Help me out a little with some background development, please.
I have returned to a setting I’ve run several times before sometimes under GURPS, sometmies under FATE. It is an interdimensional city with lots of imported populations including a culture of talking, sapient cats. This is a long standing feature of the city and I have a cat NPC attached to the player group, a bunch of starting students at a Magical University.
So I got to thinking about filling out the cat community and I got to wondering:
What do cats do to pay the rent?
They live in city full of people with opposable thumbs. Yes, they make fine rodent hunters (and every city needs that) but what can they do that doesn’t need hands?
Hmm, call centre operators? Or would that clash too much with their cultural personality?
They are the product of genetic experimentation (millenia ago now): should I give them telekinesis?
What are the obvious and not so obvious career routes for cats?
In a magical environment, some cats will have magical talents. Ones that don’t still have very good senses and excellent stealth. They may well work as guardians against invisible attackers, especially if they aren’t obviously different from normal cats.
Can’t you imagine a cat with a headset? Telemarketers. Telescammers. Hedge fund managers. Pump-and-dump rug-pulling crypto bros. Predatory lenders. Basically, I can imagine the entire cast of Boiler Room played by cats.
Maybe a levelled up version of a shop cat. Living in the store initially started as a way to control pests, but now they help out customers by knowing about stock, store layout etc.
Possibly with a guild/union, so it’s not just a helpful thing, but a mark of quality that you have a shop cat. Very upmarket places able to boast having had the same family of cats working there for generations.
Medicine and chemistry depending on how far you go with a cat’s sense of smell
Like the cats in care homes that are observed attending more closely to folks about to die (this may not be reproducible in a double blind study, correlation is not causation)
but either way if they can smell the goblet and be like “hey that’s what arsenic smelled like when I took gen chem 1 as part of my undergraduate studies” Someone may pay for that
Cats as personal shoppers in swanky department stores?
Cats as ‘the Milktray man’ delivering small tokens of affection to your lover?
Special cat masseurs in spas. Have a cat walk up and down your back and knead you with its paws.
Culling the male chicks at the local battery hen farm? (But would they be paid? Or just treat it as an ‘all you can eat’ buffet?)
Japanese cat cafes seem popular in the real world. That’s sort of day-care for the kittens and entertainment for the humans.
As well as rodents, they might be employed for general pest control problems. They use meerkats in South Africa to locate venomous snakes in folks’ homes, but cats could do that. Spider phobia? Get a cat to pounce on it and problem solved. Too many feral pigeons? And of course reporting on the movements of feral or stray dogs!
Inspecting inside pipes and tunnels that humans can’t get down. The sort of place you’d send a trundling remote with a camera on.
Cashing in on various superstitions about cats! Such as a woman who lets a cat eat from her shoe will soon get a marriage proposal. Pour water on a cat to summon rain (they will want paid a LOT for that one). You could invent a cat version of the magpie rhyme “One for sorrow, etc”. Quick we need 5 cats or our wedding will be inauspicious…
In “Starter Villain” by John Scalzi, there is an entire group of cats that function as spies, trading secrets and intel between the major powers at play in the novel.
They could also find work in settings that require fine eyesight (night watch? Guard cats?) or hearing (sonar operators? Hunting/finding things that emit ultrasonic or subsonic noise?).
They could also operate as black ops: killing all the birds in an area of farmland would result in massive famine (as proven through communist China’s “experiments” with killing seed-eating birds), or removing another nation’s cats that are responsible for killing rats/mice (again, famine, or possibly increase in disease).
There are reports (sadly from “Trust Me Bro University,” but I’m pretty sure I think from reputable sources as well) that purring increases the healing rate of broken bones, and there are numerous stories of cats identifying when people are sick, injured, or pregnant, so maybe nurses?
They’d probably also have a thriving arts community… painting, sure, but also cardboard deconstruction (work at a recycling center breaking down boxes?).
Some cats are magically gifted (the NPC cat in the same magical school class as the PC certainly is) though cuturally they have a preference for using Divine Magic.
Spies and police detectives yes. Lawyers certainly. (I can imagine a cat licking his paws during an opponent’s summing up and in extreme cases licking their own bottoms to distract the jury.)
Diagnosticians (with that enhanced sense of smell) quite possibly. Psychotherapists definitely.
I can see them as call centre workers… or maybe not given their attitude to rude persons.
The sapient cats are a long established feature of the City. Only tourists are surprised by them these days.
Explorers of pipes and such might be possible but only nice, dry and non icky pipes. Sewers are right out unless chasing rats.
There an episode of one of the James May programmes where he put go pros on all the cats in a neighbourhood and then had someone try to burgle a house. Place was absolutely locked down,
They would have their own games which would involve complex battles of will power and body language that would make the pre-wrestle rituals of sumo fade in comparison.
Also voice activated chess boards and games of DIPLOMACY ™
