Night Whispers

Read Aloud: “After the better part of a day, the raccoon is still snapping at the kit and cub. Clearly it’s ready for a fight.”

Narrator Tips: This scene focuses entirely on the fight between the players’ cats and the raccoon. It uses the rules for fighting found in Chapter Five of the game rules.

From where it stands, the raccoon will hiss at the players’ cats, but it remains focused on the kit and cub perched on the branch above. The cats will need to force it away.

If the players’ cats decide to fight the raccoon, the fight will follow all the usual rules for fighting. The raccoon has a Jump score of 7, a Pounce score of 10, a Swat score of 12, and a Bite score of 10. The raccoon has Ability chips just like the players’ cats do and spends them in the same way. It has 10 Strength chips, 4 Intelligence chips, and 6 Spirit chips. For the purposes of this fight, the raccoon is treated just the same as a player’s cat except that the Narrator controls all its movements.

The raccoon will fight until it only has 7 chips remaining, and then it will try to run away. If this happens and the cats decide to chase the raccoon, they can easily catch up with it and continue the fight. However, if they let it go, the raccoon will leave Clan territory entirely and never be heard from again.

What Happens Next: If the cats decide to delay the fight and instead try to scare the raccoon away, continue with 11.

If two or more of the cats are knocked out during the fight, continue with 13.

If the cats knock out or chase off the raccoon, they win the fight and this is the end of the chapter. Hand the adventure to the next Narrator and tell him or her to continue with 20.

16. The Truth of the Matter

Read Aloud: “With a tiny grunt of exertion, the kit lifts up her head and calls out, ‘Wait! I can explain everything!’”

Narrator Tips: The kit gets her head free from the fox’s paw and attempts to explain what happened. The details are below. Use them to improvise a scene where she is trying to make things clear quickly in order to prevent a fight, but also is struggling with the fact that she is just a frightened kit and doesn’t really understand all the details of what’s going on.

The brother and sister had snuck away from the queens and the other kits, as they often did, and were poking around in one of the furthest corners of the WindClan camp. They smelled a strange scent and heard something scratching on the other side of the camp’s wall. It didn’t smell dangerous, and the scratching sounded like it was coming from something no bigger than they were.

Their curiosity got the better of them, and they started scratching on their side of the wall, curious to see what was out there. Soon they’d poked a hole through the wall, and on the other side they saw a fox cub. They started sniffing and pawing at one another. Before long, they were rolling around and play fighting, just like old friends. This quickly turned into a running and tumbling game of tag and soon they were far away.

They spent some time running and playing together—this was the first time the kits had been out of the camp. After a while, though, she got separated from her brother and the fox cub. She thought she saw the fox cub’s tail, so she pounced on it, but it wasn’t the cub—it was his mother!

The mother fox was frantic, searching for her cub. The kit could tell because her face had the same look the queens got whenever one of the kits went missing. Then there was the sound of other cats in the area—Clan warriors who were out looking for the fox—so she grabbed the kit by the scruff and carried her off to this den.

“She’s been very kind to me but won’t let me leave,” the kit tells them. “I think she’s waiting until her missing cub comes home. But I have no idea where the cub or my brother is, and I just want to go home!”

The kit begs the players’ cats not to hurt the fox. She bets that if they find and return the cub, the fox will probably take her whole litter and get out of Clan territory as fast as they can.

What Happens Next: If the cats decide to go look for the missing kit and fox cub, continue with 14.

If the cats decide they want to fight the fox first, continue with 8.

17. Outfoxed

Read Aloud: “The scent trail heads up the hill, away from the Lake. As it leads you deeper into the woods, the other trails fade away until only this one remains. But then you realize that this scent trail is older than all the others. You’ve accidentally followed the path the fox first used when she entered the Clan territories.”