Cat People Race?

[Tywyll]

Has any version of BRP/Runequest ever had Cat folk/people statted out? I can't think of any but before I reinvent the wheel for one of my players, I was wondering if such existed out there or had been made for someone's homebrew?

It won't be difficult to make for myself, but just curious. 

[muminalver]

Drakar och Demoner had catfolk, if I'm recalling correctly.

But i do not remember any other game...

Openquest 2 has beastfolk...

Easiest way would be openquest 2 beastfolk add litte dex subtract some siz, add vision and claw attack ( bonus on climbing)

And you're done..

[Joerg]

Ringworld had the Kzinti.

[colinabrett]

A Traveller conversion written by Stefan Matthias Aust, edited by Shannon Appel, and published in the Chaosium Digest (Vol 6, Number 5) statted the Aslan, lion-like creatures. Aslan were basically Human with the following modifiers: STR 3D6+2, SIZ 2D6+6, though it did say that male Aslan might have INT 2D6+4.

Colin

[seneschal]

Yes, Aslan are sex differentiated.  Males are the big, brawny warriors and landowners who — while sentient — may have less than human intelligence.  Females are much smaller and slimmer (but still dangerous combatants) but have all the brains in the family — conducting business, science and diplomacy on behalf of their husbands and other male relatives.  Because the Aslan are so large they don’t (in Traveller) get any bonus to their DEXterity.

The Tiger Men From Mars (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) started out very much like bipedal tigers in medieval armor but gradually morphed into a much more human-like form (in sort of a Thundercats way), able to disguise themselves as human with the right clothing and cosmetics.  They weren’t necessarily stronger than humans but were very agile and sure-footed and were able to see in the dark — all of which made it easy for their scouting party to spy on and steal technology from the recently liberated Americans.  Their subsequent invasion of Earth launched Buck Rogers into interplanetary space and away from its previous post-apocalyptic storylines.

If the Kizinti and Aslan are savage brutes, the Tiger Men are the consummate conniving sneaks, talking friendship and cooperation while planning to stab those gullible humans in the back.  (Sorry about ruining your childhoods but all that heroic Lion-O stuff was just Tiger Man propaganda intended to subvert American youth!). 😱

Edited April 11, 2019 by seneschal

[g33k]

If none of the above work, you could just grab something like D&D "Tabaxi" and add a SIZ and pretty much done...

[Ethereal]

Other Suns (if you can find a copy) has 'H'Reli' a bipedal felinoid species and the 'Sanchenzii', vagually resembling Lions. Also 6 Charts  describing various animals and how to figure out their stats. The authors  name is Niall Shapero.

[seneschal]

Tiger Man:  DEX 2d6+12, Move:  12, Fast Talk, Night Vision, Failings:  Disdainful of other sentient species

[ORtrail]

On 4/10/2019 at 8:49 PM, Joerg said:

Ringworld had the Kzinti.

I love me some Kzinti, but they would be overpowered in a lot of campaigns.  From the Ringworld Explorer book:

STR   5D6+12

MAS  4D6+10

CON  2D6+6

INT    3D6

POW 2D6+6

DEX  2D6+12

APP  2D6+6

[svensson]

[This is me not going into a tirade /rant about catgirls, Omaha the Cat Dancer, fuzzies and anime pervs...]

[This is me reminding myself that my beloved Traveller game has a long history of 'dog people' in the Vargr and 'cat-ish' people in the Aslan]

[This is me recognizing that all this is all somewhat hypocritical, but also acknowledging the *ick* factor]

[Your mileage undoubtedly varies]

Edited April 12, 2019 by svensson

[seneschal]

43 minutes ago, svensson said:

[This is me not going into a tirade /rant about catgirls, Omaha the Cat Dancer, fuzzies and anime pervs...]

[This is me remember that my beloved Traveller game has a long history of 'dog people' in the Vargr and 'cat-ish' people in the Aslan]

[This is me recognizing that all this is all somewhat hypocritical, but also acknowledging the *ick* factor]

[Your mileage undoubtedly varies]

It is all Buck Rogers’ fault.  He had cat people human enough to tempt interspecies romance decades before Andre  Norton’s “Plague Ship” or Batman’s Selina Kyle or Japanese animation or “Cat Women of the Moon” or Cheetara on Saturday mornings.  And his imitator/competitor Flash Gordon introduced Lion Men.  It’s a legit science fiction trope.

At least the Kizinti aren’t cute and snuggly.  (5d6+12 STR, 4d6+10 SIZ ???  You gotta be kidding me!  Even real-life sabertooth tigers aren’t that tough. How do they cram themselves into a spaceship cockpit? A giant plunger?)

