ASOIAI GMing Tips

Preparing to Run

When you talk to your players about this adventure, outline the basic premise above—that they’re students from a local Trainer Academy who get caught in a blizzard and need to discover and put a stop to the cause of the storm, and that they’ll have multiple side quests to explore as well that will give them more supplies and make exploration easier. Describe the time management and other mechanics above without going into details that spoil aspects of the adventure so they know they’ll be managing their time and be in the right mindset to approach the game.

While Woolwich Springs doesn’t feature heavy survival elements such as tracking food and water closely or heavily involved cold weather mechanics, there are time and resource management aspects to the adventure. Parties that spend too many time slots exploring without making progress on quests to maintain the resort will find themselves in a situation where their Supply Items have dried up, they aren’t getting enough extra healing from Potions, and eventually they will be unable to recover HP from resting at night either due to a lack of fuel to heat the resort. Additionally, players will have to choose when they use their limited resource of a Pokemon that can keep them warm through extreme cold, which can limit their exploration options.

That said, the time management requirements are fairly lenient. For example, once the players arrive at Woolwich Springs, they will have a total of 7 time slots (assuming they take one slot to rest each day) before they run out of fuel for the resort. It should take only 3 time slots to acquire that fuel—which gives them an additional three days’ worth of fuel (9 time slots). And the quests to acquire the medicinal herb, find the lost travelers, and to recover the supplies stolen during the nighttime raids should only take 2 time slots each, adding up to two days of time. Of course, this assumes optimal use of time, but regardless, the available fuel rewards elsewhere in this adventure give some leeway for meandering.

The tone of the adventure is pretty light-hearted and is intended to end on a happy note, but it does involve poachers hunting and killing Pokemon for profit. Communicate to your players however much you feel is best regarding the game’s tone.

Tips for Running

Here’s an explanation of some of the resources supplied with this scenario and some tips we would give for running this scenario and keeping everything straight. Even if you aren’t using a virtual tabletop or prefer another over Roll20, you can adapt these ideas to fit your game.

VTTs and Mapping

Create a scene on Roll20 or your VTT of choice with the player-facing Woolwich Springs Resort map on it. The provided image should perfectly fit a 27x15 tile Roll20 map with the default 70x70 pixel tiles. Use this as the home page for your players and reset the view to this map each time you finish a game session so players can reference it on their own time.

Use the included Pokeball Map Marker token with this map. You can either use it to mark the players’ current location during a session or use it to indicate locations that the players have mapped (and thus can pass through without spending time). As the players discover more information about the different locations in the resort, you can mark that down on this map. At a minimum, mark the following:

• Locations the players have explored
• Locations with Extreme Cold
• Locations that are Dangerous and cannot be passed through without spending time (and which times of day they are Dangerous)

As a general rule, once the players have discovered a path to an area, they should be able to tell whether or not it has Extreme Cold. Once the players have explored an area, they should know whether or not it’s Dangerous (at least for that time of day—but it’s a good idea to give hints or outright indications of how the time of day affects the character of a location). Sometimes, discovering a path to a new area is enough to indicate whether or not it may be dangerous at a given time. You’ll have to play this by ear depending on how your players are exploring and investigating.

Your GM copy of the map has additional information compared to the player map.

• Paths between nodes are marked
  • Solid green lines denote obvious routes between areas, the kind of paths that should be immediately clear upon exploring an area and told to the players, even if they weren’t searching for that route specifically
  • Blue lines with large white gaps denote obvious routes that require a condition to cross. A boat is required for all blue lines on the map, but in the case of Blacklea Bridge to the island, the bridge itself must be repaired before crossing.
  • Red lines with small white gaps denote hidden paths that must be discovered through investigation. These are not automatically discovered upon exploring a node, unlike the other two types of paths.
• Iconography denotes which areas have Extreme Cold and which are Dangerous (and at what times)
  • The snowflake symbol in the bottom right corner of a node label denotes Extreme Cold
  • The danger sign—an exclamation mark in a triangle—denotes an area is Dangerous. If it’s accompanied by a sun, it means it’s Dangerous only during the morning and afternoon. If it’s accompanied by a moon, it’s Dangerous only during the evening and night. If there’s no accompanying symbol, it’s always Dangerous.