Populating Your World

Populating Your World With Pokémon
So you’ve created the basics of your campaign setting. You’ve drawn sweeping mountain ranges and scribbled winding rivers over your map. Labeled black dots mark your towns, and you’ve even penciled in a few thoughts about each of them in a notepad somewhere.

What next? Well, you have to fill the world with Pokémon for your players to catch and battle, of course! When doing so, you’ll want to keep in mind two main goals, though which one you prioritize is up to you. The first principle is Fun Game Progression – making sure it’s enjoyable to journey through your world and the progression of Pokémon encountered from early in the campaign to later on is satisfying to the players. The second is Sensible Ecosystems – that is, making sure the habitats and environments make up a believable world.

Fun Game Progression
There’s an obvious trend in Pokémon games regarding how the populations of the various routes, forests and caves change as you go through the game – the weaker, more vanilla Pokémon appear in earlier routes, and the more powerful and advanced Pokémon only show up after a good deal of adventuring.

In general, this is a good macro-level principle to hold to when designing your world. It is good for guiding where you place Pokémon on a large scale and in the big picture. If the cave off to the side from your first route has Larvitars, Bagons and Gibles, there’s not much to look forward to when exploring more exotic locales.

One easy way to do this is to follow the examples of the video games. Many starting GMs, and those who have players with a particular hankering for nostalgia and playing through the regions they know and love, may choose to set their campaign in a canonical Pokémon region such as Kanto or Sinnoh.

With this in mind, an easy starting point for designing habitats is to take the Pokémon encounter lists for each route or area for these regions and simply modify and add to them to suit your campaign. Of course, this may not always work. Players may find it unsatisfying or dull to face predictable encounters wherever they go.

Or perhaps your campaign starts in Blackthorn City, and you don’t want your players nabbing Dratinis and Skarmories as their first captures. Either way, it can be a very good idea to deliberately change the possible encounters per area – and you can even tie this into a plot hook explaining why the environments have changed.

What if you have a custom region, as many GMs of the system will? Well, luckily for you, the Pokédex within each generation of Pokémon is still arranged roughly in order from common to rare, discounting the starter Pokémon.

You can be pretty assured that picking mostly Pokémon from early on in any region’s Pokédex for the early game and dipping into the Pokémon near the end of the Pokédex more and more often as the game goes on will result in a satisfying distribution of Pokémon for your players.

As a thematic measure, you may also wish to group together Pokémon from the same region. One forest early on has Hoothoots, Spinaraks, Hoppips, etc. A later cave is populated with Machokes, Gravelers, Onixes, etc. This works especially well if you have multiple defined regions in your campaign world or a set of islands or other clear delineations between areas. You do not have to follow this guideline, however, and it is probably easier and more interesting to mix and match Pokémon as you choose in any given area.

What if your world is more open? There’s not always a clear path your players will take from one gym to the next as they travel. Well, all this means is you should keep the easily accessible parts of your campaign relatively equal in interesting Pokémon populations.

This means the well-traveled routes between towns, or the lakes and forests that are in easy reach. Perhaps each has their population of relatively common Pokémon along with a smattering of more rare species. Save the pseudo-legendaries like Dratini and Beldum for the out of the way, difficult to reach places. In a cave system accessible only by diving underwater in a treacherous sea, for example. Or near the peaks in a mountain range filled with odd electromagnetic activity.

This will ensure your players have a reason to seek out exotic locales while not being bored, no matter where they travel. Don’t be afraid to fudge things a little if your priority is ensuring satisfying game progression – you want to drop Scythers in a mid-game scenario but aren’t sure whether your players will go to one town or the other first? Save them for whichever path they come to later on, and populate the first path with common bugs.

Sensible Ecosystems
Following the games just isn’t enough for some GMs and players though. They want their world to make sense under scrutiny, for every chosen species to have its spot in its ecosystem. Or maybe the players just really like using Google in-character to figure out where Pokémon live, or they enjoy studying the interactions within ecosystems wherever they go.

