The Director Welcomes You

Arcade Royale

#d72234

Location

Chilly, Warm Kyrgyzstan

Time of Day

5:52

Extraction Point

114 Miles SEE

Time to Complete

45 Hours

Meddlers,
This week should be easy. You are delivering a Mantle made of heavy metal. Get to Kyrgyzstan at 11:11

Good Luck.

— The Microsoft Zune you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Zachary Hernandez

Alias

"Green Elephant"

Features

7' 5"

Blue eyes

A second belly button / Left foot

Organization

The Committee of Cool Crown

Emotions

Awkward

Personality

Weakly Ancient

Motive

Take over a country for sibling rivalry

Bodyguard

Daniel the "Weak Beholder"

Physical Size

Cramped

Story

Additional Locations

The Broad Lagoon

Touristy Citadel

Optimism Palace

Random Events

Delivery Guy Bounces oddly

Whore Balances on a ledge

Chicken Is throwing a protest

Turtle explodes

World

Stores

Ariana's Mantle Arcade

Cox's Drawers Arcade

Haynes's Mantle Hole

George's Metal chair Solutions

Traps

Burning Hands

Compacting Room of Fury

Objects

Mantle made of heavy metal

Mantle children's replica

Secret Drawers

Hidden Notebook

Watch of Fury

Wand of Wonder

Caster’s blood is strongly adhesive after it leaves his body

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Brayden Cox "Tough Pretzels" Merchant Candles Socks
Tucker Haynes "King Ribs" Mole Essential Oils Children's Stories
Ashton Sanders Chief Executive Officer Soap Water
Ariana Henderson Police Officer Doves Tigers
Ella George Art Therapist Trees Paper

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).