Lion
Anoshir
Protectors and peacekeepers drawn from every tribe, united by discipline, service, and the lion form.
Read tribe profile →A universe created by Matthew Cutright
Every cat has
a wild form.
Blessed by The Cat Goddess Bastet, cats can turn into lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, cougars, lynx, and servals; while keeping the coats that made them unique.
GRAVESTuxedo coat · Lion form
01 / THE WORLD
Bastet’s blessing
changed everything.
One transformation. One fixed wild form. A domestic cat’s colors and patterns live on when it becomes something far more powerful.
Across centuries, that gift reshapes power, law, friendship, and survival.
02 / THE TRIBES
Eight peoples.
One changed world.
Across an uncolonized North America, each tribe has built its identity around a different wild form.
Serval
Mahotani
Islanders, traders, explorers, and pirates whose coastal society prizes adventure and a little well-earned mischief.
Read tribe profile →
Jaguar
Eshokta
A secretive and mystical people whose elite assassins carry prestige and quiet political influence.
Read tribe profile →
Leopard
Owakaya
Rugged desert nomads who follow water, weather, and migrating prey through an unforgiving homeland.
Read tribe profile →
Tiger
Rashonki
A powerful military society descended from a lost Roman legion, known for discipline, arenas, and ambition.
Read tribe profile →
Lynx
Waklani
Fierce northern tacticians shaped by the cold and bound by alliance to the equally formidable Rashonki.
Read tribe profile →
Cheetah
Yanakowa
Great Plains hunters and trackers renowned for speed, grace, endurance, and reading the land.
Read tribe profile →
Cougar
Tikwasha
Peaceful caretakers of the northwest coast devoted to family, farming, food, and the land that sustains them.
Read tribe profile →03 / TECHNOLOGY & BASTET TECH
Technology &
Bastet Tech.
Devices of the Blessing
Bastet Tech
Crafted devices channel the power of the Blessing to guide, communicate with, protect, and enhance transformed cats.
| Device | Function |
|---|---|
| Transformative Collar | Helps a blessed cat activate and regulate its transformation into its fixed wild form. Rare versions can accelerate or delay a shift. Cats can transform without a collar. |
| Battle Collar | Temporarily enhances a transformed cat’s strength, speed, or stealth. |
| Bastet’s Voice Pendant | Enables long-distance, telepathic-style communication through matched soul signatures. Related devices interpret meows, purrs, and hisses. Some versions preserve messages or ancestral memories. |
| Navigation Scarab | A floating, scarab-shaped guide that follows ley lines and sacred routes, maps territory, locates boundaries or temples, and projects glyph maps. |
| Bastet Eye Lens | Reveals heat trails, spiritual energy, and threats that ordinary sight cannot detect. |
| Camouflage Charm | Creates an illusion that helps its wearer blend into the surrounding environment. |
| Sigil Bracer | Allows an authorized wearer to access compatible Bastet Tech and activate protective wards. |
Bastet Tech cannot change a cat’s destined species, create hybrids, erase Calorie Debt or Injury Carryover, or permanently remove Instinct Bleed. Coat retention comes from Bastet’s Gift itself.
An early industrial age
The world of Bastet’s Gift exists in an early industrial age, roughly comparable to the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries of our own history. Steam power, railroads, telegraph-style communication, industrial manufacturing, advanced metallurgy, printing, photography, and early electrical systems are all established technologies, but they are unevenly distributed. Horses, wagons, riverboats, and sailing or steam-powered ships remain essential to everyday life, while automobiles are still rare, expensive, and often unreliable. Major cities may have electric lighting, factories, rail stations, and experimental motor vehicles, while smaller settlements can remain largely dependent on animal power and hand-built infrastructure. The result is a world caught between eras, where old roads and new machines exist side by side.
Technology and the Blessing
This uneven development is especially important because Bastet’s Gift has shaped civilization for centuries. Cats capable of transforming into lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, cougars, lynx, and servals have influenced warfare, trade, exploration, agriculture, law, and transportation. Because transformed cats can move through terrain that machines cannot easily cross, they remain strategically valuable even as industrial technology advances. A railroad can move armies across a continent, but a cougar can still cross a mountain pass no locomotive can reach. A cheetah can serve as an exceptional courier, while lynx and tigers can operate in climates and environments that defeat ordinary travelers. Technology has therefore developed alongside the Blessing rather than replacing it.
Travel between eras
Across the world, horses remain the most common form of personal transportation, especially outside major cities. Wagons and stagecoaches move people and goods across established routes, while railroads connect major population centers and rapidly expand the reach of powerful states. Steamships and sailing vessels dominate long-distance sea travel. Automobiles exist, but they are still symbols of wealth, military power, experimentation, or industrial prestige rather than ordinary household possessions. This gives the world a transitional character: a mounted traveler may pass beneath telegraph wires, board a steam locomotive, and later watch an experimental motorcar rattle through a city street.
A civilization shaped by Bastet’s Gift
The world itself is therefore neither ancient nor modern in the familiar sense. It is an industrializing civilization shaped by thousands of years of coexistence with transformed cats. Tribal identities remain politically and culturally important, but the tribes are not frozen in the past. They operate cities, armies, trade networks, workshops, ports, farms, rail systems, and institutions of learning, each developing technology according to its own priorities and beliefs. Ancient temples may stand only a few miles from factories. Sacred relics may be studied by engineers. A warrior may carry a rifle while traveling on horseback beside a cat capable of becoming a lion.
04 / MEET THE CATS
Cleopatra’s Cats:
The Next Generation.
Art by Shine @lightshine799 on Fiverr.com
Each one carries the unmistakable markings of the cat they have always been.
01
Graves
Tuxedo · Lion
Graves loved his human. Found as a stray in a graveyard, he refused to leave his previous owner’s grave.
02
Morrow
Tortie · Lion
Reserved and mysterious, Morrow lives for adventure. The antihero of the group, he follows his own path and rarely explains why.
03
Dice
Cow cat · Tiger
Quick-tempered and drawn to violence, Dice is always ready to show off his power. Restraint has never been his strength.
04
Paint
Calico · Cheetah
Paint lives for speed. She never tires of running and charges full speed into whatever life throws her way.
05
Tubs
Siamese · Lion
Tubs loves baths and bathtubs. A bit of a germophobe, he insists on keeping his fur clean and pristine.
05 / STORIES & GAMES
The origin story
Cleopatra’s Cats:
The Elemental Triune
In 51 BCE, an eighteen-year-old Cleopatra steps into a conflict among gods, cults, and kings—and witnesses the beginning of Bastet’s lasting gift.
Available now on Amazon ↗Available now
War,
but Cats!
The classic card game, reimagined with transformed cats and the favor of Bastet. Play Classic WAR, wield special abilities in Bastet’s Favor Mode, or unleash the unpredictable power of Chaos Mode.
Play on itch.io ↗06 / THE CREATOR
“Every cat carries something wild within.”
Tuxedo Lion LLC is an independent Ohio studio founded by author and world builder Matthew Cutright, creating original stories, characters, and games.