re: the warrior cats name wheels and your tags
i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children
with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies
whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series
Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.
It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.
The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:
A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body.
She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.
A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.
A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.
A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:
A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration.
It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.
Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).
Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.
An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.
An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.
Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs.
The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see).
I should draw them sometime.
IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.
Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)
Like I said, I'm not very familiar with Canon Warrior Cats Lore, but my god is it fun to come in and play A Fucking Problem while everyone applauds you for being Such A Devastating Fucking Problem.
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