I've told a few people about this idea already, but here it is in a more formalized promotion.

Also, enjoy this awesome Sky Tower remix as you read.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon
Striders of the Stars
(Snazzy banner to come)

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE

What is PMD: SotS? Striders of the Stars is meant to be a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon team-based and team building ongoing event that puts players into the role of a special world-saving Pokémon that closely reflects their personality and tries to make it feel as if they really are a Pokémon saving worlds. In StoS, you take the role of yourself, a once-human now-Pokémon that most closely resembles you! In SotS, your real-life talents are your special powers, and you can use them to save Pokémon worlds across the universe that are in desperate need of your help!

SotS is also meant to help encourage people build upon their role playing skills, world-building skills, and urge them to improve on their writing, art, and other talents to help their guild grow and become stronger as they hone their own writing and artistic abilities. In SotS, your talents and skills are your special powers. You can role play to save worlds, use your art skills to help design and build your guild base to unlock new secrets, and use your writing skills to recruit more Pokémon to help you in your adventures across the universe.

Features:

  • As a special Pokémon that was once a human, you have access to powers and capabilities that not even legendary Pokémon have. Take the plunge into a deep and epic storyline and escape from the everyday norm into a universe where your alter-ego is a Pokémon with a big destiny ahead of them!
  • Traits and perks your Pokémon persona has also link to your actual zodiac sign. SotS features a whole new zodiac similar to the standard and Chinese zodiac where your actual birthday has an impact on what kind of special power is bestowed upon you!
  • Like world-building? Ever thought of giving it a try? SotS allows you to create entirely new worlds for players to discover, explore, and save from calamities, along with their own special story for the players to connect with. Everyone is welcome to design new worlds where you're only limited by your imagination. You take charge of the secrets, the challenges, the story, and the friends and enemies that await their arrival.
  • Players can discover new relics of power, recruit Pokémon to build and expand their guild, and go on an endless number of adventures dreamed up by other participants. As time goes on, special events will take place. Worlds that were saved in the past may return the favor. Cross-crisis situations may affect several worlds at a time!
  • There's tons of ways you can participate as much or as little as you'd like. Even if you don't think you can get all that involved, even just submitting art or a short story every now and then can help your guild grow. Or, if you really want to be extra proactive, you can go all out and join in as many RP world-saving adventures as you'd like.


BACKGROUND STORYLINE SUMMARY

Behind each human lies a special, hidden power called a Zenith. Almost all humans live out their lives and never discover it, but when the need arises, a human can be summoned and called as a Starstrider Pokémon and make all the difference in the world. When this happens, all kinds of new capabilities are unlocked. All they have to do is discover, train, and use them. A Starstrider Pokémon using the full power of their Zenith can stop some of the greatest challenges, build and create using their own imagination, and lead other Pokémon with charisma that not even the legendaries have.

Unknown to humans, their inner Zenith is why and how they're able to capture and train Pokémon even though they are creatures with far greater elemental power and strength than mankind. As it was decided many years ago, the closer humans became with Pokémon, the more they would be ready to lead, strengthen, and protect them if the need for them to be called upon as Starstriders became necessary. Even legendary Pokémon acknowledge this, but throughout all of time, the power behind the Zenith has been an extremely and closely guarded secret.

However, as time has gone on, tribulations and cataclysms have befallen many of the Pokémon worlds across the universe. As a result, a Nexus Sanctuary had been created to give a home for what would be long-term Starstrider Pokémon that would group together and make a joint effort to save these many, precious worlds from calamity, and perhaps find the root cause of all the tribulation. In the meantime, the Nexus Sanctuary would be a celestial home of bright and prismatic imagination and creation. Here, Starstrider Pokémon can build themselves an epic home among the stars, and find willing followers to help join them on an epic journey throughout the universe, saving worlds big and small, new and old, and strange and fantastic. It's anyone's guess as to where your destiny will take you!

In the past, worlds made up entirely of Pokémon have summoned Starstrider Pokémon before and have stopped worldwide cataclysms and dark futures from coming to pass (the actual Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games).

