Introduction

The Short Answer

Once upon a time, around 2 in the morning after plenty of caffeine, I decided that what I really needed to do was build a world of magic talking multicoloured cats.

The Long Answer

Depending on your background in worldbuilding and games, Kiarrcats of Ryll will either be warmly familiar, or entirely bizarre. Talking multicoloured cats with magic powers? What are you, twelve?

Well, no. (I'm on the other side of thirty, let's put it that way.) But when I was younger, I picked up a lot of experience in various creature roleplays. They were of the magic, talking charismatic beast variety. Magic cats, magic wolves, magic dragons, you name it. The ur-example of these games was probably the FDRP, centred around the Draekard species, but there were many others. Most were run as play by post games and ended up falling victim to the usual fate of stagnation. Eventually we moved on, grew up, and did grown up things - but growing up sucks sometimes. Kiarrcats of Ryll is an attempt to bring back that sort of world. It's not a parody, more of a self aware tribute.

(Curious about the history of the creature roleplay genre? I've written more over here - Creature Roleplays of the early 00s)

But why multicoloured cats? Aren't we all a bit old for that now? Maybe. And I'll straight up admit that the premise is not at all original. But I need only one reason: it's fun. I don't think there's enough fun in the world. I do serious worldbuilding and storytelling, too. Sometimes I even do stuff in meatspace, because there are these annoying things called bills that keep coming through my door. But everyone has to unwind, and I'm not the only one. When I first posted the original kiarrcat sketches (I wasn't making it up about the caffeine at 2AM, by the way) I was overwhelmed by the support. People remembered those worlds, and were happy to see them again.

Too often, we look back at the creations of our past, especially our teens, and dismiss them as "cringey". I've done it loads of times, thinking of old storylines I made up and then hastily shutting the lid because wait, I nearly let someone see that crap! That's understandable, but I think it's a shame to throw them out entirely. If you're anything like me, a lot of love and energy went into these worlds, energy that we lost when pressures of real life began to sink on us. Screw that, let's fight back. With fun.

So yes, it's about nostalgia. But even if it wasn't, I'd want to do something like this, for the simple fact that we need to make time for weird and fun things in our lives. I'll put it another way. I'm a longstanding participant in NaNoWriMo, and one of the challenges in writing a fifty thousand word novel in a month is finding the time. But at the end of it all, that time is worth it, to have made something that brought you happiness.

Not to mention that NaNoWriMo encourages delving into what you love, even if it's ridiculous. To quote the accompanying book:

If you truly are fascinated by the plight of the nation's mentally ill, the ongoing politicization of religious sects in Saudi Arabia, or inner city high-rise housing projects as metaphors for racial injustice and miscarried modernization, by all means put them in your book.
But if, in your heart of hearts, you really want to write a book about a pair of superpowered, kung-fu koalas who wear pink capes and race through the city streets on miniature go-karts, know that this is also a wonderful and perfectly valid subject for a novel.

What next?

Ryll's one big work in progress, I'm not going to lie. Plenty of stuff here is rudimentary, lots of things I have yet to get to. That's okay. It's a growing world, so sit back and watch it grow with me.

I'm not currently sure what my ultimate goal is for Ryll. I'd love to open it up as a message board based RPG like its ancestors, but I learnt how quickly those die last time around. Currently I'm toying with setting out rules for a tabletop RPG, but I don't consider myself familiar enough with any systems to confidently convert to any of them. As it stands, Ryll is a worldbuilding project, a setting for characters and stories, and somewhere to get lost in nostalgia every once in a while.

Hosting

This page is proudly hosted by Neocities, because their reasons for making their service are more or less the same as my reasons for making this setting.