Monster Manual Sewn From Pants

Im sorry but humanoid pokeon are fucking bullshit. total fucking bullshit

Scrap, in the Pokeworld is the true 'Pocket Monster' man iteself?

+Patrick Stuart come on there is a certain appeal in them acting human in only one particular way and then animalistic in every other way. Like Dr Moreau but they don't even try, they do one thing like a person (box, sing, mime), and then shameless revert to animal behavior for the rest

No humans are the only animal not yet replaced by pokemon (which of course are extrusions from an external entity)

Your two replies infer something horrible don't they? How sure are you that humans have not yet been replaced? Becasue, looking at characters in the pokeverse THEY ALL ONLY DO ONE THING AGAIN AND AGAIN

Wil McKinnee

Like defecation.

Wil McKinnee

But I mean that in a Bataille kinda way, as the sole expressive force. Like a Guayaki Tribesman's midnight song.

+Patrick Stuart maybe all the poke battling is the entities trying to determine if they have replaced everyone yet

+Scrap Princess oh god..

The entities suspect that they have already won long long ago and that there was only one entity but it's been so long that the various extrusions believe themselves autonomous even as they themselves observe the puppet selves they control turn on their strings

EARLIER CONVERSATION (EXTRACT FEATURES)

I just read Ghastleys entry in the online pokedex and its fuckng terrifying, example paragraph "Gastly first appeared in The Ghost of Maiden's Peak. This Gastly had the ability to talk and shape-shift. He kept posing himself as the spirit of the woman which legend said turned to stone after many years of waiting for her love to return to her. As the ghost of the maiden, Gastly kept on toying with the minds of young men."

Gastly can slip into any place it wants. However, Gastly's body will dwindle away when exposed to a strong wind but it can probably regenerate itself later. A Gastly is capable of toppling an Indian Elephant within two seconds by enveloping it in poisonous gas.
That last note is the kind of totally bonkers thing my kids make up. The obsession with scale and timing is a very specific feature of being about 10 years old and/or a 19th century naturalist or political philosopher.

You know George Hutcheon's "origin of Pokemon species" articles, right?
http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species:_Bronzor_and_Bronzong

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Spiritomb_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
is made from 108 evil spirits

No but ohmygod I do now.

3 Jun 2013

Rotom is ghost that possesses electrical goods, and it has different game mechanics depanding on what it has possessed http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Rotom_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

Dusknoir has an antenna to receive radio waves from the spirit world and will take a spirit in its pilant body to guide it home

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Dusknoir_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

is a fucking coffin pokemon http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Cofagrigus_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

+Scrap Princess Yep. There is one that is actually a sarcophagus and one that is a living candelabra a well.

Scrap, what the fuck is going on with Voltorb? Does anyone ever come close to explaning that? It's lie having a D&D monster where the entry in the monster manual is itself the monster.

Scrap Princess"

ancient legends once told Cofagrigus could eat nearby humans and turn their lifeless bodies into mummies. It also has the ability to form two pairs of arms. Its real face is covered up by parts that slide out of the way when it is active."

+Patrick Stuart no , just a "new pokemon just happen. Some of the happen so they look like stuff. This is pleasing to the pokemon because reasons"

Basically there is only one Pokemon, and its trying to get into this world, and it shapes its protrusions in all this myriad of form to get people to base their entire lives and society around it, and more and more of it can enter this world

like look at pokemon. Its what an alien would draw animals like if it wanted to make animal shaped lures for people. Compare fishing lures to actual bait fish. Similar smoothing and simplifying

is a vulture with acrylic nails and miniskirt of bones
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mandibuzz_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

yesyesyes. when are we playing dyspokemon?

"man, maybe its just the heat and the dehydration but I could swear those cactus are following us,,"
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Cacturne_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

Every Cubone ever WEARS HIS MOTHER'S SKULL ON HIS HEAD. Wrap your head around that.

Also, Yamask is the soul of a dead human. It retains memories of its previous life. If you put it on your face, you get possessed by it.

