While You Wait for Digimon Survive and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Check Out Fantastic Adventures for Animon Story

If you vibe with my flavor of nerddom then you follow video games — especially monster taming video games like Pokemon and Digimon Story. With the recent announcements of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet as well as Digimon Survive I’m more than eager to jump back into these science fantasy worlds! Sadly, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet won’t release until late this year and Digimon Survive has no firm release date at present. However, I need something to scratch the monster taming itch and if you’ve read my post on Animon Story then you know there is a certain tabletop roleplaying game that gives me my fix.

9 Fantastic Adventures for Animon Story

Animon Story is an RPG about humans and their Animon partners. Animon Story creator Zak Barouh recently reached out to me and generously offered a free copy of the newest installment in the Animon Story saga — the Ani-Thology. Full disclosure, he didn’t ask for this review, so these thoughts are purely unsolicited and completely my own.

Already a fan of Animon Story’s core rulebook, I was excited to see what an Animon Story adventure book might look like. The Ani-Thology contains nine adventure modules within 73 pages. The book is colorful and whimsical, and with each adventure being self-contained the book feels very much like Nerdarchy’s own Out of the Box Encounters.

While each of these adventures has its own story and branching paths, some adventures are more open than others, though I personally loved how each adventure focused on big ideas, supplementing some individual specific descriptions to help flesh out flavor. My favorite is probably the first one presented: the Ani-Mall.

To the Ani-Mall and Beyond

Like I said, my favorite adventure was probably the Ani-Mall. Not only is the name terrific but this particular adventure really felt like the most open option and I could easily think of a slew of shops and events to make the Ani-Mall even bigger and grander.

The Ani-Mall evoked places like the Indigo Plateau from the Pokemon Anime, Nakano shopping center from Digimon Story and Goldenrod city in the Pokemon Games. It felt like a giant sandbox rife for adventure, even to the point I could see a long-running campaign revolving around the Ani-Mall.

The book itself suggests the Ani-Mall might make a nice base of operations for characters and I was ready to go and get into those Digimon Cyber Sletuh/Hacker’s Memory vibes! The Ani-Mall has intrigue around every corner, it seems, and it’s full of opportunities to play minigames or even just role play.

This book also introduced random roll tables, much like those found in D&D. However, because this system uses d6s, the multi-d6 tables were new and interesting to me and reminded me of how useful and even essential random roll tables are to a fluid game like an RPG, regardless of system.

Delving further into the book, I loved so many of the evocative locations brought to life by gorgeous artwork. This book really stepped up the presentation in terms of images for Animon, which feel like they could easily slot into any Digimon series, locations with vibrant details that tell their own stories and so many colors throughout the book. It was all truly inviting.

Developing Animon Lore

Another feature of this book I loved was the new Animon introduced. Most had high quality artwork to really show what these creatures looked like, and I’ll be honest here, I’m having a hard time not overly gushing on the art in this book.

You might buy it for the adventures but the beautiful pictures on each page keep this light read engaging and memorable. The art of the Animon often falls somewhere between the iconic style reminiscent in Digimon media, yet the line work and shading evoke ’90s comic books with stark blacks and whites used for lighting effects and shading.

Seeing the new locations presented in this book really opened my mind to how diverse each Animon world could be. Just as the monster taming genre is quite diverse, this book blew me away with its comments on what types of worlds each adventure might require or fit best into, which in turn inspired me to think about how to adjust anything that didn’t quite mesh. What’s more, the adventures introduced characters and factions that really helped sculpt how I view Animon Story, contributing to the lore much in the way D&D’s Monster Manual does.

A Quibble

There was a bit of a complaint I had with this book, albeit a minor one. The book had more than a few spelling inconsistencies and what seemed to be typos. In all fairness this book comes from the UK, which means certain words are going to be spelled differently than I’m used to here in the US anyway, but there were times the names of Animon were inconsistent from a title to the text immediately below.

That said I’m by no means a stranger to typos so it only bothered me insomuch as I did some double-takes. However, it was noticeable enough I felt this did bear mentioning for fairness.

Wrapping up

On the whole Animon Story Ani-Thology is a delight and easily worth the meager $15 price tag. It’s clear a lot of love went into this book from all of the contributors and I cannot wait to introduce my friends to this game, probably via the Ani-Mall.

If you love Digimon or Pokemon or any other monster taming franchise for that matter then I personally believe you’d be remiss to overlook Animon Story and the Ani-Thology. Both the core rulebook and the Ani-thology go for $35 total on Animon Story’s Official Website and on itch.io.

Have you played this awesome game, Animon Story? Did you know that Nerdarchist Dave interviewed Zak Barouh on Nerdarchy Live (watch the video below). Also, feel free to comment on this post, like, and connect with us on Facebook!

*Featured image — ANI-THOLOGY is a collection of nine fantastic adventures for Animon Story. [Ilustration by @crowva on Instagram]

Subscribe to Nerdarchy Live and get notifications for live RPG game plays, chats with creators and industry professionals and new video series and content on our second YouTube channel here