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[Mephisto]

I have decided that it is time for me to try a bit of adventure design.

Our hobby has a grand tradition of stealing from pop (and non-pop, actually) media. Lord of the Rings. Bram Stoker. Blade Runner. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. More on that last one... right about now.

So we've talked about LotFP recently. There's an adventure for it called "Blood in the Chocolate". Basically, take the plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Make everything stupid deadly. Not just "fire hot, don't touch". I'm talking OG Tomb of Horrors "players trigger debilitating traps and can maybe save but definitely can't detect/disable them beforehand". Also mechanics that people with inflation fetishes may enjoy. As you may expect, given the people that flock to create LotFP supplements.

That got me thinking that there's maybe a market for adult adventures using knockoffs of other children's programming properties.

Spoiler: Big stupid post about The Magic School Bus as a horror adventure (click to show/hide)

Anyway, I have a toddler. Thus, I have watched entirely too much children's television. Most recently, the entirety of The Magic School Bus. That, in conjunction with my twisted mind, got me thinking. What if the bus, which seems to have been shown having emotions and some level of intelligence, went to a junkyard? It breaks down occasionally (let's pretend those are real breakdowns and not "magic" breakdowns that occur because Ms. Frizzle uses them as teaching moments) and it's old. A good 20 years old when the series first came out and two and a half more decades have passed. It's unlikely that many people will want a heavily-used 1970s-era Ward International R-183.

Random explanatory thought that I need to say now because I make use of it in the next paragraph: My pet theory is that teacher's earrings are what allow her to wordlessly communicate with the bus. Note that they frequently flash before the magic shit happens.

So what do if something untoward happens to Ms. Frizzle? She gets exposed to something that kills her outright or makes her go bonkers and get institutionalized. Something that means she's not around to care for the bus. So you've got a bus mouldering in the junkyard. You've got a lady either mouldering as well (and the bus knows it) or institutionalized and sending crazythought to the bus via the earrings. Eventually it's gotta break and go on a Christine/Maximum Overdrive killing spree.

Fetish mechanics will not be included, unless your fetish is getting non-sexually destroyed by a sapient magical murderbus. If you've got a different fetish, you can houserule it yourself.


Well that's a lot of words. I guess I should ask some questions now.

Since most adventures are probably bought for use as reading material and not play, would you peruse such a thing for the lulz?

What system do you think would best support murderbus? I'm thinking of going generic and providing mechanics for several systems, so name as many as you want. I'll do the legwork to see about the whole 3rd party publisher thing.

Outright killing people as a bus that can turn into Jupiter would be pretty easy. Any thoughts for some more subtle ways of doing things before I get started? I imagine the bus isn't doing this because it's got some level of self-preservation instincts and/or doesn't want to harm the kids or its previous owner, if any still live.

Is this just plain stupid and I should give up before progressing very far?

Any other questions?

[IronyOwl]

I'd certainly be amused and interested by an adventure about Ms. Frizzle: Jumanji Edition, but it'd have to be pretty goddamn magical to consider paying for.

I'm unsure system matters a great deal for the underlying concept of being transported into weird shit. Being hunted by a semisapient mass transit vehicle probably does fit some systems better than others, but not much comes to mind for specifics.

I would think the bus would continue attempting to transport people to magical places where they can learn things, regardless of whether or not it's attempting to murder them at the same time. If not, it's probably bringing the party to them, like a documentary crossed with Saw. Possibly getting crazier and more unhinged as Ms. Frizzle fails to narrate the events like the good old days, spiraling the bus even further into madness and despair.

This is probably stupid, yes. The payoff is almost entirely in the reference, so you're looking for the intersection between requiring premade adventures and being a fan of a particular children's cartoon.

[Trekkin]

I'd certainly be amused and interested by an adventure about Ms. Frizzle: Jumanji Edition, but it'd have to be pretty goddamn magical to consider paying for.

This is my view as well. It's a funny idea, but having gotten a laugh out of it for $0 I don't feel any need to go pay money for a longer joke with the same punchline and maybe some ancillary references I'm already perfectly capable of imagining.

[Cruxador]

That got me thinking that there's maybe a market for adult adventures using knockoffs of other children's programming properties.

Boy, have I got news for you about a show called My Little Pony.

