ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF PUTTING A CAT IN YOUR GAME

Chris and I have been writing Salt on and off since we stopped writing Heart, as I alluded to in a previous post, so during that time it’s gone through a lot of different shapes - the first serious draft, which was probably the third total, was very piratey. 

As such, a lot of the class ideas - and usually we start with the classes, as the main frames through which the players will be interacting with the game - were appropriately damp and salty. We had druids of living ships. We had weather witches, for sailing better. We had a man who was legally married to the ship’s cannon and could drive it around. I wrote down the words “SEAGULL WARLOCK.” We had a bard/brawler variant called a Shantyman.

And, most importantly, we had the Nekomancer.

The Nekomancer (working title) is an extrapolation between the marriage of the two ideas that a) a ship’s cat is a thing and b) cats do weird things sometimes so they have a reputation for being plugged into some mysterious otherworld. (There’s a good bit in Spares, Michael Marshall Smith’s capitalist dystopian novel, that sees specialised military units enter mythical places and forgotten dimensions by following a cat that doesn’t know they’re there.)

So the Nekomancer is a dude with a cat that can see dead people. The name is (I feel) a pretty decent pun pairing Necromancer and Neko, the Japanese word for cat; I think it might have been the pun that set Chris against the concept entirely, and I don’t blame him. The class reads as a joke, and it’s one-note, and it’s one-trick. You have a cat. It can do ghost stuff. Try not to lose it. 

LIKE CATS AND DOGS

Conversely, I loved the Nekomancer. I come from a family of cat lovers: my dad, who’s living out his final years in the middle of nowhere in south Portugal, attracts them as a matter of course. He is so gentle and kind and uncritical of cats; I think, sometimes, it would have been better for both parties if I’d been born a beautiful blameless mog and not the difficult, disagreeable person that I am. But it probably would have been quite distressing for mum if I'd come out with fur on, so swings and roundabouts really.

Growing up I had anywhere between one and seven cats at any given time, every single one of them a cast-off from someone else - either adopted formally, or another stray welcomed into the collective - and I am not only very fond of the little buggers but used to them doing their own thing. We lived in the countryside; sometimes a cat would wander off for a couple of weeks and come back missing a chunk of ear. Others quite literally slept upon dad’s right hand. 

I have two cats myself, themselves rescues - two and a half if you count the handsome long-haired interloper Odin from two streets over who spends most afternoons asleep on our bed - and, you know, they’re all fine. I don’t want to talk about my cats a great deal, because I can usually sense the other person getting bored hearing about them or - much worse - waiting to interject with their own anecdote about their own cats, and Christ if I don’t care about other people’s cats. 

(Listen, while I’ve got you: you can only tell me if your cat does something disgusting or irritating or wrong. I can share the burden of having a paranoid predator living in your house, and how they love to try and eat a mouse they found and then puke up half of it on your coat. I can happily listen to you complain about how wretched their awful condensed turds are and how keen they are on spraying acrid piss in hard-to-clean places. Or the hair everywhere. Or the night-terror 3am crouch on your chest while they try to steal your breath like some Japanese cryptid. Or having to finish off injured wildlife in the back garden with a brick out of a sense of mercy that the beasts absolutely do not share. 

But if they do this one cute thing? If they roll over on their back? If they meow at you? If they sit on your lap and let you fuss them? Top drawer. I do not care. It doesn’t matter. Keep it to yourself.)

Chris doesn’t especially like cats. I mean: he’s fine with them, but. He has two dogs. Comes from a dog family. House smells like a wet doormat and you can hear both spaniels go absolutely mental before you even ring the doorbell. 

(Listen, while I’ve got you: is anyone else creeped out by well-behaved dogs? I mean, I get it, you gotta train them, you can’t just leave them running like a lizard or a hamster or dishwasher or whatever, but there’s a bit that dog owners do where they’ll get a treat in their hand and present it to the dog and the game is the dog is not allowed to eat it until the owner’s given them permission and - weird, right? You mind-controlled this thing? You broke it so it can no longer eat without your express say-so? Seems a bit grim to me, chaps. Maybe I’ve just been exposed to too much depersonalisation transgender lesbian mech pilot erotica lately.)

