What Is This?

We want to try out a creative activity that can bring the whole Pokémon Tabletop community together to make maps, adventures, fakemon, and more all around a theme! This is our first time hosting such an event, so bear with us as we figure out how to best run this.

From now through January 5th, we’ll be taking submissions via a Discord submission channel for creations in a few categories:

Maps made for battles, towns, and exploration areas

Homebrew Pokémon – whether they’re regional variants, Shiny Pokémon, Type Shifts, or flat out Fakemon

Battle encounters, whether they’re wilderness encounters, Gym Battles, or other boss fights

Adventures, whether they’re location descriptions, quests, or longer modules

This isn’t going to be a formally ranked or judged event, and we don’t have strict rules for submissions in each category. However, all submitted entries will be linked in a showcase post, and some of the devs and mods will take a moment to highlight an entry or two which they found interesting, which had a unique idea, or which spoke to them in some other way. Doxy’s thought process is capricious and subservient to the whims of the Power Brick, so don’t treat this like a competition to win!

The Theme

The theme for this event will be “Winter Festivals and Celebrations”!

We’re purposefully avoiding making the theme explicitly Christmas or another winter holiday so you can think about what kinds of celebrations people in a world with Pokémon might have, whether it’s a small-town festival held when the first local Cryogonal awaken for the winter, or a larger holiday that exists in your personal region centered on a Legendary Pokémon like Articuno.

There’s a whole world (literally!) of inspiration to draw from for this theme, and so we’d like to gently remind everyone to be tasteful and responsible when borrowing from cultures you aren’t member to. If you’d like to base your entry on a real world festival or celebration, ideally talk to someone from the source culture for a sensitivity check and make sure to do thorough research. However, also be mindful that members of minority cultures often spend a lot of time and energy explaining their cultures to others as it is, so ask for help tactfully when you do.

How to Submit

Please enter your submissions by posting in the #community-creation-submissions channel on Discord.

In your post, include the following:

The name or handle you and any collaborators want to be credited by.

Which of the four categories you want your submission filed under; if you feel your work falls under multiple categories, choose the best fit.

A short, 1-3 sentence blurb describing your entry. This will be used to describe your entry in the showcase post.

A link to your submission. This should include enough fluff and description to tie it to the winter festivals theme. We suggest hosting a Google doc or link to a file on Google Drive, but a forum post or other form of hosting is fine too. Just be reasonably sure all links you provide will last.

Credits for any art used (that you have permission to repost), assets with licensing that allows reuse, etc.

A few notes on submissions:

We reserve the right to exclude any submissions we deem to be inappropriate. Use common sense here.

You can collaborate with others and submit works together.

You can submit multiple works, but keep it reasonable. If you do this, we’d prefer if you submitted works in multiple categories instead of multiple works in one category.

If you use outside art and assets that aren’t under a license that permits resharing and alteration, you must acquire explicit permission to repost them and show us proof. (Official Pokémon assets are an exception; feel free to use game sprites, ripped tilesets, etc.)

Resources and advice will be provided for each submission category, so read on for more details!

Resources and Advice

Maps

Resources

If you’d like to make Pokémon-style pixel art maps, we recommend Tiled Map Editor (https://www.mapeditor.org/).

Here’s a good starting tutorial for Tiled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwaomOYGuYo

(You can safely ignore the parts of the tutorial talking about collision maps since you are just making an image and not a functional video game map)

This tileset has plenty of winter-themed tiles for a map: https://www.deviantart.com/chaoticcherrycake/art/Pokémon-Tileset-From-Public-Tiles-358379026

(Note that if you repost maps you make using this tileset elsewhere, you should credit the artists listed in that deviantArt post)

Should you choose to use tilesets from elsewhere, check that their creators are okay with others publicly sharing maps made from them and please give them credit as well.

If pixel art maps aren’t your speed, 2minutetabletop offers a variety of map-making assets under a Creative Commons license. Unfortunately, there isn’t a snow-themed asset pack, but you can find many other useful assets here: https://www.2minutetabletop.com/product-category/map-assets/

Advice

Large battle maps in Pokémon Tabletop tend to be cumbersome and can severely disadvantage melee-centric Pokémon if the entire breadth of the map is used. 20×20 tile size is recommended for a standard battle map, and if you go much larger than that, consider adding environmental features that help combatants move around quickly.

