look in the backs of your Omen of the Stars books, you might have seen strange little

numbered walls of text, with the title informing you this was the Warrior Cats Adventure Game.

Honestly, from what I've seen the majority of even the people who did see these ignored

them, but the same can't be said for me.

These wonderful, horrible, absurd little stories at the back of each Omen of the Stars book,

along with Battle of the clans and the old Warriors website, were for a while the main

draw of the books to me at all.

And frankly, I think more people should know about this odd little game, so I'm going

to explain it for you all here.

The Warrior Cats Adventure game is a group tabletop game written by Stan Brown and illustrated

by James L. Barry where you and a group of friends each create characters in the Warriors

world and play through pre written adventure stories where you get to use your team's

unique blend of strengths, skills, and choices to solve problems in your own way, earning

praise and acclaim for your characters if you do well and disappointment or pain if

you do badly.

You could find six of the eight adventures in the backs of each book in the Omen of the

Stars arc, one in the back of the Battles of the Clans field guide, and one tutorial-style

adventure was included in the rulebook, the 53 page PDF detailing the game's rules and

setup that could be found for free on the old Warrior Cats website.

The blank character sheets were also available there.

I still have both PDFs in full downloaded from when I used to be extremely invested

in the game, but they are also still accessible if you just search “Warrior Cats Adventure

Game” as others have uploaded the full PDFs in the wake of the old website's closure.

As for how the game is actually played, it's more complicated than your average board,

card, or video game but significantly less complicated and more limited than other tabletop

roleplaying games.

The character sheets have space for you to add in plenty of information like the cat's

name, pelt & eye colors, and even a picture of them if you're interested in adding it,

but most of the space is for mechanical information.

Your character's clan and age, for example, both have mechanical impacts.

Each of the clans you can join, the main four as those were the ones that existed around

the lake at the time, provide a bonus to a different skill based on that clan's specialities.

Thunderclan gets a bonus point in Ponder, Riverclan gets a bonus in Swim, Windclan gets

a bonus in Listen, and Shadowclan gets a bonus in Sneak.

I promise I will explain the skills in full shortly but even by their names alone it should

become more clear what each clan is granting you.

Age meanwhile actually has to do with progress.

Unlike leveling based on experience, enemies defeated, or adventures completed, the base

Adventure Game system has progress based on how old your character is in moons.

You get some base apprentice stats as an apprentice at 6 moons, a base warrior upgrade at 10 moons,

and every moon after that will provide you either an extra skill, ability point, or knack,

until you get especially old and begin to occasionally lose some abilities based on

your body growing frail.

This aging is, in part, done naturally in game as certain prompts at the ends of adventures

or, hypothetically, mid-adventure will lead you to increase your cat's age by a moon

or more and get the appropriate bonuses, but the rulebook also encourages you to age your

cats in real time as you play through several sessions or by choice in an agreement with

your group.

Now it's finally time to explain what all those advancements would even do, using as

our example the beloved (to me) Adventure-Game exclusive character, Muddyclaw!

The rulebook, along with its generally sleek graphic design and attractive accent drawings

to frame each page, contains several illustrations of this cat, Muddyclaw, who starts as Muddypaw

and works as their example for how to create a character.

As they suggest we should do for our characters, Muddypaw begins as an apprentice and therefore

has 5 ability points to split between the three abilities: Strength, Intelligence, and

Spirit, with a minimum of one point allocated to each ability.

This means that all apprentice characters will either have 2 points in 2 abilities and

1 point in the third ability, or 1 point in 2 abilities and 3 points in the third ability.

Muddypaw as shown here has 2 points in intelligence and spirit and 1 point in strength, and it

seems he is becoming an apprentice two moons early…huh.

But anyway, when he does become a warrior, he automatically gets another point in the

strength ability and chooses to take another point in intelligence rather than spirit.

The ability points are important in that they determine how well your cat will perform at

certain tasks, and while which specific skills fall under which ability are listed in the

Skills table below, the general overview is that Strength is used in attacking and shows

of strength, intelligence is used in thinking of lore, new solutions, or looking for details,

and spirit is used for both agile movements and emotional resolve.

The ability points you have will not only determine how well you can do at certain tasks,

but how much extra effort you can expend and how long you can stay standing, a factor I

will explain in a short while once I tell you what the other factors are.

Skills are the next important mechanic, and there are fifteen of them which all correspond

to different actions your cat could be asked to do in-game.

There are five that fall under each of the abilities, and they are as follows.

Under strength, the skills are Arch, Bite, Climb, Swim, and Wrestle, under intelligence

is Ponder, Pounce, See, Smell, and Swat, and under Spirit is Focus, Hiss, Jump, Listen,

and Sneak.

Most of the names are self-explanatory but the rulebook also has extensive descriptions

of what each skill could be applied to, such as the “Jump” skill always being defensive,

being used to avoid enemy attacks, get down from high places safely, or land safely rather

than crashing to the ground during a fall.

As mentioned earlier, you get one skill point based on the clan you've chosen and Muddypaw

got an extra skill point in Listen due to being in Windclan, along with three other

skill points which he gave to Jump, Listen, and Ponder.

Being a warrior doesn't immediately grant you extra skills, so Muddyclaw stays the same

in that regard.

However, he does get something else: Knacks.

Knacks are the third main gameplay mechanic, and the last element of the character sheet

to cover.