So he’s against cats, generally, but he’s also against something I’m going to call cuteness when it comes to games design. You know: soft edges, bright colours, funny little guys. I think he views the whole concept as somewhere between exploitative and far beneath our talents - that we’re playing to a common denominator and we could make something more interesting and challenging and worthwhile by having it be really horrible instead. He runs Delta Green for fun, for god’s sake.

(I’ve got no such qualms. What pisses me off is whimsy, but that’s a whole different blog.)

Which means that the Nekomancer has oscillated back and forth over the three years since I had the fateful idea of doing another Deadwalker/Carrion-Priest, but this time having it be a cat that follows you around instead of a) an invidious spectre of your own death or b) a slavering hyena. Was it too cute? Was it too traditional? Does the cat have hit points? Does the cat have its own turn, its own dice pool? Would we need rules for losing the cat? 

In October last year, I decided that I was going to rewrite Salt an in an attempt to please Best Friend Chris. (And to get us over our half-decade of writer’s block, perhaps.) It was time for me to hammer the Nekomancer into a shape that old “Dogs” Taylor would appreciate.

CRACK THAT BOX OPEN, SCHRODINGER

I killed the cat. 

Which isn’t to say “I got rid of the cat” in an editing sense, but rather I made it undead.

Here’s my reasoning: Chris doesn’t like cats very much, nor cute things in games. Undead cats are less cute than living cats, even if only from a smell perspective; they’re closer to the realm of death, which the class is about, which is a good bit; they’re dead, which is horrible, so he’ll like that surely. That’s the sort of thing that the characters in Bottom, his favourite TV programme, would like. I can picture Rik Mayall in his big y-fronts waving a dead cat around. 

The problem came when I described it to literally anyone else.

“I don’t think I want the cat to be dead,” said Jinn, our Head of Finance and foremost Cat Person in the office. “If I have a cat I want it to be alive.”

I’ll be honest: I was thrown by that. I’d offered three different kinds of dead cat (Egyptian Mummified, Catholic Bejewelled, Wet N’ Recent) and surely a cat that’s already dead is harder to kill and therefore you get to keep it longer? But the more I talked around it, the more people seemed upset at the very idea that our Ranger analogue had a disagreeable felid corpse in their knapsack that they would get out and wave around in the general direction of ghosts whenever they came up.

Nothing was working! I just couldn’t make it fit. 

The problem was: this was my darling. And it was such a darling, it carried so much weight, that it was deforming the game around itself.

OH MY DARLING

“Kill your darlings” is some of the most common writing advice you’ll hear. Sometimes you fall in love with a thing in a book you’re writing, and you can’t bear to lose it, so it tags around on every successive rewrite. It no longer fits the shape of the thing, it’s got the reek of an earlier draft, but you can’t bring yourself to chuck it out because you love it.

And why wouldn’t I love the Nekomancer, pray fucking tell? Cats? Good! Ghosts? Good! Both? Sure, why not?

I wrote down the rules for the class. (First! It was the only concrete thing I had!) I changed the name to CATSWAIN, because it’s not a pun, and started writing out abilities. You got your “see ghosts” bit, that’s the Core ability. You’ve got your “fight ghosts” bit, which seems obvious, but you could round that out to general “fight living things as well as ghosts” ability, it’s a funny image to imagine the cat doing 1D8 damage once per fight to some guy with a cutlass. Then you’ve got, um...

Well it’s a Ranger analogue, right? So it should have ranged weapon abilities. But those are boring, and don’t say anything about the world.  And the Ranger’s Pet bit is already taken. So.. two-weapon fighting? No. Show me two-weapon fighting rules that aren’t either a) dull or b) ineffectual or c) both. But, uh. Route-finding! Exploration! So you get a bonus when you... when you... when you uh...

There’s just not enough there. The Catswain is a great bit - “you’re followed around by a disagreeable ship’s cat that can see ghosts!” - but not much more than that. I bet you could do a decent D&D or Pathfinder subclass with it, but a) Resistance doesn’t have a lot of numerical wiggle room, systemically and b) I refuse to write a normal class. I refuse. I shan’t. If a class has everything in it you imagine then I’ve failed in my job. I must surprise and delight and empower with every new ability. (Chris is largely the same.)

