Dreamlands Cat
Everyone knows about cats. They’re small, sometimes-obnoxious predators that people often keep as pets or exterminators. Cats are normally not a sapient species. Normally. Like humanoids, they have a dream life, but unlike most people, cats are aware of this dream life. Furthermore, while in their dreams, cats are as intelligent as humans, sometimes more so. Of course, they are still cats, with cat personalities and traits.
Even more remarkable, cats can freely pass physically from the waking world to the Dreamlands and back again. This means that they can either transfer between the dream and waking state in the normal humanoid way, by falling asleep and waking up, or they can physically move to the Dreamlands and back.
History
Cats traveling the Dreamlands run the full gamut from feral to domestic. However wild they might be, almost all player character cats have lived or currently live in and among humanoid communities. Such cats are likeliest to get along with other species and be willing to adventure with them.
Unlike other companion animals, cats almost certainly initiated the domestication process, so it is arguable that cats actually mastered humanoids, rather than the other way around. It has certainly been a successful partnership. In return for protection, shelter, and food, cats keep down the population of rodents and other pest animals in humanoid areas, which helps ward off both disease and famine. In addition, cats provide affection, companionship, elegance, and beauty to their humanoid families—at least, on their own terms. And during their languorous periods of rest, often with fewer interruptions thanks to the security of a humanoid home, they can walk the Dreamlands with enhanced mental acuity and reason.
Occasionally, a cat decides that it wants to spend its waking hours as well as its sleeping hours as a fully sapient being. When this happens, it becomes what is known as a Dreamlands cat, a suitable choice for a player character. Any cat may decide it wishes to be a Dreamlands cat and then take on that role for a time: sometimes just a few days, sometimes the rest of its life. Likewise, a Dreamlands cat may decide to return to its former life as a mundane cat. For those who know cats well, it comes as no surprise that such decisions seem to be made capriciously.
Humanoids cannot tell whether a particular cat is a Dreamlands cat based purely upon out-ward appearances. Typically, either the cat must inform them somehow or the humanoid has to figure it out by watching the cat take on tasks that would be impossible for a normal cat of animal intellect and awareness.
Playing a Cat
Cats are pretty much a “love ‘em or hate ‘em” type of creature. While some people can’t stand them, others can’t live without them, but few are neutral on the subject. Some people are even ailurophobes, making them neurotically afraid of cats. Even those who dislike or fear felines are sometimes willing to admit that cats are graceful, nimble, and often adorable.
If you’re a Dreamlands Cat, you likely...
· are busy, active, and aloof.
· are energetic when interesting things are going on but sleep soundly for hours when no action is afoot.
· occasionally insist other party members carry you. They may or may not mind.
· are quiet, curious, and interested in new things.
· hate cats’ natural enemies (dogs, mice, birds, whirring machines, string, and so on).
· are easily distracted (see natural enemies).
· are highly athletic and can move fast when you want to.
Others Probably...
· are not always sure if you are sapient or not. (“Is it a normal cat? Can I talk to it?”)
· think you are cute but possibly useless. (“Aww… it licked my eye. Eww...”)
· try to pet or otherwise annoy you when you are busy, forcing you to teach them a lesson about personal boundaries.
· misconstrue your thought processes.
Physiology
Cats are highly sensitive, agile, and much smaller than characters of other ancestries. They are typically between 15 and 21 inches long from nose to base of tail and 8 to 13 inches tall at the shoulder.
Cats have extraordinarily keen senses, including excellent detection of motion in low light. Their one defect in this regard is an inability to taste sweetness. When a cat eats cantaloupe or other sweet items it does not taste the sugar and instead reacts to savory flavors, assuming there are any. Cats can’t see in complete darkness, but they can rely on their sense of touch, which is amplified by their whiskers, to feel their way around a darkened area.
Cats do not have rigid collarbones, so they can squeeze through any space through which their heads will fit. Because a cat’s whiskers are as long as its shoulders are wide, the whiskers also serve an additional purpose in indicating whether the cat can fit through a particular opening.
