We Will NOT Play DnD

One rule of saving the day is that you wouldn't have an adventure if someone else would save it for you. If that were the case, the story wouldn't be from your perspective! It'd be told by the guy that saved the day!

The burglar attempts to resort to his own trap, if not to catch our heroes in the act, then to at least confirm they're creatures in the house and not the house itself. Of course, what one does can sometimes lead to the spread of bad ideas.

The Krampus comes to collect the wicked and punish them for their misdeeds, but this mythical creature has been at it for a while, and his work has gotten sloppy. But his wife wants him to take the kid to work for a day, and all humans look the same, so a hapless butler is kidnapped and subjected to a trial of morality!

The Krampus's son is all too excited to subject Paul to a test of his character. However, it turns out having Hitler on your team is incredibly distracting if you're the type to get sucked into an argument about Hitler, with Hitler.

Facing another moral trial, Paul is forced to use Mr. Sprinklewinker's business assets to meet the terms of the test, but quickly finds he can't breach any of the security to do that. Naturally, he must turn to grief, anger, bargaining, and pizza.

The Krampus Jr decides to mash together the spirit of "tag" and "Candy Land" into a real life, cross-country chase. Unfortunately, Paul isn't much of a traveler and he's completely caught up in an argument with the Krampus.

The Krampus has his own game to play, but this one involves a certain level more realism, while also abstracting everything into carved stone figurines. Paul is forced to act as chieftan to a small island in Krampus, while shielding himself from Hitler's pointy elbows.

With Hitler taking over the island and Paul not the most controlling type, the fate of everyone there is clearly not sunny. Dahmer is naturally not the first person to turn to, so Paul is forced to improvise and play off of whatever the islanders choose to do.

Paul is put on an official trial for his actions in the island game, but with the Krampus Jr as the jury and the Krampus himself as both judge and executioner, it's a bit of a kangaroo court.

It's the final challenge, and there's no way Paul can get out of it by proving he's a better person than the Krampus gave him credit for. All is not lost, of course, because all Paul has to do is outwit a child. At least in theory.

Somewhere in the world, there's a mysterious candy factory making sweets that mystify scientists and baffle engineers. Corporate leaders would kill to know its secrets, and there are plenty of killers for hire who would try to crack such a place, only to learn that its insides defy all reason.

The simplest way to deter would-be intruders to a magical candy factory is with a guard dog, but in this case a few of the fundamental rules of deterrence have been ignored. For one, the guard dog is a secret only to be discovered by the unlucky.

Only a certain amount of whimsy and magic can hide the horrific necessities of industrial demand. Charlie Chanclas knows that when you have a goose that lays a golden egg, you breed it and eventually establish a mass farming operation while aggressively capturing market shares.

After a few twists and turns, the party winds up in the innards of the factory, and it spells bad news for all those who dwell there. There are a certain list of pests you never want to see in a building that handles food, and player characters are at the top of that list.

Trapped and interrogated, the party has no choice but to cooperate with Chanclas himself, and they're given one final tour. However, they won't go out entirely without a fight, and they definitely won't be pleasant about any of it.

In defiance of convention, the group makes a set of characters inspired by the DnD class system. They're your basic dungeon delvers and skeleton slayers with unusual backstories. However, Mayson's estranged father appears with an important message. Is he sincere, or is the entire thing all an elaborate act?

It was all a skeleton plot! A mysterious man named Max pulls aside the curtain and reveals our heroes have been duped about their adventure from the start, but he's not entirely forthcoming yet about why or how. For now, escape is foremost on the mind.

Max leads the crew through the woods and to a temporary location, but Mayson doesn't have a lot of good reason to trust Max's intentions. Additionally, their location of rest turns out to be less than safe in the long run.

After arriving in East Turkanislockistav, Mayson realizes that before they do anything, they need independent information, and Lawry learns that his abilities as a talented sneak, thief, and artist place him in demand.

Mayson raises the question of his wife with Elvis, and the crew decides that the effort is a worthy "side quest". The only hitch is how to do it and how to keep Max from objecting.

The crew meets Mayson's wife, and she's not terribly excited to see them. Seeing your estranged husband after two years of running off to be a monk is one thing, but apparently him being there violates some kind of international law.

There's been a murder, but who done it? The group has only minutes to identify the culprit, but evidence is shaky at best, and from some points of view the most likely perpetrator is Lawry.