Neither of those are Dark, but they are pretty dark.

Also, aside from spending his afterlife being forced to fight children's pets, Yamask can also breed and lay eggs.

Also, lest I be unhelpful: Umbreon is the cutest dark pokemon (according to peer-reviewed journals).

+Patrick Stuart Voltorb shares a lot of DNA with mimics. When you find stuff on the ground of dungeons, it's always inside a pokeball. In the Power Plant (Pokemon Red/Blue), some of the items on the ground were actually relatively badass voltorbs that attacked you.

They re-used this idea in Pokemon B/W, with another gotcha pokemon: foongus, the most asinine creature in the game.

+Arnold K. There are dungeons in pokemon, and things in the dungeons and they are inside pokeballs? How?? Why??

Dungeons are either (a) pinatas full of angry hornets with a rare pokemon at the bottom, or (b) just in your way. Despite having cellphones and digital watches, their transportation system is so shitty that completing your pokemon journey (going from one major city to another) requires you to go through meteorite-impacted caverns. You can't even get a boat to some places. You gotta swim though flooded sea caves and fight hundreds of zubats to get places.

And pokeballs. . . you can put anything in pokeballs. Pair of socks, the soul of the king of pokelantis, etc. Primitive pokeballs were made from weaponized fruit (?) called apricorns, and big pokemon had to be captured in appropriately sized pokeballs.

Also, giving some credence to +Scrap Princess 's conspiracy theory: it looks like pokemon have been replacing the default animals. Normal birds were shown in early episodes, but no longer. Normal fish were shown in museums, but only to demonstrate what ancient pokemon used to eat.

+Patrick Stuart well pokemon can hold items. SO maybe the pokemon had the item and then it escaped and left the item behind. Or items are pokemon spores

The ocean is about 70 to 80% tentacool, and darkness, darkness is made out of fucking zubats.

Meowth, that's right. You can't swing a zubat in some caves without hitting a zubat.

And the ground was paved with geodudes.

like the first time you see "repel" in a shop its like "man that's stupid, why would I turn down exp?" but by the time you are trying to get through the marine caves its like "YOU SHOP DRONE! HOW MUCH SUPER REPEL ? I WILL HAVE ALL OF IT HERE IS FISTS FULL OF MONEY DO YOU HAVE THIS IN A TANKER ? ONLY 99? 99?!?!? WHAT THE FUCK I WILL BUY TANKER SELL ME A TANKER SELL ME A FUCKING CROP DUSTER OF IT FUUUUUCK"

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Amoonguss_%28Pok%C3%A9mon%29 "uses its pokeball shields to lure pokemon" Why are the pokemon heading towards the pokeball? Is this why wild pokemon attack constantly? Is it rage or envy that drives them against trainers? Apparently Ammoongusses lures rarely work on pokemon. Only trainers are stupid enough to try and pick them up

Everything is animate and intelligent, like evil shinto

there is prob a totally crap " mysterious orientals" essay about how the lingering influence of Shinto informed the creation of the pokemon franchise

SCIENCE SCREEN REPORT - Ecology: Bats - Creatures of the Night - Volume 41 Issue 2

I imagine that there were just millions of zubats boiling above my head, hissing in the darkness and constantly shitting on me. It's just the one zubat out of a million that actually went batshit and mistook me for a locust.

The pokeball is an end-point for human technology. Because pokemon can do anything, control of them is the only meaningful control.

A dark day in the histroy of war was when specially breed zubats were released in the enemy cave networks. Their move list: "sing" "confuse ray" "stun spore" "self destruct"

And they all have Arena Trap, so you can't run away.

And there's a man outside the cave selling lawn mower hats.

Maybe pokemon are devolving us. Turning us into some sort of simpering, childish society where we cannot work or think on our own. Where ten-year-olds are the pinnacles of achievement and the adults just flounce around putting their pokemon in beauty contests and shit.

