Fantastic Fantastical Mountain Lodging

published March 24, 2025

This is a tangentially-related Pokémon fanart. I'll explain after the image. I may need to replace my current drawing tablet, every time I want to draw I have to fight with the goddamn power cable just to get the thing to turn on. Every. Single. Time. Guh....

I follow a couple of YouTube channels' RSS feeds (for the love of god please use RSS), and one of them surfaced this video that introduced me to the absolutely fascinating and adorable and also kind-of-cringe-but-in-a-cozy-way idea of a Pokémon-themed D&D campaign. The settings used interested me especially, although...I found it weird that this D&D campaign just uses a straight-up tavern as a starting location?? It feels like that clashes with the whole "Pokémon-themed" thing (can Pokémon even drink alcohol??).

Of course that kick-started my brain into imagining what an actual Pokémon-themed "inn" or "B&B" could look like. The above artwork is exactly what came to mind, a big grand building standing in a peculiar place. Admittedly it's not very themed 😅 Just pretend those black blobs sitting in the chairs and standing on the rooftops are Pokémon.

I completed this just within today, and I finished it at 10:35. I did not expect it to take so long, though! But maybe I should've. I made such an intricate outline that I felt that, if I were to try to make an actual clean final product, I'd just snap a nerve and die /j, so I left in the messy rough outline. Everything else became messy along with it...the coloring was haphazard and mostly manually-done instead of using the fill tool, and I feel like I didn't have a good enough foundation to do fancy lighting tricks, and the details of the trees and snow are totally ugly, unlike with that one "Olivine Lighthouse" artwork which is how I wanted it to go 😓 But then, I came up with so many things to put in this that it was hard to hold in my head, I could've snapped a nerve and died /j.

I wonder if this artwork could've been something a lot greater, if I'd given it more time? Kinda like with the UFO artwork. Maybe I could revisit it someday, who knows. On a completely unrelated note, I was also imagining what it would be like if this thing got built in Minecraft. Pokémon Crystal is getting tiring, and Pixelmon (that one Pokémon-in-Minecraft mod) has been resurfacing in my mind...but god knows that I've never been able to really commit to Minecraft. Anyways, I have to, like, do school and stuff.