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Nightcats
A Sword-and-Sorcery Setting of Jungles, Ruins, River Kingdoms, and Ancient Dread for Barbarians of Lemuria
Nightcats is a world of steaming dense jungles, fallen cities, half-swallowed roads, river and island kingdoms, painted idols, moonlit blades, and old stones that remember too much. It is a setting of ambush, treasure, betrayal, temple-robbing, and desperate courage in places where civilization is narrow and the wilderness is vast.
Welcome to Jhelum, a hot and dangerous land of great rivers, crowded cities, jungle frontiers, and ancient powers. Beyond its roads and courts stretches a green immensity filled with beasts, ruins, forgotten shrines, jungle tribes, and things older than memory.
And at the heart of Jhelum broods the Sea of Blood. Vast and red as a wound beneath the sun, it is both trade road and menace, a barbaric inland sea whose waters touch pirate ports, old kingdoms, ruined shores, and secrets better left drowned. The Sea of Blood is beautiful, infamous, and never wholly safe.
Nightcats are already in motion when play begins: scouts, thieves, priests, mercenaries, caravan guards, hunters, dancers, sailors, exiles, pirates, and tomb robbers. They are capable people thrown into danger, mystery, splendour, and dread.
Adventures and Play
Nightcats is built for bold, fast-moving sword-and-sorcery adventure with the rules-light Barbarians of Lemuria ruleset:
- jungle expeditions
- temple robberies
- river journeys
- pirate voyages on the Sea of Blood
- court intrigues
- feuds, vendettas, and betrayals
- torchlit battles in forgotten places
- cults, sorcerers, and older things beneath the earth
Tone and Inspirations
The tone of Nightcats draws on classic sword-and-sorcery, jungle adventure fiction, lost-world romance, and Indian-inspired antiquity. It is a world of splendour and menace, where gold glitters in ruined sanctuaries, kings rule behind carved walls, the jungle swallows empires, sorcerers cast spells in forgotten crypts, and the gods are never entirely absent.
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The Setting
Current State
The Nightcats section of the Codex is under active expansion as material is migrated, revised, and reorganized into its new form.