What This Game Is

This is a Pokémon journey for people who have already left home. Your character is a young adult — someone with rent, debts, a past, and a partner Pokémon that matters more than any badge. The world is the Pokémon World: regions full of creatures with temperaments and wants, cities with banks and boarding houses and broken hearts, and leagues that run on tradition, money, and ambition. You are not a child on a first adventure. You are someone who chose to be here, with all the trouble that choice brings.

What this game is about

The bond between human and Pokémon is real, conditional, and earned. A Charmander's tail flame is not a power bar — it is the creature's honesty, visible to everything that might want to end it. A Pikachu's red cheeks are batteries, and the cute is a warning. This game treats Pokémon as creatures first and tools never. When you battle, you are not spending hit points. You are pushing a living thing past its limits and living with the consequences.

That same weight applies to your human life. Money runs out. Work piles up. A night that runs long can cost you the morning, your reputation, or a friendship. The game is as much about surviving your own life as it is about the league — that is the whole point of the adventure.

How the game runs

The GM (Game Master) describes the world, plays everyone you meet, and keeps the consequences honest. You say what your trainer and your Pokémon do. When you attempt something risky, uncertain, and worth the trouble, you roll dice to see how it lands — the rules for that live in Resolving Actions. Everything else is fiction: talk, plan, bluff, bond, and make choices, and the world responds.

What you need to play

• A trainer character, made in Making Your Trainer.
• At least one partner Pokémon — the creature that chose you back.
• Two six-sided dice (2d6).
• This handbook, and a GM who has read it too.

The golden rule

The fiction decides. If it makes sense in the world, it happens — and if it doesn't, no roll will save it. A Water-type will not be defeated by fire no matter how high you roll, but a clever Fire-type that douses itself in mud and fights from the rain might win anyway. The rules are here to keep the world honest, not to replace it.