The Monsters in Alcha-Tera

This has come up a few times, but because our social circle irl is predominantly Pokemon and we have that as a special interest, we loosely have a collective Pokemon Trainer or broadly Beastmaster archetrope. I fit this more strongly personally, but it's also a common enough theme in our system that I'd count it as up there for collective identities. 

We love any collectable mon stuff, especially if there's an easily accessible physical element of it. That's why we love collecting TCGs because they're so easy to get and store, and playing physical tournaments turns into a tangible thing we can do with them. We also collect Pokemon figures and toys. This also extends to why we also collect Bakugan and things like that. Though physical accessibility is still a big thing and so we don't have a lot of big, specific collections outside of Pokemon, but we have a lot of little guys from stuff like Moshi Monsters, Beyblade, Neopets, and a lot of it is because we've found them while thrifting. 

To us I think this also stretches what counts as a "mon" or the subject of a Beastmaster. Because we've gotten more into the Cookie Run TCG, the characters to us feel closer to that, but that's not remotely how the actual game treats them. It comes down to I feel a specific summoner attachment to it and thus in my brain they become that. It's like Herb Cookie winds up being a battle species instead of a character.

For some reason this is only a thing with physical media though. Even though we play a lot of video games we don't feel as strong of a draw with digital media, but I think that might be because we wind up replaying/resetting a lot of games. We'll still generally lean towards creature collecting games or like playing as Beastmaster characters (most recent example I can think of is Ochette from Octopath Traveller II). I think it's also having some kind of tactile thing makes it feel more grounded and real to us since we're otherwise very hands on. 

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.