There's a god for every occasion, and for every god, a champion blessed with that god's powers, however minor. Getting noticed in this kind of ecosystem can be pretty difficult without a leg up, but luckily there's a champion of charities!

Even singing up for event times can be a sort of challenge when you've got the right sort of team. At least the catering is free and the breakfast is continental! For better or worse, our heroes are contractually obligated to play the games to the end.

The first challenge of the show is an apartment fire! Our heroes have a chaotic and non-cooperative technique at best, but with a little dumb luck victory is possible. It's just fortunate by itself that the victims trapped in the building aren't real people!

There are a lot of different aspects to balance, and when your god represents precarious balance, the whole act of currying your gods favor is naturally prone to tipping. The next challenge is theoretically impossible for Elvis to lose! Which means the god of precarious balance may be rather fickle about it.

Champions aren't just fast and neurotic! They're also supposed to have a lot of neurons, or possibly faster neurons, or maybe well-connected ones. They're smart, supposedly - a fact which the team must put to the test in an escape room.

Champions aren't just fast and neurotic! They're also supposed to have a lot of neurons, or possibly faster neurons, or maybe well-connected ones. They're smart, supposedly - a fact which the team must put to the test in an escape room.

It's the final challenge! But the whole game seems rigged, and the whole event has been so stressful and off the wall that not everybody involved still knows exactly what they want anymore.

In a world of elemental powers, our heroes stand above the rest in the mercenary business, due to good marketing if nothing else. The Emperor of the Dark Nation himself hires our heroes to track down a plucky twelve year-old boy with unclear motives and a prophetic destiny.

The party finds themselves in a small frontier town where the Light Nation boy was supposedly seen, but before they can capture him, first they have to deal with precocious hijinks and tomfoolery, ending in tragedy.

Bingle has been captured, but he isn't happy about it and it's a long walk back to the Dark Nation capitol. Just about anything could go wrong, and our heroes still know fundamnetally nothing about their captive.

If Bingle were clever, he'd be quite difficult to find after an escape in a ray of light. Fortuantely, he's twelve, and would get lost if he didn't follow the roads, leaving a trail of dazzled and confused witnesses. You can't pay a teacher with rays of sunshine, and Bingle had to have stopped somewhere.

Our heroes find themselves in an abandoned mining town where they're harassed throughout the night without much explanation. The enemy is clearly near, but who the enemy is and what they want is decidedly muddy.

There must be a way a group of top government agents can capture a magical child, and the group conceives of a method absolutely nobody will see coming. As the saying goes, the enemy cannot anticipate your plans if you yourself don't know what you're thinking.

Even the most well run public event has a few hitches to it the planning teams don't expect, but luckily those bumps along the road are secondary to the main objective of our heroes! Unfortunately, there's one issue they hadn't considered, and the whole plan risks falling apart at the seams from it.

Bingle retreats to his home territory, and our heroes learn a little more about Bingle's past. It's not a typical life story, and it's not a typical place to grow up.

When it's clear he can't stay in his old home, Bingle strikes south towards the Earth Nation, where as it turns out, there's a veritable party of earth masters forming. In this case, it's a celebration style party, rather than a traveling group of adventurers, but if you're going to find people who can magically move earth, it's the place.

The Earth Kingdom's fighting champion is a sure way to impress Bingle, but it unfortuantely also tends to draw the attention of the criminal establishment. Getting the kid on board to travel the world as a fighter, with his nemeses, wearing false facial hair, turns out to be a complex, multi-step endeavor.

It's the day of the fighting championship, and Lawry chooses not to play things straight, to put it bluntly.

It's the day of the fighting championship, and Lawry chooses not to play things straight, to put it bluntly.

Having successfully failed, now the party has to clinch their victory and nab Bingle. The problem is, they haven't really thought that far, and Lawry pulled out all the stops during his fight with the Obliterator.

The very universe seems set against the party in their goals of kidnapping Bingle, but on the upside at least they have funding and, normally, a lot of success with disguises!

Elvis is not ready to let his current disguise go, but to make something of it, he is willing to go rather extreme lengths while dragging his compatriots helplessly behind.

The team should have seen Elvis's rampage coming. A guy who stays so happy lucky on a mission of kidnapping and deception can't be all there in the head, but what's done is done. Even better, Paul comes up with a better idea - one that doesn't need Bingle to be anyone's friend!