Cats are highly vocal when needed, and humanoids seem to need a wider variety of sounds than cats do. Normal cats have more than 100 different vocal-izations. Of course, Dreamlands cats have the same vocal apparatus, but with their greater intellect, they can string different sounds together to create more nuanced meanings.
Unlike many other predators, cats are exclusively carnivorous. Their teeth are designed only for cutting and devouring flesh, so chewing up bread or vegetables is a clumsy affair. Feline digestive tracts are not adapted to process such food either, and a cat deprived of meat will quickly suffer significant health issues.
The Gates of Slumber
When encountered in the Dreamlands, all cats are Dreamlands cats: intelligent and fully sapient beings with feline instincts, behavior, and skills.
Dreamlands cats spend so much time asleep because that is when they enter the Dreamlands and become fully intelligent. Their waking lives are somewhat of an afterthought, intended as an opportunity to seek affection, to mate, to fuel their bodies, and for rest and relaxation. Most of their activities take place during sleep.
A cat can always choose whether to enter the Dreamlands or the waking world, either physically or mentally. Most of the time, a cat enters the Dreamlands mentally and leaves its body behind, asleep.
When a cat enters the Dreamlands physically, it travels through the Gates of Slumber, a dimensional portal imperceptible to most beings. When doing so, the cat is no longer present in the waking world. Cats can only do this when they are completely unobserved. The Gates of Slumber are actual physical locations, but they are typically open at many places at once and move around, so they are not always in the same spot. Sometimes, they may be behind a backyard fence, or perhaps they might be found in an abandoned badger burrow, or else up a spooky old tree. Only cats know for sure, as they seem to be drawn to these gates that only they can perceive. Humanoids can only tell the cat has left physically when, for instance, the cat runs into the attic and doesn’t return for a day or so. Most assume this simply means the cat is hiding somewhere they can’t find.
A cat wishing to enter the Dreamlands must physically locate the Gates of Slumber and can only pass through when entirely unobserved.
A cat cannot simply escape to the Dreamlands when it is, for example, caught in a trap or imprisoned. Cats can only perform this form of travel when they have free and unrestricted movement.
Back to the Waking World
A cat in the Dreamlands can always choose whether it wishes to return to the waking world mentally or physically, regardless of how it got to the Dreamlands. When a cat returns from the Dreamlands, it always returns to its physical body in the waking world.
If a cat returns physically to the waking world, regardless of how it entered the Dreamlands, it returns through the Gates of Slumber, which always lead to a location within 1 mile of where the cat left.
If a cat went to the Dreamlands mentally and returns mentally, it wakes up in the waking world wherever it left.
If the cat entered the Dreamlands physically but returns mentally, its body reappears where it entered the Dreamlands or at an unobserved location within 1 mile.
A cat cannot otherwise use Dreamlands travel to move its physical body. The cat does not control where the Gates of Slumber manifest in the waking world, and so it cannot direct its return like some form of teleportation magic.
Between the Dimensions
While a cat is in the Dreamlands, it can travel much farther and faster than it could while waking. For example, it can leap to the moon and back from the earth’s surface in the Dreamlands. It can even travel to the stars beyond, but this is dangerous, for terrible things lurk out in that darkness.
When in the Dreamlands, cats might meet unusual entities and objects, particularly if they travel far from the places they know well. A cat may well visit the Dreamlands, fill up on eating pixies, and then return sparkling with pixie dust. A Dreamlands cat may encounter an entity none was meant to see and might never return—or be profoundly changed by the experience.
Family and Life Cycle
While cats often regard other cats as friends or recognize them as relatives, they are fundamentally solitary creatures. Tomcats wrangle over desirable mates, then depart to live alone. A mother cat has a powerful love of her kittens and will die to protect them. But even for her, once a kitten grows up and moves on, that consuming love fades and is replaced by a lower level of affection. Cats often settle into unexpected, chosen families, frequently with beings that are not cats, such as their humanoid companions or adventuring bands.