Meanwhile the pokemon are all breeding with each other, traveling through the internet, talking with the dead, messing with the weather, and exhuming our graveyards to raise armies of yamasks.

thank you so much for this thread. I love it.

And really, when are we running this?

+Richard G What system would we even use? Call of Cthulu with Pokemon?

Richard G

That could certainly work - POW v POW battles to get the creatures into the pokeballs.

I'm going to give some thought to writing a system just for this..... (tho no results quickly, I suspect)

For some reason the most frightening thing on the yamazk Bulbapedia page (out of a lot of frightening things) was this;-

"They serve Cofagrigus. They were lonely and tried to make more friends, but now they are happy because many Pokémon have come to play."

Now they are happy.

at first they are noisy and resist but their wills soon subside.
...now I can't remember which Cthulhu module that's from.

Well, don't use it, but I'll mention it now because it'll probably never be relevant to any other discussion in my life ever:

Have you seen pokethulhu?
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/pokethulhu.htm

I have not. Have you tried it? What's it like?

gotta catch you all is a great tagline
It's an S John Ross game... I wonder... it might actually be good.

Never played it, but I've read all of it. It's a clever mangling of the mythos and the 'mons. The system is really simplistic and gamist. It looks like it could be fun, though, but only if enjoyed the abyss at the center of that particular Venn diagram.

what's going on here I think is different in intent - Ross seems to have gone "hey Pokemon are cute and a little creepy - let's dial up the dissonance by importing Cthulhu," whereas I think the agreement here is that Pokemon is plenty creepy enough already.
...it's free, though. Worth a look...

+Richard G yeah I was going to say that, like the mythos is a step back from the strangeness of the pokemon. Like "evil scaly squid demons" are pretty played out and chibi'ng them is not doing anything new.

The only angle I can think of to make a pokemon rpg interesting for me is if you player some kind of protean being outside of space and time and you insert yourself in this world as the things known as pokemon. But each aspect of you has to have a certain amount of autonomy or it destabilizes. You also need human trainers . The interactions of which help congeal reality around your aspects.

So you start off being only able to manfeist a couple of basic pokemon and can get a fairly loser trainer , but as you can gain in strength you manfiest more bizarre or trainer appealing forms, lose your old trainers, and there is always the choice between keeping an old aspect or starting again with something new and more potent, or more appealing to richer trainers. Because you also gain in strength by competing with other Intrusions.

It would be kind of meta with like how a player has a bunch of different characters but they are all "aspects" of you intruding in this fantasy world, but now you are explicitly stated to be this. So the player is actually playing a player character player with player character player characters.

...

...

mechanically it would be like you earn exp but can spend it on leveling up, purchasing new characters, unlocking new characters.
Trainers would be like equipment, with prerequisites. Like if you want a "beach babe trainer" you would need be a X level water pokemon that is cute or something.

that sounds amazing! My own idea - to set it all during the 17th century and you play Balinese or Ryukyu islanders who are forced to make devil's pacts with the pokemon to drive off the Europeans - seems relatively pedestrian.

playing a protean being that needs humans reminds me of a video game proposal I wrote once for Little Lost Shoggoth, where you play a shoggoth with a simple mission (get to Carlsbad Caverns to restart the world engine) and you have to get the humans to help you, but if they see you they go mad and if they find out you exist it's torches and pitchforks, so the game is about sneaking around them, reading their work papers when they're not there, using recordings to play over the phone to make stuff happen, and hiding in unlikely places aboard ships and trains to get transported to where you need to go. I thought about maybe if you ate someone you could get their skills for a short time.

I like Scrap's idea. Other ideas:

You could play it straight, as a group of the few lone souls that know the truth. Every day you machine gun down a dozen trainers send a few more pokemon back to the nameless void. But the pokemon lap the blood off the ground and core the memories of all involved. You never make it on the evening news. You need to make it to Los Alamos in order to detonate the nukes there. You've got a scientist that thinks he's found a way to destroy the whole planet and everyone on it.

