Populating Your World

Populating Your World

So you've created your 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 principles, though which one you prioritize is up to you. The first principle is game progression - making sure it's fun 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 verisimilitude - that is, making sure the habitats and environments make up a believeable world.

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 videogames. 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. 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 when starting your campaign? Save them for whichever path they come to later on, and populate the first path with more common bugs.

Verisimilitude

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 pay attention to verisimilitude, and where this principle applies best is when designing individual habitats and the Pokémon within them on a smaller scale.

Of course, verisimilitude 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, plant-life (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 - type shifts, 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 follow these two principles and keep them in 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.