#they'd see their sucker unattended

[bonefall]

Thinking about that one post about the 5000 year old teenager girl found buried with her collection of 180 sheep ankle bones but specifically the addition of how ankle bones were used as dice back then and she was a gamer.. what I'm getting at is: would clan cats make bone dice and Are They Gaming

First let me teach you a little bit about Knucklebones: The Game.

You probably know one of its variants better as Jacks, that game you play with a rubber ball and little metal spikes. There's a version of Knucklebones in nearly every culture, where the basic idea is to throw an object up in the air, pick up as many of the smaller objects as possible, and then catch the larger object before it hits the ground.

In cultures with a lot of access to livestock, usually the hand and ankle bones of sheep would be used. Places that don't have them might use rocks, seeds, shells, whatever. It was Ancient Greece that had such an extreme take on the game that it eventually evolved into dice-throwing-- a totally chance-based game where you would just throw the biggest foot bone of a sheep (the astralagus; equivalent to the talus in a human) and see how they landed.

So the girl they uncovered in Kazakhstan with the 180 sheep bones wasn't really buried "with dice," make sense? It's more like being buried with jacks. Central Asia is actually jam-packed with knucklebones-types games. Mongolian Shagai is recognized by UNESCO.

And it makes a TON of sense, because those regions are grasslands absolutely ideal for raising sheep.

SO. CLAN CATS.

There's two major considerations here;

ONE: The access to, and size of, sheep bones.

Clan cats don't kill sheep. TRIBE cats actually have access to sheep and kill one or two a year! I would actually like to give them a bunch of special uses for various parts of the sheep. I think the eagle-killing thing in canon is actually pretty ridiculous for several reasons

BUT THAT SAID, an astralagus is the size of a cat's paw.

[ID: A human holding an astralagus in the tips of its fingers.]

You'd need to play a different sort of game with this. It's more like a square softball to a cat than a little rubber ball.

Boar also have bones like this, though. A muntjac probably produces bones that are sized properly for a cat. Hares and rabbits are probably the BEST bet here though, which, somehow feels right. I'm not sure why, but WindClan seems like the gamerclan Clan that would think up these sorts of cute games.

Something about it fits their whole savvy culture, tunneling, emphasis on trade and invention pre-Heatherstar. ShadowClan and WindClan share a cultural value of innovation, but ShadowClan seems more... chemical and competitive.

Hard to explain it. ShadowClan invents flax retting and WindClan invents the drop spindle. There's overlap but it has a bit of a different flavor between them.

TWO: Range of motion

I've made BB!Cats have the same range of motion as the cats in canon, which is higher than a real cat. They're able to WEAVE, you can't do that without a basic pincher grasp. They're also able to mix herbs, wrap things up in leaves, and apply bandages.

I haven't actually given my reworked cats much more ability than they already had, I just codified rules based on what we already see.

But that said, they DO have less range of motion in their hands than humans. They have little thumbs and a better ability to grab, but can't twist their paws completely upwards. There's no way they can toss an object straight up, then catch it again.

So any games they do play would need to accommodate that. So far I've got Scratchstone, Teeterstrike, and an unnamed rhyme game. The bone game would need to look more like a game of marbles than jacks. Or, maybe more modified to accommodate swipes and strikes, somehow? Or a two-person game of catch?

Gotta think about it.

[xenophiliarp]

Everyone hated the king, those under his employ because how he would leave the castle unattended and without so much as a note. Why would he leave a note? They'd be able to find him. His country's people hated him because he almost seemed to refuse to live in the lavish castle he'd inherited by committing the sin of patricide to the mad blood sucker that lived there first, built his kingdom on slaves, fear, and blood. Why would you want to live in a place like that? He would never ask his retainers to do something he would not do himself, so if he could do it himself why waste time asking someone else to do it for him? It could be done by then.

The way he made it seem to need them, they hated him for it. Well they didn’t hate him, not really, they just resented his attitude towards his responsibilities, his seeming lack of interest in ruling, and his attitude in general.

More often than not, he was seen in the castle town square, causing mischief with kids too young to know who he was. He was raised by a commoner, so he dressed like a commoner, no jewels or baubles when he could help it. And he’d be damned if he had to wear that sweaty crown a microsecond longer than he had to.

He was a force to be reckonned with. None could compare to his mastery of the sword in his kingdom, he longed to see how other sword masters faired in skill in others. He was nimble, adaptable, and agile to an inhuman extent, especially towards those not privy to his secret. He was a mad king’s child, borne to a dark inheritance, those that knew his father’s reign, feared him to become the same; a horrid creature of the dark. They even called him a prince of darkness and several other dramatic and dreary titles.

When you looked at him with your own eyes, he was easy enough to overlook. A simple man, with simple features, wearing simple clothes that were just a muddy-looking as anyone else. If you singled him out, it’d be because of the dull gray hair on his head, the fair paleness of his skin, and the subtle golden luminescence of his eyes. He didn’t often emote, in voice or expression, his ability to blend in naturally was entirely uncanny.

However alone in the woods on the outskirts of the city, cooking a meal he caught and hunted himself, it was easy to single him out and not so easy for him to blend in. He was accompanied by a large monster of a horse, the only way of seeing it laying languidly in the dirt was the reins illuminated by the fire light, the saddle was giving him something to prop up against on the log he’d felled to use as a seat. Everything done, was done by his hand.

He didn’t have the most reliable memory, until he’d met someone he would get lost in his imaginations of what they looked like, and end up not remembering anything about them until he met them. So this woman, this woman was nothing to him, but he could smell blood, he just had the nose for it, and it wasn’t coming from the meat of the deer he’d killed and cooked. Though there were no tools or weapons clearly present at the campfire with this man, no bow or blade. Just he, his kill, and his giant, snoring horse.

“Help you?” He inquired back, “Help you, how?”

@kizhavvorsa

open to: anyone

verse: Targaryen’s win the war;

plot: Despite your reputation as a Dark Lord, you have a strict moral code. So when a young girl showing signs of abuse wandered into your realm, you took her in. Now the neighboring kingdom is accusing you of kidnapping their princess. You have to choose between returning her to her abusers or war.

Daenerys looked a state, travelling days through the forest on her Silver, knowing that her brothers were doing everything they could to find her but she hoped that she gave herself a good head start away from them. She couldn’t do it anymore, the constant battle for peace, fighting to stop Viserys and his wicked ways. Deeper into the forest she pulled her horse along until she saw a campfire in the distance. For a moment she debated on whether to approach them, it could be anyone, the worst of the worse and there was a chance they would march her right back to her castle walls for a price. “Please.” Daenerys held onto the reigns of her horse. “Please help me.”