Strange tale from the road.
It somehow turned out that half of hunters in my new campaign are Pokemon. It started with one player wanting to play Pikachu (Monstrous with Pure drive – Joy) and me agreeing because this player usually does well with strange characters. Then after a few sessions another player sacrificed his character to draw power out of an immortal demon and suggested his new character will be a Mimikyu (a creepy Pokemon who cosplays Pikachu to steal part of its popularity, of course he’s a Spooky).
I’m actually surprised how well it works. When there’s time to vent off both players are making lovely fun out of being two competing Pokemon, when solving the mysteries both are devoted and efficient. When they need more human hunters badly, Pikachu transforms into a young Pikachu cosplayer – I allowed the Shapechange move to work the other way round because Pikachu has no humanoid form by default. And oh my God, this cosplayer is so cute! He even once lured a minion into a trap by pretending to be a lost child looking for his mother 🙂
I’m slowly starting to create mythology around them. I’ve decided that Pikachu is the clone of Ash’s Pikachu made by Mewtwo in the first Pokemon movie and sent to our world because Mewtwo wants to see if Pokemon will be happier in a world where there are no trainers forcing them to fight each other. Of course the unplanned appearance of Mimikyu is a hard blow for Mewtwo so he tries to reconcile the two Pokemon…
But as a genius with a tendency to act like an EVIL genius he does it by kidnapping Team Rocket into our world and making them hunt for both Pikachu and Mimikyu so that they have to cooperate. Team Rocket with all their Pokemon is a single monster, their weakness is “sending them back to the world of Pokemon” – I don’t want them actually killed, they’re too cartoony for that. When they lose all their Health they’re just blasting off again.
Mimikyu also tells everybody that Team Rocket’s motto (“To protect the world from devastation…”) was actually written by a great Polish poet from XIX century, Adam Mickiewicz, because one of human hunters is Juliusz Słowacki, Mickiewicz’s arch-nemesis (The Exile – a playbook for time travelers from Generic Games website) and Mimikyu hopes their cooperation will go more smoothly when Słowacki believes so.
I’m just can’t wait to see how it develops in future mysteries 😀