This is when you’ll want to give a sense of verisimilitude, making a setting and world feel real even if everyone knows it’s being tailored for a game. Where you can apply this idea best is when designing individual habitats and the Pokémon within them on a smaller scale.

Of course, making a sensible ecosystem applies on a large scale as well. You don’t put water types in the middle of a desert, and you don’t populate a dark cave with grass types who need sunlight to survive. But when you get to individual habitats is where it can really help to think about what makes sense in an ecosystem and how they function.

First, think about the energy pyramid in an ecosystem. No, you don’t have to get into any advanced biology to do this. Just think generally about food sources and food chains here. Keep in mind that producers, that is, plantlife (or photosynthetic grass Pokémon perhaps!) are the most populous denizens of an environment, and the higher up you go on the food chain, the rarer a species becomes. The Sewaddles which feed off of leaves in the forest will be much more numerous than the Pidgeys eating them which are in turn less common than higher level predators such as Sevipers. This, luckily, works out pretty well when it comes to meshing with satisfying game progression, since most of the rare Pokémon tend to be powerful predators.

Secondly, you will also want to consider niches and competition in an ecosystem, though this is one level of detail that you may wish to ignore to save headaches and maximize fun. However, here is an example. In a dark forest, a Pokémon such as Murkrow may be a much more efficient predator due to its ability to blend in with its surroundings, compared to Pokémon in the Spearow line. If both exist in one ecosystem, it’s likely the Murkrow will out-compete the Spearows and the latter will go extinct. The opposite may be true in the case of a more open plains where the Spearows’ coloration helps them blend into the tall grass when they aren’t flying.

Of course, another possible result of this is, of course, adaptation. Species in a particular area may adopt traits that help them compete against and survive against otherwise better prepared species.

Cast’s Note: Essentially what I’m saying here is – Typeshifts, different Ability options, changed Move lists, different Skill or Capability allocations. There’s a lot you can do here to represent these adaptations, though you should use this option sparingly. The Spearow population in the aforementioned example may have higher Stealth ranks, a dark coloration, or Moves that let them compete with Murkrow better.

Finally, many Pokémon have very weird diets and other living requirements. Magnemites, Voltorbs, and the like are probably mostly found in industrial areas, where there’s enough electrical machinery from human civilization to sustain their populations. And if you’re running a historical campaign set before the invention of electric-powered technology, don’t be afraid to say some species simply don’t exist if they wouldn’t make sense. Looking at you, Porygon and Rotom.

You’ll want to keep these needs and preferences in mind across all sorts of different species. Ghosts, while they do not strictly require run-down habitats, may be much more comfortable living in abandoned homes and similar places rather than shiny, clean, urban environments. Perhaps they feed off the emotional energy of sites of tragedy. Dragons, even if they have easy to meet biological requirements, may have been hunted to near extinction in the past due to their value. As such, you may only find them nowadays in out of the way caves and mountains.

It may simply be that you need to introduce quirky locations just to facilitate the existence of certain Pokémon species, such as the Ruins of Alph for Unown.

You may add an ancient temple floating above a desert to your world to hold Yamask and Sigilyph populations, or you decide ghosts in general are rare enough that you need to introduce a Pokémon Tower or Mt. Pyre counterpart to specially house them. A Safari Zone where rare Pokémon species are bred for trainers to capture is another easy way to solve the problem of exotic species for which you can’t find a proper home.

No one can tell you the one right way to handle how you populate your Pokémon world, but if you keep in mind these two goals and maintain balance with what your players want and expect, you’ll come out of the worldbuilding process with a set of ecosystems that will keep everyone happy.

Pokemon Intelligence and Personality
This has been alluded to before, but another crucial aspect of your campaign that you will need to decide is how animalistic or human-like your Pokémon act. Do you want to replicate the feeling of the anime where Pokémon generally understand human languages, know what a Poké Ball is and even how to operate it or trick it, and act with pretty much the personality of a person aside from their quirk of repeating their names? Can Pokémon form small gangs like the Squirtle Squad with human-like characteristics or even learn to talk like Meowth? Do Pokémon generally want to be captured and desire a formidable Trainer to call their partner? Or do you prefer to portray Pokémon as feral animals which need to be tamed and may initially react to Poké Balls and capture with extreme fear and confusion? Is Pokémon training a necessity for survival in a dangerous world rather than a popular sport and pastime?