Unlike skills, which every cat can do and can be asked to do regardless of whether or

not they have bonuses in it, knacks are special tricks for specific situations that cats can

use to specialize in a certain area, and usually these are used to have a better chance of

completing a task or increase your talent in a specific area based on your cat's experience

with that particular field.

Once again, the knacks are detailed in the rulebook, but there are 25 of them, several

of which you can take multiple times to increase that knack's effectiveness, so it's a

good place to give some unique details to your character.

Players are encouraged to choose ability points, skills, and knacks based on an imagined personality

and story for their cats to integrate the storytelling aspect into this storytelling

game, and as you get three knacks for completing warrior training, you are especially led into

thinking about what your cat might have learned to love or specialize in during their apprenticeship.

Muddyclaw found out that he really likes medicine cat work, and so he chose the Herb Lore, Medicine

Lore, and Alertness knacks to find, identify, and use herbs.

If you don't want to create your own character at all, though, several completed character

sheets are included in the rulebook for prominent canon Warriors characters, if you'd rather

play as them.

With the character sheet filled, I'll quickly walk you through what an interaction with

this would look like.

Let's say that Muddyclaw is asked to listen ahead and check for the creature they're

tracking.

Listen is a Spirit based skill, so we start with Muddyclaw's Spirit Score: 2.

Muddyclaw has a +2 bonus in Listen as well, giving him a 4 on this check by default.

Muddyclaw also has the Alertness knack, which, if paid for with a spirit chip, can be used

to add a bonus point to a Focus, Listen, Ponder, See, or Smell check.

He has two spirit chips to spend so could use this to add +1 or +2 to his check.

Now, if he wishes, without the knack, he is allowed to spend chips to increase his score.

Each chip spent adds +1 to your score for this check, but you may only spend chips that

match the ability being tested.

Muddyclaw has 2 spirit chips, so he could spend one or both of them to add a +1 or a

+2 to his score and get a 5 or a 6.

Since Muddyclaw had to spend a Spirit chip and got a +1 bonus for each chip in either

case, it may have become apparent that knacks aren't always very useful, unless you take

them multiple times and can get a +2 for each chip instead.

All of this is also assuming he hadn't spent any chips previously, as chips that are spent

are lost until they can be refreshed at specific points in the story.

This is especially important because chips in general also act as measures of your health.

If you are in a fight and get hit, you lose chips, and cannot gain these back unless you

are healed, which is a much more rare occurrence than refreshing spent chips.

If you have no ability chips left, your cat is Knocked Out, which in many cases means

the end of your adventure, especially if it happens to multiple cats in your group at

once.

Spending chips then, especially at these low ages where you don't have many chips, can

be somewhat dangerous.

Applying all of this to a game section, you should imagine less of a free-form discussion

and more of a choose-your own adventure.

I actually discovered while researching for this video that this is now more unequivocally

true than ever as the new “Enchanced Edition” of The Last Hope's e-book version features

a choppy tap-here choose your own adventure version of the Saving The Kits and Plaintive

Howls adventures, mostly copied over word for word without any of the skill checks and

with a somewhat clunky transition.

But in the original game, the Narrator, or player leading the game by reading the adventure,

sets up a situation and offers players a choice, but they can really only choose one of the

two to five options that the writers of the game anticipated you to pick.

When players have made their choices, and perhaps passed or failed a necessary skill

check, the Narrator finds out which of the options at the bottom of the page their choice

refers to and goes to the corresponding prompt on whatever page the choice indicates to set

up a new situation.

For anyone who is familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or other tabletop roleplaying

games, this is not really like those in a lot of ways.

Because of the system it's built on, made to be easy for children to grasp, there isn't

really much space for roleplay, creativity, or character building, and all the characters

in a group have to make one choice for the whole party anyway, among only a handful already

chosen for you by the story.

The system of character creation, spending ability chips, and most importantly the complete

lack of dice also removes any random chance from the equation and makes most opportunities

to change your score both rare and costly.

This results in a situation where, for the first several moons, every single check is

going to be incredibly difficult if not impossible, and later on every check will be immediately

passable without a chance for failure.

The different adventures, although they are advertised as being playable in any order,

really do have to be played in a specific order based on how high the checks are in

each one, and how many ability chips they expect you to be able to spend.

Swapping Narrators several times throughout a game is also a mechanic I have qualms with.

Even aside from it being weird for characters to pop in and out of existence mid scene depending

on who the Narrator is at the moment, the Narrator absolutely must read through the

sections they are leading to see the different situational factors and choices presented

to the players and kept hidden from them.

In that time, it is very easy to read something that comes from the adjacent section, which

is often not the same as the next section.

The sections in the Adventure Games are numbered and sorted much like Choose Your Own Adventure

books, so a typical pathway through the story could look like this.

This means that the Narrators are likely to be spoiled on sections they will not be leading,

ruining part of their experience.

This is a rule I have always ignored when running through the adventures.

Most of the design choices I have discussed were almost certainly made for the sake of

providing an easy and equal experience for all young children, but it doesn't create

an experience with much change for nuance, different successes and failures, or creativity

in choices or roleplay.

In my personal history, I spent far more time reading through these adventures, and even

the rule book, from front to back.

It was entirely out of order most of the time, I never roleplayed with anyone or even created

characters, and I absolutely loved it.

I can't fully explain it but I did already love doing this with D&D modules and Choose

Your Own Adventure books too, so maybe I was just strange.

Becoming so familiar with them, I did eventually run through all of them twice, first by forcing