The mother trains and teaches her kittens how to hunt, where to hide, and all about her habitat, so the kittens reach adulthood with a near-perfect understanding of the area around their home and the creatures and wildlife that populate it.
At 12 weeks, though they are not fully grown, kittens are fully socialized and able to leave their mother. Most cats are considered to have reached adolescence by the age of 6 months.
In the wild, cats can live upwards of 16 years, though many die in the dangerous outdoors earlier than that. In a safer environment, such as a humanoid’s home, they typically live 13 to 18 years. Dreamlands cats, on the other hand, tend to live longer than those who spend less time sapient in the waking world, and may live upwards of 25 years.
Language and Society
As normally solitary and often capricious hunters, cats don’t really have a society in the humanoid sense of the word. Cats may live in large groups but do not cooperatively hunt or organize. With their greater intelligence, Dreamlands cats can work together to go to war, gather for raids, and hold celebrations. Dreamlands cats have been known to form an effective militia of sorts, including military ranks, to proactively defend themselves from organized enemies such as zoogs and moon-beasts.
The cat vocal apparatus is not built very well to speak humanoid languages. However, cats are perfectly capable of understanding these languages, and they can learn any of the languages spoken in their home area. Other people must learn the Cat language to understand their fickle feline companions. Fortunately, the Cat language is easy to learn. In fact, most people who live with a cat are halfway there already. A one-week association with a specific cat allows a character to understand that cat without needing to learn the Cat language. This does not allow them to understand other cats unless they spend a week with those cats as well. The character can spend one week with multiple cats and understand them all after that week.
Communicating with cats is a combination of learning what some of their meows and whines mean and understanding patterns of behavior. A Dreamlands cat understands what party members are saying, and soon enough those party members usually learn how to talk with the cat.
The Cat language has no written form. Its words sound like meows, hisses, and yowls. Since non-cats have such difficulty with the sounds, cats generally prefer others to use equivalent words and names in their own language rather than trying and failing to use Cat correctly. When a cat speaks, it meows or caterwauls, but when humanoids speak to cats, they speak in their normal tongues. It is quite a different situation from most communication, in which both parties must speak the same tongue to get anything done.
Otherworld Cats
Many other worlds have feline organisms of their own. This is so common that researchers theorize that somewhere there exists a sort of ur-cat, the basic cat upon which all other cats are based.
Cats from different worlds are often unfriendly toward one another. In fact, it is quite common for them to live in a state of low-level warfare.
Alignment and Faith
Dreamlands cats are disinterested in societal expectations and view each relationship as a unique arrangement distinct from all others. They are most often chaotic. Cats have a spiritual nature and often seem to commune with the Beyond. They have gods, but instead of worshiping them, they try to live in harmony with them. Usually, these gods are known to and sometimes worshiped by the local humanoids, particularly if they value cats for religious reasons. For example, Bastet is a well-known goddess of cats, and other worlds (and other cultures) have similar entities.
Cats sometimes feel a pull toward spiritual life and are known to serve alongside priests of compatible gods for their purposes. Many worship sites have a cat that keeps out vermin and accompanies the priests on their rounds. These cats, when they choose to be Dreamlands cats, often become clerics
Culture
Cats in the material world don’t have a true culture in the sense that humanoids do. Instead, cats live for the now and participate in the culture of their humanoid neighbors. Even the intelligent Dreamlands cats use their greater brain power to simply adapt to their environment to better enjoy their lives as cats.
Cats are not typically materialistic: they do not keep much in the way of equipment or possessions. Part of this is practical, as cats lack prehensile hands or any real means of manipulating objects, rendering them unable to create material items. Without a specially constructed harness, they can only carry small objects for short distances in their mouths. And cats are also naturally passive creatures, taking what is offered to them, like food or affection, and assuming it will be offered again in the future.