Zubo and Ibo, as it turns out, are theater fools in a somewhat desperate situation. However, just they're desperate, doesn't mean they're stupid, and the theater fool is often more clever than the men they interact with - or else they'd never survive their foolery!

They say a leopard can't change its spots, but the upside to this being the truth with certain people is that you predict how they'll react to some things. They'll behave like leopards, for example.

With the bait set and trap laid, all our team has to do is return home! It's as as simple as that, and everything would work itself out once Bingle chases behind. Or it would be, but the Dark Nation has been through some changes while our heroes were away.

The most threatening stories involve a little bit of ambiguity. When something can be anything, there's the possibility it's the worst possible thing. On the other hand, it might be the best possible thing. You wouldn't know until it's too late!

It's the final showdown! But what needs to happen? Who lives, who dies? Some questions are a bit too big for simple men, and when it comes to issues of infinity and the great void, there are no clear answers.

Dungeon City is a place where you barely scrape by if you're willing to go underground and bonk skeletons with a hammer. More of them will appear later, and they carry iron weapons, which can be sold as scrap. What this life attracts most are people who believe they're going to rise above the odds and be more than a skeleton scraper, and this is the story of some of those people!

Lawry resovles to take Elvis into a dungeon, but the whole process is ridden with bureaucracy and red tape. That means the only way is to go in unofficially, and to get a black market sample of the experience.

Dungeons are thought by some to be a very controlled experience where small, discreet units of bad guys assemble to be slaughtered wholesale. But in the event you ever found yourself in a dungeon where every creature in it decided to kill you, without waiting for you to arrive in their isolated room, you'd be better off staying at home.

There's nothing quite like a religious organization to get you questioning everything you know about life. Or is that not how it's supposed to work? In Paul's case, it's a source of stability and existential furstration.

If money attracts anything, it's bureaucracy, and the Adventuring Guild has that in spades. There's rules, regulations, fees, and a wait list to get in to the dungeon. And as these systems always exist, there are always temptations to work outside them to save time and money.

Rutherford has a proposal for the team, but unfortunately he's a bit more familiar with dealmaking than our heroes. To start with, they're already willing to work for free! Or just on promises, which is a flaw a lot of adventurers need to learn to drop early on if they'd like to live for long.

Not everyone knows about the most important cultural staples of Dungeon City. In particular, Gerald the Dog, a comic character who as it turns out has quite a lot in common with magic and the idea of the city itself.

What you want is rarely what you get, especially when it comes to experiments. Unfortunately, this was bound the be the only result Rutherford was liable to get, although there were worse possibilities! There weren't many worse possibilities, but there were some.

Rutherford promises everything can be cleared up within a mere twenty-four hours. There may be a lesson here about things that sound to good to be true, but in this case, the lesson might be unfairly harsh to Rutherford.

The trick to any successful plan is to ensure that it has the fewest possible number of steps. Or, failing at that initial step of good planning, to simply have the time to repeat the plan as many times as necessary to get it right. Where it comes to a rumor mill, eventually something will figure itself out. Where it comes to breaking and entering, well, there aren't a lot of chances for a do-over.

There are a few ways out of jail. Sometimes, just doing nothing at all is the fastest way out, provided you can afford a good lawyer to figure it out for you. However, in a society with rules that aren't as well put together, sometimes a few greasy palms in the right places can make a very sudden difference.

Elvis returns home to visit his family, and while they aren't exactly the shining definition of helpful, they do have a certain amount of knowledge about the upper echelongs of society and plenty of opinions about them.

Once you've angered the wrong people, sometimes just talking a walk out of the hosue can attract the wrong sorts of attention. Naturally, the one weakness of that is the right sort of attention!

There's nothing like a pizza to get someone to admit that they're following in an unsettling and yet legal fashion. And while using a pizza as a weapon is likely a form of battery and is illegal, it's the type of thing the police tend not to want to deal with.

Cheri Deckard is a professional, but she's also fundamentally self-employed and lacking in any specific industry standards. It's good thing for the party, however, because a lack of standards is the only plausible way they'll be hired to do anything!

A lawyer is a great way to stay out of trouble with the law, unless that lawyer is hiring you specifically to do crimes. In that case, you should really consider getting a second, less illegal lawyer.

