Setting Essentials

This is a collection of brief information covering the major aspects of the game’s theme, things well-known to any ‘morph in the underground.

Pokemorphs, Underground

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Pokemorphs are genetically engineered amalgams of pokemon and human lineage. While their history has long since been covered by the sands of time, they are the dominant intelligent life underground, where humans never made it and feral pokemon are, well, feral. Standing between 4’ and 9’ in height, pokemorphs are bipedal versions of their base pokemon, with the ability to speak, hands with dexterous fingers and thumbs, and attitude.

‘Morphs generally wear clothing; many use this as an avenue for self-expression. Basic body modification through tattoos, piercings, body paint, and fur dye are all common as well.

More information can be found in Pokemorph Details.

The Underground

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The underground is a sprawling, multilayered tangle of large caves, small caves, tunnels, and everything else that makes up the traversable area deep below the surface. The underground is all anyone knows; the surface is a distant paradise legend of unimaginable things like never-ending open “skies,” blanketing bright light, and abundant food. A fairy-tale, hardly even believed in.

There are a few large caves where moonstones line the ceiling like a bed of stars, providing a dim but appreciated day-night cycle. Often enough you’ll find bioluminescent mushrooms. Everywhere else is dark, a hazard to traverse without a source of light for everyone but dark types. (Unsteadily groping along the cave walls in the dark is always an option, but it’s not a good one.)

Moonstones, once activated by electricity, lose their natural day-night cycle and instead function like a bulb, emitting brighter light when powered and no light when not. This principle is the source of most artificial light in the underground, as it just requires electricity or an electric type to power them.

Coveted and much rarer than the plentiful moonstones, sunstones appear to be a dim version of one at first glance, but when stimulated they emit a bright, broad spectrum light and a bit of heat. They’re ideal for grass types, small greenhouse operations, and large floodlights. They are however, much more delicate than moonstones and susceptible to shattering under rough handling, so they are normally relegated to fixed installations.

Rather than leafy green plants, almost all vegetation underground is some form of mushroom, algae or lichen. Mushrooms in particular have been cultivated into various useful lines. Mushrooms with heavy, fibrous structures are used in place of wood and for both construction and the papermaking that allows bureaucracy to function. Mushrooms provide oil, spice, and various textures of substance for food. Generally, mushrooms only need access to dirt and water to grow, as nutrients are oddly plentiful in the soil broken from the underground’s floor by the earliest pokemorphs. Lichen and algae are the main source of breathable, clean air in the tunnels, and it isn’t unknown for lichens to be carried around as good luck charms because of this.

Away from built-up civilization, feral pokemon roam like wild beasts, their once characteristic intelligence lost. Lost due to a reversion in their mental state? Simply long social isolation? It matters little when one wants to make you dinner, especially considering that ferals are quite a bit more powerful than pokemorphs, their abilities undiluted by the latter’s ancient merger with humanity. They can be quite a challenge in a one-on-one battle, and the packs they generally move in can be a real danger.

Food

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Food is mushroom, mostly. Thankfully the underground’s mycological makeup is diverse and useful, especially after generations of cultivation. Mushroom oils, meaty mushroom steaks and crunchy fried mushroom strands all make for a tasty meal. Raw mushrooms on occasion, for a change of pace. All washed down with a hearty mushroom beer. Pokemorphs can thrive on merely mushrooms; their bodies can pull needed nutrients from them and create the rest—perhaps a strange side effect of the genetic engineering.

Canal City’s vast dearth of noble-controlled technology has made it one of the very few places where non-mushroom plants can be found on the market. These rare plants go for a high price, but can include leafy greens, vegetables, and fruits. One of the most rare and jealously guarded export of Canal City are the spices that cannot normally be found or even grown underground and the additional flavor they can add fetches a high price. These can provide a small but exquisite addition of taste to the elites’ dinner tables.

Technology

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Canal City is the most advanced in terms of overall technological development, sporting a roughly 1910s European level of technology including a basic electric grid and streetlights, running water via gravity-fed aqueducts and pumping infrastructure, and functional sanitation, and a growing factory district. One of the newest inventions, the fully-automatic elevator, has made its way into even apartment buildings. The city is powered by its own hydroelectric dam, though the pace of growth means they’re now importing a lot of power from Basalt City’s geothermal systems.

There is no oil, but there is good old-fashioned coal entering mainstream use, and certain mushrooms are able to provide analogues to some oil-based materials like plastics.

For more specific information on the exact technology available, check out the Technology Level guide.

Main Settlements

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There are three primary settlements in the underground, each of which has grown into a city-state of its own. Each is surrounded by outlying towns and villages of various purpose, and others have sprung up on the paths between.

Canal City

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“The Original City,” “The Bread Basket,” “The City of Legends.” Canal City is called many things depending on who you ask. As the first place that pokemorphs started building in the underground, it stands some five hundred years old. It has a fairly strict class-based hierarchy with nobles at the top determining laws, a mercantile and judicial class that handles city affairs and trading, a working and trade middle class, and an underclass of dispossessed workers. Canal City is also the main source of water and food for all three main settlements, making much money on the sale of these vital goods either above or below board.

Canal City’s cave is a truly massive open space unlike anything else in the underground, with Canal City proper taking up only a fraction of the cave’s space. Mushroom fields stretch out from the city itself and outlying farming towns are slowly springing up in the space, but it’s still quite open for your relaxing countryside walks.

More information on Canal City can be found in the Canal City Details.

