Roleplay

@Carnifex Ideas, I'm full of 'em. \D There's also the question of how long after the apocalypse we want this to take place- five, ten, a hundred, a thousand years? The way I see it, there's advantages to both extremes. If it happened less than a human lifetime ago, you get to explore characters who had lives before the apocalypse, whereas if it happened several generations ago you get to go wild with worldbuilding and exploring extreme post-apocalyptic cultures. :-D Best of both worlds would be to have the apocalypse happen several generations ago, but have "vaults" like in Fallout with cryogenically frozen people [or some equivalent- maybe legendary pokemon stepped in and preserved small pockets of people and pokemon in stasis for a few hundred years?] so that we can have characters who remember life before the "Event" and people born hundreds of years after who have.. probably never seen a green plant or something.

Anyways, I have to go!

@tharn @hotdoge

I DIG the idea of both vaults (because hey the whole social experiment aspect is great man) but also the idea of a legendary preserving humankind or pockets of it is great too. Especially cause you could get like. a cult of these people who want to A. "preserve" the old way of life and B. AGGRESSIVELY worship this legendary.

@Carnifex @hotdoge Ohhh, fanatical Legendary cults, I like it. >:D Especially the part about "preserving the old way of life"; it provides a way for there to still be food and goods being produced hundreds of years after basically all other society has broken down. That'd be important, since it'd be hard to explain why our characters aren't wearing skins and furs. [or... are they? XD] Maybe there could be legendary created sanctuaries for pokemon, and scientist-build vaults for people? I think having a sinister scientific corporation operating in the background could be a solid basis for an overarching plot, if we get around to it...

If y'all are still into it, there's plenty more we could dig into. One possibility that I've been considering- to really make it feel like the land is sick and wounded- would be to limit the types of pokemon that would regularly be encountered- maybe only poison- and steel- types can be commonly found in the wild, since they're the only types immune to [radiation] poisoning. I can see how that might be kind of boring, though- for one, it limits the dex to about sixty pokemon. X'D So to make up for that, types that weren't poison before could have developed a secondary poison typing. For people who want to preserve the original typing of their faves, [and let's be honest, who doesn't like having a bit of diversity on their team] there are any number of ways that "natural" pokemon could be encountered- maybe they wandered out of the "sanctuaries" created by the legendaries by mistake, or maybe some lucky survivor just stumbles upon a centuries-old pokeball buried in rubble and find a lucky pre-apocalypse pokemon inside.

Anyways, sorry about all the tangents, I'm sooo eager to worldbuild this you have no idea. X'D

@tharn @hotdoge

yoooo I like the idea of like. you've got your run of the mill scavengers and survivors and then you've got like these vault/sanctuary folks. i could see an interesting sort of tension between both factions, and the sheltered people may end up having to face the outside world when they realize that evil science incorporated is doing bad things to them and their pokemon--maybe harming their legendary patrons or something

and i do like the idea of poison/steel types being WAY more common and becoming a secondary typing for most pokemon that survived--i can definitely see the strongest of species eventually adapting to the environment and slowly overcoming it to handle it better. (also because i shamelessly want an eeveelution).

and hey no problem! tangents are cool yo

@Carnifex @hotdoge I'm sooo here for conflict between these like, roving tribes of mutated nomads vs sheltered sanctuary-folk. Seems like we would need a bit more detail as to how these sanctuaries actually work- did the legendaries just protect pockets of land from the radiation, and people congregated there, or did the legendaries specifically preserve populations, possibly in stasis, and pop them out a few hundred years later when the radiation had abated somewhat?

I like the idea that maybe the legendaries are "slumbering" as they divert their power to maintaining their respective sanctuaries. Then as their power ebbs away, more and more sanctuaries are being "revealed"/brought out of stasis as the legendaries no longer have enough power to keep them hidden. Maybe there's something about the radiation that saps their strength faster than they had anticipated? It's the age-old "man-made pollution" vs "forces of nature" scenario. Sanctuaries of "lesser" legendaries, like suicine, celebi, etc, might have run out of power much quicker, while those of more powerful legendaries like groudon and kyogre have only just started to emerge.

So here's what I propose:

-Devastation caused by a "mutually assured destruction" scenario between two armed nuclear superpowers. [or that's the ~official~ story, anyways, wink wink ;) ]

-In anticipation of the destruction, each legendary [except possibly man-made and/or malevolent ones like giratina and genesect- what do you guys think?] preserved a small pocket of ecosystem directly around their slumbering bodies. Because this drained so much of their energy, they were forced to hibernate, so no one knows whether the legendaries actually intended to preserve patches of pokemon and human population or whether it was just a side-effect of their own self-preservation. Nevertheless, many of the human communities that formed around these sanctuaries started cults dedicated to their sleeping saviors.

-For variety's sake, each sanctuary may or may not have initially included humans. Some sanctuaries might have only preserved pokemon, some might have included a human or two accidentally, while others might have preserved entire communities.

-Still slumbering, the legendaries eventually lost so much power that they were unable to keep their sanctuaries hidden, and eventually whatever barriers they had put in place crumbled, allowing both those that had been preserved inside to escape, and for survivors of the destroyed world to come in.

-Some of these sanctuaries- those of less powerful/more susceptible legendaries- were revealed extremely quickly, and, because they'd been protected from the brunt of the radiation, were ideal places for humans to settle- and to fight over. Some sanctuaries have completely lost their hidden status and are regular targets for raids by packs of wasteland scavengers.

-The longer a sanctuary has been revealed, however, the more its protections have deteriorated, and many of them are scarcely less poisoned than the surrounding land. Nomads and sanctuary-folk alike are desperate to discover new sanctuaries to inhabit. Both groups often send out search parties in the hopes of finding these fabled promised-lands, leading to clashes out in the wastes between scouting parties.

-There's another group of people that are eager to find these sanctuaries for the legendaries themselves, rather than their arable properties- our mysterious scientists. I've got more ideas on that, but I'll cut this post off here before I completely turn you guys off with all this text. X'DD

Edit: holy hell this turned out long. How much worldbuilding is too much? Evidently, I have no idea. |'D