When you're surrounded by mystery and intrigue, the quickest way to cut to the heart of the matter is to walk up to the whatever organization it is that's making the trouble and then deman to speak to the manager. This is basic intelligence knowledge, all the world's best espionage operatives do it.

The part has dragged one of the city's largest players into the fray! However, a big player doesn't like being called on to make small plays, so the party is forced to bet all their chips all at once on an unsure thing, and the results of that bet will mean their lives.

With his friends in bad shape, the only one left to get around is Paul, who's got quite a few feelings and concerns about recent developments. A lot of major players throughout the city have also developed some concerning opinions and feelings on Paul as well, and the heat is turning up.

The party has become so well noticed by the city's higher-ups, that those higher-ups are beginning to wonder, with some agitation, why they keep hearing about a small group of guys who, prior to just this year, were completely beneath the notice of even the local guard. The unfortunate part about rising very fast and very independently is that you have no way to know what anyone else is thinking about it.

It'd be a big deal if Lawry can simply turn off any magical effect by yelling at it, with far reaching consequences for all of society if Lawry had a mind to truly use the ability. Society would therefore be in a great deal of danger if Lawry's number one priority wasn't to completely disengage with everything it touches forever.

It's never a great feeling to get sucker-punched, but when the entire party gets clobbered before they can do anything, the upshot is that nobody ever got to play a single one of their cards, and the enemy has no idea what kind of animal they're trying to keep in a cage. In Lawry's case, it's an animal who's as dangerous and unpredictable as he is annoying.

When impersonating a powerful or succesful person, there's one basic rule to follow: even if you don't know what's going on, always pretend you do. That's and it's important to name drop a bunch of people you've met, to establish that everyone wants to meet you and you've met everyone.

Paul has a natural proclivity towards following the rules and respecting a heriarchy, so faking it as a guard in a foreign land is easy when they all inexplicably speak and write the same language! However, it turns out that the Darkbottom guards aren't the only ones our heroes need to worry about down here.

There are two other cat people in the Dark Bottoms, and they've been here for quite a long while. Long enough to be Paul's parents, in fact. But are they? And if they are, then the next big question is how to get them out of there.

The heads are mostly accounted for and it's now clear a jail break is the only way to get everyone out with their good health! But now the big question is, how can our heroes do it while still hanging on to said good health?

The pieces for the grand escape are falling into place! More or less. Every key the team needs to get out of there exists, and there's a way to grab it. But with any multi-step plan, all it takes is a single point of failure or one overlooked snag.

The nicest thing about making an escape through a tunnel network designed to facilitate an escape is that the whole process works pretty effectively! Until, that is, that the royal madam you've been forced to escort gets wise and has a few difficult to answer questions.

Navigation is easiest when you know where you're going and you have a clear idea of where you've been. That's why the woods can be so dangerous if you get lost, because there's not much of a horizon to find landmarks from. Trying to find your way out of a cave network based on a map written by people who weren't completely accurate about where all the caves are or where they go is going to lead to getting lost about a hundred percent of the time.

Though dragons were thought to be largely extinct, it's very hard to prove a negative. How would you go about proving there are no dragons? By not meeting any, obviously, but of course that gets blown out of the water the day you do actually run into one. After that, what do you do? Reclassify it as a species that isn't technically a dragon? Negotiate with it? Ask it stupid questions? As long as it isn't immediately eating everyone, why not try all of the above?

When the chips are down and you've been in the dark for too long, sometimes all it takes is a malign, obviously self-interested dragon woman to help guide you towards the light of creating further political instability. All you have to do is walk a little further into that bog of trouble you're already in. One more step and you'll be on the other side! For sure this time!

There's an old story about a kung fu master who teaches his student 99 techniques, but he keeps the hundredth technique a secret so that he can defeat the student if the student becomes a traitor. There should, however, also be a story in which a master teaches his student only one thing: distrust. The consequences of which don't end as well for the master.

Our heroes have had things a little too easy for a little too long, and that's in spite of all the hardships! At some point, all of this meddling in things beyond their pay grade was going to bring the chickens home to roost, but in this case, the chickens are dragons. It's time to fight the big men or die standing.

Extracting information from captive colleagues can be a complicated process, but the whole thing gets a lot easier when they aren't paid nearly enough to put up with this kind of trauma.