[svensson]

25 minutes ago, seneschal said:

It is all Buck Rogers’ fault.  He had cat people human enough to tempt interspecies romance decades before Andre  Norton’s “Plague Ship” or Batman’s Selina Kyle or Japanese animation or “Cat Women of the Moon” or Cheetara on Saturday mornings.  And his imitator/competitor Flash Gordon introduced Lion Men.  It’s a legit science fiction trope.

At least the Kizinti aren’t cute and snuggly.  (5d6+12 STR, 4d6+10 SIZ ???  You gotta be kidding me!  Even real-life sabertooth tigers aren’t that tough. How do they cram themselves into a spaceship cockpit? A giant plunger?)

Well, my main impression of the Kzinti is of a mangy group of derps-in-space in an old Star Trek Animated Series episode...

Kinda hard to take them real serious after that.

 

Edited April 12, 2019 by svensson

[svensson]

But to your main point, yes, EVERY sci-fi franchise and IP seems to have anthromophic species in it. Cat-, Dog-, Bear-, Ferret-, Whatever-'people' that we're all supposed to take seriously.

Fair being fair, Anderson's Kzinti [and Traveller's Aslan for that matter] do not behave as cats beyond some surface behaviors any more than humans behave like monkeys [although you could make a real argument for Facebook being the 21st Century's equivalent of baboons throwing poop....]

[seneschal]

The aliens couldn’t be TOO cat-like.  Otherwise they’d sleep 98% of the time and never get around to conquering vast swaths of the known universe.

Poor animated Star Trek Kizinti!!  That’s what happens when those Starfleet SJWs get their hooks in a noble carnivore race.  🙀

[svensson]

"I was once acquainted with an officer of Royal Artillery. The man owned a tom-cat that he'd named 'Imperial Cavalry' because, he said,  all the damned thing ever did was eat, drink, fornicate, and groom itself..."

--Rudyard Kipling

[David Scott]

On 4/11/2019 at 12:05 AM, Tywyll said:

Has any version of BRP/Runequest ever had Cat folk/people statted out?

Let's not forget the H'Reli of Niall Shapero's Other Suns

[Tywyll]

19 hours ago, seneschal said:

Yes, Aslan are sex differentiated.  Males are the big, brawny warriors and landowners who — while sentient — may have less than human intelligence.  Females are much smaller and slimmer (but still dangerous combatants) but have all the brains in the family — conducting business, science and diplomacy on behalf of their husbands and other male relatives.  Because the Aslan are so large they don’t (in Traveller) get any bonus to their DEXterity.

That's funny! My Kzin race (name stolen from the Kzinti) always had that exact sexual dimorphism, but I don't know where I got that idea (or if I came up with it). Might have been my own love for characters like Tigra and Cheetara that influenced my 16-17 yo self (these go waaay back before 'Catgirls' became a thing). 

19 hours ago, seneschal said:

The Tiger Men From Mars (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) started out very much like bipedal tigers in medieval armor but gradually morphed into a much more human-like form (in sort of a Thundercats way), able to disguise themselves as human with the right clothing and cosmetics.  They weren’t necessarily stronger than humans but were very agile and sure-footed and were able to see in the dark — all of which made it easy for their scouting party to spy on and steal technology from the recently liberated Americans.  Their subsequent invasion of Earth launched Buck Rogers into interplanetary space and away from its previous post-apocalyptic storylines.

Oh interesting. Is this from the original books, comic strips, or some other source?

19 hours ago, seneschal said:

If the Kizinti and Aslan are savage brutes, the Tiger Men are the consummate conniving sneaks, talking friendship and cooperation while planning to stab those gullible humans in the back.  (Sorry about ruining your childhoods but all that heroic Lion-O stuff was just Tiger Man propaganda intended to subvert American youth!). 😱

😂

[seneschal]

Tiger Man info from reprints of the original Buck Rogers newspaper strip, circa 1930.  They arrived in spherical spaceships (propulsion method never explained) and were armed with staff-like force beam projectors that could pummel an opponent or pin him to a wall or floor.  They coveted human anti-gravity and projectile weapon technology and also kidnapped friends of Rogers to take back home.  The Americans had already built rocket-propelled aircraft held aloft by inertron (sort of like rocket-powered dirigibles), so Buck persuaded Dr. Huer to construct a space-worthy ship in order to pursue the feline marauders.

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, svensson said:

But to your main point, yes, EVERY sci-fi franchise and IP seems to have anthromophic species in it. Cat-, Dog-, Bear-, Ferret-, Whatever-'people' that we're all supposed to take seriously.

