

71 Miles SWW

Time to Complete

9 Hours

Examiners,
As you can see you are trapped inside underneathe a Underground Lake . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Silver Basilisk" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A white horse dashes past at the Screaming Waterfall". Your mission was clandestine, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Colorful Towel hidden on you.

— The Messenger Pigeon you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Ivy Tate

Alias

"Silver Basilisk"

Features

6' 4"

Red eyes

Stretch Marks / Right thumb

Organization

The Department of Pitiful Party

Emotions

Love

Personality

Briskly Masochistic

Motive

Disrupt the military for fear of the heroes

Bodyguard

Daniel the "Shitty Owl"

Physical Size

Gigantic

Story

Additional Locations

The Girthy Tower

Archaic Tower

Perspiration Mansion

Random Events

Princess Calls menacingly

Demon Skips merrily

Pickpocket meets disaster

Amulet overflows

World

Stores

Harmony's Fire poker set Beauty Stop

White's Statuette Threads

Osborne's Sculpture Boutique

Dunn's Hat Convenience store

Traps

Hail of Needles

Extended Bane of Redemption

Objects

Fire poker set children's replica

Sculpture children's replica

Secret Statuette

Hidden Rapier

Bangle of Redemption

Wand of Wonder

All within 50 yards have a mark identifying them as pariahs

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Ariel White "Junior Lemons" Merchant Robots Soup
Josiah Osborne "Plump Lox" Mole Chili Dice
Rylee Klein Master Distiller Comic Books Mirrors
Harmony Santos Bruised Music Soap
Jacob Dunn Optimistic Sun Glasses Cookies

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).