Welcome to Ten Forward Fridays, where a new playable species is presented for the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game, filling in some gaps until official material can be released.
For January we’re venturing into the semi-canonical television show, Star Trek: the Animated Series. This week is the feline Caitians.
Of all the aliens from The Animated Series, Caitians are the most official, as two Caitian individuals appeared in the backgrounds of the courtroom scene of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The first Caitian character, M’Ress, was also featured in numerous comic books, and was brought into the 24th Century for later novels.
Caitians were supposedly descended from an ancient Kzinti colony; the Kzin being Larry Niven’s feline race from his Known Space series that also appeared in Star Trek: the Animated Series (in an episode written by Niven). This version of the Caitians should also function for the Kzin, as well as the Ferasans from Star Trek Online, which are the Kzin but renamed for legal reasons. (The Kzin’s psychic abilities can easily be replicated with Betazoid talents.)
Cat-people are a popular type of human-animal hybrid, being common in anime and even Western science fiction (such as Red Dwarf), making them innately desirably to players. First contact with the Caitians was placed in the middle years of the 23rd Century, a few decades before The Original Series, making them uncommon during Star Trek Discovery. As such, the species works best for campaigns set later in the timeline. (However, the aforementioned Kzin could work in their place prior to Caitian first contact.) But it does seem like they rapidly joined the Federation following contact, with many quickly joining Starfleet and rising through the ranks, so they should be fairly common in later eras.
Click image for PDF
Click HERE for black background PDF
I keep forgetting to, and now recall, to thank you for posting these. I hope to do an STA game in the months to come, will use the Einstein class and the species you provide, to do an early UFP campaign set in the 2190’s. You’re giving me a wealth of data.
The best one yet. I love everything about this! Well done!
So, to head off the inevitable player question, can these guys use their claws as weapons?
The link for the Black Background PDF still links to the White Background PDF.
Fixed
I should have caught these errors last time, but here I go again:
1) “be that an actual Caitian clan of the crew of a starship.”
should be
“be that an actual Caitian clan or the crew of a starship.”
2)”burls” should be “bursts”.
3) Change “The firm pads of their feet allow them to eschew boots or other footwear, but allow them to move with surprising silence.”
to
“The firm pads of their feet leads them to eschew boots or other footwear and allow them to move with surprising silence.”
4) The Talent “Ieen Hearing” needs to be “Keen Hearing”
5) Also in “Keen Hearing”: Put a comma between “sense of hearing” and “you”.
Updated!
Changes are acknowledged and approved. 🙂
Now to move on to the other few dozen entries… 0_0
Definitely lots of small errors. The usual typos plus some fun Adobe errors from when I copied the text from the original PDFs to the cleaned-up InDesign file I currently use. The character recognition did some funky things.
Yeah, I’ve seen some…*interesting* errors crop up when cutting and pasting text from certain files. *shudder*
I’m gonna try to do my edits from the More Races PDF into a Word docfile so they’re all compiled in one place. Mephit has my email addy (assuming you don’t have it as well) so you can contact me that way once I have the docfile ready.
I dunno if I’ll do any more CM Species edits any time soon after getting the 27 species on the More Races PDF done. I expect I’ll have earned a break after that. 🙂 Not to mention that I’m still working on Saul Schmiek’s Kzinti (11 pages!) and I’ll want to move on to CM starship entries after that, especially since we have the Eaglemoss Official Starship re-Scale stuff to do soon (see the latest comments in the Happy Enterprise Day post if you haven’t already).