As for the murder bus, well, it's not the kind of thing I'd be interested in unless I heard that there was something particularly visionary in the mechanics of it, from which I could learn, and that's about the lowest level of interest I have in any RPG stuff. As for terrible but non-lethal things the bus can do, the show used to involve a whole lot of being transformed into things and stuck in places. It was played for the education, but if you take away the kiddy filter, being turned into a salmon is already a pretty grim fate. Being sent inside a human's body is even worse. And that's just two episodes I happen to remember from decades ago when I myself was the age to watch it. I'm sure you could come up with more since you're watching the show with your kids, either from the episodes or from popping open any science book. Or if you want to get more fantasy, you can have the bus abduct the party one way or another and transport them to hell/ravenloft/any unpleasant plane.

[Mephisto]

I'd certainly be amused and interested by an adventure about Ms. Frizzle: Jumanji Edition, but it'd have to be pretty goddamn magical to consider paying for.

This is my view as well. It's a funny idea, but having gotten a laugh out of it for $0 I don't feel any need to go pay money for a longer joke with the same punchline and maybe some ancillary references I'm already perfectly capable of imagining.

Addressing both of these at once, it'd probably be a free product should I actually produce anything, which is definitely not a given.

[wierd]

I dunno, a sick twist on when they drove the schoolbus around inside ralphie is perfectly doable too.

Magic Schoolbus: Or how Miss Frizzle gave Ralphie gastroenteritis.

Be sure to feature all manner of horrible parasites.

[Grim Portent]

You are the hunter gatherer descendants of Miss Frizzle's class, you have lived many generations in the dangerous and strange world known as Ralphie, hunting the mighty white blood cell, gathering food from the small intestine and battling the invasive forces of bacteria.

[Hanslanda]

Having watched Blue Planet 2 recently, getting dropped off anywhere near Mantis Shrimp of any species, while being less than full human size is probably easily one of the more horrifying things the bus could do.

[scourge728]

You are the hunter gatherer descendants of Miss Frizzle's class, you have lived many generations in the dangerous and strange world known as Ralphie, hunting the mighty white blood cell, gathering food from the small intestine and battling the invasive forces of bacteria.

I'd read that

[wierd]

You must drive without rhythm, or you will attract the worm!


And yes. Unless Ms Frizzle also does some serious time distortion shit with the bus, that mantis shrimp will literally boil the ocean water with how quickly it will grab and consume the bus if it gets too close.

[Mephisto]

These last few comments are basically "that one episode of Rick and Morty: The RPG". I don't know if I'm intellectual enough to tackle Rick and Morty RPG shenanigans.

[Kadzar]

So I just finished my second game of Call of Cthulhu. My character, the Canadian archaeologist Dr. Steve "Vancouver Steve" Stevens, is no more, gunned down by gangsters.

In his place, his illegitimate daughter, Ophelia Cordova, will appear, trying to find out his whereabouts and likely getting involved with some eldritch horrors in the process.

[IcyTea31]

Playing Kult: Divinity Lost over Discord, I actually got to the point of shouting into my microphone for the first time.

My character's, Eddie's, special project of raising his wife Sofia from the dead took a setback when Eddie's rival and another character's, Adele's, ex-fuckbuddy Zaol, who is a magician, ended up being possessed and destroying Sofia's corpse. In rage, Eddie stabbed Zaol, but before he could finish the job, Adele intervened with magic to force the combatants to disperse. A bit later, the characters regroup and Eddie asks Adele "what the fuck, I had him!" Adele says that she still has feelings for Zaol and won't allow him to be killed. Now fuming with rage, Eddie shouts at Adele and reminds her of just the previous night, when an occult ritual went wrong and dozens of innocents died. The response: "but I didn't care for those people." Eddie finally collapsed, but part deux of this argument came to be when Adele fed a mugger to a bunch of possessed policemen. "Does life and death really not matter when it's not somebody you know?" "Not really, no."

It's worth noting that even though Eddie holds the goal of raising Sofia, Adele is more experienced in the game's lore and thus is the expert Eddie turns toward. However, when both she and Zaol show such sociopathic tendencies, Eddie is starting to doing whether magic really is 'good'. Needless to say, Eddie's Relation value towards Adele fell after the session.

Kult might be a game of occultism, sex, drugs and violence, but somehow we turned even that into a soap opera. A love quadrangle gets interesting when one of the characters in it is dead.

[Jimmy]

My group's about to encounter the final series of battles in their current scenario, having tracked the local goblin menace to the city's dump.

Any suggestions for cool crap they might stumble across when exploring a fantasy refuse pile?

[wierd]

Spoiled potions, defective magical items, monsters borne from discarded magical items in late stage decay, "Anomalous areas" caused by such items decaying, poor people picking through the refuse, fires, corpses (including zombies), that sort of thing.