The below culminates in a brief exchange that occurred during Sunday's final run at PrinceCon. I was running on 4 hours of sleep since 5:20 am Friday morning, and I may have been acting a little punchy. The set up is long, and details roughly the plot of the campaign.
Andy (Purraku) & I (Lamm) were on the final run of a GM's campaign, and we had also been on its first run Friday night. The first time around we had stopped and investigated every small, racist northern coastal town we came across trying to solve the mystery of the vague turmoil we heard rumors about. Lamm would tromp on ahead and win over the small-minded townsfolk with her perky honesty and obvious naiveté. They would see we had a Catfolk (or two) with us, and we'd try to figure out as much as possible before we wore out our welcome. By the end, we had an idea of where the bad guy, "Bad Horse," was located, and a vague idea of what he was doing (kidnapping humans and turning them into Eponi - the half human/half-horse people).
The last run was vastly different. The previous group had found and defeated Bad Horse and removed the hammer that had been causing the race changes, and now we had to respond to disturbance in Falconberg. Our poor GM Chris probably had to finish as much of his plot as he could, because we walked into a 5-front war. I guess we made the 6th group of combatants. Turns out that not only had there been a hammer that turned humans into Eponi, there was also a blow-gun that turned people (well, at the very least dwarves) into Perrin, the otter-people, and a set of claws that turned others into Catfolk. The people (or animals) wielding these items desired the other items, and any other item containing evil magical shards of crystal. Various other races were there, too.
We had seen the wielder of the claws, a huge cat the size of an elephant, creating Catfolk from little alley cats. The last group to arrive was a rag-tag bunch of humans literally dressed in rags carrying improvised weapons. Instead of assuming that they were zombies (which only now did I think of), we assumed they were the people who had been Eponi who had turned back once the hammer was destroyed.
Now, there are only 3 of these half-animal, half-human races; the Perrin, the Eponi, and the Catfolk. They were created by an evil mage/cleric some 70 or 80 years prior. Andy was playing a Catfolk, and upon seeing this new group of enemies and hearing my own hasty assumption that they were former Eponi, he jumped to his own conclusion. Here is the rough transcript of what followed.
Lamm: So all we have to do is destroy the claws and all of these fighting Catfolk will turn back into alley cats!
Purraku: Oh no! I wonder what I am going to do when I turn into a cat.
Lamm: A what? a cat?
Purraku: It'll be great! I'll be adopted by someone and sleep for 14 hours a day and have all the fish and milk I want!
Lamm: Wait you need to be adopted by someone when you're a small, *real* cat?
Purraku: Maybe you could-
Lamm: I'll adopt you! When you're a cat I'll adopt you and you can be my pet and we can be friends forever and we can talk about all the battles we fought in - well I can talk about them and you can listen - and we'll be friends forever, because you'll be my pet! *bounce bounce hug*
As you might have guessed, destruction of the item did not cause original - or even the recently created - Catfolk to turn back into alley cats, nor did Purraku change either.
