In Magical Kitties Save the Day every kitty has a human and every human has a Problem. The hometown where your human lives is also filled with Problems – witches, time-traveling dinosaurs, hyper-intelligent raccoons, and the like. These hometown Problems make your human’s Problems worse, so you need to solve these Problems with your magical powers and save the day!
The hometowns in Magical Kitties come stocked with hometown Problems, and the players will create their human’s Problems during character creation. The GM can create Magical Kitties adventures by taking a hometown Problem and aiming it at a human Problem.
For example, if your human’s Problem is that they’ve lost their job:
- An evil leprechaun might tempt them with its pot of gold, trying to trick them into making a fairy bargain.
- A hyper-intelligent raccoon might steal their car for their experiments, making it more difficult for them to get to their interviews.
- Their new job offer might come from a corporation that the kitties know to be run by an immortal sorcerer with a nefarious agenda.
The kitty krew is going to have to do something!
While a single hometown can often be just the right size for a Magical Kitties series, you may want to scale things up. Maybe as the kitties start dealing with bigger and bigger problems, the campaign will grow in scope. Or maybe you’ll want to launch a new campaign focused on the GKT (the Galactic Kitty Taskforce).
Fortunately, it’s easy to take things to the next level.
REGIONS
You might want your kitties to have free rein of the state, the country, the planet, or even the whole galaxy. While that might sound like a lot of work, fear not, because a planet is really just a big hometown!
We can refer to these larger areas as regions. Although they’re larger than a hometown, you can create them and run them in the same way: They’ll have region Problems, which work just like hometown Problems. You’ll aim region Problems at human Problems to create adventures, and by going on those adventures the kitties will reduce the rank of the region Problem.
Creating a region works just like creating a hometown: Give it Problems, locations, and a supporting cast. The only difference is that instead of a location being a building or an ancient tree, it might be a whole town or an entire forest. Of course, if a single building in the region is really important, it can still be its own location in the region. The supporting cast in a region also works like any other hometown: These are the humans, animals, aliens, and other mythical creatures that live in the region and inspire adventures. Some might have a greater impact on the region, like the King of the Birds or the lead scientist for a company capturing magical creatures, but others can just be common folk.
THE MANY ARE ONE
As kitties become more powerful and deal with bigger Problems, their new “humans” might not be single individuals. Instead, they might be a group of humans, such as a family, an organization, a town, or even a whole kingdom. These communities still have Problems that the kitties need to solve, but instead of affecting only a single individual, they afflict most or all of the humans in the community.
For example, the entire community of River City might be suffering economically because the Union Chemical Plant shut down. A kingdom has to deal with political strife after the queen passes away with no heir. The android community could be experiencing prejudice from humans who don’t think of them as anything more than machines. Rocket Laboratories could be under a lot of pressure to deliver their new interplanetary shuttles. And so forth.
Despite the scale and scope of these Problems being larger, these community Problems work just like human Problems: They have ranks, you can point hometown Problems or region Problems at them to create adventures, and the ranks of the community Problem will go down (and eventually be eliminated) as the kitty krew successfully completes adventures.
Even though the kitties are now dealing with the Problems of large groups of humans, you’ll want to create a few specific supporting casting members in the group that kitties can directly interact with. These personal relationships will help give meaning to the struggles of the community.
REGIONS WITHIN REGIONS
As you build your series, you may find it useful to think of regions fractally: Regions can contain other regions which contain hometowns. For example, a planet can have many countries; countries can have many districts; a district can have many towns in it.
Just as you can connect multiple hometowns into a single series, you can also connect regions. You can also zoom in and out between regions. For example, you might be running a planet-scale series where the kitties are grappling with Earth-wide Problems. But any time you (or they) might choose to focus on just one town and its hometown Problems (along with its locations and supporting cast) for awhile, before swapping to a different hometown or zooming back out to the planetary scale.
I have not played Magical Kitties, but this advice would probably confound me. The first part makes sense: expanding a Hometown Problem into a larger-scale Regional Problem is great.
I get lost trying to think about Human Problems turning into Community Problems, because it seems like Community Problems are just a new name for Hometown Problems.
I worry that losing the focus on a single human or a few humans would really abstract things too far for this type of feel-good game about helping people.
Hometown Problems are things which make Human Problems worse.
A Hometown Problem is a Witch or an Alien or a Werewolf.
A Human Problem is Being Anxious About Losing Your Job.
Making “Being Anxious About Losing Your Job” bigger does not turn it into a Witch. Not that you’re actually turning one thing into another thing at all.
The belief that helping communities can’t be “feel-good” is a whole ‘nother thing.