WesWorld: The Squirrel Tenenbaums

A Three-Scene TiGGR Scenario from WesWorld

What is TiGGR?

TiGGR (Tiny Game for Generalized Roleplaying) is a fast, flexible system for exploring stories inspired by the media you love. Pick a cultural touchstone, create characters, and dive into 30-45 minute collaborative stories.

Core Rules: Roll 2d6 + Stat vs. Difficulty (Risky: 6, Dramatic: 8, Climactic: 10). Characters have Body, Mind, and Charm stats (3 points total), 5 HP, one Special Ability (+1 in specific situations, once per scene), and Signature Gear (+3 to any roll, once per scenario). When you hit zero HP, you're knocked out until the next scene - but everyone heals fully between scenes. TiGGR is about momentum, not attrition.

Touchstone

Former prodigy squirrels return to their childhood oak as it faces destruction by the park service. What begins as a cache-retrieval mission spirals into emotional excavation where outcasts, underdogs, and characters under existential threat use elaborate rituals and formal behaviors as armor against forces that threaten to expose their fundamental vulnerability.

Setup

Scene: The ancestral Great Oak, now marked for removal. Interior includes multiple hollows, forgotten caches, and crumbling squirrel-run infrastructure.

Goal: Retrieve personal items, resolve buried tensions, and prevent collateral damage when the tree falls.

Factions:

• Royal Tenenbaum (Charm 2, Mind 1, HP 4): Claims squatters' rights. Has a fake deed, stolen maps, and a knack for shifting blame.
• Park Ranger Badger (Body 2, Mind 2, HP 3): Calm, passive-aggressive authority. Carries a clipboard and a chainsaw. Special: "+1 Mind when enforcing regulations."
• Storm Winds (Environmental Threat, Body 3): Only rolls when escalation is needed—no HP, just pressure. Special: "+1 to any complication roll involving chaos or collapse."

Characters

Players may build their own squirrel-sona using TiGGR rules, or adapt one of the following:

Name	Stats	Special Ability	Signature Gear
Chas	B:2 M:1 C:0	+1 Body when protecting his children	Tiny Lockbox of Gold-Leafed Nuts
Margot	B:0 M:2 C:1	+1 Mind when keeping secrets	Pine Needle Cigarette Case
Richie	B:1 M:1 C:1	+1 Charm when reminiscing about failure	Championship Acorn

Other PC roles could include:

• A half-brother possum filmmaker documenting the event
• A raccoon divorce lawyer mistakenly invited
• One of Chas' precocious kit triplets

Scene Breakdown

Scene 1: The Gathering

Location: Upper hollow, dim light through bark slats, smells like cedar and repressed emotion.

Complications:

• Royal appears with a forged deed to the oak (Charm 8 to see through it)
• Margot's kits whisper rumors about a "chainsaw wedding"
• Chas and Richie argue about a buried game from their childhood (Mind 8 to remember what it meant)

Scene 2: The Excavation

Location: Root chamber cache—dark, damp, scattered with old childhood belongings.

Complications:

• Richie finds his old love letter, unsent (Charm 8 to admit feelings)
• The ranger/badger arrives with official eviction documents (Mind 8 to stall with legalese)
• Storm winds howl—branches creak. The hollow begins to splinter (Body 8 to brace or escape)

Scene 3: The Fall

Location: The mid-trunk hollow, sunrise visible through a cracked knot hole.

Complications:

• Falling branch threatens the playground below (Body 8 to redirect descent)
• Royal confesses his own father died during a windfall (Charm 8 to forgive or not)
• Siblings must coordinate to stabilize the tree's final crash (All stats relevant, team rolls encouraged)

Special Mechanics

Flashback Rule: Once per scene, a player may trigger a narrated flashback to gain +1 on a roll. Flashbacks must begin with:

• "That fall, after the hickory harvest..."
• "The day Royal left was the day the owl moved in..."

Tone Notes for the GM

• Narrate with dry omniscience: "Chas had not spoken to his father in three winters. This would not change today."
• Let players frame moments as tableaux
• Insert melancholy with gentle absurdity
• Characters take themselves completely seriously - the humor comes from the gap between their earnestness and the absurdity of their situations

Themes

Displacement. Grief as a nesting instinct. Love as survival adaptation.

