Feline races in sci-fi and fantasy

Don't base them on the pop culture cat people thought up by a race of sexually repressed weirdos who pine for the glory days of the lost Japanese Empire.

Instead base them on the pop culture cat people thought up by a race of sexually repressed weirdos who pine for the glory days of the lost British Empire.

Like this

>cat bodyguards/ secret service
I lost it.

They eat humans.

Vulpine races in sci-fi and fantasy:

How do you make fox races that are interesting, more than tropes, and not just magical realm material?

don't dress them in school girl costumes

1. Make an interesting culture
2. Make the race catfolk
3. Make sure it's not attractive furry bullshit

Done.

>7
>4
>8

Yeah but, they do it because they think you can't do it yourself

>Clearly you are incapable of hunting, so I took pity upon you and brought you something to eat to show you how it's done weakling.

Make them moody and indifferent like real cats, rather than the ~nya ~nya type nekogirls in anime.

First you have to accept that they're gonna be "tropes" and magical realm anyway, if you don't like that don't use them.

With that first picture, that carries the worrying implication that it's normal for them to hunt and eat members of other sapient humanoid species, possibly including you if you were in a different situation.

I suppose that's something to run with.

In my mind cat people are as fuck huge as the typical werewolf (i.e. Think WoD werewolf in Crinos form but as a cat).

I could see them hunting and predating other sentient species with no qualms or concerns about it.

Literally this. More people should see the world like you do, user

I like my fantasy cats Lovecraft-inspired.
> It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

Pretty much, though I would also add obsession with cleanliness, sitting in places most humans wouldn't sit on or in (such as on top of a wall or slouching in a crate), fidgets with objects and insects (but still in a way a human would), and a desire to doing whatever it wants.

Like most non-humans, they should do things that humans find strange or unethical. For instance, maybe the way they treat courtship or raising their young.
Take for example lions, which cull their entire litter of kittens if the pride is taken over by a new male.
Humans find this troubling. Big cat sophont finds it normal, if annoying.

Taking an eating the remains of your enemies may be another point of contention. I suppose they could either view victory as a successful hunt or just a moment of opportunity to extend your rations

Cannibalistic rapists. Basically beastmen.

Make them as unappealing as possible.

Yeah, make them like the maori.

Remember that they're obligate carnivores, not omnivores.

That means less agriculture, more ranching and hunting. From that, you're going to get a much more individualistic species. While large families and social units help around a farm, there's only so much they can contribute in this model.

They might well not engage in longterm relationships at all. Human concepts of marriage and loyalty are a bit weird to them. While they won't betray you for the hell of it, they won't keep helping you once you stop being worth their time.

I remember that there was some "alien races as opposed to humans" thread we had in scifi, and the proposal was basically that due to human's predilection for endurance and throwing shit we were predisposed to line battles in a way that most creatures wouldn't be, but in particular, our conception that spacecraft should even HAVE ranged weapons might be the result of personal bias.

Basically the proposed "non-human" species was a bunch of ambush predator cat people who spend most of a day in a near sleep state vaguely observing everything and thinking, then accomplish everything that needs to be done for the day in a single burst of activity. Whose ships were just immense, heavily armoured and undetectable dreadnoughts that would suddenly activate and accelerate into a ramming manuever that smashes enemy ships into a thin smear with no warning, before going back to sleep. And that, due to our fundamental lack of perspective about the universe the hard scifi tactical laser + drone carrier fusion torches that humans set out in would die to this every time.

That's a pretty interesting line of thought. Ambush predator IN SPACE.

On the other hand, I don't think ramming tactics would be as effective on that level. Space, after all, is BIG.

Meh, depends how 'hard' the scifi setting is.

>That means less agriculture, more ranching and hunting
Don't forget fishing

A thought crossed my mind thinking of something like this. Would it make sense to enslave a race to do most of that for you? I mean, if your primary diet is meat then you arn't concerned with the vegatables and shit your slave race is growing because that's for themselves and to maintain the stock to feed you as well.

