FKR Hack + Skirmish Wargame for my PokeRPG campaign
I've been running a Pokemon game for my friends the last six months and figured I'd post about it after discussing similar games with Liches on Discord a couple months ago. I'm using a FKR chassis to represent normal everyday activities stapled to a skirmish wargame of my own design to represent pokemon battles.
Find the link to the ruleset here.
I'd like to credit Velexiraptor's original Legamon posts years ago, they're what prompted me to start the project in the first place.
For my homegame, I've had to make nearly 140 statblocks. Feel free to use them if you'd like to just jump in and start playing, link here.
FAQ
Q. What's the actual structure of your game look like?
A. I'm running a hexcrawl through a pokemon region of my own design called Tirio. I made a map for it, the PCs explore through the region on a quest to get enough badges to challenge the Elite 4 while helping people and pokemon they meet along the way. I made a map of my region here.
I run battles using a VTT called Shmeppy, I just change tile colors to represent different Terrain. Here's a screenshot of a battle about to occur:
Q. Why a skirmish wargame for pokemon battles when the rest of the rules are so loose?
A. I wanted to represent something similar to the complexity of pokemon battles within the mainline games. I needed to be able to engage everyone at the table at the same time, so that meant some kind of battle representation that included up to 4 or 5 mons on a side at once. I also wanted to have players be trainers with multiple pokemon, meaning I could not use a simple GLOG-style hack to represent a single mon, I needed something much more lightweight to represent an individual.
I settled on a skirmish wargame style mostly by accident as I made changes to the underlying system over time. The initial drafts were much closer to each pokemon evolutionary line being it's own GLOG class, which I found way too clunky in play. Players would also complain that the battles were feeling a little stale just using what amounted to differently typed versions of a D&D fireball. I took a look at what other popular games had battles like this that weren't D&D-esque and found that skirmish wargames like Kill Team were probably closer to what I wanted. I leaned entirely into the Combat-as-Sport aspect of the battles and divorced it from the exploration angle, which I continued to run FKR-style. Haven't looked back since!
Q. What's the tone of the game like if you're basing everything off the children's anime?
A. Most fanhacks lean more into the darker / more realistic view of the Pokemon universe, and I was there at first as well. I found that the Pokemon universe really can't stand up to scrutiny very well (for example: what do people eat? What do pokemon eat?!) and I was having to make increasingly sweeping rulings about the setting to have it make cohesive sense. When I started my hexcrawl, I created some factions and situations that leaned pretty far into climate disaster, late-stage capitalist and colonialist exploitation themes for players to play through. We found that while these types of themes were entirely normal for my other games, in the pokemon world they didn't feel right compared to the Combat-as-Sport skirmish game and otherwise cute designs of the pokemon.
Talking with my players, we settled on something more approximating the original Pokemon anime. I make ruling and set situations based on what I think would happen in the show and everything follows cartoon logic. It's wildly different from anything else I run, but it still stays consistent due to having something concrete to build vibes from (the anime).