The Director Welcomes You

The Deliberately Tiring Agent

#290940

Location

Cloudless, Calm Somalia

Time of Day

10:20

Extraction Point

6 Miles SE

Time to Complete

2 Hours

Examiners,
As you can see you are trapped inside within earshot of a Abandoned Lodge . We almost couldn't find you — Please explain when you get back. All we know is "Two Hedgehogs" is responsible and they sent us this message - "A lone flower growing at the Dead Forest". Your mission was black bag, achieve what you can.

Hopefully you still have that Slippery Toothbrush hidden on you.

— The CD player you were holding self destructs.

The Villain Dossier

Name

Hannah Chambers

Alias

"Two Hedgehogs"

Features

6' 4"

Brown eyes

A second belly button / Left leg

Organization

The Council of Large Monument

Emotions

Nervous

Personality

Deliberately Chunky

Motive

Take over a country in pursuit of knowledge

Bodyguard

George the "Shallow potato"

Physical Size

Microscopic

Story

Additional Locations

The Tiring Tower

Underground Citadel

Excitement Island

Random Events

Turtle screams at the top of their lungs

Bag of Lemons Balances on a ledge

Odor meets disaster

Reindeer Is throwing a protest

World

Stores

Wyatt's Barrel Warehouse

Frank's Lamp Chic Chåteau

Jennings's Sconce Brothers

George's Oil Lamp Du jour

Traps

Arrow

Scything Blade of Delight

Objects

Barrel children's replica

Sconce that has been hollowed out

Secret Lamp

Hidden Boomerang

Collar of Delight

Wand of Wonder

Once per day, caster can turn his head 360° at the neck, unharmed

People

Name Codename Career Likes Dislikes
Jesse Frank "Dull Pastrami's" Merchant Shirts Toilets
Alejandro Jennings "Black Waffles" Mole Cousins Chickens
Avery Harper Chief Executive Officer Books Flowers
Wyatt Hart Optimistic Doors Dolphins
Katherine George Restless Slippers Plushies

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).