It’s important to discuss your intentions on this subject with your players so there’s no confusion once the game starts. You wouldn’t want to create a harsh world of feral Pokémon and be met with PCs who immediately try to pet and talk to the local wildlife, nor would you want to create a lighthearted Pokémon setting to find that a player has made a character who treats all Pokémon as inherently dangerous and potential threats to his life.

On a mechanical level, you’ll need to decide whether or not Pokémon need social and knowledge skills added to their normal stats. Chapter 5: Pokémon provides some guidelines for creating Skillsets for Pokémon (page 201).

Regardless of your answer here, you should consider Pokémon hierarchies and social organization. Very few Pokémon live in complete isolation. Bug Types have hive structures, many feline and canine Pokémon have packs, Flying Types have flocks, and Water Types may live in large schools of fish. These should factor into encounters you create, as some sort of leader will usually be present in a group of Pokémon.

Further, understand that ‘intelligence’ is itself a vague term that encompasses plenty of different meanings. Pokemon are unlikely to be well-read or book smart the same way a human might be, though some Psychic types like Alakazam may take an interest in reading. However, a Pokemon like Bellosom might tell time by the position of the sun and read plant growth patterns to determine soil quality, but not understand how telephones work.

When deciding how intelligent Pokémon are, both in general, and in relation to each other, it’s most important to think about types of intelligence rather than trying to make intelligence into a single sliding scale. As a baseline, however, Pokémon should be smart enough to understand basic commands; otherwise Pokémon battling wouldn’t get very far.

Take, for example, memory. Some Pokémon may have a hard time being taught complex tasks, such as Combee, but their memory is excellent and perhaps rivals that of humans when it comes to creating a cognitive map and memorizing the layout of a field and where good spots for flowers and other valuables are.

Tool use and social intelligence are other categories to consider. We often associate tool use and the ability to adapt to human language and communication, such as sign language, as signs of intelligence in animals, but some Pokémon species may have highly developed social intelligence and social hierarchies but simply be incompatible with human attempts at complex communication. Birds are one place where the common wisdom says they aren’t particularly intelligent, but many birds are able to make use of tools and can learn over time how to more efficiently take advantage of human creations.

In general, assume that a Pokemon is at least as intelligent as it needs to be to survive in its natural habitat. Predator species can tell the difference between Rattata and Nidoran, to avoid getting poisoned by the latter. Canine Pokemon employ pack tactics when hunting, feline Pokemon know how to ambush and hide, bird Pokemon can read air currents, and so on. A Caterpie knows how to eat, how to spin silk, and how to escape predators – anything beyond that is likely to be beyond them unless you’re treating Pokémon as a whole as particularly human-like.

Once a Pokemon is captured, it’s almost certainly going to get smarter. In the real world, there’s a difference between a smart dog and a smart service dog, andthat sort of difference can carry over into Pokemon. Exposure to novel situations and a close bond with a trainer can bring out more apparent intelligence from Pokémon Behavior and Intelligence an individual Pokemon as that Pokemon learns. Even taking an animalistic interpretation of Pokémon into account, the majority of Pokemon can reach a childlike level of intelligence after working with a Trainer, and that’s a comfortable place to stop. After being caught, that Caterpie may understand what Poké Balls are for, but not how they work or how to use them.

Some GMs may decide that special exceptions exist for Pokemon with the Telepath, Aura Reader, or Aura Pulse capabilities. These Pokemon are often comparable to humans in how much they understand when it comes to communication, as being able to read thoughts removes any language barrier in place. However, low stage Pokemon may still be limited by juvenile perspectives or a lack of education. Like humans, even these relatively smart Pokemon need experiences and instruction to show off true intelligence.

