To celebrate halloween this year I have decided to spend some time brainstorming "spooky" ideas for Pyco Mundi to help flesh out parts of the games that have had very little thought put into them thus far. I figure this might be an interesting look into how I design content because this blog is basically how I write down all my ideas in various text files. Haunted Mansion "Montague Mansion" The haunted mansion is a mid to late game side location, found in the lowlands between Cobalt Bay and Fenton Highway. The surrounding area is swamplike and may be the first (maybe only?) location that willisp and smurkey can be found in the wild. There will be a pumpkin patch near the mansion, examining the pumpkins on a friday the 13th or around halloween has a chance of encountering a grimkin. Willisp that level up within the pumpkin patch can pycomorph 5 levels lower than normal, 10 on those special days. The mansion itself is locked, the key is obtained from the metal guild leader: Brandon Montague. You encounter him in the next city. He will only give it to you if you talk to him if your character has seen the locked mansion door and read the sign with his last name on it. The mansion has been in his family for generations but has been abandoned for decades. The mansion will have willisp, barkoal/smurkey (in the basement where the furnace is), diabra, webtrix/evos, cartassle, pinecushion, cycloon and very rarely pilfur/sneekit. I suspect that this would be the first location to find Barkoal as a normal wild encounter but otherwise all these mons would have been available earlier in the game. Every in-game day (8 hours real time is the current plan) after the mansion is unlocked there will be a chance for a variety of npcs/trainers to appear within the mansion for you to fight. Many of them will be named after famous haunted mansion explorers or characters from halloweenish stuff, such as the gang from scooby doo, the ghostbusters, characters from the x-files or supernatural, horror movies in general, etc. These appearances will be guaranteed during friday the 13th/halloween and might have an extra bit of dialogue to them compared to normal. Beating all the npcs will reward an item, could be related to the npcs (maybe a scooby snack reference?) or just be a general good/spooky item. The amount of times you accomplish this will be factored into your current teams strength and your guild token count to augment the levels of pycomon within the mansion, both wild and with the trainers. Each of the trainers pokemon will increase by 1 level minimum per 2 encounters, no matter how weak your team is. Wild pycomon do not have this guaranteed increase so you can bring a weak team if you wish them to be lower level for some reason. New Pycotrophs While figuring out which pycomon to add to the mansion I realized that I have not actually created any new spirit types in all my brainstorming sessions in the past year. I've added Remice and Barkoal but they were existing sprites and not new concepts. On top of that, the spirit type has not been combined with very many types. So as part of this blog I am going to invent a spirit type to add to the Lantilla Islands region. We'll go with spirit/primordial, so I'm thinking a caterpillar and moth (we'll skip the cocoon phase). The first stage will either be called Catulpa or Tulpillar, which is just caterpillar+tulpa. If I go with tulpillar it might have a bit of a totem pole theme with its body design. The evolution would be called Miasmoth and it would have a purple fog flowing off the back of its wings. There is a good chance that Miasmoth could be spotted in a trainers team in Duallas within Pyco Mundi: Origins. Now we have a conundrum, after inventing Miasmoth I went to bed and realized that we don't actually have any proper pure spirit pycomon. Ghoomber is the only one and he's just a mid-tier evo which honestly could possibly be changed to spirit/rock when I look at it. So now I need to invent a pure spirit type for the Ayenn Islands. I'm thinking a single stage mon called Vaporage (vapor+mirage -not rage-) which creates mirages relating to water such as oasis in deserts and so on. The Ayenn Islands will have 2 desert areas so that's the main places it will be found, it will definitely give a good bit of variety to our limited desert wildlife selection.