Cats who do not live with people may have a den, but even this is not constructed by the cat itself: it is merely a hole or hollow tree in which the cat finds shelter from the elements.
Relations
Fundamentally, cats are friendly to humanoids—or at least those who keep cats as companion animals. Of course, even within these societies, there are those who dislike cats, and cats are usually keenly aware of who likes them and who does not. Often, a cat will pay special attention to someone they can tell does not like cats, as a way of keeping that person off balance. In the Dreamlands, cats often have tense relationships with zoogs.
Adventurers
Cats sometimes adventure, most often with humanoid companions, to feed their curiosity and to contain threats to their chosen territory. Cat adventurers like to point out that they cost nothing when staying at an inn and can often feed themselves, catching small rodents, bats, insects, or birds. They are clean and neat and take up little space. When traveling in areas where cats find it hard to go (such as up sheer cliffs), the cat can be easily carried in a pouch or on a shoulder. They are incredibly convenient as companions, and of course, a cat that can cast spells or scout has obvious value.
Playing Dreamlands Cats
Of the ancestries presented in this book, cats have perhaps the most physical challenges integrating into the party of typical humanoid adventurers but adjust very well to the temperament and mental nature of such a group, unlike ghouls, gnorri, or zoogs, whose mere presence can frighten or disturb the unprepared.
Note that the cat’s size and lack of hands make certain class choices challenging to play or even downright impossible, but other choices can result in characters of great efficacy. Cats make poor alchemists, due to their lack of hands. Most cat barbarians, champions, fighters, and rangers depend on the Precise Bite feat to compensate for a poor Strength and must account for being unable to wield ranged weapons. Cats make successful monks (substituting powerful paws for powerful fist), effective rogues (especially with the thief racket), and crafty spellcasters.
Dreamlands Cat Rules
Your Dreamlands cat character has animal traits that present you with challenges but also grant you many benefits. You are a beast, not a humanoid, so spells that specifically target humanoids (such as 1st-level charm) fail to target you.
Rarity
· Rare
Ability Boosts
· Dexterity
· Free
· One other determined by your heritage
Languages
· Cat
· The language of a nearby community (generally Common) and additional languages equal to your Intelligence modifier (if it’s positive). Choose from any local common language, Aklo, Gnorri, or Zoog. You can’t speak or write any language other than Cat without magical assistance, but you can learn to read and understand them. Anyone who has spent a week interacting with you regularly can understand your speech and signing, though not those of other cats.
Traits
· Beast
· Cat
Dreamlands Travel
You can physically travel to the Dreamlands via one of the many hidden Gates of Slumber. These gates shift and change their locations over time and may only exist in one space for a few seconds. You can attempt to sense a nearby Gate of Slumber at will; whether or not a Gate of Slumber is present is subject to the GM’s discretion (typically, there’s a 20% chance of a Gate of Slumber being somewhere within a 1-mile radius). If a Gate of Slumber exists, you know instinctively where it is. Only a Dreamlands cat can traverse a Gate of Slumber. Gates of Slumber always manifest in hidden, obscure areas, and are rarely in a convenient place when you need to travel to the Dreamlands, such as when trapped or in sudden danger. Except in unusual cases, you cannot generally return to the physical world farther than 1 mile from where you left. Whenever you return to your body from the Dreamlands, you can choose to return with Intelligence 2 (perhaps to protect your mind from disturbing discoveries or to thwart mind reading) or with your full Dreamlands intellect intact. You can take any objects you wear or carry with you to or from the Dreamlands.
While in the Dreamlands, you can use the Moon Jump activity (see below).
Moon Jump 【双动作】
Concentrate, Conjuration, Move, Occult, Teleportation
Requirements You are in the Dreamlands and aren’t fatigued.