For most campaigns, an easy guideline to keep in mind is that most Pokemon can be smart, but they shouldn’t be so smart that they make the Trainer character obsolete. It’s perfectly acceptable to have a Pokemon realize that fire and smoke are bad and to drag an unconscious trainer out of their house before it burns down. It’s less acceptable to have the same Pokemon realize there’s a fire extinguisher under the sink and to put out the flames before calling 911 themselves. Coco the Primeape may know sign language, but she doesn’t know how to hold down a job. Otherwise, you may run into issues with players feeling uncomfortable with catching Pokémon that are so human-like or having trouble keeping track of so many NPCs with complex personalities.

That isn’t to say you can’t run a campaign with more humanlike Pokémon, but you should be aware of the issues and level of work before doing so. Very human-like Pokémon, such as Meowth in the anime, can be a fun and refreshing addition to a campaign. On a related note, another source of potential awkwardness is Water-Type Pokémon in general. In Pokémon media, aquatic Pokémon are often seen functioning just fine out of water, either by flopping about or floating. It’s up to you whether to follow this example or subvert it by restricting fish to the water. We don’t take a stance in the system, but you should make sure your players know yours!

Pokémon Habitat List
This list is simply a compilation of the information in the Pokédex PDF on which Pokémon live in which habitats. If you’re stumped on what species to populate a route or section of your world with, this makes for a handy reference. Feel free to deviate from this list, however, if you have other ideas for where Pokémon might make their homes in your setting. For example, you might have a mountain-dwelling version of Spinark and Ariados.

Quickly Building NPCs
Building a full character in Pokémon Tabletop United can be pretty time consuming. If you try to build every NPC just as you could build a PC, then you’ll quickly find yourself swamped by a lot of work for very little gain. Instead, you should give most NPCs just the bare minimum of what they need to function, especially if you don’t foresee using them in combat. By all means, spend the time to write out full builds for major NPCs that will be showing up often, but most NPCs don’t need that treatment.

Use the following process to quickly generate NPCs:

Decide on a Level. The easiest way to do this is simply by reference to the PCs’ Levels. Is your NPC generally more experienced than the PCs or less? By how much? While you may not use this directly when doing quick stats for an NPC, it’s good to have an idea of the Level difference between the NPC and the PCs.

Choose major Classes and Features. You should have a general idea of what kind of archetype this NPC represents or what role you expect to play in the story. Based on this, pick a small handful of Features you know they need, including Class Features. Unless they’re at a very low Level, you don’t really have to worry about whether they can gain all of these. For Combat Trainers, focus on the Moves and Abilities they’ll use in battle.

Choose major Skills and Edges. Look at the Features you chose in the previous step. Mark down any Skillprerequisites for your NPC and any Edges they may need as well. Then, if you feel there’s more to the NPC not represented here between the Features, Edges, and Skills, add the missing Skills and Edges within reason. Don’t give an NPC everything, but if you build a quick Martial Artist / Ace Trainer but remember he’s supposed to be a gadget whiz too, it wouldn’t hurt to bump up his Technology Education to Adept or so.

(Optional) Distribute Combat Stats. Starting Trainers have 10 HP and 5 in the rest of their Combat Stats. They then add 10 points on top of that. A fully non-combat Trainer will then have an additional stat point for each Level past 1. A fully combat focused Trainer has twice that due to Stat Tags. Add Stat Points somewhere between those extremes as appropriate.

Example: A GM is preparing a Poké Ball crafter and wilderness guide who lives in a shack outside the woods the PCs are preparing to explore. Here’s the quick process for making this NPC.

Decide on Level: The PCs are all about Level 10, having gotten a few Gym Badges under their belt along with the other exploring they’ve done. The GM decides his crafter is somewhat more experienced than them, having spent his life traveling the region. He sets his Level at 15.