Basalt City

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From its beginnings as a power-generation outpost of Canal City, Basalt City quickly grew into a city of vice where any clandestine deal can be made—as long as you follow the rules to the letter.

The heavy waste that Canal City’s industrialists (and a few Scrap Town tinkers) can’t manage is shipped here; they pay the city to melt it all in magma. The plumes of toxic fumes that this gives off make the whole cavern toxic outside of carefully filtered and maintained thoroughfares and buildings. The poison-type nobility use this atmosphere as another layer of defense against spies and troublemakers.

The power-generation potential of the city is its economic jewel, however. It’s situated in a large cavern with easy access to underground magma rivers and enough high-temperature metals in the walls to create the geothermal power plants that harness this heat energy.

Mystery Dungeons

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There are passages in the cave network that lead to strange and wondrous labyrinths defying time and space. Mystery dungeons are where treasure hunters, history seekers, and adventurers from all walks of life make their due. Those that dare enter one could find any manner of geometry, from a mind-bending twisting cave network to a straightforward underground bunker. Some dungeons even contain fragments of the world before pokemorphs, before the underground: strange slices of history that offer the chance to score some rare and technologically advanced artifacts. Sometimes human remains are found, but never those of ‘morphs.

Feral pokemon are often found within mystery dungeons, always deranged and violent, and sometimes far stronger than those that wander the underground. They’re the most common danger, but they’re not the only danger to those who delve.

It’s hard to enter a mystery dungeon without knowing it. Passing through the strange mystic membrane into a different air is often unsettling, especially when you’re new to it. And just being inside of one will sap an adventurer’s energy, causing them to go hungry faster. Being properly supplied is vital to exploration.

A mystery dungeon’s barrier blocks nearly everything but people and what they push or pull through the portal—what happens inside a mystery dungeon stays inside. Radio signals fail to transmit to or from the outside world, and the psychic field that Teleport rides is severed the barrier. However, everything works as expected between locations inside the same dungeon. There’s nothing that can get in; the only things that can breach outward are the alert signals that Guild badges send out when their owner faints or a particularly powerful Psychic call, the stress of which is likely to faint the caller by itself.

The portal that takes you into a dungeon will take you back out when you have to leave, but there is often a second exit to be found at the end, often after some kind of challenge. This second exit generally leads out the same ways as the first.

Academics and adventurers alike have theorized and debated on the nature of mystery dungeons since the early days of the underground, but answers are still scarce. It is known that there are three general types of mystery dungeon, however:

• Passing dungeons are what explorers will see the most often. A dungeon entrance opens somewhere in the cave network, and stays open for a certain amount of time or until it gets completed, after which it simply vanishes. As such, a passing dungeon needs to be dealt with in a single foray. Their flighty nature means there’s always reason to explore the cave network, as they can pop up in any place, well-known or obscure.

• Static dungeons are rare. They last much longer than passing dungeons and their interior doesn’t shift at all, meaning their often mineral-rich walls and other assets can be more thoroughly mined out and looted, but whatever is taken stays gone. Static dungeons tend to be larger, with a number of challenges to be tackled in sequence, and thus typically require multiple trips in to complete. Sometimes the portals to static dungeons will still close and reopen or even move, leaving them as they were but with anything built or brought in by pokemorphs removed as if it didn’t exist in the first place.

• Stable dungeons are the rarest. Their portals are in a fixed location, and they will reopen in the same location after being completed. When this “refresh” happens, new loot and new challenges can be found inside. Anything brought in will vanish at this point as well. Sometimes the dungeon itself is substantially different when the portal reopens, but there’s always something there. (Don’t worry, this rarely happens when anyone’s inside…)

Poke, the currency of the underground is, oddly, often found up for grabs in dungeons, as well as common, well-known items. But what everyone hopes to find is an artifact. Things like rare potions, TMs, wands, orbs, technological devices, and even ancient plants and berries have been found in dungeons before. These are all generally considered human artifacts.

Human Artifacts

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The primary loot that draws people to the danger of exploring mystery dungeons are human artifacts. Technology of the mythic past, ranging from ballpoint pens that never run out of ink to weapons that surpass pokemorph moves in power and effect, with all sorts of incomprehensible devices and broken scrap in between, human artifacts all share a futuristic design that is visually recognizable. Artifacts run the gamut from helpful to harmful to near apocalyptic in effect. (And remember, a wondrously good technology applied wrong often leads to wondrously bad results.) Some will be identifiable to someone from our world, some are science fiction, and some are downright incomprehensible.

There is a strong stigma against the open and direct use of human artifacts, especially in Canal City. They are given a worried reverence appropriate for a dark magic that threatens calamity, and are suspected to be responsible for whatever happened that drove the pokemorphs underground in the first place. Canal City’s vaults are the only place capable of containing dangerous artifacts, where Guild specialists can carefully study them and apply what’s learned to pokemorph-built technology. Artifacts judged to be “safe” are sent to Canal City University for further study, but even this is conducted with care.

Guild adventurers generally entrust recovered artifacts to this system. Rogues, however, tend to be a little more proactive with direct use of artifacts, the taboo against this offset by an anti-authoritarian finders-keepers mentality. Mercenaries, well, that depends on the details of the contract, doesn’t it?

Weathered and decayed artifacts are sometimes found outside of mystery dungeons without being recognized for what they are. But once what they are is discovered, the taboo descends upon them, and it’s shuffled off to the vaults.