Pokemon and Worldbuilding

I am playing Dragonsden's Pokemon: Team Rocket Edition again. Its a fan game made by a Spaniard but I think its becoming translated into english already. It might be the greatest pokemon game ever made. This is the pitch:

You start the adventure as just another recruit on the Inta Island headquarters, at Archi7, with the intention of ascending little by little into the Team Rocket organization. Yoy must fulfill succesfully the missions assigned by your superiors. 

The story unfolds in the same timeline than Red's and Blue's adventurers (the MCs of gen 1 pokemon) and, given that you will be sent to Kanto, you will be able to witness their stories from the perspective of a Team Rocket's member, and everything that happened on the backside, keeping the canon from the original games intact but adding a surprising depth into the lore.

You soon find that the Team Rocket, while still being criminals and Pokemon thieves, are at the core a patriotic resistance from Kanto, resisting an invasion of the Lance, a warlord from Johto, and their Elite 4 who invaded the region using their pseudolegendary Dragonites, and you can feel first hand the campaign of hate and the media manipulation they use trying to paint Giovanni's Team Rocket as crazy terrorists (If you were a vaccine-skeptic person by covid times you'll know what i mean)

If the plot is not enough to sell it to you, the pokemon-training part is awesome: you can potentially capture basically 99% of pokemon of the first 4 generations and fully visit Kanto, Johto and Hoenn. This is my current team:

 

This game really shows how good pokemon worldbuilding is. We don't speak enough of how crazy its premises are:

* A world where there are no animals beyond a very specific number of species, most of which are evolutions of each other, and a great number of them are legendary and not really seen around. 

* Pokemon can be so powerful that there are no arms race between countries. No guns, tanks, nukes or even more primitive weapons: There is no need of them when you can just train a worm into a Beedrill and make it fight for you. Everything in Kanto, from the small to the big, is settled by combats, and all combats are fought by pokemon. A government getting hold of Mewtwo is the equivalent of the race for the Nuclear Bomb.

* In a sense, pokemon work as local fauna, flora, workforce, weaponry, pets and shinto gods. Everything and everyone in the setting has a different relationship with pokemons. Every city has a pokemon something: a museum, a safari zone, a pokemon burial yard. 

See this video if you want to see all the types of pokemon trainers of gen 1, or just marvel on how artists could make peak 56x56 pixels pictures with 4 colors. If you are like me (a worldbuilding ultra geek) you can spend hours thinking on how each of the random trainers represent an alignment chart of personality x strate of society, which defines their lifestyle and which pokemons they get:

Bugcatchers are kids trying to get pokemons in their nearby forest. I like to think that, given that bug type pokemon are strong against dark and psychic, those kids can defend their homesteads of evil Sneasels, Hypnos and Kadabras. Some bugcatchers will stay sheltered or forego pokemon hunting as adults, others will attempt to get a Pinsir or a Scyther, but most will switch to another type as they grow up. 

Swimmers strike to me as some sort of 60s surfers, living in the coastal areas by and for the sea. Sailors are also water-pokemon users, which reminds me that while there are cruises available, there are no sight of cars. Kanto is a good example of a non-globalized world where people lives near their workplace, and travelling is done by bike and for fun. I don't think planes are really needed either, when important persons can teach FLY to their pidgeottos.

Bikers and Team Rockets are the organized criminals, the former using poison/fight pokemons such as weezing or mankey, and the latter using their signature rattatas/zubat combo. As revealed in the game i'm playing, they pretend to be lamer than they are as a way to gain advantage over the elite 4. As Giovanni says: "you cannot fight what you don't know it exists"

Mountaineers (geodudes and onixs) are the common country man who loves Lynyrd Skynyrd. Blue collars become engineers (magnemites and voltorbs) in more industrial zones. Fishermen complete the middle class triad. The most drunk of them talk about the magikarp they will never evolve, the most level headed about where and when to find more (or less) level 19 tentacools at this time of the year.

Those self called Cool Trainers (endless nidorinos) represent the snob, against the true Gentleman's Arcanines and Manectrics. The Nerd will get their personal pokemon waifu (usually Slowpokes) for personal fulfillment instead of elitism. 

Maybe its just me, but I see many people at the street who could be the Gambler. Those old men with a couple of poliwags or wasted junkies with a meowth who should be taken away by the pokemon welfare; trying to get all or nothing in a street combat. One, trying to recover the spirit of his younger days; the other, some coins for some Silph-manufactured crack.  

Which leads me to one of the greatest pillars of the setting: Scientists. Wherever you go, under a very thin veil of innocence, they are doing massive pokemon-related shit. Cloning Articuno, Creating Mewtwo and creating countless waste (Dittos) in the process, creating all types of pokemon steroids, resurrecting fossils, inventing the pokedex or better types of pokeball, or closing the gap between science and parapsychology with the silph scope. I like to think that, just as they invented the teletransporter tiles, Escape Ropes really work as teletransporters in-setting. The clash of nature/divine vs science/manmade is a heavy underlying theme through all the games.

