Into the Oddish is a brazen, perhaps brave, parody of Pokémon and Into the Odd

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.

The designer and essayist behind Prismatic Wasteland leavened his initial flip tone with unaffected concern that Into the Oddish’s very close parody of Pokémon, among other media, amounted to much of a threat. “There is nothing that really can be done to protect myself from a massive corporation with a bottomless legal budget. Even if my fair-use argument is ironclad (aside: I think it is a parody of Into the Odd [and the OSR more broadly], White Plume Mountain, the original Pokémon games, the Mewtwo movie, etc., and that using the recognizable characters actually assists with the commentary I am doing. If I just filed all the recognizable parts out [a la Pal World*], it would be less clear what I am commenting on and actually make it feel more like a ripoff and less like parody.)”

And Smith knows parody. His most popular tabletop RPG creation, Barkeep on the Borderlands, sends up Gary Gygax’s 1979 adventure module of almost the same name. Trouble in Paradisa transforms LEGO’s beachside City sets from the ‘90s into a location-based murder mystery. Wonky Willie's Authentic Interactive Extravaganza is a more biting critique of AI-generated art and the warehouse pop-up/unlicensed scam that went viral in 2024. Smith’s modesty stopped him from claiming the self-styled moniker, “the Weird Al of TTRPGs”, but only just.

How ironclad Smith’s ostensible fair use defense may depend on a lot of factors: the financial resources the copyright holder’s summon, the zeal of their legal team, and the threat posed. In the US, the fair use doctrine is conventionally applied on a case-by-case basis, and decisions generally (but not always) favor non-commercial works whose aim is to criticize, comment, or use in reporting or teaching purposes. The largest practical factor is how much the infringing work damages the original work’s market. For Pokémon, that’s the aforementioned Pal World — a video game whose unofficial (but not discouraged) pitch was giving Pikachu an assault rifle. Nintendo’s lawsuit against Pal World developer, Pocketpair, is ongoing and likely mounting massive costs for both parties.

“The law isn’t some objective system of rules that unerringly moves in favor of the party with the best claim,” Smith said. “The reality is that I am a hobbyist making a book for fun (and to communicate my message/commentary on the properties involved) and if a major, litigious corporation, be it Nintendo or WotC (or Chris McDowall [Into the Odd’s author]), want to duke it out, the side with the army of lawyers (i.e., not me) will win the day. So, you can ask lawyers whether my fair-use claim is meritorious, but in the end the answer is irrelevant to the realities of power, which is the only thing the law actually enacts and protects, at the end of the day.”

Smith postulated that a version of Pal World that directly ported Pikachu and other Pokémon into its system of indentured servitude and gratuitous gun violence would stand up stronger as intentional parody. Cogency and depth, he argues, isn’t required of good parody. Neither is a robust legal defense, but copyright law has a history of protecting powerful corporate owners over artists — even as AI companies such as Anthropic and Meta attempt to leverage the fair use doctrine to defend their own mass theft.

Speaking of stealing, Smith is calling Into the Oddish’s pre-order campaign “heistfunding” as another cheeky nod to his skirting the de jure understanding of copyright and IP. What some may call ill-advised, or even dangerous, he considers necessary for playing with ideas and iconography currently locked in a gilded cage. At the same time, it allows him to divest from crowdfunding’s similarly restrictive model — a move more independent creators are recently trying in order to reclaim a semblance of financial freedom.

“Whether I’m a Robin Hood, repurposing ideas that are already in the bloodstream of popular culture despite being intellectual property of a corporation, or a dastardly outlaw robbing a train is a matter of perspective,” he said. “There are plenty of reasons to skip a traditional crowdfunder. You should need a reason to do it instead of a reason to skip it.”

If a cease and desist letter does arrive at his digital doorstep, Smith is ready to act immediately in order to make everyone who has already pitched in whole. Until then, Into the Oddish can be pre-ordered on Prismatic Wasteland’s website. Also, the Yahoo Anime rule (IYKYK) obviously applies here: we’re neither big enough nor indexed by Google such that the wrong people will see this, so don’t snitch to any suits. And If you’re a Nintendo lawyer reading this, no you didn’t. But also, please subscribe to Rascal!