Into the Oddish is a brazen, perhaps brave, parody of Pokémon and Into the Odd
Its creator thinks the threat of cease and desist letters shouldn't discourage art.
When asked if W.F. Smith is worried about alerting The Pokémon Company, International and Nintendo to his audacious, if commercially benign, new tabletop RPG, Into the Oddish, he seemed unperturbed. “First off, I don’t know what a ‘Nintendo’ is. I assume it is from one of the newer Pokémon games, of which I am less familiar,” he told Rascal via email.
Into the Oddish melds the original entries into the popular monster-collecting video game series with rules-light roleplay design ethos to create something halfway between lampoon and homage. Players will portray any of 15 Pokémon from the original generation and pilot them through a dangerous version of the Kanto region full of familiar critters, but no humans. Importantly, Smith lifts names (Brock’s Onix), recognizable attacks, and proper nouns (the creatures are explicitly called Pokémon) into the text of an 86-page rulebook. Well, two books because of course there’s a separate Red and Blue Version with exclusive ‘Mons.
An accompanying adventure module, Vile Plume Mountain (listed as Vileplume Mountain on the webstore), provides a “funhouse” dungeon inspired by the endgame cave where Mewtwo resides in the original video games. Cover and interior art is replete with stylized versions of early Pokémon, and Bruno Prosaiko has designed a character sheet that emulates the old PokéDex. Given the litigious nature of TPCi and Nintendo, the project in aggregate feels like watching someone smoking next to a gas station.
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