Unless they have only the budget for slight latex add-ons to the faces, like Star Trek. The Ewoks of Star Wars are the equivalent of the ducks in Glorantha - diminutive, ridiculous, mean.

The Other Suns "aliens" were just cheesy.

3 hours ago, svensson said:

Fair being fair, Anderson's Kzinti [and Traveller's Aslan for that matter] do not behave as cats beyond some surface behaviors any more than humans behave like monkeys [although you could make a real argument for Facebook being the 21st Century's equivalent of baboons throwing poop....]

The Kzinti are part of Niven's Known Space universe. Anderson had various cat-like humanoids encountered by Dominic Flandry (complete with primate-like mammalia in one case, IIRC), and also earlier a Cynthian ("dog-sized, bushy tailed and white furred except for a blue mask effect around the eyes") as one of the three crew members of David Falkayn's ship.

The lion pride social structure apparently has its appeal for a carnivorous species with sexual dimorphism,  like the Hani in the Chanur cycle. Niven's Kzinti with their females bred to not being able to speak are a weird inversion of that trope. But then the Gloranthan trolls are not that different except for the gender reversal.

The Space Opera genre seems to humor the human habit for pattern recognition in its description of aliens. It usually has way too many chordate species, though. Even if you allow for a great number of endo-skeleton species, the chordata are a fairly unlikely candidate during the Cambrian Explosion to become a dominant life-form on the water planet, and having the spine as a carrying construct is plain bad engineering by evolution.

[seneschal]

But the H’Reli are so cuuuuuute!  Awwwwww!

[svensson]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Unless they have only the budget for slight latex add-ons to the faces, like Star Trek. The Ewoks of Star Wars are the equivalent of the ducks in Glorantha - diminutive, ridiculous, mean.

 

No matter how clever they are at log rolling, I just can't take a teddy bear with the linguistics of Jar-Jar Binks seriously. At least H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy Sapiens had a culture.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

The Other Suns "aliens" were just cheesy.

True words, man. If you want a definition for 'phoning it in' just look at OS' race and culture stuff. Which is sad because political and naval stuff wasn't bad.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

The Kzinti are part of Niven's Known Space universe. Anderson had various cat-like humanoids encountered by Dominic Flandry (complete with primate-like mammalia in one case, IIRC), and also earlier a Cynthian ("dog-sized, bushy tailed and white furred except for a blue mask effect around the eyes") as one of the three crew members of David Falkayn's ship.

Whoops. My bad. Got Poul Anderson and Larry Niven mixed up.

15 minutes ago, seneschal said:

 

[ORtrail]

I feel like the old SPI Universe RPG is the only space RPG I have that didn't have the usual cat/dog/reptile aliens.  Oh, and the even more rare Journeyman RPG too. 

A big part of this is how warm and fuzzy the cat race is.  No one could think a hulking Kzinti with those fangs, claws, flattened ears, and rat-like tail is anything but an apex predator.  At the other end of the scale is the H'Reli. 

Edited April 12, 2019 by ORtrail

[seneschal]

Originally, Traveller was a humans-only situation, much like Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” setting.  Yeah, there were weird cultures out there but the aliens were us.  The non-humans got added later.  In fact, three of the official aliens — Vilani, Solomani, Zhodani — are human. 

For non-standard aliens check out Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Sure, his slinky space princesses are of the bumpy forehead variety but he also gave us insectoid hordes (Green Martians) and quadruped carnivores (Va-gas, The Moon Maid).

So, has the OP selected a favorite cat type yet?  Inquiring whiskers want to know.

[svensson]

Just now, seneschal said:

Originally, Traveller was a humans-only situation, much like Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” setting.  Yeah, there were weird cultures out there but the aliens were us.  The non-humans got added later.  In fact, three of the official aliens — Vilani, Solomani, Zhodani — are human.

But the great thing about Traveller was that Miller, Ford, Chadwick, the Keith Bros. and co. specifically constructed the humans with distinctly different cultural imperatives. And, by the by, the stereotypical Evil Humans were from Terra!

Miller commented that as the aliens were introduced, they got weirder and weirder... the uplifted canines of the Vargr, then the Aslan 'lion-samurai', then the militant vegetarian K'Kree, then the stagnant, caste-driven Droyne 'bug-bats', and lastly, my personal favorite, the Hivers. And I don't know of one major sci-fi IP with a major race as absolutely weird as the Hivers [aka, 'the Squigglers']

[seneschal]

Somehow in all this, we’ve got to incorporate Third Earth’s sheep-based aliens in the mix — if only so a short but brawny warrior can shake his horns at the player-characters and demand, “What are ewe looking at, Bub?”

Edited April 12, 2019 by seneschal