Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Create-a-character: Cat

Published by the Wicked Dead Brewing company, Cat is billed as a Little Game about Little heroes. You play a cat who protects people from evil spirits - Boggins. They can do this because they can see Boggins and enter the world of dreams. The Cats are obligated to protect humans because Cats have won The Contest for the past 9000 years or so, whilst humans have come last. (Winning the contest is what gives cats their nine lives and magic).

Character creation in Cat is quite simple. Each cat has six Traits which are:

Claws - For fighting and climbing.
Coat - For impressing others and protection
Face - Senses
Fangs - For fighting and carrying
Legs - For jumping, balance and running
Tail - For magic

I'm going to stat up our cat, Daisy.

The first thing to do is to assign ratings to the traits. One trait is your cat's Best trait, three of them are Strong and the remainder are Good.

Claws: Strong
Coat: Strong
Face: Strong
Fangs: Good
Legs: Good
Tail: Best

Next, we come to the Naming of Cats, which is as T.S. Eliot wrote is a difficult matter.

Your cat has three names - the given name, or the name that men call him. His cat name - the name that cats call him, and finally, his secret name - the name that only he must know.

The given name is easy enough - Daisy.

I'm not bothering with a cat or secret name for this character, but I imagine that they should probably be in the style of the names from Old Possum's book of practical cats.

Cats have Reputations. You have seven points to spend on reputations, and none of them can be higher than three.

Daisy has the following reputations:

Rat-killer: 3 (Daisy Six-rats)
Ship's cat: 2
Sociable: 2

If a reputation is applicable to a roll you get to add its rating in dice to your trait and advantage (bonus dice given out by the GM) dice for that roll.

Cats have a number of magic points equal to 5 plus their Tail trait - in this case another 5 for a total of ten.

Finally, Cats have 9 lives which can be burnt to automatically succeed at a Risk or to avoid injury in a round.