It hit me when I was having a left-handed cigarette out back, as most things do. I wrote a list of opposing Weirdnesses in Salt, in my head, because I was getting a bit muddled. It went:

- The Dead, both corporeal and not, permeating the place and powering it

- The Relics, and the City as an extension, staining those who entered their domain

- The Gods, mouldering beneath the foundations, who probably had their own agendas

Quite a lot of things to grasp, I thought, for a new player. Or an established player of Spire or Heart, even; one of the things I’ve actively tried to avoid is weirdness fatigue in Salt, which I think Heart suffers from a little. (Everything is maximum strange all the time, and it’s fleshy walls and teeth farms and worm dads and severed destinies and body-doubles and back doors to heaven right off the bat.)

But I needed the Gods, to show the hubris of the forerunner Prokatakos. I needed the Relics to show their tremendous technological advancements. And I needed the Dead to show, uh...

Obviously, the Dead were crucial because one of the things we want to talk about with this game is, hm...

I mean it gives us the opportunity to demonstrate that, um...

I needed the Dead for the Nekomancer.

I was stocking the city full of hungry ghosts bound into circuit streets because I had an idea for a cat that could see them. I was defining various types of non-corporeal undead; I had keywords for five different flavours of people who weren’t what you’d call one hundred percent dead but certainly wouldn’t need to visit the doctor any time soon. 

So I cut the Catswain completely. I also cut the class currently entitled STARYS WET NECROMANCER, which was a fun idea that Chris and I had about a brute-force dominator wizard themed around the fallen drow house of ages past, because it was only there because of the inclusion of the Dead and that was only there because of the cat.

But darlings, of course, have a way of sticking around. 

A MATTER OF CLASS

It’s been honestly wonderful to do so much design with Chris; he’s often quite ill, and I’m often quite busy, so I don’t get as much one-on-one giant brain games genius time with him as I’d like. We’ve set it up so we work for two hours most mornings, and it’s meant that we’ve kept momentum on the work. Now, as everything’s in flux and up for debate, Chris is happier to push back on my ideas and try to make them better, and what began as a Thing I Made For Him rapidly became a Thing We Are Making Together.

Which means that every single class is having a complete ground-up redesign, because we’re pushing each other. Often classes will go through several complete ground-up redesigns as we search valiantly for the right blend of strong theming and player freedoms; we’re averaging out at one finished for playtest every eight days. 

I read Liz Shrike’s You Will Die In This Place and I very much enjoyed it. It’s not the sort of thing I normally enjoy in games - it has some very dense design - but crumbs it’s brilliant. One of the core ideas (aside from a wonderful Beginner’s Guide-esque approach to the truth) is that every class uses completely unique mechanics, which communicates distance between characters beautifully. There’s something similar in Jay Dragon’s upcoming magnum opus The Seven-Part Pact which sees seven players all playing entirely separate interlocking games to manage their progress, and Mina’s been developing distinct downtime mechanics for every faction in Children of Time. 

Which is to say I am enjoying non-standard approaches to classes right now, and non-standard in such a way that brings at least a little mechanical spice to each one. I didn’t want to do anything as revolutionary as Liz or Jay’s work here - I believe part of the appeal of the work that Chris and I do together is that we stick to fairly old-school design principles and iterate from there - but as we started to fuck around with each individual route into the City Adrift we both felt that pushing them to be more distinct might be fun.

Over the last few weeks we’ve redesigned the Mechanist twice to the extent I’m not sure whether it makes sense any more but gosh I do very much want it to so let’s not look at it for a bit.

We’ve sketched out the basis for the Jurist and as a byproduct of that determined the fundamental laws of Salt that they play with (probably another whole blog post in that once we work out what the fuck we’re doing with the minor advances).

And we’ve invented and finished the BENTHIC SCION, a fishman.