Karatekas, who use machops and hitmonlees, are beautiful to have. You never ever see a man vs man (or man vs pokemon) fight in all the game. I understand it so that no man can match the fighting skill of those fight pokemons, yet they still practice karate to hone their spirit, strenght and skills. True spiritual man that seek for enlightment and possibly get inspired by the energy of their pokemon companions. 

The spiritual representation continues on the Channelers at Lavender Town. It is refreshing to see that the game cares to show you that there exist death rites and beliefs in this world for men and beasts alike. They double up as goth girls, making the world become suddently much more interesting. Also, see this note on how Erika, the plant gym leader, was probably destined originally to be a ghost trainer or a ghost itself.

 

If I was a real person on Kanto, however, I'd probably be a Bird Keeper. They strike me as sort of a middle ground between a complete outcast and a functional life. Fearow is probably my favorite pokemon: its not just beautiful, but also a real (glass) cannon, a true sweeper if you can manage to never let your opponent get a turn

Interesting how policemen trainers carry growlithes for protection instead of guns or batons. I like to think that when they carry a random haunter or pikachu, they do it because they are on a special mission, so they are not easily targeted by a water-user criminal. 

As a wrap up, I'd say that all this examples paint a world in which the common people is very connected to nature, and most of them live meaningful lives pursuing their passions. You might not have noticed conscioulsy yet but now you just did. I will probably expand on pokemon-related ideas this month, because I am a huge pokemon nerd.

As another wrap up, just some quote that I might extend on the future: any worldbuilding is not great just for what the world shows, but for the stories and explanations it allows you to make. 

 

Is the Owlbear spanish?

Looks like an Owlbear, but its a Bú!

 I like Owlbears; it's probably my most used monster straight from the book. I love that, without having powers, they are big and terrible, and make players fear camping out at night in the woods. I rule that they can be easily stunned by flashing lights, as their pupils are so used to the dark.

 I've heard the tale of Gary Gygax making up the monster around a cheap toy he found on some shop:

 

 

Yesterday, researching some myths, I heard about a creature from a spanish region neighbour to mine: The Bú (maybe coming from the first syllabe of Búho? Thats how you say Owl in spanish) 

 

This page has some good lore about it (in Spanish). It is believed that it has it's origins on an ancient god, maybe even older than our celt/iberian/celtiberian past. I'll translate some of the descriptions:

 

"A hunchbacked person of bloated face and open feet"
"A bird of great size and terrifying aspect, of the likes of the owl and the barn owl"

"Gargantuan owl of enormous red eyes"

"Dark and sinister bird"

My favorite: "A big and black owl's body, great silent wings, plate-sized red eyes, a menacing beak and claws as big as traps for wolves"

 

It was said that on this villages the monster used to appear on the night sky, searching for kids playing on the streets after sunset. Mothers and Grandmothers called upon the Bú to scare the children when they didn't want to sleep:

 

Duérmete mi niño,

Que ya viene el Bú.

Que se lleva a los niños.

Así como tú.

 A castillian lullaby that translates to "Sleep my children, for here comes the Bú, that takes the children just like you" (perfect rhyme even in english!). But there are enough mountains and other landmarks dedicated to that monster to incite me to believe that, for the locals, it was a little more than a mere kid's tale. 

 

 

Sex scenes

 Related to this post, but not actually about that. 

I am working on a magic system outlined in here, which works by calling forth magical spirits instead of casting the spells, and I was thinking on the incubus-like nature of ifrits. 

I don't know about how often do sexual themes or scenes appear in your games. Its not something I bring to the table on purpose (or so I think), but feel that sometimes they appear on their own and I have to work to circunvent them. 

From D&D, B/X: Nixies are 3' tall water sprites. They look like small beautiful women, and their skin is light blue, green, or gray-green. They avoid combat, but may try to charm an adventurer. Ten nixies can cast one such charm, and if a save vs. Spells is not made, the victim will enter the water and serve the nixies for a year. (Each nixie can cast a water breathing spell on her slave, but this must be renewed every day.)
If forced to fight, nixies use small tridents (treat as spears) and daggers, and each will summon a giant bass to aid them. Nixies dwell in rivers and lakes, making their lairs in the deepest part of the water.

You can try to make up whatever you want, but the logic on nixies is that they are obvious rapists of men. It makes sense they do it like this to reproduce, as their own race has no males. The charm, their attractiveness, the myth of nymphs and sirens and even the implied sensuality of water play into this story too well as to not use it. 

