Organizing a season
When you chain multiple Epsiodes of Pocket party together, you are playing through a Season. In each Epsiode, Adventurers face local crisis in each of their Pocket world in the hope of catching and defeating the Big bad evil.
Each Adventurer has at least one game focusing on their Pocket world during a season. This means you need to decide how many times you want to venture in each dimension ahead of time, then multiply that by the number of Adventurers. The result is the number of Episodes necessary to play through your season!
Well…That plus the finale! In the last game, Adventurers travel to the Big bad evil’s world and confront them directly! Time for a smackdown!
Endgame routine
When you play a Season, there are a few steps to go through at the end of each game that will allow you and your friends to enrich your game universe together.
Create canons
Canons represent how you remember the world.
Each Player gets to reflect on their adventure and pick an element of the Pocket world they want to canonise. It can be a piece of the adventure they loved, something that they deem useful or simply a critical part of their journey.
There are three categories of Canons you can choose from:
A character → Can be an ally or a foe. When summoned, it never turns against you (but it can create difficulties!).
An object → Can be of any size and shape: gun, crate or floating boat!
A rule → Apply a strong logic of a specific world to another one, see what happens!
Once per game, an Adventurer can summon any Canon of their Pocket world in a scene. The Canon persist throughout the Scene and goes back to their original world at the end of it. You can’t expect them to hang around all day!
Create an evil aspect
Evil aspects is what you understood of the Big bad evil. It is a persistent story element that will come to life in the final game of the Season.
To build up toward the final confrontation, each Adventurer makes a statement about the Big bad evil in relation with the adventure they just went through. An Evil aspect should be a simple sentence.
Players record all statements somewhere to be able to refer back to it when shaping the Big bad evil’s world in the final Episode of the Season!
Growing up
A season is often charged with crazy adventures, emotions and in the end, memories. When concluding, take the time to sit down and describe how all these events will influence your kid growing up.
Each Player can describe what they do immediately after defeating (or not!) the Big bad evil and what kind of adult they eventually become.
If you defeat the Big bad evil, take the time to celebrate. Maybe the band keeps going on adventures together, free from this looming shadows. Maybe they give away the legacy of the Pocket worlds to the next generation of Adventurers?
If the Big bad evil triumphs, describe the hardship that follows, but remember to put a gentle positive twist on the conclusion. Maybe your kid ends up developing that one strength they were lacking in the real world to do some good!
Do a short roundtable and take the time to appreciate what you all went through together…Until the next adventure!