Cook the Chaos | Enter The Realm
Welcome to The Realm!
That’s your setting. In The Realm are these locations: The Keep, The Town, The Deep, The Woods, The Ruins, The Caverns, and in between all of these, The Wilderness.
You’re welcome to explore The Realm, but you do so at your peril. It’s a place at the far reaches of civilisation, where everything is stagnant, where most live hand to mouth, seeking nothing more than the basics of life, where rumours are many but the would-be heroes who might investigate them are few. If you fancy exploring these rumours, group up with other players who want to do the same thing, grab yourselves a GM, arrange a session, or play it solo and just go for it!
Playing in The Realm can be led by you, the player or players, or by the GM. Set an objective, and just head out there!
“Who wants to go explore the ruins tonight?”
“Last time Claire’s group got raided on the way to the woods... fancy checking that out?”
“Hey, we need a weaver to help us look into this thing. You free to play yours next week?”
Although some rumours are laid out here to kickstart the game, you should feel free to suggest & introduce rumours your character(s) might have heard for a location, and to follow up on rumours others have introduced or not yet managed to resolve. In this game, whoever’s running each session has no clue in advance what’s going to happen, working off random tables to fill in the blanks. And what happens will depend largely on what’s rolled and what’s introduced through play.
So no matter if it’s solo, player-driven, or GM-driven, try and visualise & narrate out what things look like, what your character’s up to, what the party might see as it crests that hill over there. In this sense, the world will start off blank, and will unfurl with exploration and your imagination. You will build this world, and will live or die by it!
In every session, your party will begin in The Keep, head out on an adventure, and if you’ve survived, at the end of the session will return to The Keep, ready to explore another day. So this way, you can pop in and out of the game whenever you’re available and feel up for an adventure. Just sort a pool of players & GMs or grab your journal, and head out into the wild!
Unless you prefer it that way, there is no set party, so you can join games at will. Maybe create a stable of characters to play, each character with no connection or transfer of coins & gear between them. For any given session, you can then choose which of your characters you want to play, which might feel best for the objective you've chosen for this session. When creating your characters, don’t write a huge backstory tome. Before each session, simply note on your character sheet one current motivation, and one reason you came to The Realm, using the available tables in this deck if you like. Characters can change The Realm, and you’ll begin to see this in future ventures into the setting. For example, there may be a big boss with a hoard of treasure, but if one party with another GM manages to loot the treasure first, another party who’d planned to do the same next week might note that they’re too late and it’s been plundered!
what's next?
Ok, so from here you might want to...
...move onto keeping track in your sessions
...return to the cook the chaos intro
...or double check the rules of the chaos
Remember, though, that you can navigate anywhere on the site using the menus on each page, and if you ever get lost, roll 1d6 and we'll see what perils you encounter!