[Pokémon Campaign] Pokémon Campaign

I've been pretty quiet here lately, been concentrating on playing games rather than writing about them... well, of course, I have to do SOME writing about most of the games I run. I've been running two campaigns, both 5th Edition.

 

I recently put the bigger campaign on hiatus, as I've got less time right now. The campaign is set in Kvin Mondöj, though less Heavy Metal and more Kitchen Sink. I ran the campaign at a local game store every other Sunday for several months, and even though we'd have an average of 8 to 10 players at a time, most of the characters reached 5th or 6th level... and that's where I find 5th Edition to kind of break down, with twice as many characters at that mid-level. I hope to pick up the campaign again, but first I'll have to figure out how to run it in a balanced yet challenging fashion for that many players at that level and higher...

 

It got a little weird at times, almost but not quite this weird...

 

The other game is a one-on-one I've been running with my wife. She's a huge Pokémon fan and so she introduced me to the anime midyear last year. After watching several episodes, I commented on how it would make a wonderful tabletop RPG, and wondered why such had not appeared as yet (in official licensed form)... and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

At first I looked through the usual suspects for a system to use (all the old Guardians of Order systems, for example), but I felt that they really didn't capture the experience just right. So I punted and started designing a Pokémon trainer class for 5E. I also snagged the Kanto Pokédex from Caniswolfman24 on Reddit; though it is a very good start, it only captures each Pokémon in a snapshot, and even then, as mix of each of the various generations as the author preferred... and as I wanted the Pokémon to be able to level up, just like they do in the game (and the anime), I had my work cut out for me...

 

And then, too, I needed a world... well, a Region, really, as these adventures needed to take place in their own region. I could have used Kanto, or Johto, or any of the already defined regions, but I wanted something that would be unknown and wild and open... a real Pokémon Sandbox, so to speak. So I created the Byoga region (not based on any real Japanese region or other worldly region), and set about creating the region based on my wife's favorite artist. Try to figure it out...

 

The main map isn't finished yet; I just wanted to get a decent feel for the overall region, and then drill down to the individual hexes. The campaign started in Café Town, and her first adventures were all in the Café Hills. The region hexes are 5 miles, and the township hexes are each 0.20 miles. I packed a LOT of stuff in each hex; with the way Pokémon trainers wander, they tend to miss a lot, so she was guaranteed to find SOMETHING each session (each session is one or more "episodes," depending on the action that takes place and the length of the session).

 

Anyhoo, here are three of the maps, and I'll see about posting some of the information about the Pokémon Trainer class and the various Pokémon Racial Classes...