It think its appropiate to have Ifrits play a specular role, being smug fire devils that like to molest women. An ifrit taking/burning the clothes off a sorceress as a drawback from a partial success could work so good on the paper. Or granting strenght to a male caster, but also filling him with an unbearable lust. 

 The problem is that what makes sense on the worldbuilding aspect may be a little weird to pull on an actual game, like if you were pushing your rape fetish or suddently doing ERP with your friends. Sometimes the sexual option is the most valid: I've pulled out nixes straight, but also bandits who kidnap women to make them serve in brothels. My shadowrun elf was a gay samurai who prostituted himself a couple of times to advance plot (lol!). Never described actual sex scenes beyond the classic "roll a d20 to see how you perform" and that is OK. Its not something I search for itself, but I do sometimes think that its a shame to actually deprive a world from the sexual dimension, which is so important in both our world, our history and our myths. From monsters that look a suitort to classic rapist bandits, they are expressions of human emotions and sometimes trying to tone them down is funny and childish; other times are bland and artificial, specially if they contrast with the tone the players assumed in your campaign.

 

6 Attributes and what are they used for.

In a way that they are important for everybody regardless of their "class". They are randomly generated, and there is a random chance to improve your chosen one at level ups!

1. Strength: Improves HP; Improves damage with some weapons, defines maximum load. Can be used to test something when you want to kick a stuck door. 

2. Dexterity: Check this when you want to spend your turn dodging an attack, checking if you do something fast, silently or when doing a risky jump; but it doesn't improve ranged attacks, or any other kind (see the Weapon attribute)

3. Intelligence: Defines how many times you can pull a Flashback scene per adventure (in the Blades in the Dark sense). This includes producing an object you didn't have. Specialist objects must suit your background (choose one at some point); and you can use it to do checks when applying your background too. 

4. Magic: this defines your Mana Dice and your skill using magical items or checking for magical awareness. 

5. Charisma: As I am using Cohorts (Blades in the Dark again) this is what you check when leading them (or even aquiring them). Wizards also use this to command spirits, while kobolds will use this to bind and manage animal companions.

6. Weapon: A bonus on this attribute means you have bonus skill on a given weapon (sword, maces, bow, fists). Not all weapons are trainable in this way, some are too crude. A penalty on this attribute means you cannot fight effectivelly, with a corresponding disadvantage. 

On my notes right now, you cannot pick a class; but you can swap two attributes, so use that to analogically choose one (getting some magic will make you a caster, and getting dexterity or intelligence might make you some sort of thief)

There are only two races: Humans and Kobolds (hobbits by other name). The latter get a bonus on dexterity, but half the strength. 

At some point, the character must roll the overall importance and status of his/her clan or equivalent (it determines available money) 

 

 

Abstract wealth

Because I've never liked beancounting on games for multiple reasons; I can't remember what I did with my last abstract wealth rules. Let's rewrite them. But first, let's break the wealth tiers, even if just for having a reference:

Tier 0: You are broke. You suck dicks to survive. You must roleplay how you get your food and shelter 

Tier 1:  You have some silver coins. You can afford basic adventuring gear, cheap weapons such as axes or spears, some food and some nights at the inn until your GM says so.

Tier 2: You have some gold coins. You can afford a decent sword with a sheath, hiring a specialist/gang for one job (use common sense, GM's), a rare item that requires a specialized artisan; reagents or alchemical products (typically, alchemical products will be one tier more expensive than the reagents they use, but this might have exceptions)

Tier 3: You have some gemstones, jewels, or a stash of gold. You can afford plate armor, a warhorse, hiring an elite professional/warband for a job, extremelly rare reagents or alchemical products. You can commission the building of ship or a house, though this may require multiple "successes" depending on its size

Tier 4: You have a great treasure. You can afford building many ships or a castle (multiple rolls needed)

It's up to the GM to conceptualize other items or services on this table. If a PC wants to buy a plot of land, for example, think about the quality of said land and what does it represent for the owner. 

* PCs can buy whatever they want that is under their Tier Level
* PCs can buy some items of their current level. They roll 1d6, if they roll equal or under the items they bought, their Tier goes down. 
* PCs will occassionally find items for sale below their usual Tier, the GM will make up why and how (or randomize it). PCs can also try to trick or convince sellers to lower their prices.
* One (1) piece of gold or (1) gem can represent one use of their respective tier, or as having the tier below, as needed. 

 

not much related but here it is, an old drawing of a couple of hobbits paying the bridge tax to a troll

I started an NSFW webcomic

 And it's here: 

 https://phylacteryquest.thecomicseries.com/

Two adventurers are sent on a quest through an average jrpg land; It's sort of related to this blog because I can't help doing tons of OSR meta-references. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. Just Tome I for now (with surprisingly no female nudity yet), I expect to do the II this month, and honestly if there is enough interest, I have an actual epic plot in mind. (Please consider dropping a comment in there if you like it)