#curious ventures

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)

Bindings 4/Storyteller 1/Emptiness 5/Knight 1

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

run statistical analyses

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

run out of chewing gum

dodge spears, arrows, and/or crossbow bolts

break a mirror

execute a frame-perfect or pixel-perfect maneuver

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

Bindings 1/Emptiness 1/Knight 2

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)

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

put a poorly-fitting cover on something

kick rocks off a cliff

So, here are this quest set’s arc notes!

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.