Revision as of 15:28, 23 March 2026

Nightcats

A Sword-and-Sorcery Setting of Jungles, Ruins, River Kingdoms, and Ancient Dread for Barbarians of Lemuria

Nightcats is a world of steaming jungles, fallen cities, half-swallowed roads, river 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.

This is 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, and things older than memory.

And at the heart of Jhelum broods the setting’s greatest and most terrible landmark: the Sea of Blood. Vast, inland, 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 one of the great horizons of the setting—beautiful, infamous, and never wholly safe.

Nightcats are not farm boys awaiting destiny. They 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, avarice, splendour, and dread.

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The Setting

Adventures and Play

Nightcats is built for bold, fast-moving sword-and-sorcery adventure:

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, and the gods are never entirely absent.

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Current State

The Nightcats section of the Codex is under active expansion as material is migrated, revised, and reorganized into its new form.