Would this work?

I've never understood why fishing isn't categorized as a form of hunting, but, yes.

Why would you bother to enslave a race to raise crops that you don't need? Traditional ranching doesn't require agriculture because you just drive your herd over a range where they graze naturally.

A race descended from humans and Arcanalolths. Technically a Tiefling.

Guys, I think I might be a cat irl.

One thing I'm pretty fond of as a mechanism in scifi is the idea that our modern conception of what space is like is totally inaccurate.

It sits somewhere between soft and hard scifi, basically the assertion is that in just the same way that people of old thought that the sun was a vast mass of burning coal with a lifespan of a few million more years, and other equally absurd conceptions, our own understanding of how physics, biology works, or the structure of the universe, are wildly wrong in some ways.

Rather than saying "Oh but don't you understand, there's this magic crystal ethereum" or "You just go into the hyperspace dimension".

It's more stuff like "Relativistic physics is an understandable rounding error due to the effect of that tachyon cloud in your home system. Redshift? What the fuck are you talking about, things just emit red light if they move away from you."

My favourite implementation was a friend's game, where the fundamental premise was that evolution on Earth was unlike anywhere else in the universe, in that most of the time when primordial life spawns on a planet, it immediately begins evolving to more complex forms while devouring its predecessors, becomes intelligent, and fucks off to space, in an incredibly short space of time. Speciation and having millions of years of evolutionary history was considered very abnormal. And they don't produce any radio signals doing this because even cavemen level aliens immediately intuit that space is filled with aliens that will fucking kill them if they leave an opening, so they develop directly into space travel without ever emitting any detectable radiation. Also, in most of these species they self-evolve from an early stage, IE at dog or monkey levels of intelligence they have already established that there is a limited habitat on their own world and in order to get into space they need to continually select for more intelligent individuals until someone invents a way to get there.

two can play at that game

Make them uplifts. Rifts had a good take on mutant animals coming out of the Lone Star facilities.

Anyway, to summarise my point: We would assume that ramming is a really tremendously stupid idea in space. Because it is vast, and the things we sling around in it have to pass so close to hit each other. And because small things can accelerate and change direction much better than little things. It's beyond physics, it's basically a matter of logic.

But maybe in practice solar systems are filled with small debris that limits ships to an extremely small number of possible trajectories. Maybe a more intelligent species could come up with an extremely simple scheme of accelerating and spinning their ships that causes humans and their automated systems to fail evasion attempts 100% of the time even with hours of warning. Or maybe there is some propulsion system that functions much more efficiently on larger, manned objects. Maybe things that accelerate linearly for extended periods of time are eaten by grues.

As much as it frustrates me as a scientist, we know that people in the past had some ideas that were dumb as shit and it's unlikely that what we believe now is 100% on the level, even 5% would be enough to drastically change what is and isn't permissible. Soft scifi is fantastical and is disappointingly ineffective as speculative fiction because it isn't even trying, but hard scifi tends to have an excessive and unreasonable belief that the understanding of reality we have RIGHT NOW is definitely the canonical and correct one that we will have until the end of time, and we will not find out anything new.

huh, guess in that realm, other species think our excessive signals are a trap of some kind. We are ironically saved by our lack of caution.

>Redshift? What the fuck are you talking about, things just emit red light if they move away from you
Trouble with this one is that we can observe the Doppler effect with, say, a tuning fork on a rope. Not to mention the fact that "away from you" is entirely dependent on point of reference.

Fucking faggot.

Watch Red Dwarf and make an entire race based on Kat.

Are arcanaloths cute foxgirls?

Is Miranda the best Western catgirl?

Nope, its M'Ress.

Real funny way of spelling Aisha Clan Clan

No.

Western catgirls, Aisha is obviously superior but is also from the East.

>Japanese
>Western
Or is it because it's a space western?

Nobody in Japan gives a fuck about Outlaw Star

Also this

>Traditional ranching doesn't require agriculture because you just drive your herd over a range where they graze naturally.