Choose major Classes and Features: Poké Ball Crafter is crucial to this concept of course. This means he has Poké Ball Repair too. On the wilderness guide side of the concept, the GM decides this guy has the Survivalist Class and Hunter Classes from dealing with the wilds nearby. Because he’s good at dealing with the rough weather around this area too, he gives him Researcher and the Climatology Field of Study.

Choose major Skills and Edges: The GM first looks over the prerequisites for the Features he’s chosen and bumps up his NPC’s Technology Education to Expert, General Education to Novice, Stealth to Novice, and Survival to Adept. Since he’s good with Pokémon and a researcher, he goes ahead and writes down Novice Charm and Pokémon Education for the NPC too.

(Optional) Distribute Combat Stats: While the GM was just planning to make his NPC a guide through the forest and a source of information, his session takes an interesting turn, and he thinks he’ll need to have the guy participate in a battle with wild Pokémon the PCs provoked.

He writes down 10 HP and 5 in the rest of his NPC’s Combat Stats. Noting he’s a guy who can take a hit, he puts 5 more points into HP and 5 into Defense. He then thinks about how many more Stat Points he’ll have. Hunter will give some HP and Speed Stat Tags, but he’s also a Researcher. A fully combat ready Trainer has 28 additional Stat Points at Level 15. A fully noncombat Trainer has 14. Since this NPC is somewhere in between, the GM gives him 20 Stat Points, 10 of which he puts in Speed, and 5 each in HP and Special Defense.

===  Quick-Statting Pokémon  Just as with NPCs, you don’t always have the luxury (or desire) of spending hours fine-tuning a combat encounter. Sometimes, you just need something quick to throw at your players as they go exploring the wilderness or looking for Pokémon to catch. Here are some tips for on-the-fly wild Pokémon battles or last minute prep work. ===

1. Stick to 2 or 3 different species.

You want to clone a few Pokémon to populate your encounter, but you don’t want an encounter made entirely of one species either. Luckily, it makes logical sense for most Pokémon to travel in packs, and you can pick species which supplement the “main” species you select for the encounter.

2. Pick species that are easy to stat.

An ideal Pokémon for quickly statting an encounter has one attacking Stat and HP as their highest Base Stats or is in a position where a choice of Nature can easily make that the case. Pokémon with very low base HP make for difficult statting on the fly.

3. Pick 3-4 Stats to focus on per Pokémon.

If you’ve picked a fairly easy to stat species, then you can simply evenly divide Stat Points for the Pokémon among their highest 3 or 4 stats, depending on their specific Base Stat configuration. This will usually raise HP, one attack stat, and then some combination of speed and the defenses, making for a reasonably well-rounded combatant that can still hold its own.

As an emergency option, you can grab just about any species, distribute Stat Points evenly across all six Stats, and then throw them into an encounter. Keep in mind though that enemies written with this method will be much weaker than an equivalently Leveled PC Pokémon almost all of the time.

Example: The players have suddenly taken a detour away from the beach path to the grassy plains, and the GM’s prepared Krabby and Crawdaunt encounter is now completely out of place. They’re still looking to catch wild Pokémon though, and so the GM needs a new set of stats, and quick!

Glancing through the list of grassland Pokémon, the GM finds Growlithe and glances over its Base Stats. Attack and Special Attack are highest, followed by HP and Speed. Pretty good for this exercise. She tosses in an Arcanine as the pack leader and decides that the group also adopted a Herdier, to give the encounter some variety.

Growlithe’s Stats are simple. The GM distributes all Stat Points evenly between Attack, Special Attack, HP, and speed, creating a mixed attacker easily even with an unadjusted neutral Nature.

She takes a quick moment to be fancier with Arcanine, giving it a Curious Nature to raise HP and lower Special Attack, making it focused on Physical attacks. She then distributes Stat Points evenly between HP, Attack, and Speed only.

For the Herdier, a neutral Nature works as well. Stat Points are split between Attack, HP, and both defensive Stats, making it the tankier part of this encounter. Finally, all the GM needs to do is write down their Abilities and Level Up Moves and then decide on whether to give them an Inheritance Move or two if she’s getting really fancy with her hastily statted encounter.