Battle maps should not only look good but have interesting terrain features. Including a brief description of what kind of encounter your map is best for, any mechanics particular to the terrain, and any fluff and lore behind your map’s location (even if it’s just the site of a snowball and Pokémon fight at a festival) will make it more useful for GMs.

When it comes to town maps and routes and other locations to explore, it’s even more important to include some brief descriptions.

Homebrew Pokémon

Resources

ElementalKnight has put together a utility for Type-Shifting Pokémon here: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/Pokémon_tabletop/ptx-type-shifting-movelist-helper-t3192.html

Our very own Pokémon Tabletop blog has various ideas for variant Pokémon you can use to get an idea of what the possibilities are for regional variants and shinies: https://Pokémontabletop.com/category/pokespotlight/

While it is old now, the homebrew Sage dex done by a set of PTU veterans remains a good example too: http://paradoxhaze.wikidot.com/capxdex

Advice

The easiest way to start creating a Fakemon of any sort is to take an existing Pokémon and make adjustments to it. You can slot out Moves for equivalents of different Types, use their move lists to gauge what Moves go at which levels, and pick similar Ability options.

Don’t feel obligated to provide 100% full Egg, TM, and Tutor Move lists. Having several strong options in each list is more useful than very full lists with a lot of filler and Moves that no one will ever take.

When it comes to homebrewing Moves and Abilities, don’t go overboard. Having a core Ability or Move that is distinctive to the Pokémon and which it is built around is more effective than giving it a massive array of new things.

Include a couple ideas for how your homebrew Pokémon can be encountered and how it fits into a world. The theme is winter festivals, so maybe the Pokémon is at the center of a celebration.

Battle Encounters

Resources

Our Pokémon Tabletop blog has some old posts with tips for making Gym challenges: https://Pokémontabletop.com/category/gymideas/

One of the most impressive tabletop systems I’ve seen recently for tactical combat is Lancer, and it not only has interesting ideas for enemies in a variety of combat roles but suggestions for creating objective-based combat encounters where you’re not just aiming to rout the enemy side. Take a look at an old free draft of the system, starting at page 350: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ekxb2fxp60ccsnk/Lancer_Core_Book_%2528PR2%2529.pdf/file

Advice

A good battle encounter has enemies that play multiple roles and that are of varying levels of danger. A boss or lieutenant with two stronger bodyguard types and then a mass of weaker Pokémon supporting them is a well-tested pattern. Players should feel like they have meaningful choices in target prioritization.

The GM has more leeway to use strategies that may be less optimal for PCs to use – for example, you can make stronger use of status Moves by adding more weak enemies that exclusively use status Moves. You’re improving the enemy side’s action economy, but by making them relatively weak actions, you aren’t going to overwhelm the PCs and you get to use a strategy that is less common in PTU.

Otherwise, combat encounter design is a very, very well-tread topic for Pokémon Tabletop that many veterans are happy to talk about. It’d take far too much space to put all the possible advice here, so don’t be afraid to ask for help!

Adventures

Resources

I recently found a pretty good article on writing winter encounters. It’s more geared towards D&D and other fantasy games but can still be helpful here: https://www.2minutetabletop.com/how-to-run-a-snow-adventure/

And here are more example snow encounters from the same author: https://www.2minutetabletop.com/10-snow-encounters/

Advice

You don’t need to create a linear adventure for this category. It can be a location with multiple quest hooks, like a festival with many friendly competitions to join and locations to explore, or a set of adventure hooks for an entire region centering on winter celebrations.

There are a number of things you can do to make an adventure or location easier for a GM to use:

Make NPCs simple but distinctive. A signature Pokémon, a peculiar mannerism, or an off-the-wall description can all make an NPC easier to remember.

Include ways an adventure can be modified – this could be multiple possibilities for where a clue can be found in a mystery, what-if scenarios for players going off the beaten path, ways to reuse content that players have “skipped”, ways to move a scene forward if the players are stuck on what to do, etc

Structure your work in a way that’s easy to reference at the table. All information and materials that would be used together should be put in the same place.

This category can feel like you have to include the other categories in your submission (a map, a battle, etc), but that isn’t the case! It’s okay for this category to write the outline of a location or quest and leave suggestions for battles and maps to use without going into explicit detail. Though this can also be a good reason to do a collaborative submission with someone else.