And Another Thing... (20/30 XP) (Curious Ventures 8/8)
Bindings 5/Storyteller 5/Knight 4
You have probably messed some things up for your session, or in your social relationships, in your eagerness to delve into the Deep Mysteries of Sburb. You should probably fix that.
And Another Thing... (30)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
after you put in a lot of effort, you manage to contact someone who is usually very reclusive;
you write a long letter to someone you haven’t seen in years;
you compile your knowledge of the Game into some sort of FAQ or guide.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
blow bubbles
hold a potluck
play a “party” video game with other people
pour a drink onto the ground for a fallen comrade
team up with someone else in your session to do low-key quests
speed-stack cups
And Another Thing... (Simplified) (20)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you set up a fun activity that requires semipermanent equipment (like a zipline or water slide), and invite other people over to use it;
you compile your knowledge of the Game into some sort of FAQ or guide.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
roll dice (the literal kind)
do laundry
attempt to make pumpkin pie, and end up with a thin film of sugary egg custard with absolutely no pumpkin left in it (the pumpkin disappeared during the baking process)
You do some deeper delving into Sburb’s code in order to figure out why what you did worked (or why an existing gamebreaking technique you’ve read about works), and to see if you can come up with other applications for the gamebreaking technique in question. This often involves dangerous objects like the Pendant or the Session CD. You’ll probably find something actually important or useful at the end of all this.
Binary (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you carefully examine a piece of plot-important jewelry;
you post an open call for other people to help you gather some type of data;
there is a dramatic illustration of how game physics does not correspond to IRL and/or intuitive physics (such as obvious clipping errors, or something getting launched at high speed from something that really shouldn’t be able to provide that kind of speed).
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
use a telescope, microscope, remote viewing portal, and/or scrying ability
run a program called a “disassembler” or “debugger” and look through the output
take notes on small, seemingly-unimportant details, such as the number of cobblestones in a path, or the colors of the flowers in a florist’s window
listen carefully to the noise that something is making in order to determine something about its internal state
mention some sort of limit that comes in units of powers of two, such as 4096 (the upper bound on the number of Consorts on each Land) or 32768 (the maximum number of particles in the particle effect around the Crystalanths)
assume that someone else will consent to something without ever actually asking them
eat rock candy
Binary (Simplified) (25)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you create some sort of database;
you set up a “farm”, i.e. something that generates a continuous stream of some game resource, and that you only have to check on occasionally.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
explain something in terms of “saving frames”
listen carefully to the noise that something is making in order to determine something about its internal state
use a metal detector, or any similar gadget that helps you search for things that aren’t obvious or visible
A Desperate Gamble (35/45 XP) (Curious Ventures 6/8)
Bindings 3/Storyteller 2/Emptiness 2/Knight 5
Now you have to prepare, and then implement, aforementioned dangerous gamebreaking. You risk your life in the process. Or the life of other people. (Whether you tell them or not.)
A Desperate Gamble (45)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you set off a massive explosion;
you break into a room that should never be accessible to you (e.g. the Queen’s personal quarters, the dummied-out grist room behind the Denizen, a Debug Room);
you let a cat out of a bag (usually in a metaphorical sense, although if for some odd reason you can make it literal that’s fine too);
one of your gamebreaking attempts seriously endangers someone else’s life.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 20 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
first need to talk about parallel universes
say that you need to set a certain variable to a certain value
hold a tool between your teeth so that your hands will be free to do something else
interrupt someone’s monologue
stand with one foot on one side of a boundary and the other foot on the other side
make a barrier by stacking unusual objects, such as doomed-Time-player corpses or paintbrushes
use duct tape
alchemize something with a clown poster, picture, or statue
A Desperate Gamble (Simplified) (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you edit, or have someone edit, your heart/shiny/identity;
you set up a hunting blind or other hiding spot, and then sit motionless in it for an extremely long time in hopes of observing or capturing something;
you feed some process’s outputs back into its inputs, causing it to spiral out of control (putting a microphone next to a speaker, having the Prospitians copy every book in their library and put the copies on the shelves of said library, making every consort ask every other consort for something...)
