Magical Kitties Save the Day, the game I co-designed with creator Matthew Hanson and Michelle Nephew, is being placed under an open license by Atlas Games!

Atlas asked me back to answer some questions about Magical Kitties, the open license, and what my plans are for the future.

Check out the full interview!

This scenario for Magical Kitties Save the Day is designed to be run in 20 minutes as an ultra-fast introduction to the game or as a fun micro-game for any occasion.

For players new to Magical Kitties Save the Day, you’ll want to prep a quick introduction to the system and give them a system cheat sheet. The scenario can be played with pregen characters, but character creation for Magical Kitties Save the Day is so quick and easy that you can easily include character creation in a short session.

If you’re comfortable with a little improvisation (or want to do a little extra prep), you can expand this to a 30-minute scenario by playing out the kitties discovering their missing human and tracking them to Dewberry Park.

THE PROBLEM

Pick whichever kitty’s Human is most likely to be kidnapped by an evil Witch. A young child is thematically most appropriate, but the following text can be easily adapted to the particulars of any given Human and their Problem:

Your Human disappeared while on their way home from school. You’ve been worried sick about them. After speaking with some squirrels over on the 7^th Street, however, you’ve tracked them to a small copse of trees that lies on the far side of Dewberry Park.

The land sort of dips down back here. You’ve probably been down here dozens of times, but this time it’s different: Huddled into a little clearing near the center of the trees is a quaint little hut. It has a thatch roof and a chimney from which a thin stream of smoke is drifting out. A raven perches at the top of the roof.

THE WITCH’S HUT

A witch has kidnapped the kitty’s Human. This is her hut. The raven is her familiar and he’s looking for trouble; he’ll squawk and raise the alarm if he sees anyone approaching.

GETTING IN

• There’s a door on the front of the hut and a shuttered window on the back wall.
• Generally speaking, make it a Difficulty 4 task to get into the hut without being noticed. (Even on a failure, the kitties might still get in, but get noticed by the Witch or the raven.)

INSIDE

• If not disturbed, the Witch is stirring a big, bubbling cauldron of some purple liquid.
• Nearby, the kitty’s Human has been tied to a chair and gagged.
• A fire is burning in the fireplace. There’s various shelves with books and animal skulls and cobwebs and everything else you’d expect a witch’s hut to have.

THE WITCH

• Cute Defense: 4
• Cunning Defense: 4
• Fierce Defense: 5
• Owie Limit: 3

Reactions:

• Whack: Causes 1 Owie
• Turn Into a Frog: The kitty’s Attributes are all reduced to 1 and they cannot use magical powers until turned back or the spell wears off (at the end of the scene). However, they do gain the Talents of “Jumping” and “Slippery.”
• Other Hexes: The GM should improvise any other spells as appropriate.

THE WITCH WITHDRAWS

When the kitties have successfully thwarted the Witch’s schemes, the doors and windows on the hut slam shut and it grows four bird-like legs. The legs lift it high into the air and then the whole hut goes sprinting away. If appropriate, the Witch cries out with a hideous, cackling laugh, “I’ll be back, my little kitties!”

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.

Magical Kitties Save the Day, the RPG I co-designed with Matthew Hanson (the game’s creator) and Michelle Nephew, has been nominated as the Best Family Game for the 2021 ENNIES Awards!

The nominations are juried, but the final awards are based on a people’s vote! That means we need YOU to vote for the game by August 27th!

A few things to know about voting in the ENNIES:

• You should only vote once.
• There are several different categories. You’ll vote in each category by selecting it. Magical Kitties is nominated in the Best Family Game category.
• You vote by ranking the nominees from 1 to 5. The best rank is 1 (that’s what you want to select for Magical Kitties). You can also select “No Vote” if it’s a game or book you’re unfamiliar with or don’t think deserves an award.
• Make sure you hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to register you vote for Best Family Game.
• You don’t need to vote in all categories. You also don’t have to vote in all categories at the same time! So if you want to wait to vote for Best Adventure until you’ve had a chance to check them out, you don’t have to wait to record your vote for Best Family Game.

Also take the opportunity to check out all the other great games, supplements, and books that have been nominated! There’s a lot of cool stuff to discover!

VOTE NOW!

YOU ARE CUTE! YOU ARE CUNNING! YOU ARE FIERCE!

In Magical Kitties Save the Day! every kitty has human, even human has a problem, and the kitties must use their magical powers to solve those problem! To make matters worse, kitties and their humans live in hometowns which are ALSO filled with problems! Problems like alien invasions, velociraptors, fairy queens, and enchanted blizzards! These problems make the humans’ problems worse, so the magical kitties have to deal with them, too!

Originally designed by Matthew J. Hanson, I worked with Matthew and Michelle Nephew to design the second edition of the game. That included designing the River City hometown and The Big Adventure graphic novel solo adventure that you’ll find in the boxed set:

The boxed set includes the rulebook, River City (including an amazing poster map by Jason Bradley Thompson!), and The Big Adventure, along with dice, tokens, character sheets, and everything you need to start playing!

Pictured here is the Deluxe Edition, which also includes the Alien Invasion and The Wild Ones hometowns; fully illustrated cards for Powers, Flaws, and Talents; and upgraded dice and tokens. The box is practically bursting at the seams with amazing kitty goodness for just $60!

Right now (and for the next week) we are running the Magical Kitties Level Up! Kickstarter, which — with your help! — will fund the creation of:

Magical Kitties Power-Up! a new sourcebook by Matthew J. Hanson which will double the number of magical powers for your kitties, give you the tools to venture forth on epic adventures, and power up your existing magic to all-new levels!

Series Workbooks, featuring an Our Hometown workbook for the GM and a bundle of My Kitty workbooks for your players! These deluxe portfolios give players old and new alike cool tools for exploring their Magical Kitties Save the Day adventures in all-new ways.

Fantastica, a new hometown by Clio Yun-Su Davis, featuring the Nine Kingdoms of Fantastica, each based on your favorite fairy tales and ruled by a Princess or Prince. In the land of the Fantastica, magical kitties don’t have to hide their magical powers, completely transforming the way you play the game!

(This is actually something I’ve emphasized in developing all of the Magical Kitty hometowns: We want each one to present a unique spin on the game, not just in terms of flavor, but also structure. So in Fantastica you can use your powers openly and save kingdoms rather than humans. In Mars Colony you help build the colony’s tech tree. In The Wild Ones there are no humans and kitties instead have obligations to wild clans. In Alien Invasion, node-based scenario design is used to literally take the adventure to a whole new level, at which point the tables are turned and the kitties have to CREATE problems for the aliens instead of the other way around!)

Truth be told, the Kickstarter has already been a huge success. (As I write this, we are at 1000% funded!) But this will be your last chance to grab the Deluxe Edition for just $60. (If you wait, the price will be going up to $75, while supplies will be limited.) And if you want to jump in to Magical Kitties for the first time, the All the Kitty Toys! pledge level will get you absolutely everything! If you just want to sniff the catnip, the standard edition of the game is just $25.

Become a backer today!

FURTHER READING
System Cheat Sheet
Design Notes: Kitty Power!
Character Creation in 7 Sentences: Magical Kitties