This guide is meant to be a general overview to start your participation in Rival Gates. Information not covered here will most likely be covered in the FAQ. If it’s neither here nor there, feel free to ask us directly.

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Rules, rules, rules...

First off, make sure you’re familiar with our rules of conduct. This is supposed to be a place where everyone involved can have fun and be creative, please don’t spoil it for everyone else. Our Rules and FAQ will go over them, as well as any other information not covered in this section.

Time To Get Started!

Participating in the group is as simple as 1, 2, 3!

• First, simply join the group. Don’t worry about waiting for approval, you should be accepted into the group automatically.
• Second, come up with a pokemon character or two that will live in this mysterious world! Pick which of the two guilds they want to join, fill out either the drawn or written application, and submit it to the appropriate  folder.
• Third, have fun! If you don’t have an art program to use, there’s good freeware out there such as GIMP and Paint.net. If you don’t have a word processor, you can use Open Office or Google Docs.

Team Applications

Your team application is going to be your hub where you get to track your team’s progress, and it serves as a reference of your characters. A team usually has only 2 pokemon to start, but it’ll start expanding the more recruits you get.

There are two types of applications, the Drawn Applications (Ardent Cinders & Roaring Icebergs ), and the Written Application (both guilds). You only really need to fill out one of them, since you will still receive full credit for a writing entry if you just have the drawn app, and vice versa.

Make sure you use the correct application your team will join. Will they join the hotheaded Roaring Icebergs, or the calculated Ardent Cinders?

Also, please don’t change the color scheme on the drawn apps. Nuri and Jay won’t appreciate it and they might throw you down a pit.

For written apps, you do need to have a written short of some kind included in order to participate. If you’re having trouble coming up with something, you can always have your team interact with Butter.

Oh and remember! New teams start out broke with 0 Meobans usually after paying for all those pesky forms. Looks like you have to go broke before you can start rolling in the guilds mula!

Your guildies

Your troublemakers are going to need an alias to call themselves by, so make sure you write that down just under their guild’s name. It can be anything you want, just don’t use anything offensive or vulgar. Gotta keep things clean!

When first starting out, you are limited to only two pokemon for your team. You are allowed to have any baby/basic pokemon that you want, and you may start with one first-stage pokemon if you wish. You can also start with an egg if you want, but there must be another team member to take care of it. How could an egg register for a guild in the first place?

However, you cannot under any circumstance start with any legendary pokemon. I know it would be awesome to have Mew or Shaymin on your team, but that would throw the universe off balance and destroy the world. Please be considerate to our universe. Palkia is still cleaning up the mess from last time.

While designing your pokemon, please try not to stray far from the original design. We encourage you to be creative and give them a unique look, but they can’t simply ignore the biology of their species. If the changes are too drastic, especially if we have to question what species they are, they won’t be accepted. Shiny pokemon are allowed, but they are very rare and should be treated as such.

Pokemon who have the move Transform or the ability Illusion must be drawn on the applications in their original form. Maintaining those disguises uses up a lot of energy, so they can’t keep it up forever.

Additionally, anthropomorphism is not allowed. Human-like pokemon exist, and quadrupedal pokemon are able to walk around on two legs, but nothing more than that.

If your team is only starting out with one member, they may recruit a second member to join them at any time without the need for a hiring form, so long as they adhere to the same restrictions. Any additional recruits will have to be basic stage evolutions or lower unless you have evolution evaluations to go with them. If you plan to have 4 team members or more, please refer to the Housing Guide.

Their moves and abilities

Your pokemon will have a maximum of four moves, as well as an Ability to go along with their Nature and Characteristic.

This might be a little tricky, because your pokemon cannot start with any TM, HM, or Tutor moves. Don’t worry though, TM slips are easy to come by so they can learn the moves they want quickly.

Aside from that, they can pull any move they want out of their species’ movepools. As they become stronger, they will be able to upgrade their moveset from their level-up movepool. If they forget a move, there will be a service available where they can relearn it.

Egg moves are a little more complicated. You may choose up to 4 egg moves, enough to fill all 4 move slots, but they MUST have the compatible pokemon in their bloodline. Unlike other moves, Egg moves come strictly from a pokemon’s genetics, so they cannot be taught from scratch by another ‘mon. If your pokemon has forgotten an egg move and wishes to relearn it, they must visit a special move tutor who can pull it from their memory.

As far as their Ability is concerned, they may select any one ability that is available for their species, Hidden Abilities included. There is no changing this available at this time, so choose wisely.

