WIRE Buzz: Wendy’s cooks up D&D-style RPG game; NBC opens post-apocalyptic Vault; more

Already a Twitter troll master for its snappy social media retorts, Wendy’s is apparently going beyond mere trolling with its latest viral marketing gimmick: a thoroughly-crafted, 97-page Dungeons & Dragons-style tabletop roleplaying game that buffs you for eating Wendy’s food and hampers you with negative status effects, obviously, for eating anything else.

Download and browse Wendy’s ridiculously well-done Feast of Legends board game, and it won’t take long to see that some D&D fan on the Wendy’s payroll spent some quality time in the kitchen with this one. In the fight against frozen beef, the nation of Freshtovia (yes, Freshtovia) stands alone in the realm of Beef’s Keep, where Queen Wendy one day finds herself beset by the evil “Ice Jester and his rogues gallery of frozen fiends.” How will you stop them? Well, you’ll just have to put down that Frosty and roll the dice.

Check out the teaser for the game (which is made all the more awesome because Wendy’s plays the whole thing hilariously straight):

With locations like Costa del Spicy, Biggie Vale, Roast Beach, and the French Fry Forest, the game world is already mapped out and ready for you to explore. Join The Order of the Spicy Chicken Sandwich (they’re resistant to fire), or the Order of the Baconator (you guessed it — they’re damage-mopping tanks), but be warned: to ice this silly quest against frozen beef, you’ll have to follow the same carefully-plotted rules as you would if this were an actual D&D game, and not merely an insanely elaborate Wendy’s commercial. 

Of course, you’ll get positive status buffs for eating any Wendy’s-branded food that you encounter, but, “if you’ve settled for something other than Wendy’s, it can cause your character to weaken,” the rules advise. That means points off for pizza, “Frozen Burger Joints,” or “Gas Station Food” — which dings two hits of point damage off your Intelligence stat.

Read more about the game at its fully-realized website, or just download the whole book now and start taking chances with your drive-thru fate. Who’s hungry?

NBC is going dystopian for a new post-apocalyptic thriller series that seals away the world’s brightest minds deep in the frozen North to ride out the end of civilization — where they must band together to help rebuild it all.

THR reports that Code Black writer Jesse Lasky will executive produce the new series, aptly titled The Vault, which focuses on a geobiologist named Annie. In anticipation of a world-changing disaster, Annie establishes a remote, high-tech facility in the Arctic, where “a dozen experts in their respective fields with specific skill sets” end up assembling to put their heads together on how to remake Earth’s shattered society.

The report describes the apocalyptic disaster behind all the chaos simply as a “cataclysmic event,” so we’re waiting with fear and trembling to see what forces could drive the planet’s biggest brains so far from home, all in the name of preventing humanity’s extinction. There’s no early word on casting or a premiere date for The Vault, so stay tuned.

With two Emmy awards under his belt for HBO’s Chernobyl, director Johan Renck now has his sights set on sci-fi. Deadline reports that Renck has agreed to direct a big-screen adaptation of Spaceman of Bohemia, the first novel from up-and-coming Czech-born American writer Jaroslav Kalfař. 

Operating under Channing Tatum’s Free Association production company in partnership with Tango Entertainment, Spaceman follows protagonist Jakub Procházka, “raised in the Czech countryside by his grandparents” after being orphaned as a child and eventually making his way into orbit as the nation’s first astronaut. On a high-risk, one-man mission in the reaches of space between Earth and Venus, he “discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion,” according to the report. 

The screenplay for Spaceman of Bohemia is being adapted from the novel by short-film writer and director Colby Day. There’s no early word on casting or a release date — but with a setup that puts an astronaut into a space friendship with an oversized space-spider, we’re happy to wait as long as it takes.