IIIIIIIF I WERE A FISH-MAN

Yes! You can become a fishman now. Or an squidwoman. Or a crabperson. (Any combination of marine life and gender will work.) Chris likes Call of Cthulhu, and as a result Chris likes Deep Ones, and he championed the inclusion of some bug-eyed aquatic types in the game. I’d envisioned Salt as a dead, abandoned place, so I pushed back myself for a bit - but the idea of little fishman towns stuck to the bottom of it charmed me. We could tie it back into the idea that the godsblood from the esoteric foundations of the city transformed whatever it touched. 

From there it was an easy few leaps during one panicked “just name some fuckin classes” brainstorming session to reach the Secretly A Fishman player character class. Your DNA is bound up with the godsblood that leached out of ancient Salt; the longer you spend in the city, the more your body changes to suit it. You can have big crab claws and octopus camouflage, sure, but I also wanted to play around with the idea that fish don’t really have emotions like we do - they’re powerfully unintelligent, because they don’t need to be, and how could we turn that sort of single-minded simplicity into a strength? 

So there’s a few ways to soak Blood and Mind stress and fallout, or to suppress it, because you’re too busy to worry about things like blood loss or pain or interpersonal drama or self-actualisation. Crucially, and the unique thing about the class to tie this in with the earlier paragraphs even a little, they also don’t get class beats like everyone else does. Instead, they permanently fill in (and overwrite) existing parts of their advancement grid with things like DROWN and FEAST and DESCEND. They’re quite literally inhuman!

GRANT, THE CAT. THE CAT. THIS BLOG POST IS ABOUT THE CAT

Right yes, sorry - onto the Sovereign.

The Sovereign began as the Nonesuch which was another name for the Digger which was my interpretation of an Indiana Jones-style action archeologist, a sort of pulp hero in the real world thanks to channeled zeitgeist magic, and they had the option to wear different identities throughout the campaign: stuff like The Hero or The Bastard or The Lucksmith.

I had some high-falutin ideas about what they could be - they didn’t permanently spend their advances to gain ongoing abilities, but instead spent them all every session (within their quite tight Identity) to trigger powerful one-shot effects. I saw them as burn-bright treasure-hunting heroes (or bastards, etc) who could get a lot done once and then flounder around without their power. 

It didn’t take. (Not characterful enough. Not enough room for the player to make a mark on the class.) But thankfully, another one of my cast-offs - the Tide Coin - would take its place.

In the playtest I introduced the idea of a Tide Coin - a coin showing “D12” in the centre of the table. Whenever the players wanted, they could flip it and roll with D12s instead of D10s; but on the other side was “D8”, and whenever the GM wanted, they could flip it and force the players to roll with D8s instead of D10s.

It was an effort in part to remind myself and the players that advantage and disadvantage were things in this game, unlike the previous ones. In practice, it felt plastic - and Chris just kept rolling on D12s all the time, leaving the D8s for someone else to resolve. (Chris skews towards what he feels is the optimal path in games, so if there’s a button that makes number bigger, you better believe he’s pushing it with both fingers.) I’m glad I tried it, but I’d rather have the GM and the players discuss and negotiate fictional positioning than relegate it to a coin, so I cut it.

Chris remembered it. (Probably because he got so many D12s off it.) We were knocking around the idea of a less-combative character type for the Lucksmith - akin to Noah Wiley’s Librarian from The Librarian or the dorky sidekick from Tia Carrere’s  Relic Hunter, more scrabbling to safety and lucky breaks and enthusiasm than the dogged and unshaven Indiana Jones.

Pirate stories are full of cursed treasure - by which I mean I remember some funky coins from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film - so why couldn’t we have a guy with a lucky coin? You could toss the coin, spend it, hand it back and forth, etc etc. Lots to do.

But how do we channel the whole “treasure hunter” bit into that? Reader: we didn’t. We tried and we gave up. The lucky coin gag, it turns out, was enough to sustain the whole thing. 

I’d done a lot of reading into maritime superstition for the original draft of the Lucksmith (before it was incorporated into the Digger, it was its own swashbuckling class) and there are few people as dependent on luck as a sailor, so there’s plenty to play with there. I have a repeatable minor advance where you can halve damage from one specific thing, and some of them are what you’d expect (gunfire, falling, drowning) while others hopefully aren’t (gambling debt, fish, red-haired women). 