Now it's your turn!

(There will definitely be a lot more expanded onto this, but you get the idea)

BUILDING A GUILD

Creating a home in Nexus Sanctuary

There are several ways to build up your guild headquarters. Every guild starts with something like this:

  • Main Hall
  • Basic Sleeping Quarters (For five members, including Starstrider Pokémon (actual PXR Members) and NPCs (Pokémon you have recruited))
  • Dining Hall


Meanwhile, there's a whole slew of expansions that are possible! You can either buy them with money, use special artifacts you recovered from missions to summon them, or use your artistic skills to draw and design them to create them also!

  • Sleeping Quarters Upgrades (To house more members)
  • Research Hall (To discover identify relics found on adventures)
  • Medical Hall (Helps injured/tired Pokémon recover faster!)
  • Training Hall (Learn additional skills that might be useful during world-exploration!)
  • Garden (In the Nexus Sanctuary, there's all kinds of mystical and powerful berries, fruit, and things you can grow to help your missions! Plus, you need to keep your members well-fed.)
  • Mystic Fountain (You'll need it if you want Pokémon to be able to evolve!)
  • Workshop (Repair broken relics and items to good as new condition! Or create new ones!)
  • Defenses (No comment!)
  • And more!


And pretty much all of these could be upgraded multiple times. For example, the first level of the Mystic Fountain would allow for second stage evolution Pokémon evolutions while the second level of the fountain (Lv2 Mystic Fountain) would allow for third stage evolutions, and the final, third level of the Mystic Fountain (Lv3 Mystic Fountain) would allow for Mega Evolutions. All of the expansions to the guild hall will work like this. So a Lv2 Workshop will unlock being able to create better things and fix the stronger broken relics that the previous Workshop couldn't fix. And so on.

Recruiting

Adding NPC Pokémon is something that will be pretty helpful, and you can do that by writing "capture stories" for them by visiting worlds and helping a Pokemon in need. Or, you can draw them to try and recruit them (known as Starstrider Summoning). An "official" will determine if the recruitment was successful based on the quality.

These NPC Pokémon can join you in saving worlds as companions in your RP journeys, or they can stay at the guild headquarters by helping with some of the tasks, such as research, building, or defense. You just need to make sure they've got a place to sleep and food to eat.

IN CONCLUSION

These are some of the basic overview ideas I have for this project, and it's definitely a work in progress and most of this is still a draft. There are a few questions I'd like to hand out to people so I know exactly what would be the best way to continue designing this to meet peoples' interests. It would actually be a big help if people wouldn't mind answering some of these questions.

What do you think of the PMD: StoS idea so far? Since this is a pretty new and revolutionary idea that's unlike anything I've tried to run before, I'd like to know what people think of it. Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 or give it a star rating, but it would be helpful if you highlight a few things about why you like or don't like it. Feedback would definitely help when it comes further building things up.

Do you see yourself taking part in PMD: StoS? I understand a lot still needs to be worked out, but at this point, I think most of the main idea has been laid out. I'd like to know if this is something you see yourself getting into. Note that a "not sure yet, would like to see more" answer is totally ok too. Also, if you are interested, what do you see yourself doing? RPs, building worlds and the quests that go along with it, doing art/writing to help build guilds, and so on? I will need some people to serve as judges in determining when recruitment is successful, when research/building is successful, and a few people that would be interested in the world-building component that will definitely be needed a lot in this project.

Any ideas or things you'd possibly like to see in this? There is still PLENTY of room to expand on this, and I'd love to see what kinds of suggestions and ideas people have that they'd like to see implemented into this. There's a few things I'm still considering (should the RPs be on the simple side, be more like Dungeons & Dragons, or something in between), but in general, the basic foundation of the idea is here.

----------

In any case, this is currently the BIG THING I'm working on. With excitement building for the new PMD game, I figured this would be a great way to prepare and celebrate it's coming with some good old-fashioned forum fun. I'm hoping it could potentially become as big as GCEA or ASB, so we'll see.