22 Jan

Pokémon Spotlight: Mareep Family

Artwork by 電竜ライ

It’s the year of the sheep! Back when Gold and Silver first came out, Ampharos was my favorite Pokémon, and I’m happy to celebrate this Pokémon family as we coast into the new year.

As a note, we’ve ramped up the work on the 1.05 update for Pokémon Tabletop United, which is why this post has taken a while to surface. It’s also why the blog will be going on a partial hiatus until we get the update done. I may still post once or twice before the release if I find topics I really want to write about, but don’t count on much.

Mareep’s fluffy coat of wool rubs together and builds a static charge. The more static electricity is charged, the more brightly the lightbulb at the tip of its tail glows. – Mareep Pokédex Entry

Flaffy’s wool quality changes so that it can generate a high amount of static electricity with a small amount of wool. The bare and slick parts of its hide are shielded against electricity. – Flaaffy Pokédex Entry

Ampharos gives off so much light that it can be seen even from space. People in the old days used the light of this Pokémon to send signals back and forth with others far away. – Ampharos Pokédex Entry

10 Jan

Over There! A World War One Pokémon Campaign: A Retrospective

Or How I Bait-and-Switched My Players SUPER Hard

Today’s post is a guest article from KamenWriter, who was a member of the PTA dev team since early in the system’s life and has contributed a lot of help to PTU as well.

Introduction

“Over There!” AKA World War One Pokémon, was a short, two-month-long campaign which took place in Europe, 1917, in the midst of the Great War.

The world is one just like ours, with the same history, landmasses, and names for anything. The only difference is that this world has Pokémon where our world has regular animals, and they have a way to train the creatures to fight alongside them. As the game begins, two trains filled with soldiers and their Pokémon roar along the tracks, one filled with Allies heading east towards the German front, and another heading in the opposite direction, originating from Berlin, Germany carrying Central Power soldiers.

Suddenly, there is some kind of anomaly! A sudden surge of power, and the players find themselves suddenly alone on the train, except for a strange man in cobalt blue military garb, wearing a bright red poppy where his medals would be. The man disappears, and the players suddenly find that outside the window there is another world altogether. The two trains, one heading east and the other west, find themselves on the same track, roaring uncontrollably towards one another. There is a crash! The players are plunged into darkness.

When they awake, they are in a thick woods where just a moment ago there was a wide plain. On the two trains, two enemy factions are suddenly face-to-face, and are forced to survive being stranded in unfamiliar territory.

That is how Over There! Began. Probably one of the biggest bait and switches in PTU history. I approached my players with setting details, and was light on the actual content until the first session, where they were whisked away to an unfamiliar territory and forced to fight for their lives. The twist was that the most powerful of the legendary Pokémon hand-picked these soldiers, an American nurse, a Russian spy, an experienced German airforce pilot, a top-secret Psi-ops candidate, and a young German man fighting for what he believes in, in order to put them through a trial by combat to decide the fate of the human race.
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06 Jan

Gym Design: Unconventional Challenges

artwork by 弐河99℃

Last time I talked about Gym Design, I constrained myself to more traditional League format challenges. Nonetheless, the advice I gave there is just as applicable to unconventional Gym Challenges, which is what I’ll be focusing on for this post. For the purposes of this post, I consider a conventional Gym Challenge to be one where the Trainers on each side battle Pokémon to the last mon standing, and Trainers participate only through Orders and other League Legal Features rather than fighting directly. Most of the ideas and concepts here will still focus on combat, as I believe that’s a defining characteristic of a Gym Challenge as opposed to a Contest, Pokéathlon, or other (generally) non-violent competition. However, the goals and rules of the challenges will differ greatly from a conventional Gym.

As before, I’ll give example outlines at the end for Gym Leaders using the concepts developed in this post at the end so you can have a starting point or source of inspiration for your own campaigns. Do note, unlike the previous Gym Design post, you’re not supposed to try to incorporate every heading in this post into a single Gym! Most likely, you’ll just take one of the concepts and put your own twist on it.
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01 Jan

GM Advice: Keeping Starter Mons Special

Artwork by sumikarasu

Happy New Year, everybody! And what better post for a time of new beginnings than one talking about starter Pokémon, a crucial element of opening a Pokémon Tabletop United campaign? Before I go on, I should note that the issue this post addresses definitely does not come up in all campaigns, but I’ve seen it enough through a long history of Pokémon tabletop campaigns to feel it warrants a post.

Starter Pokémon provide a crucial foundation to beginning Trainers and should be defining members of a Trainer’s late-game team too. They are often their Trainers’ most steadfast companions, the ones most likely to risk their lives for their Trainers – and in return the ones their Trainers will take the greatest risks to save. Specialist Trainers choose starters based on their battling styles, and even those who start their journey as generalists often find their starting Pokémon plays a big role in choosing how to grow and specialize later.

Unfortunately, starters all too often find themselves outclassed by carefully bred, Shiny, or other rare and special Pokémon such as Legendaries that Trainers befriend or capture in the course of a campaign. This puts players in a tricky position of having a Pokémon they’re very attached to from an RP perspective but which may not perform up to par mechanically – or worse, which feels dull and mundane from a fluff perspective despite reasons for in-character attachment.

This happens more often in campaigns where GMs work hard to give the players opportunities to find special Pokémon with unique traits, but that by no means suggests that GMs shouldn’t do that. The solution isn’t to diminish and exclude Pokémon ideas that may be more interesting than a baseline starter but instead to work hard to keep starters relevant and to develop them throughout a campaign. Read on for my tips on doing so!
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