We like being in a world of anthropomorphic animal folk. “We” being my #family — playing #DnD.

I spent some time looking for options for us. Our 9-year-old likes combat. Our 14-year-old likes avoiding it. They both like mysteries, and unfamiliar cultures, and role-playing.

Everyone likes character creation and character development, but no one is up to collating and combing through all the options. So we use #Roll20 for character management. A free account (for all involved) works pretty well for that, though we may be about to run into a problem. (More on that in a later post.)

After some research, I bought City of Cats and the Southlands Player’s Guide from @KoboldPress@mastodon.social, Humblewood Campaign Book from #HitPointPress, and the Player’s Handbook from #WotC. In our world, the #Southlands are the continent to the south, while #Humblewood exists on the east coast of the continent to the north.

Our party consists of:

• Our 9-year-old’s dragonborn bard
• Our 14-year-old’s mapach barbarian
• My partner’s elf fighter
• A subek paladin that I play as an NPC

Our first adventure was an adaptation of Richard Pett's “Cat and Mouse” from City of Cats. I chose it specifically because it's meant to be played different ways, with thought given to non-violent ways of handling situations, and lots of opportunities for role-play. It also manages to be compact (for our group, which spends a lot of time role-playing, it was six sessions) while having an “open” feel. By that I mean that characters can move through the adventure's streets and islands as they like, encountering some NPCs/situations and others not, and the result feels quite coherent.

The Southlands campaign setting needs some massaging to be appropriate for my kids — for example, removing slavery. It also needs some more subtle changes to fit with non-racist ways of playing animal folk. This particularly means that gnolls, basteti, nkosi, ratfolk, subek, kobolds, and others do not have racial personalities or predispositions to violence or other activities. Also, far too many positions of importance in the Southlands societies and adventures are held by humans, though luckily “Cat and Mouse” is generally an exception to this. Though it still has the problem that too many important NPCs are males.

So here are a few small adjustments I made to the characters:

• Raheed: Seen as a thief who doesn’t pay his debts by others, but seen as a hero by ratfolk because he uses his resources to help their downtrodden community. (It’s hard to be a rat in the City of Cats.)
• Hakaan: A trader and merchant, not a “slaver.”
• Heth: Female, but otherwise substantially the same.
• Nassoor, Achraf, and Oumayma: I was going to make at least one of them non-human, but the party only ended up encountering one of them.

I also introduced Omar, a key NPC from a future planned adventure (“Three Little Pigs”), into their adventures in the Perfume District. I changed him from human to nkosi — and from a hapless merchant to a cartographer well-connected in the world of antiquities. He became their introduction into a second adventure, based on Jerry LeNeave's Tomb of Tiberesh (also from Kobold). For this I’ve changed Hazi into a gnoll and Lugo into a heru.

I’m hoping this choice of materials — and these alterations — might prove useful in someone else’s campaign, if they're playing with folks with tastes like ours.