Elisabetta Golzio
For this review of Cats! The Conspurracy, Black Book Editions provided us with a physical version of the manual, for which we are grateful.
You can find it here, in English or French, at the price of €50, or €25 for the digital version.
Have you ever wondered if cats were up to something behind your back? The question seems obvious enough, but we’ll finally know what it was.
Review of Cats! The Conspurracy: A Conspiracy Theorists’ Boon
Mankind has always been certain of being at the centre of the world, the most important creature on planet Earth. And it’s a good thing you keep believing it, because it will mean the conspiracy is safe, and cat society is working hard to ensure it stays that way.
But what’s the reality? Clearly, those who appear to be small domestic felines are actually the masters of this planet. Far more cunning and intelligent than their little human slaves, they still strive to appear like simple pets and thus manage to take care of things more important than earning money. Many cats, in fact, possess psychic powers inherited from their predecessors. You will play as these adorable four-legged friends, and the fate of the world rests in your hands! Can you think like a cat?
Creating a Character
Let’s start with the skills, that will have a score from 1 to 5 where 1 indicates a very low one and 5 the best. Some breeds will not be able to exceed certain values, but let’s go in order and discover which ones they are: Claw (Strength), Eye (Accuracy), Fur (Constitution), Tail (Agility), Purring (Intelligence), Strokes (Will), Whiskers (Intuition), Paws (Sociability), and, finally, Luck. We will distribute a maximum of 28 points among them.
We will also have the option to play two other character types besides cats: humans or bastets, feline spirits trapped in a human body. In these cases, we’ll have 24 points available for the former and 26 for the latter. A group can therefore be mixed and interact differently in situations.
Furthermore, each character will start with a certain number of fame points, which will increase or decrease depending on our actions in the campaigns: they will provide us with modifiers for Paws-related skills with members of our own species.
Races
Class differences we typically find in other roleplaying games in Cats! The Conspurracy are defined by the different feline breeds. We’ll discover that Abyssinian lived in Atlantis before it sank and is still believed to be the pinnacle of evolution. Maine Coon, on the other hand, is intimately connected to the human conquest of North America. We also find Angora, Bengal, British Shorthair, Chartreux, European Shorthair, Exotic Shorthair, Norwegian Forest Cat, Oriental Cat, Persian Cat, Ragdoll, Scottish Fold, Siamese, and Somali.
Each of these races has unique abilities and flaws, that will make the characters more interesting. For example, gluttony will make our little four-legged friend irresistibly drawn to good food and the smells of cooking. Humans and Bastet will also have to choose these distinguishing traits from the tables, including an allergy to feline fur. Could anyone be this masochistic?
Review of the Psychic Powers of Cats! The Conspurracy
We come to the pinnacle of our powers: psychic gifts. We can choose among 22 different types of power, although some are unavailable to humans. They range from hypnosis to mind control, from telekinesis to telepathy, all the way to the Schrödinger Effect, which allows us to be in two places at once.
While cats will naturally use their gifts, humans and Bastet are much more limited. You have a maximum of 24 gift points available in a day (depending on your Whiskers score): the more points you spend, the more powerful the effect. Afterwards, you’ll need to rest to regain them. To make this happen more quickly, each cat must tolerate at least five minutes of human cuddles, managing to pass a roll set on the appropriate table. If we fail, the human will tire of our attitude and stop petting us. What a complex creature!
Game Mechanics
We all know that luck is important. Even more for cats. Our luck score represents the number of 10-sided dice we can roll. Result obtained, added to our skill score, must be higher than the difficulty level the GM has proposed. For example, if we have a Luck of 3, we will roll three d10s. To this result, we will add the skill level we need for this particular challenge. Our GM checks the difficulty level table: for example, if we have to face a simple challenge, the minimum score we need will be 7.
If the test is instead asked on a different skill, our d10s rolled according to our luck score must be added to double that skill level.
As for the combat rules, the difficulty level will be adjusted based on our opponent’s Tail skill, so the more agile they are, the harder it will be for us to hit them. But let’s remember that there’s no shame in running away, and as the manual reminds us…
Fly, you fools!
To the Adventure!
Chapter 10 of our manual, the last one, is made up of 8 different adventures divided into chapters perfect to be completed in some sessions. This addition is truly a great way to fully immerse yourself in the Cats! The Conspurracy universe, with stories crafted specifically to let us explore the different character types, their potential, and all the game mechanics.
For example, in the first game, Saving Kitten Ryan, we’ll encounter a surprising discovery: two cats with no powers appear to have given birth to a kitten with special powers. This has never happened before: felines that have regressed to pet status don’t usually give birth to superior creatures. It would certainly be a very interesting situation to investigate, were it not for the fact that the kitten has already been taken away by a human. It will be our job to recover it and uncover the secret of this anomaly.
Another adventure, Dawn of Time, will take us to the ruins of a completely out-of-place structure: what is an ancient Egyptian pyramid doing in the middle of Mexico? The Egyptians certainly had good taste when it comes to cats, and felines are happy to investigate this ancient civilization.
Gift Pack
Along with the core rulebook, we were sent a welcome addition, a gift pack containing a block of official character sheets, some pre-filled sheets with ready-to-use characters printed on stiff cardboard so they can be used over and over again, and several maps for our adventures.
There is currently no way to purchase it on the official website, but we hope it will be published in the future as it is definitely very useful material for anyone wanting to create a campaign in this world.
Conclusions of the Review of Cats! The Conspurracy
Cats! The Conspurracy is an extremely well-finished product and we are happy that from the French mother tongue (its author,Vincent Mathieu, is French) has at least been translated into English. The nearly 300 pages of the core rulebook, graphically stunning, catapult us into an extremely detailed world, for which this article alone is not enough. It explains historical events that were perceived a certain way from a human perspective but distorted from a feline perspective, the descriptions of numerous enemies and allies, and countless possibilities for creating unique characters. Not to mention the very welcome possibility of already having adventures to start from.
Illustrations, carefully crafted and wonderfully bohemian, were created by Maxime Teppe as well as the splendid hard cover that presents the volume excellently.
Italian localization would be the icing on the cake for all domestic feline lovers (even if domestic is a manner of speaking). We can only hope that such a detailed product arrives on our shelves soon.