The story becomes about lost homes and finding family bonds stronger than the structures that first sheltered them. These are characters whose carefully constructed identities are under siege, using elaborate rituals and precise behaviors as armor against forces that threaten to expose their fundamental vulnerability - whether that's aging, failure, abandonment, or just the basic condition of being unknowable to others.

---

The air in the upper hollow was thick with cedar and repressed emotion. Chas Tenenbaum had not spoken to his father in three winters. This would not change today.

Royal appeared first, as he always did, flourishing a piece of yellowed bark like a theater program. "My dears," he announced to the empty hollow, "so glad you could make it." The bark bore a crude drawing of an oak tree and the words "This oak, henceforth and forevermore, belongs to Royal Tenenbaum" written in what appeared to be crayon.

Margot arrived second, trailing pine needle smoke and wearing the same expression she had worn since adolescence—equal parts boredom and barely contained fury. She examined Royal's "deed" through half-closed eyes. "Crayon, Royal? Really?"

Richie came last, clutching a championship acorn from his tennis days, back when he could still hit a ball without thinking about love. He had not played tennis since the day he realized he was in love with his adopted sister. That was seven years ago.

"The park service is quite serious about these things," Richie said, gesturing vaguely at the orange tags that marked their childhood home for destruction. "A deed probably isn't going to cut it."

Chas adjusted his tiny lockbox of gold-leafed nuts—his emergency cache, maintained with the obsessive precision he had developed after his wife's death. "Royal, that looks suspiciously like the map I made of our old nut caches when I was a kit."

Royal's confidence faltered for exactly one second. Then he puffed out his chest. "Perfectly legal documentation, I assure you."

The kits—Margot's children—whispered from the shadows about something called a "chainsaw wedding," which sounded ominous but was probably just their interpretation of municipal tree removal. Children had a way of making the mundane sound apocalyptic, though in this case they weren't wrong.

In the root chamber below, among scattered acorns and forgotten treasures, Richie found the letter. It was folded carefully inside a piece of bark, preserved by accident and desperate hope. He had written it to Margot seven years ago and never sent it. He had been seventeen. She had been eighteen. The math of it had never mattered to his heart.

"Margot," he said, holding out the letter like an offering. "This is from a long time ago."

She took it with the same care she reserved for lighting her pine needle cigarettes. As she read, something shifted in her face—not happiness, exactly, but recognition. "I had no idea," she said, which was the kindest thing she had said to anyone in months.

The Park Ranger appeared then, clipboard in one paw, chainsaw in the other. He had the calm demeanor of someone who demolished homes for a living and slept well at night. "Official eviction notice," he said pleasantly. "Nothing personal."

Margot and Chas argued environmental impact assessments and historical significance with the desperate eloquence of people who had learned to weaponize vocabulary. Somehow, it worked. The Ranger granted them one hour. Exactly one hour.

The storm came without warning, as storms do. The oak groaned like a ship in heavy seas. Chas braced himself against a support beam, thinking of his children who weren't there but might have been. Richie steadied what he could. Margot, who had never been good at physical emergencies, took a shower of splinters to the head and said nothing about it.

In the final moments, as dawn broke through the cracked knot hole and the oak prepared for its last act, Royal told them about his father. How he had died in a windfall, caught unaware. How Royal had spent forty years trying to prove he wasn't weak like him. How everything—the fake deeds, the abandoned family, the elaborate cons—had been armor against a child's memory of helplessness.

"I'm sorry," Margot said, and meant it.

"Dad," Richie said, and the word carried the weight of seven years of silence.

Chas said nothing, but when the tree began to fall, he threw himself against the trunk with the strength of someone who had already lost too much.

They guided it down together—Chas with his body, Margot with her mind, Richie with his quiet determination. The oak fell like a cathedral collapsing in slow motion, settling into the earth with surprising grace. The playground below remained untouched. The forest floor accepted its new monument.

In the aftermath, covered in dust and exhaustion, they looked at each other and saw not the family they had been, but the family they might become. The tree was gone, but the roots ran deeper than wood and bark. They ran through love and loss and the terrible, necessary work of forgiveness.

Royal brushed splinters from his whiskers and, for once, had nothing to say.

The sun rose fully, casting everything in golden light, and for the first time in years, the Tenenbaums went home together.