The Monsters in Alcha-Tera

The first issue though is that the best thing to do would be to ask specific headmates to front and we've noticed not everyone is comfortable doing that. We genuinely don't mind it in any context most of the time. It would help if someone is shutdown in the front to see a message like "Get Rex to front" or "Get Bobby to front" so we can actually de-escalate and help them calm down.

The other issue is I don't want us to be seen as pretentious or anything like that.

We went to a local zine fest a month or two ago and want to get more into making zines. Our dad made zines in the 90s and he's been going back and printing a lot of his old zines, though they're more like comic books. They're actually pretty cool but he (reasonably) does not want to share any of them online and I don't think I could share any of them without risk of getting doxxed.

We have a lot scripted for now and he gave us a large infodump this morning about how to go about laying it out and printing it. We may get around to converting some of our essays into zines, though we may need to make more "new to the concept friendly" essays. There was one we came up with for Trans Day of Visibility but wasn't able to finish in time, but it's far enough along that we may be able to get started on it.


We've also been working on a few homemade TCGs on and off as we get more into Pokemon and also smaller TCGs like Altered. The gimmicks we have in mind is that they can be played side by side, which means that systems can play them without any modification. The idea that is the furthest along is based on emotions (something like Voidpet, but with more monster variety and variations). So far we just haven't been able to come up with a good win condition.

We did play with the idea of making a TCG based on our system but weren't able to figure out a decent execution. There's also the typical monster mechanics which we also had a draft of, but we need to figure out a way to make it interesting.


Then there was also a modified version of the Pokemon TCG we've drafted to be played by a system. We still need to playtest it to modify the rules and erratas, but the idea is that the bench space is cut to 3, there's an added supporter bench of 3 where one supporter in the bench can be activated per turn, and there's a visible "bag" section for item cards. So it's set up like this: 

Prize	Prize		Active		Stadium
Prize	Prize				Deck
Prize	Prize	Pokemon	Pokemon	Pokemon
		Supporter	Supporter	Supporter
Bag					Discard

Some cards had to be modified with this set up (Professor Sada's Vitality for example would be broken, so we removed the draw engine). Any unused cards at the end of a turn just get shuffled back into the deck. To keep evolution Pokemon from being useless, there's a rule where Pokemon can be evolved when they're placed down, but their abilities are neutralized if they're evolved during set up.

We just need to playtest it, and we're probably going to end up either printing out proxies or trying to find a simulator that will let us do this.


Luckily for all of this, there is a printer at work and our boss is never in, which is perfect for using to print our random neurodivergent bullshit in short amounts.