The Gaming Den

PokeDen
Fuck it, lets make a region.


Barracok used Tri-attack

Ok, so people here want to make a region, but they don't want to sign up form Tumblr. That's understandable, I mean, I like Tumblr, it's a great time waster, but some people aren't looking for more ways to be unproductive.

So I'm making a thread specifically for the creation of a pokemon region by the Den. I'll post a thread with a thing to be decided, like "what's our region based on?" (ie, France, New York, etc) or "what is the theme for our region? (ie, fire vrs water, time vrs space, etc), and a deadline for ideas, and we can discuss and make suggestions, then at that deadline, no more ideas, just discussion and voting. And I'm probably going to say ~48 hours for that intermediate discussion before I just call for a vote. Because this is the Den. We can drive a topic into the ground and keep fucking discussing and discussing it.

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The Region

Facts:

• Region: Based on Faerun
• Starters (concepts/inspirations/type pairings)
  • Grass:
  • Water:
  • Fire:
• Legendaries, especially the "cover" legendaries
• Gyms (types and leaders, at least 1 Gimmick gym)
• League members, team types
  • League Champion:
• Towns, min. 9 including starting town
• Professor:
• Antagonists, including name, purpose, aesthetic, and symbol:

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So, for the first question-

What is the basis for our region, and what is it called?

To get a ball rolling, I'll make a few suggestions:
(Geographic) Basis
-Portland
-Australia
-Faerun (why the fuck not)

Name
-Soukutsu (Japanese for Den)

Well, Australia does have every RPG area - the jungle (well, rainforest), the desert (plenty of those), the frozen wasteland (or at least, snow-capped mountains), the massive crater where the final boss is and so on. On the downside, Australia is full of fuckwits, the Pokecentres would have all been shut down or privatised, import costs would mean Potions cost 1,000P each, and everything is part Poison type.

While I wouldn't want to live with those downsides, they'd make for a hilarious region.

That said, we're running into the problem here where only a couple of Denners actually live in Australia. The same applies to any other real-world region you care to name. So I guess I'm voting for Faerun, because that region is at least fictitious and therefore applies to all of us equally.

A healthy dose of ignorance is totes an advantage in this case since it helps ensure that your goony parody country is built from stupid but widely recognized jokes as opposed to stupid in-jokes that nobody cares about.* I mean, honestly, my idea of what Ausfailia looks like is only marginally less fictional than Faerun to begin with.

*I mean, let's use my home state of Minnesota as an example. There is very little I could contribute to a parody of MN that is more valuable than jokes about Coen brothers, the Mighty Ducks, Jesse Ventura and everyone but Prince being super white. If I started getting all butthurt about Target, Caribou Coffee and our Twin Cities Hmong population not getting mentioned that'd be stupid because it'd just be burying the lead.

Well, do we really care if anyone or everyone lives in a given region? To my knowledge, the only Denner who lives in Portland (and really, I should have said Oregon) is Jigoku, and while I lived there for a short time, I no longer do so. I just really like the area and it can give a nice mix of environs. Hell, there's a college with a nuclear reactor there which is operated by students.

My point is, do we need to worry about whether any of us live in an area, or if so, how many? If we could design based on Faerun, we could just as easily, if not more so, design based on Orgeon. Or Australia. Or Russia. It's not about favouritism, it's "hey, I like this area, anyone else feel like using it for the basis of our region?"

For what it's worth, Oregon has a pretty diverse range of ecosystems.

Edit: to build on Whipstitch's great point- My time in Portland was spent in the Pearl, an upscale downtown region of Portland full of hippies and hipsters before the word was really widely used. And lasted about eight months. So I'm actually more towards the parodic knowledge of Oregon, with a hint of knowledge about specific locations (there's a really good pizza place, a pretty good sushi place with the whole conveyor belt thing, a tea garden I never visited, a gay bar, and a big elephant statue in a small green bar/park in the Pearl)

The first four Pokemon regions were based off of Japanese areas, the very first of which was the most densely populated region in all of Japan. Japan being a fairly small country, I'm reasonably certain that every single one of the first four games had on their team people quite familiar with the realworld regions they were loosely basing the games on. But that's not even the real problem. The real problem is that if we make a region based on Australia, we have made a region based on Australia. Australia is not the Den, nor is it particularly relevant to the Den, and a region based on Australia is not the Den's region, it is Australia's region that happened to have been created by the Den.

Ah, I see the hangup now. The way I'm approaching this is just a region created communally by the Den.

I'm making another vote for Faerun. A high fantasy Pokemon setting sounds by far the most interesting.

People are totally free to make other suggestions as well.

I'm good with Faerun. It means we have pre-existing maps and cities right there, and ties in with the fact that the Den as a whole supports the fusion of D&D monsters and pokemon, conceptually.

