GM: Sean Nittner
Players: My daughters and friends
System: Cat
My little one wanted a game of cat for her birthday. I have awesome kids!
We all made pizzas together and while they were being cooked (the oven could only fit two at a time, so it was going to take a while) we made characters. The girls were very good about paying attention the whole way through. I thought it would be a challenge, but they really wanted to fill out their cat sheets and to do it right.
First we had a bit of discussion about what cat magic does. Last time we played it did everything, which got a bit old. So this time I wanted them to agree amongst themselves what magic could do. Several ideas were pitched but they ended up agreeing on telekinetics, which seemed pretty cool to me as well.
I read them a few blurbs from the game text about cats, humans, and boggins, and they were ready to go. One thing I didn’t expect is how many names they would want. Some were content with three, but a few of them just kept adding different names that different people called them, usually in the form of insults people yelled at them.
For simplicity sake I told them they all lived together in one house. This didn’t fit perfectly with their initial ideas but with only a hour or two to play, I really didn’t want to do any kind of “getting to know each other” scenes. In retrospect I could have had a small community of families that where in an complex and they all could have been from neighboring houses, or one could be a stray that got food from the others, but all in all, starting in one house was great.
Grandma is coming
The premise of my single situation games was simple. On an otherwise lazy day, a moving truck arrived and with it, their owner’s mother. The cats overhead that Grandma is getting old and having a hard time taking care of herself, so she’s moving in with the family. What the cat’s learned the moment the movers opened the door to the van, however, was the reason Grandma was so sick was that all of her furniture (and probably her house as well) was infested with boggins. And all that furniture was about to be carried into their house!
We had a lot of fun with the cats trying to stop the movers, escaping from being put in their cages, and attacking the few bogins that did make it inside before they could spread. Eventually, when several movers had their pants shredded they gave up on doing the install and drove off with the bulk of Grandma’s furniture… and with the boggins. Success!
Thoughts on the game
Man, do little girls like to get violent. And are they big on shredding pants.
I ended up drawing a couple lines to keep the game decent. One at shredding underpants (I opted for the mover to have long underwear that could shredded but still keep him decent). The other at telekineticly moving bird droppings into eyes, mouths, etc. For that I asked them to think of a different way to use magic and the suggestion to unravel a garden hose the mover would trip on came up and we worked with that. It was one of those cases where “say yes” was going to devolve into penis and poop jokes.
There girls had a blast and when it was time for presents and cake, I asked my youngest what her cat did next and she said “she eats grasshopper pike cake!” (which was the the kinds the girls were having). That made a perfect endcap for the game. We wrapped and ate cake. Good times.