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
strap something onto yourself using Velcro and/or snap fasteners
Three Wrongs Make A Left? (25/35 XP) (Curious Ventures 5/8)
Bindings 2/Storyteller 3/Emptiness 3
You’re in a session/situation where the only solution is, or seems to be, dangerous gamebreaking. So you volunteer for that. The complication is that you have no idea what you’re supposed to do about it. So you do research and experimentation. Some of these experiments somehow manage to make things worse.
Three Wrongs Make A Left? (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you receive a message, via time player, from a doomed timeline in which you broke everything;
you make something that self-replicates out of control (an internet meme, perhaps?);
you try to examine something plot-critical, but accidentally break it in the process of trying to observe it.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
misjudge something’s hitboxes and get hit/not hit by something that you really needed to not get hit/get hit by
screech to a halt (whether literal or metaphorical)
examine long text logs of some kind
accidentally enter wrong passwords too many times and lock yourself out
pick a lock
talk to an NPC repeatedly and get the same dialogue every time
gristwidget some feature of your Land, such as parts of a puzzle or a Consort hut
Three Wrongs Make A Left? (Simplified) (25)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you leave a message trying to contact an expert, and don’t get a response for at least two chapters;
you’re discovered trying to sneak into a secure facility/area.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
chew on something that really shouldn’t be eaten
wear rubber gloves that go all the way up to your elbows
disprove your own theory of how something works
pick up something, drop it on purpose, and then immediately pick it up again
cross a high balance beam or tightrope (If you’re clinging to it upside-down, hooking your legs over it and inching forwards hand-over-hand, it still counts.)
You have the advantage of experience, but for whatever reason, you don’t perceive yourself as having the advantage of experience. Everyone else thinks you know what you’re doing. You try to dissuade them. It doesn’t work.
De Facto Expert (30)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you edit your name out of something and then save or re-upload it;
you take responsibility for something negative that wasn’t actually your fault;
you purposely underperform when someone else is trying to test/assess your capabilities.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
cram yourself into something that is too small for you
can’t take a compliment seriously
deliberately don’t answer a question you know the answer to
get mad at someone for not knowing something “obvious”
walk (or scroll?) past something you’re looking for
blow the dust out of something electronic
De Facto Expert (Simplified) (20)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
someone assigns you responsibility for something without asking you first;
you set yourself a frankly unreasonable challenge (e.g. playing a video game with both your hands tied behind your back by moving the analog stick with your teeth; solving the n-body problem; attempting to break a world record in something you’re not good at).
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
turn off a camera
keysmash out of frustration
open something from the wrong end (like a tube of cream, a banana, a heat-sealed bag, or a conversation)
are very unimpressed with something’s capabilities
Tentacle At Your Heels (25/35 XP) (Curious Ventures 3/8)
Bindings 1/Emptiness 4/Knight 3
There is a Horrorterror who keeps showing up in your dreams. (If you haven’t made a Deal yet, their excuse is that linear time is hard. Or that you’re especially interesting.) Or there’s a glitch that keeps following you around across sessions. The pressure of this... thing... grows until it starts crowding out the rest of your life. Are you even going to have any life left at the end of this? You really don’t know.
Tentacle At Your Heels (35)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
there is a trippy dream sequence in which you hear strangely seductive whispering from the darkness;
you speak in tongues and/or are possessed;
a prophecy foretells your doom. (This is less life-ending than it appears; keep in mind your Imperatives and Priorities. It’s still a scare, though.)