So... it seems like we're making Poke'Faerun.

Ok, that works for me. All of Koumei's points hold true. And I suggested Faerun because it's seriously tiny.

That said, do we want to stick to a specific portion of Faerun with a couple of unassociated points--like the Western coast of actual Faerun proper and a Maztican island that you get to by boat/surfing pokemon/magical teleportation? Or some other portion?

Oh, we can also start talking about towns, starter concepts/inspirations and whether/what to make starter secondary typings.

Ok, fuck keeping the order. It helps when you're doing a big community thing on Tumblr, but there's like... five of us. So whatever, jump in, make whatever suggestions you want. I will merely record things once they're decided. The things to determine are below, and in a spoiler in the first post.

• Starters (concepts/inspirations/type pairings)
• Legendaries, especially the "cover" legendaries
• Gyms (types and leaders, at least 1 Gimmick gym)
• League members, team types
• Towns, min. 9 including starting town
• Professor:
• Antagonists, including name, purpose, aesthetic, and symbol:

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I kind of want Elminster in there somewhere, just because he's just a major FR figure, but he should be someone whose ass you kick, because Elminster should have his ass kicked at every opportunity.

Actually, what if Elminster fulfilled the roll of "guy who stops you in the road and holds you up so he can teach you to catch pokemon for the millionth time? And then he challenges you to a battle so he can teach you to battle, and uses either blatantly OP pokemon, or horribly suboptimal pokemon? I of course lean to the latter so that you can kick his ass.

Also, there should definitely be a tarasque legendary, and probably an eevee-like dragon pokemon that evolves into different forms based on the stone you use, with maybe an optional evolution from any of the "final" forms into a dracolich pokemon.

What if Elminster was champion of the pokemon league equivilent?

Elminster should be the annoying companion character, like Cheren or Dancing Freak. /trollface

I have no idea how blatant we're going to be about the region being Faerun, so we could just have a dick Mary Sue parody wizard Champion. But Elminster being the corrupt and/or inept Champion who does jack shit as you fight the villains of the game (especially since Gen III, where literally every villain is all about using Legendaries to destroy/conquer the world in a very unsubtle way) is perfect for describing FR adventures, or even a parody of FR adventures. So basically Elminster has to be the champion (bonus points if people call him out on his complete and utter lack of doing meaningful shit, and it's made clear that the only reason he retains his position is that he has a monopoly on Pokemon force).

Again, depending on how subtle we want to be, I think the villains should be called Team Thay or Team Zulkir. Because Szass Tam. Basically they would want to summon a shitload of Ghost Pokemon so they can do the batshit insane stuff they do in their Pokedex entries and murder the faces off of everyone, because Necromancy.

City names are mostly dependent on how much wizard cock the setting should suck (for Faerun, and D&D in general, this is traditionally ALL THE COCKS, but there's no reason for that to be the case here.)

Does everyone own at least one pokemon like in the games? If not, what proportion of the population uses pokemon, and what proportion actually trains and/or uses them for battles?

I'm guessing challenging someone to a battle would be akin to a sparring match (you'd be expected to not kill their pokemon, or pay for a resurrection in case of accidental kills (I suppose you should just assume pokemon get KO'd in these cases if you don't feel like futzing with non lethal rules)) with predetermined rules (e.g. one at a time, double battle or whatever) and stakes (winner gets x GP), but fights with bandits, raiders, evil overlords, etc. would involve all trainers on both teams and be to the death (unless one side escapes or surrenders).

Actually, another idea for the villains-- aren't the yuan ti a big deal in FR? The villains could be yuan to poke'trainers who want to awaken their god Mershaulk who's really a giant snake pokemon, and of course they all use snake themed pokemon.

Honestly, in the games it actually seems like the percentage of people who have their own pokemon is a lot less than 100%. It looks like the more common case is that a family owns one or two, like real families own one or two pets and some don't own any and some own a bunch. Poke'trainers are adventurers, pure and simple, sparse in number perhaps because if they were really common it'd be like Discworld before the wizard academies were established--total reality clusterfuck all out war.

I had wanted to see if I could pull out a plot that didn't involve the version legendaries for once, since I personally think that shit's overdone (and wanted to call attention to the fact that Ghost Pokemon are totally fucking metal).

But you could totally do something with the Yuan-Ti and the Sarrukh and Merrshaulk. It's pretty much Team Yuan-Ti or Team Red Wizards for the villains, since those are the two BBEGs of the Realms, but it could be either or.

What if it's both? Not like Ruby/Sapphire where the two teams are opposed, but more like- what the hell do the yuan ti care if Team Thay summon a bunch of ghosts to wreck shit? They have their own thing. So the two teams could actually be working together to further their individual goals.