My players have before expressed difficulty grasping the Pokemon setting for one reason or another, so I thought I'd do some posts talking about it. It's also one of many alternative approaches to the Pokemon setting. I plan to talk about the general feel of the Pokemon setting used in our Friday group and some general lore about the setting and some of its history. So if you're curious about world-building, Pokemon Tabletop Adventures, and gritty settings, do continue. I co-designed and co-run this setting with Rashiko. He has talked about this setting and his contributions many times before, but these posts will be a supplement from the other side. Expect some information overlap. We kicked off the two Pokemon games during a summer hiatus on Rashiko's D&D game, and since neither of us could decide if we wanted to play more or run more, so it was decided we would do both, running two alternating campaigns. Since we were new to the Pokemon Tabletop Adventures beta, running two games gave us a better chance to look at the system as GMs (or Pokemon Masters, though the rules text sadly does not refer to them as such) and give the players more opportunities to try different classes. The primary regions we focused on were Kanto (Rashiko) and Johto (me). Dividing up the world seemed a good way to run coinciding campaigns; we liked the idea of having two distinct regions to build, and Johto and Kanto's adjacent locations gave an interesting possibility of the campaigns intertwining. The regions would share history. Since Generation 2, Kanto and Johto have had a bond through the Indigo Plateau and shared NPCs, so they were the ideal choice. The setting with these regions involved a few key ideas. The first was the idea of the Pokemon setting as a post-apocalyptic, recovering world. This is based primarily on information in the games themselves. The towns, despite suggesting larger settlements, are fairly sparse. Places like New Bark Town have a population of perhaps a dozen people around with only four buildings in town, and even the metropolis of Goldenrod City has a recorded population of 126 according to Bulbapedia. Between these pinpricks of civilization are routes filled with dangerous creatures, which can't be traveled without proper protection. Pallet Town's Professor Oak will immediately stop you if you try to venture beyond the city's boundaries for fear of the dangerous creatures in the tall grass. Even the economy - from PokeMarts to big business ventures like Silph Co. - revolves around furthering technology and supplying efforts to reassert or maintain the balance of people over Pokemon. The primary technological advancements exist to further the capturing, training, and control over Pokemon, though the approaches vary widely from ruthless optimization to fond caretaking. As for implementation of the post-apocalyptic theme, we chose to go with the town sizes and populations as in the game. There is also a massive schism in the development between traditional technology and Pokemon-related tech. While Pokeball stasis and PC storage are accessible technology, radio and dot matrix printers are, as well. Weapons advancement was limited in favor of refining Pokemon enhancements. Some changes were made to preserve plausibility and to reflect the changes we made to the setting (which I'll discuss in another post), like limiting resources within towns and the presence of wandering trainers. The second main idea was treating Pokemon as a grittier setting, which tied in with the post-apocalyptic feel. This approach is based on the manga, which is said to more accurately represent the world implicit in the video games. Pokemon are dangerous - electricity, fire, and poison are mortally threatening to people and Pokemon alike. As the tabletop already establishes, Pokemon in a tabletop environment appear much like the recent hordes of X and Y - groups of Pokemon together in a single encounter. Unlike in the video games, however, there is nothing in the tabletop that prevents a wild Pokemon from deciding that the ten year old kid is a better target than his trained beastie. In the future, I'll elaborate on what factors contributed to the campaign setting's current state, and what the players have learned about its history since.
