halflings suck

There is no such thing as a regular domestic house cat. They’re all sentient and can walk like a man, there are just some that choose not to. But the cats that do talk, live in nomadic caravan bands, trading from town to town. They speak most languages, and a secret double cat-speak.

Cats worship the lucky number 9. Ideally everything should be in groups of 9, which is luck in its most pure, simple and powerful form; but cats will make do with lesser numbers, or multiples of 9 which are somewhat lucky. Cats believe they re-incarnate 9 times as the same gender, before switching again.  However 10 is the corrupting number and is always avoided. It is man’s curse to always want more, why settle for 9 gold pieces when you could round it up to a big juicy 10? Why settle for 9 thousand slaves? Cats settle for 9 symbolically as a humbling act. Always about the journey never the destination, today’s jobs not the career e.t.c They worship and respect all gods, and cats traditionally carry their favourite 9 idols of 9 different gods that they have collected of their travels, a personal pantheon.

There are 9 legendary cat folk heroes, each one’s slightly embellished story of adventure contains a moral and a superstition. Cats have no rulers, but if a cat could prove they are a re-incarnation of one of these folk heroes, they would be a king of cats, and would be able mobilize the cats as an army.

Gambling is culturally very important to cats, and they’re very good at it since they have learnt never to gamble more than they can afford. A cat never takes more than 99 lovers in a life time, never more than 9 of those as husbands/wives, and a cat will never miscarry on their first 9 kittens, but will always miscarry after. The 9^th kitten is always black with two tales, a bakeneko.

Cats are often associated with crime and theft, and are derogatively called Halflings (half-a-person) although never to their faces.