You leap into the night sky and travel to a moon you can see. If you are on a moon, you can also jump to the nearest planet you can see. After 10 feet of vertical travel, you enter a demiplane, a small separate plane of existence, until you arrive 2d6 minutes later. A group of four Dreamlands cats can bring a single creature up to one size larger with them when they Moon Jump, while a group of eight Dreamlands cats can bring a single creature up to two sizes larger with them. When you use Moon Jump to return to a planet or moon you left via Moon Jump, you return to within 1 mile of where you departed that planet or moon. If you use this ability more than once before making daily preparations, you become fatigued.
Low-Light Vision
You can see in dim light as though it were bright light, so you ignore the concealed condition due to dim light.
Item Melding
You can meld a magic weapon, a held magic item, any clothing, or any magic item with the invested trait permanently into your body when you wear or carry it into the Dreamlands. If it requires investment, you must invest it to meld with it. When you meld with an item, it permanently vanishes and becomes a part of your body until you separate it, perhaps manifesting as a differently colored patch of fur or a glowing tattoo.
A melded magic item can’t be damaged directly, other than by damaging you, but removing the matching body part ends the item’s benefit until that body part is reattached (generally by magic like regenerate). A melded item’s magic aura can still be detected normally. A single body part can’t have multiple items melded into it. When leaving the Dreamlands, you can choose to separate the item from your body en route. If your investment in a melded item ends, it remains melded but you lose all its effects until you invest it again.
Any observer can notice your body part is unusual by succeeding at a DC 15 Perception check.
The item can be identified with a successful skill check to Identify Magic, but the DC is 3 higher than it would normally be. Melded runes remain visible on your fur, fangs, or other appropriate body parts and can be removed as normal from a magic weapon or armor.
When you use a polymorph effect to assume a form that could normally wear or wield the melded items, those items appear on your person or in your hand (your choice). They return to being melded into your form when you change into your natural form or another form that can’t wield them. If you are not holding or carrying the items when you return to your cat form or another form that can’t wield them, they cease to be melded with you.
See below for rules on specific types of magic items; you can’t meld with a magic item that doesn’t fit into one of the listed categories.
· ARMOR When you merge armor (including adventurer’s clothing), it melds into a pattern of fur on your back and underside. You must be trained in using a suit of armor to meld with it. You are treated as wearing the armor in all respects. You can suppress or resume the armor’s effects by taking consecutive concentrate actions for the length of time normally required to don or doff it.
· HELD ITEM When you merge a held item, it melds with one of your eyes. That eye glimmers with some magical feature (such as flames) that is symbolically appropriate for the item. You can use the melded item as if it were held in one of your paws.
· WEAPON When you merge a weapon, it melds into either your jaws or both sets of front claws. All magic properties of the weapon (but not the weapon’s base physical statistics) apply to your unarmed strike using that body part.
· WORN ITEM When you merge a worn wondrous item, it melds with the fur on a matching area of your body. You are constantly treated as wearing the item. As a concentrate action, you can treat the item as if you were no longer wearing it until you use another concentrate action to treat it as if you were wearing it again.
Cat Equipment
You are limited in the type of magic items and equipment you can use. As you have no hands, you cannot use items that require hands (such as wielding a manufactured weapon or shield). You can hold items in your mouth well enough to aim a wand or carry another Tiny object. You can wear armor if it is tailored to fit your feline form. You can wear and benefit from magical rings, belts, goggles, gloves, boots, bracers, amulets, cloaks, and similar items, which magically adjust themselves to your size and shape when you invest them. Cat spellcasters often create variants on magic items designed to be worn as earrings. You can speak a magic item’s command word in Cat to activate it even if it normally requires another language, and you can speak Cat even while carrying something in your mouth.
Cat Spellcasting
You can provide somatic components for spells by moving your tail and whiskers. You can provide verbal components for spells with normal cat sounds. If a spell requires a material or focus component, you can hold it in your mouth, which does not interfere with providing verbal components. Alternatively, you can use a material or focus component you can touch in your space so long as the component isn’t carried by a creature unwilling to let you use the component.