caffeinated bear!

Based on the metaphysics of the universe as presented in OotS, with the idea that StarClan is memory incarnate and all, I've always thought it'd be fascinating to play with StarClan cats morphing to fit the majority perception of their memory from cats down below.

In my rewrite concept I play around with ocassionally this is already kind of a major theme explored, how the past can be distorted and wielded as a tool, for good and ill alike.

Firestar is only ever shown through the eyes of others, more often than not as an idealized already dead hero whose origins are swept under the rug best they can be. Mudclaw goes from being remembered as a villain to a figure of resistance against an unpopular leader to a full blown folk hero who manages to ascend after Onestar is no longer there to deny him a funeral. And if I go further I'm sure I'll find more places for it.

But I also like to think about in the smaller less grandiose ways as well. How the shifting memory of an individual as the people who knew them personally start to die and it's their stories that remain.

A warrior who enters StarClan at the peak of their youth, sustained by all the stories of his successes in their glory days slowly aging back up as the generation who tells those stories becomes outnumbered by the generation only ever knew him as the cool grandpa the apprentices didn't mind that much having to spend time taking care of.

Or the reverse, a cat who enters into StarClan with a body bearing the marks of a life lived to the very end slowly aging backwards until they're a spry young warrior, or even an apprentice, as their largely uneventful life fades from memory leaving only that one very memorable anecdote from the spring of their life.

The tragedy of an apprentice granted a warrior name while they were on their dying breath may be forgotten, or even deliberately written over, prompting them to age to young adulthood to when they would've gotten their warrior name.

A certain physical feature of a cat may become more prominent as their story gets told and retold and that particular feature becomes an iconic part of how they are remembered. (Yellowfang being canonically just utterly flea-ridden in the afterlife comes to mind particularly for this. It annoys the shit out of her how much the exaggeration has made it worse.)

Imagine entirely ficitious cats coming to existence in StarClan as the stories they were created for become confused for real tales. Or a StarClan warrior shifting to be more of a fairy tale archetype than a fully rounded person as they get flanderized by the transmission of their stories.

ah. its painful

i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children

with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies

whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series

Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.

It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.

The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:

A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body. She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.

A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.

A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.

A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:

A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration. It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.

Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).

Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.

An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.

An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.

Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs. The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see). I should draw them sometime. IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.

Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)

Cats disembowel 'on-screen'

There actually was a cougar menacing the cats

for a while everyone thought one of the clan's leaders had rabies. Turns out he was possessed by his wife's dead stalker(I stopped reading before this happened)

Cat heaven and cat hell decided to duke it out and dragged the living cats into it

One noteable character got her face ripped off by dogs

A cat learned how to control dogs

fire

The second series was about the cats having to move because humans had decided they needed to bulldoze the forest they started in

disease outbreaks. So many disease outbreaks.

Assassinations

TNR's been alluded to

The very first main character joined the clan cats for the sake of his fireballs(IYKYK)

One of the cats travels to the past and meets a possibly eldritch cat being

Sometimes a bird snatches a cat and they just have to deal with it

Also kitty bigotry. So much kitty bigotry.

I'm honestly genuinely pleased at the level of gritty realism about the horrors of being an outdoor cat because that's the sort of thing that embeds itself in a young person's mind and makes them never let their own cats out.

Actually the RP might have been nicer than the books because the Trashcan (it was trashcan after all) was getting hit with mass death so often they literally could not afford to do Cat Bigotry, and had plenty of external threats to hate on.

I'm not sure what the timescale of WC is because I am curious about the relative death tolls of each.

There were about 12 players playing an average of 5 characters at any time, but I was called in when the average got over 8 PCs per player, so like, I'd start with a colony of 100-120 PCs and was expected to bring that number down to like, 20. Each antagonist arc I did played out over one week to three months in-game, and I think I calculated the average death rate to be a little over 21 cats per week across all of them. The Horse had the highest kill rate at 26 cats in 3 days (I was on dental surgery drugs last night and couldn't do math), but the Dogs had the highest total kill count, taking a colony of 150 cats down to 8 over the span of three months, with one session spanning one month in-game and running through 100 total/3 entire generations of cats.

My antagonists weren't meant to be defeated, they were meant to be dealt with- by leaving the area, coming to a truce, changing the way the colony operates etc. The Game Master's antagonists were meant to be killed or dealt with without as serious a death toll, but sometimes the dice would decide otherwise, which was part of the fun. She made some great ones like:

Trashclan was looking for a new home when they found this beautiful woodland area and abandoned factory thing full of slow, dim-witted prey and absolutely no humans for miles and miles. Paradise, really, except for the ghost cats that looked like rotting corpses that seemed absolutely determined to not let them settle in the area, causing disasters, possessing PCs and general terrorism. Trashclan tried to hold their ground against what they thought were cats that had been banished to cat hell, until one of the medicine cats managed to commune with one of the ghosts to ask what their fucking problem was. Best in-game use of the "This is not a place of honor" warning ever.

The game was taking place in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Like, far enough after the apocalypse that there were cities and civilization again, but there very much had been a major apocalypse.

The Moonpool develops a Carbon Monoxide leak from vegetation rotting under the mud.

Just straight-up Growltiger from Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. Years before the movie, so look up the stage musical.

Also the Great Rumpus Cat from the same musical

She used a lot of the characters from CATS as NPCs. And the lore as the basis for the afterlife lore of the American warrior cats. So rather than going to the star place, Trashclan believed they would go to the Heavyside Lair.

An Alien Invasion Force lands and the cats save Earth when they eat the 6-inch tall would-be colonizers. There were a lot of them and they had laser guns, but there were a lot of very hungry cats too. Some of the PCs developed alien mutations from eating too many aliens tho.

Not an antagonist per se, but the GM and two of the players got very, very deep into the science of feline inbreeding so they could have a realistic incest mechanic and I think one of them ended up publishing a scientific paper about it because they had done all that research, they might as well get that grant money.

Godzilla, who actually turned out to be a major boon for Trashclan because he laid waste to the city with the TNR volunteers and opened up a bunch of new territory for them. He was grated godhood and ascended to part of their panthe(r)on.

note: I (the owner of this blog and maker of wheels) am not into warrior cats! I just thought this would be fun to make

Figlia del Lago (Daughter of the Lake)

btw, idk if this will be seen by any of the countless people who already have seen and reblogged this post, but heres the original guide posted on how to make the chibi-rocky! the OP also has a separate guide for a more accurate rocky, though obviously less simple of a guide than the little thingy shown off