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
aimlessly flip through channels on television, or videos on a website
throw something out a window that’s at least twenty floors high (you can use a balcony if you really have to)
steer a conversation decidedly away from personal topics
eat unlimited soup, salad, and/or breadsticks
describe something that really shouldn’t be oozing as “oozing”
play with something radioactive
Tentacle At Your Heels (simplified) (25)
Major goals: The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
you’re trapped, and every move that you take to free yourself draws you in further (quicksand, a giant glue-trap, a particularly violent game of Twister, etc.);
you (uncharacteristically, hopefully) punch a hole clean through a wall.
You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 10 XP.
Quest flavor: 1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
get soaked in water or another liquid and then just stand there, dripping
Note: Despite the fact that a gamebreaking story may involve increasing one’s capabilities and stretching one’s limits, there is no Aspect arc ordering for this quest set. I couldn’t get the quests to fit well enough. If you really need one, take A Scientific Adventure from the core and rearrange it into its Aspect-arc ordering, then rip out and replace most of the quest flavor options.
Notes for Bindings arc
Tentacle At Your Heels or De Facto Expert
Three Wrongs Make A Left?
A Desperate Gamble
Binary
And Another Thing...
There are two Bindings 1 quests on this arc! Be careful with that.
Bindings is the canonical order for this quest set. It should be simple to see what’s going on: you are dogged by either Corruption or your own insecurity; you try to get a handle on your problem and, through some rather foolhardy observation and experimentation, reduce it to a scope you can actually comprehend; you implement a daring plan to fix the problem. If you go to Quest 4, you decide to see if you can generalize your fix, or if you can figure out why exactly it worked. And if you go to Quest 5, you have to go back and fix your social interactions, since you’ve spent too long neglecting them.
Notes for Storyteller arc
Binary
A Desperate Gamble
Three Wrongs Make A Left?
???
And Another Thing...
Storyteller 4 doesn’t seem to exist on this arc, but it should be easy enough to slot in something from a related-looking quest set. I decided to sketch out this arc anyway, because one type of character on this arc is clearly a Storyteller.
So, you start off looking into things in the Game with real interest. Then you realize that there’s a big problem that needs fixing, which you proceed to attempt to fix. I say “attempt” because you’ll probably patch something up... but in the third quest of this set, you’re going to have to grapple with the Game and attempt to wrap your head around what’s been going on.
I couldn’t get this particular quest set to shake out a Storyteller 4 quest by any stretch of the imagination. So for the fourth quest of this set, you may want to try Fighting Back or Something Better.
And Another Thing... is, in this case, a metaphorical descent, if you play through it.
Notes for Knight arc
Binary
De Facto Expert
Tentacle At Your Heels
And Another Thing...
A Desperate Gamble
Unlike the other arcs for this quest set, a Knight arc is clearly focused on becoming - on living up to The Role of Gamebreaker, rather than (or, possibly, in addition to) expanding your knowledge or fixing problems. You’re not doing it for others. More than anything, you’re doing it for yourself.
The first quest is about you trying out gamebreaking in the theoretical sense - not for any particular reason, just because you find it interesting. The second quest is about the fact that you’re not confident enough in your abilities - which will be this arc’s Vice - and the third quest is about trying and mostly failing to deal with the intersection between your gamebreaking and your life.
Should you go onto the fourth quest, you repair your social relationships a little; and if you want to continue after that, the fifth quest will be about, well, doing some actual gamebreaking.
Notes for Emptiness arc
De Facto Expert
A Desperate Gamble
Three Wrongs Make A Left?
Tentacle At Your Heels
Binary
As noted with the Knight ordering, the character on this quest set is likely to already have significant self-esteem problems. Unfortunately, the Emptiness arc won’t make these problems any better. To be precise, it will make them worse. But maybe that’s the story you want to tell...
In the first quest, your daily life involves chronically underestimating yourself. In the second quest, you become fascinated with a bug and are sucked into trying to fix it. The third quest is about the increasing bugginess of the Game eventually overwhelming your ability to believe that you can fix reality.
The optional fourth quest is about having the knowledge of The Bugginess of the World always lapping at your heels. The even more optional fifth quest is about deciding that even if you can’t fix things you can at least know things.