Agriculture can raise the meat-per-unit of land too.

If you were a predator who ate humans, would you prefer "naturally grazing" hunter-gatherers or farmers? Obviously the latter, because you get a lot more farmer humans out of the same unit of land.

Even with modern herbivore livestock you get faster cheaper meat by feeding them corn and soy and other high calories-per-land crops grown elsewhere.

Yeah, but, without the need for cultivation for your own use, you probably wouldn't learn that until fairly late in cultural development.

Furries should yiff in Hell.

How does one make any race interesting? The same fundamental question applies to reptillian races, humanoid races, canine races, anthropoid races, radially symmetrical races and so forth.

>rat thread
>cat thread

Very nice

Start with mythology. Combine traits from various region's foxes (especially involving morality and how they think) until you get an interesting blend.
Then proceed from there. Figure out how that affects everything else.

From a Sci-Fi over Sci-Fantasy, the only reasons I can see is that they where genetically engineered by/from humans 'because we can', fashion, passion and Furries.

No one can save us from this grimdark future...
No one...

Checked

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Cute :3

So basically, this thread has taught us that there is no way to integrate cat-people into a D&D campaign without it become degenerated furry shit

There is literally nothing wrong with magical realmness
There is, however, everything wrong with fucking furry faggots

Well we're here to try and find a way. What exactly is "fur" shit anyway? Maybe the problem is with the definition.

Cute kitty.

It's a fox. This is a kitty

K'zin.

damn it japan why do I find that adorable.

Looks like an African cat. Why would you post a fox in a cat species thread anyway?

>That pic
I wouldn't mind being a househusband and spoiling mai waifu after a long day of work.

furshit

>What exactly is "fur" shit anyway?
Does it have a snout? Y/N

WITNESSED

>race of indifferent but lazy individualists, squatting all over the dilapidated but comfy place, smoking and fiddling with sunflower seeds

What game is that?

>pic related

And this means.... ?

Wow, I'm retarded. You shouldn't have even responded to be for being that dumb, but thanks.

I made them Laguz.

Except they're not blue

Interesting. Could cat-like aliens independently evolve?

"may you walk in warm sands"

If their ancestor species were literally cats, it's a bit of a stretch, because human-like intelligence isn't necessarily a survival advantage to be selected. For example, cats wouldn't benefit much from learning to make fire, having better night vision and better digestive enzymes than humans.
This is explained better in this video so I'm going to advertise it shamelessly: youtu.be/0xbSHn4Fbu4
Now if we include hominids with a few superficial cat-like features, it's more believable.

You don't. Furshit is the inevitable result and we can't have that.

There are Felinid Imperial Guard so don't act so angry.

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Its a fairly common trope. In fact, most cat people in sci fi are weird aliens. Cathars of Star Wars, Caitians of Star Trek (M'Ress up thread is one of those), Kzinti, Dilgar of Babylon 5, and so many more that I don't feel like copying from the TVTropes page or Wikipedia.

Whether it could occur in real life? No way of knowing. A species of catlike "monkeys" following our evolutionary path could happen or it could be something completely else. We won't know till we get out there among the stars.

Incidentally Cathar are a wonderful example of just how human you can make cats look and still be recognizably cat.

For something more subtle and enjoyable, I always reccommend the chakat. They're a lesser known race that blends into pretty much any setting with the right gm. I put them into nearly every Pathfinder session I host, and once I even managed to convince a different GM to let me play one.
They're fun but also smart enough to run a planet in a sci-fi universe, so there's no reason not to have them.

Here you go. No active females means no magical realm. No sir, no magical realm at all.

Faggot

Forgive my ignorance, but aren't Chakats the genetically engineered furry six-legged two-armed hermaphrodites with a myriad of Mary Sue-ish social and biological traits from a few decades worth of what was initially bad Star Trek fanfiction?

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So I googled chakats, and literally every link and image was something furry.