Today I wanted to take a deeper dive into what i have been calling the “core game” of Castles & Cats. From a few questions I have received, I feel a meshing between the Campaigns/ Adventures and the “core game” has occured. The “core game” of Castles & Cats is a role playing game system and can stand alone depending on the game master. A role playing game system provides the game master and players with the tools/information they need to play any campaign or adventure designed by anyone for the role playing game system, they are using in this case Castles & Cats. Castles & Cats can literally providing infinite hours of game play.
Think of the Game Master and the players as artist. Castles & Cats is the paint brush, paints, crayons, markers, canvas, the tools needed to create a masterpiece. You can create worlds and adventures from your own imagination without the need of an official Castles & Cats Adventure.
The Castles & Cats Adventures are like a “Paint by Number” Canvas. While they are not needed by all artist, to some artist they can provide a refreshing and peaceful guided experience. Personally I like a bit of both.
To look more closely into the Castles & Cats tools let take a look at its most important aspect, the class customization system. As you have seen from the Kickstarter campaign or castlesandcats.com each of the four classes comes with a series of armor, weapons, companions and in some cases spells. As I have already shown you the cleric cards, let's take a look at the mage.
While all characters use elemental magic through various weapons and items, the mage is by far the master of elemental magic. Mages do not need to be in the heart of battle to do damage, so the only armor needed is cloth robes. Their weapon of choice is a wand, and they have so much control over elemental magic that their companions take the form of elemental sprites.
It’s these item cards that allow players to create their own unique character experience.
Let’s start out with a basic dwarf mage, unarmored with a basic wand. The Star in the price banner means these items are starting items.
The + Magic, Detect, History and Navigation you see on the race and class cards is in regards to Role-playing advantages.
There are a few more aspects to creating a new character but I will cover more in a separate post about character creation.
As characters progress through adventures they will collect new items through loot or buy new items with gems. With these items players will be able to start customizing their character to fit their own play style or adventure environment.
Let’s take a look at the mage after Adventure 4. The mage has replaced most of their original gear giving them more armor and some small bonuses to water and arcane spells.
Now let’s take a look at a the mage after Adventure 15. They have collected the majority of the items and have chosen to focus on the element of fire. Although they still only use 4 elemental dice in combat, if they focus on trying to cast fire they could pack quite a punch, especially if the players are traveling through a yeti cave or frozen tundra where monsters might be more vulnerable to fire damage.
Although the game play is very simple as the players gain confidence in their ability’s, switching around class items will allow growth and planning for more complex characters.
As a final addition to this post, I would like to show off the new game box!
The box for the most recent print of Castles & Cats is a bit larger than the prototype you have seen in my previous video. I wanted to leave room for organization of game components and for any adventures game masters might want to store. I can fit at least 3 printed digital Castles & Cats adventures in the box.
The box measures at 11.75 inches long 9.125 inches wide and is 2 inches deep.
I hope you enjoyed this look into character customization! Castles & Cats has one more week on Kickstarter! Make sure to check it out!