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.

Tracking Quest Progress

Keep a running table that tracks where the players explored during each day, what they’ve accomplished, and when their fuel will run out. You can also use this to track which types of Supply Items have been taken away in the nighttime raids, whether the players have unlocked daily Potions, and the status of the resort’s heat-providing Pokemon.

A filled out example is given below, and a blank version of this table will be made available in a separate file.

In this example, the players have completed just over a day of adventuring, enough time to finish the Lost in the Frost quest, returning the trapped travelers to the resort and gaining the use of their Coalossal to help them adventure further in the cold. The red days in the first table indicate that the party will not have Resort Supplies during those days and thus will not recovery HP from sleeping. Looks like the party better get working on retrieving those fuel tanks.

During the night of Day 1, their Gourmet Ingredients were stolen and are no longer available to take as Supply Items. As they took a nap in the evening and then stayed up late through the night on Day 2, they were able to stop their Batteries and Air Canisters from being stolen by fending off the raid. The rest of their Supply Items are also intact.

The rest of the table is pretty self-explanatory too. They haven’t completed the Leaf it to Wooloo quest, so they don’t get a Potion each at the start of the day. And they haven’t progressed far enough to get the Blacklea Bridge repaired or to take back the Lapras gems from Oliver Knight.

It can be useful to share some parts of the second table with the players, but obviously don’t share all of it—letting them know it’s significant to repair the bridge and that there are some sort of important gems to acquire can spoil part of the adventure for them.

Daily Checklist

Here’s a simple checklist for running the day by day of the adventure:

• At the start of a new day, if the nighttime raids are ongoing, announce to the players which type of Supply Item has been raided and is now unavailable.
• Remind the players of any ongoing effects from their last Camp Phase they should keep in mind for the day—such as bonuses from cooking.
• If the players have unlocked daily Potions, each player receives 1 Potion.
• Each player then can spend 1 SP on Supply Items for the day, out of the selection still available at the resort.
• Then, the players begin exploring, starting by deciding what to do with their morning time slot.
• Throughout a day, you typically want to aim for 1-3 combat encounters, depending on how arduous they are. The fixed combat encounters for each quest tend to be more difficult, while you can easily make more softball encounters out of the combat stats provided for routine wild Pokemon.

Pregen Character Notes

Four pregenerated characters are provided with this adventure, with the Galar Region starters and Yamper as their Pokemon. When your players are choosing their characters, you should keep the following in mind:

• Scorbunny is a strong and straightforward Pokemon to use in this scenario because of its Typing, and Strategist is a fairly straightforward Class to play, making it good for players who are less familiar with tactical combat tabletop games. By the end of the scenario though, the player will want to have picked up other Pokemon to use against the Lapras boss fight, however.
• Grookey on the other hand may be difficult to use because of its weakness to Ice, but Grass is still a good offensive choice against the Stonjourner and Lapras battles. The Trainer associated with Grookey was given the Ninja Class so that the player has other offensive options while they’re picking up more Pokemon to flesh out their team.
• Fashionista, with a Sobble starter, poses the greatest risk of inspiring option paralysis in someone because its base talents require the player to pick several items upfront and then offers the possibility of swapping items each Camp Phase. It’s recommended to hand this pregen to someone who can make choices quickly and is okay with trying something out instead of agonizing over every decision.
• Taskmaster, with a Yamper starter, requires careful balancing to not drain the party’s healing resources while taking on the job of guarding the party’s squishier Pokemon.

Capture and Team Size Tips

The adventure is set up to give the players “second starters” very soon into the first session. However, you shouldn’t just stop there. The first quest the players embark on should also provide capture opportunities, whether through befriending or through battle. Consider downsizing the battles you throw at the players or giving them fewer battles until the players have filled out a full team of four.

Encounter Construction

As a general rule of thumb, against a party with full teams of Pokemon, a normal encounter uses a number of standard Pokemon equal to the number of Trainers in the party.

Minion Pokemon count as half a Pokemon for these purposes, but you don’t want to swarm them with Minions either. It can be a good idea to trickle them in as reinforcements. For example, against a party of four, the battle may start off against two standard Pokemon and two minions, and two more minions join the fight at the start of the second round.

Boss Pokemon count as a number of Pokemon equal to their actions per round, which should equal their number of HP bars as well.

As a general rule when pacing waves of enemies in an encounter, the enemy side should keep around the same number of actions as the player side.

Also keep in mind that players will not go into battles 100% fresh. If you notice your players’ Pokemon teams are especially beaten down, you may consider making some of the adjustments recommended for smaller parties.