Their Stuff

In Huana, the most widely used currency are golden coins called Meobans. They will be offered as payment for your team’s services and can be used to buy a variety of items.

Each team member has 3 item slots available for things that they carry with them. They won’t have any to begin with, but as they go off on their adventures they’re bound to pick up a few things here and there. Items and artifacts have a variety of different effects, and it would be a shame if they didn’t get put to use.

On the other hand, they’re bound to find more than they can carry, so any items they are not currently using can be left behind in storage.

When it comes to their accessories and clothing, however, all team members must have their designated guild uniform equipped while they’re out doing guild business. They are free to wear whatever they wish otherwise, but they won’t have any special attributes unless it’s a reward item listed in their item list.

Please note that with the art apps you do not have to use your item slots to place a visual representation of any non-guild uniform accessories in and instead if you'd like to put a visual reference of any other items your characters are typically seen wearing outside of the app art, that can go below in the about box.

Mission Stamps

In order to track your team’s progress, the guilds have developed a stamp system which will help keep track of every mission they have completed. If they collect enough stamps, your team will rise in rank within their guild!

There are four ranks: Basic, Super, Ultra, and Master

Each time they rank up they can get a new house that can unlock 2 more slots for team members. In the end there will be 10 team member slots, however only 4 members can be active at a given time.

Basic= 1 stamp or lower
Perks: You are paid 10 Meobans per job and 5 Meobans per mission. You own a home with 4 available slots, with only one requiring furniture vouchers.

Super= 2-4 stamps
Perks: You are paid 12 Meobans per job and 7 Meobans per mission. You can upgrade to a larger home to add two more locked slots, for a maximum of 6

Ultra= 5-7 stamps
Perks: You are paid 14 Meobans per job and 9 Meobans per mission. You can upgrade to an even larger home to add two more locked slots, for a maximum of 8. You may receive one Z crystal of your choice.

Master= 8 stamps or more
Perks: You are paid 16 Meobans per job and 11 Meobans per mission. You can upgrade to a mansion and add two more locked slots, letting you live in style with 10 slots! You may also receive one Mega Stone of any type of your choice. 

If you miss the deadline for a mission, don’t worry! You can still complete the mission as a late entry, allowing you to receive a Slowpokestamp which will still count towards your team’s guild rank. However, you won’t receive the special items from that mission.

The Rivalry System

Rival-Gates will be telling its story based on the performance of each guild. In other words, both guilds will be competing with each other to find out how they advance the plot!

In order to do this, both the Ardent Cinders and the Roaring Icebergs will be participating in an important job. Their performance for the job will determine which guild is more qualified to take on the advanced mission.

When you submit a completed job before the deadline, it will be looked over by a judge and given points between 1 and 5 based on the overall quality of the content. This score will be taken into account for the guild’s overall score, and the guild with the higher score gets to participate in the advanced mission!

If you’re a member of the losing guild, don’t fret. While they won’t get to participate in the advanced mission, they will still be participating in their own mission with just as many rewards for completion. While it might not be as exciting as an advanced mission, that doesn’t mean it isn’t as important as what the others are doing.

Submitting

So you’re ready to post your entry for judging. What should you do? First, make sure you have a link to your team’s application in the description of your entry. This way we know which team is going to get the benefits.

Once that’s done, go ahead and submit your entry to the group. Make sure your entry is submitted to your guild’s folder. Mixups are bound to happen, so do be careful where you put it.

Finally, send the group a note with a link to your entry, so we can track and judge it. It will prevent us from skipping over your submission once judging begins

Judging and Ranking

To elaborate a bit, you will earn more points for telling a good story than showing off the best quality content. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t produce high quality content either since it is still a secondary factor in your overall score.

To mitigate this, make sure you rank yourself according to your skill in storytelling instead of your skill creating works of art. This is represented by the little faces in the top right corner of the drawn app. In the written app, rank yourself according to student, scribe, or novelist accordingly. If we feel like you’re rating yourself too low, we can suggest that you go up in rank. But if you think you ranked yourself too high and wish to drop to a lower rank, send us a note so we can check and confirm whether you should drop rank or not.

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And that’s it! You’re on your way into the world of Rival-Gates. We’d like to thank you for showing your interest and for caring enough to read all the way through our guide, and we hope you enjoy being part of this group. We’re all looking forward to seeing your team(s) in action soon~!


Have any questions or concerns? Please let us know below!