It's a grim goal, but it's better than the alternative. You've all seen what the pokemon are planning. You all know what they intend for humanity.

And so you strive to end the world, in order to save the souls of the living. They'll never thank you for it, of course. They don't even know why you fight, or how you fight. They call you "Team Rocket" on the evening news, presumably after the nuclear stockpiles you are seeking. But people are told that you "steal pokemon". And when they learn differently, the pokemon make them forget it. Yeah, a lot of you wear black sweaters, but they sure as fuck don't have a big red letter R on them.

It doesn't matter. Everyone sees the letter R anyway. Just like how they don't see the shotguns and the scroll cases. And you kill pokemon, yes, but you kill people, too. They die never understanding anything about the world they live in. The death of livestock. Which is perhaps an appropriate comparison.

Okay. Simpler prose. Focus. Shit.

But there is no security or network or anything. No one knows how to do anything except fight pokemon, watch pokemon on TV, talk about pokemon on the streets, and go to pokemon beauty contests. All you have to do is take off your black sweater and you are incognito and no one recognizes you.

Not even the pokemon recognize you. Sure, some of them do, but most are them are just appendages of something greater. All humans look the same to them.

The old cities are there of course, but no one goes there. It's like no one can see those places. Instead of using the old highways, the people take roundabout routes, going through mountains and swimming across oceans.

There are roads connecting the major cities, but they're invisible to the common folk. Maybe it's too much illusion to maintain. Certainly the old cities are wrecks. Scarred in a dozen ways by the pokemon's arrival.

And so you go into the shells of the old cities for supplies and weapons. Things are just sitting on the shelf. The stuff in cans is still edible. The apocalypse wasn't that long ago.

Team Rocket owes a great deal of its survival to the creature called Meowth. It's a traitor to its kind. A rogue drone. It's assistance was neither asked for not understood, but it is gratefully accepted.

All pokemon can speak, of course. It's just that the words are usually the last thing their trainer ever hears.

+Scrap Princess I'm just going to vomit ideas out. Excuse me.

It'd be hard to roleplay an alien intelligence. What does an alien intelligence do for fun? It needs a human element.

Maybe you need a human trainer to be your face to the world. Maybe your power is linked to how many people think you're awesome, but no one remembers a sandshrew, and so you've got to attach yourself to some chump and ride him to glory.

You can just form new pokemon and appear in front of your trainer. In fact, pretty much all the wild pokemon that appear in front of your trainer are just aspects of you.

But when you fight another trainer, you actually are fighting another entity. The thundershocks are just for show, the real battle takes place on a whole different plane. And so you rise and fall with your trainer. If your trainer dies or whatever, it's a pain to reattach yourself to a new one.

There's other stuff you can do to get more XP, too. Devouring souls, eating fingernails. But pokemon battles are a big one. So your job is to steer your idiot trainer around so you can fight entities of about your power level (to get XP) while avoiding ones who are more powerful than you.

And you don't just manifest as pokemon, either. You can also control electronics and mess with people's brains. When you catch word that Team Rocket is going to drop sarin gas on Pewter City, you need to play some stuff on TV about a spearow swarm on Route 24. Get Ash excited enough to jump on his bike really quick-like. And you need to get rid of Brock, too. He's starting to suspect too much. Killing him would be harder than engineering a situation where he runs of chasing the local nurse, so you do that.

And thus, vast, transdimensional intelligences are forced to find their a date for a 10-year-old kid for the dance aboard the S.S. Anne.

The identical pokecenter nurses? Your creatures entirely. Like finger puppets on top of a tentacle. If a human ever cracked open that pokeheal machine, they'd see the yawning abysms of infinity stretching out around them, instantly snuffing their fragile, three-dimensional brains.

Richard G
+Patrick Stuart +Scrap Princess +Arnold K. I know this is nothing like as awesome as the discussion here has been, but I figured you might dig my new attempt at a pokeball magic item.
http://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/spiritrap-a-variant-on-bilbils-ravenous-phylactery-for-pokemon-type-shenanigans/