The Lost Doll - A Halloween 2023 One-Shot
New Year, New One-Shot!
This time, we’ll be doing something different: Stick around if you want to know how I used Infinite Realms to do a Pokémon one-shot!
A quick rundown of the story: The adventure is set in an mediterranean-ish coast town (for my fellow pokémon experts: it’s close to the city of Fermanca). My players will investigate why multiple residents of an retirement home have gone missing. A long time ago, one of the inhabitants lost their favorite plush toy in the basement of this building. Unfortunately, their toy turned into a vengeful banette. As the old person returned to this place decades later, the banette saw an opportunity to revenge its abandonment.
Now, it’s up to the players to go down the cellar steps and save the day: Will they be able to calm the raging spirit? Or will they have to fight it into submission?
But before they can do any of this, I’ll have to prepare a few things, mainly the maps and the music tracks. Pokémon RPGs don’t have any official maps, so I will have to improvise a little. If you want to run a similar oneshot, you might use „the crossing paths“(mainly the ritual site) and „Mooncrest island“ from the Infinite Realms maps. But for this one, I really want to get that mediterrean feeling. Which is why I shamelessly reuse pictures from my family’s last trip to Italy. The upload via „Add Map“ is easy enough:
Mediterrean Map
On this map, using weather effects doesn’t make much sense (it would look like the rain drops are falling onto the projected surface, which isn’t quite what we want to do here).
This doesn’t mean we cannot use this feature at all! On another battle map, my player’s are going to face a houndoom which has been tricked by our antogonist banette to attack outsiders. I’ll use some rain to create a gloomy atmosphere:
Overview Battlemap with Weather Effect
… okay, I’ll go for a little less rain… (This map was created by the amazing Daniel James by the way, in case you are looking for something similar for your own game.)
Next up: The music! Pokémon is more of a light-hearted genre, so I want to keep things not too creepy. Luckily, there’s a wide variety of tracks to choose from: We start of with the melancholic „A band at the bar“, which ramps up to a cheerful symphony. They will never guess what’s waiting for them! Once the first inhabitants have gone missing, I’ll heighten the tension with „the beginning“. During the last confrontation in the wine cellar, I will pull out „13 sins“, which is just the right mix of horrific and epic.
Last but not least, I will have to get this whole adventure to my friend’s house, where we will be playing. The „export“-function really comes in handy here: My laptop is over ten years old, and if I worked on that thing alone, I might just postpone my oneshot to next year… This way, I can play with my new map wherever I want!
That’s all, folks! Thanks for coming with me on this journey! And I didn’t even use this opportunity to get a cheap jumpscare!
BOO!
Happy Halloween!
-by Vidda
PS: You have ideas for one-shots, campaigns or similar? You can send us your article and we may publish it for you on our blog page!
Cover picture: “Creepy Doll 2” by hill.josh is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.