Aside from the coin, the Sovereign was shaping up to be a pretty normal looking class (although that coin turned up everywhere in their abilities); we struggled for a fifth major ability to include, as was tradition, and then I remembered the cat. My darling. My scabrous, mewling, wretched little darling.

“Ooh! Chris! A lucky cat!” I said.

“Cats aren’t lucky. Cats are unlucky.” He said.
“Black cats are unlucky. I bet you I could find a lucky ship’s cat somewhere.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Look, lemme... lemme write it up. Lemme have a go and you can tell me if it’s working.”

Here is what I wrote:

And you know? He liked it. I made it as shit as I could on purpose, to appeal to his disdain; there are other Sovereign abilities that let you downgrade incoming fallout with ease, or summon a storm by whistling, or redirect damage from yourself to someone else. This is a major that gives you an extra dice if there’s a ghost nearby and you decide to fuck with it, and it can be upgraded to allow:

- Cat now eats ghosts

- A hairball gag

- Some sort of bullshit that’s only useful if you’re trapped

I smiled broadly and uploaded a PDF of the class to the work Discord for people to have a look over. Two hours later, Chant read it and said:

“Great class man. You do know that everyone’s going to take the cat, though, yeah?”
“Ah no, you see - I made it shit on on purpose.” I responded, smugly.
“Doesn’t change the fact that everyone’s going to take it because it’s a cat.”

“People can just have a cat if they want. I’m not going to stop them from just describing a cat.”
“They do want a cat. And they’ll do it through this.”

He wasn’t wrong. The cat overshadowed everything else. Everything else was some sort of coin manipulation play and the cat was, well, a cat. The cat was still a darling. And god, what a darling: a horrible fuck of a thing that pukes up coins and brings you dead mice while you’re trapped beneath wet rubble. 

Maybe I can rewrite it to be more about the coin. Or maybe I can rewrite everything else in the class to be more evocative and concrete. But this cat can’t stay as is, and I’m loathe to lose another draft of the game over it. 

Chant says I should make the cat a crewmate, like the cartographer or demolitionist; Maz says I should come up with several pet types, and I say that if it took this much rigmarole to position a single cat in the game, god knows how long it would take to get a whole pet chapter. 

Please do keep an eye out when Salt is released to see who came out on top.

BONUS ROMANTASY SECTION

Very briefly - Naomi, our Social Media Wretch, is slightly younger and much more online than most everyone else in the office, so she on occasion she'll bring news on what's relevant on TikTok and we'll all nod and make appreciative noises. One of the things she's mentioned of late is BookTok, which I am led to believe is a new way of doing books where you just say what happens ahead of time and describe the plot beats in surprisingly clinical terms, and then half the fucking internet buys it.

One of the popular genres at the moment is Romantasy - alongside What If You Fucked Your Tall Handsome Manager - which combines Fantasy (your dragons and swords and wizards and enchanted mirrors) with proper old-fashioned crucial-to-the-narrative romance, which I'm into. (Romantic Fantasy, I am told, is akin to a romance story that happens to have a gnome in it. And I'm guessing Fantastical Romance is more of a Chuck Tingle sort of thing but with fewer graphic descriptions of foreskins.)

FistfulofCrits is hosting a Romantasy TTRPG jam over the next few months, and I was struck by inspiration on Friday night, so I started writing one - you'll see it here next month, I imagine. Here are my findings so far:

• Leaving space for players to yearn their little socks off is fun

• Unable to tell a nice story, I have set it after the fall of the fey kingdom and the burning of the Far Forest and you're expected to fix or finish it

• Is it respectful or disrespectful to be get schlocky with this? I don't know

• You play beautiful Knights sworn against one another briefly allied during a civil war

• Like the guns in Spire, it is bird-themed

• One character is a mortal woman with a cold iron amulet that means she can't touch the bare skin of a fey (oh no!) and gets an extra life (oh yes!) but it destroys the amulet when used (oh no!) but at least that means she can rub those sexy knights all up and down now (oh yes)

• The only way to win is to fall in love. If you don't, the world ends by default

• The core system is fuckin Honey Heist and I can't find anything that works better so here we are

That’s all for this month. 

Stay beautiful,

- Grant