Welcome to Unstoppable Industries! Home of the Unstoppable Force, one of the most famed and respected superhero teams in the United States. Headquartered in the proud city of New Jerseydelphia, they just so happen to be looking for a new member, and our very own Elvis has managed to ace the interview process.

Every man is mortal, and no man is truly an unstoppable force. Whether by old age, a secret weakness, or the copyright expiring on their public appearance, at some point a hero must die. This is the night that bell tolls for Captain Momentum, and with him follows the death of an entire era.

Grieving comes in steps, so they say, but it also takes various forms and elevates certain priorities above others. When the death of a friend occurs at a company, the company kind wind up impacting what sorts of grieving are most acceptable or most prioritized.

Even with Captain Momentum lost to the world, villainy and crime still happens, and it's up to the Unstoppable Force to intervene. Unfortunately, without a man impervious to bullets and physical harm to back the effort, the whole thing requires a lot of finesse that our heroes may not be quite in the practice of using.

The team signs on with the government to learn what they can about the weapon which ends all super heroes, and it provides an important lead on who they should be talking to in order to catch Mercury. Meanwhile, one major advantage to reformed villainy is being in contact with current villains, who can keep you in touch with the ongoing developments of the underground.

Unstoppable Industries moves to officially declare a new head of the superhero field crew, and naturally it's politics from top to bottom. Freeze Frame is the company's favorite, as the other candidates are too new, or have way too many open files with the HR department. Though the company logic is there, one has to wonder if an ego the size of Kimon's can really be okay with it.

Good police work is rarely done from the barrel of a gun - that sort of thing is for emergencies. Ergo, good super hero work follows the same rules. Just because it's possible to use laser vision or throw a car into the sun, that doesn't mean you can really stop crime by doing so. Good super hero work means identifying the crime, gathering evidence, and following the rules. Usually.

You can't just wait for crime to happen and then go punch it down. If any crime of that caliber happened off, no city would survive. Instead, there's a lot of concern about budget, the amount of work being done, and who's doing it.

If you can run faster than a speeding bullet, then you can bet society is going to insist that you follow a lot of rules about when and where you can run. Crime-fighting super heroes have to get warrants and talk to lawyers, or else the whole system would be a chaotic mess of autocratic heroes - and look, society has spent a lot of time trying that. It works sometimes, but not always, and when it doesn't work it can really not work!

Any kind of breaking-and-entering, even if it's technically legal, is going to be fraught with perils. It's something that requires being in and out with all the sneakiness of the Grinch on Christmas, and when a person gets caught, it takes quick thinking and buttery lies. Super powers also help quite a lot.

The real depth of a super power is determined by the creativity and the wit behind it. No superman is all that difficult to overcome if he always does the same predictable things and has no new ideas. Paul and Lawry are certainly men of their own ideas, however, and the two split up to pursue completely separate goals.

In many events that deal with the law, self-incrimination can be a leading cause for arrest. For example, it's not rare for someone to discus how much they've had to drink during a sobriety test. And while you don't have to speak to the police or let them in the house if they don't have a warrant, certainly those rules change if you do something flagrantly illegal as a reaction to a knock at your door.

Interrogation is an unusual art, and it's not something that's easily done in a vacuum. It requires already knowing some answers, being careful not to give away what you do and do not know, and giving the subject enough room to say things you wanted to hear without them knowing what you wanted to hear. And in the case of police work, when there's not a lawyer present, a bit of trickery and flimflam is on the table.

There is a simple rule in any conflict-related role: there is no safe way to apply force. Any act of violence can have unintended consequences, or be made too rashly. Just shoving a person can result in an accident. So what does one do when people have super powers? What's an ethical way to stop a man who can fly? Who can read minds? Who can jump between moving vehicles and take control of them in the process? A wacky world leads to some wacky police hypotheticals.

Worse than being talked about is not being talked about, but when it comes to bad news, you can't always get away from it. What you can do, however, is change which bad news people are talking about. It's usually not good if there are multiple negative things to talk about, but it gives options!

You can't tell a man like Kimon that he can't go do something if it's important to him. He'll find a way, or do it in secret, and is good at that. You also can't really replace exactly what Kimon can do, though Freeze Frame might try by inviting the oddball couple that is Lightshow and Terry to the city.