Catnut Swamp
Official illustration by Clément de Ruyter
Catnut Swamp is a sea of trees covered in moss and lichen, west of Cat Tree City. Those who dare to venture in describe a polluted forest, home to strange and terrifying animals. The greenish silt is acidic: it burns paws and irritates eyes.
Black water, thick and sticky, stands between the roots. Heaps of big-bare-butt refuse float on its surface.
The Timberwalkers are a tribe of Catnuts living high in great meowgic trees, which they guide like herds. In this way they open irrigation canals through the peat bog, which carry the toxic waters away.
The swamp is spreading. The farms around it say its waters gain on the crops every night, and at Les Moulineaux the tracks are turning to mire.
Every morning, the wind carries the smell of silt to Cat Tree City and wakes King Walter. His disgust for the swamp has become an obsession. In his mind the Catnuts are the culprits: they would be fouling his kingdom in revenge for their exile.
At Les Moulineaux, people talk of a priceless treasure buried at the heart of the swamp, of a beast that devours those who venture in, and of serpentine creatures led by a strange toad that raid the farms nearby.
The Catnuts
Catnuts are shaggy Cats, mostly exiled Kittens who cut every tie with the Kingdom to live as hermits in the woods. They rarely see one another, and even less the outside world, so no one could count them.
They know the forest so well that they move through it and hide in it without effort. All sorts of legends circulate about them, hard to verify.
Their name comes from their armor of giant prickly husks, which makes them look like large chestnuts. With their fur matted with mud and tangled with leaves, they are the bogeymen of fireside tales.
They are frightening, but it is their introverted, almost wild nature that keeps up this reputation. When a Catnut trusts a Kitten, it proves a very welcoming host and a loyal friend.
Bibi is a Catnut who grew up in the swamp and knows nothing of civilized life in Cat Tree City.
The description of the Catnuts comes from the Core Rulebook. The swamp itself, its geography and its inhabitants, is the subject of Book 3.
Inhabitants
- Treefur: a wildcat as big as a lynx, the swamp's most powerful Shaman
- Pimprenelle: a small bat taken in by Treefur, whom she follows everywhere
- Balise: a red Kitten, deserter from the Red Company, poet and mapmaker living alongside a meowgic tree
- Pancake: an anxious red Kitten, apprentice meowge from Highcastle sent on placement into the swamp
- Ratafia: a Timberwalker bonded to a weeping willow in flower almost year-round
- Siméon: a swindler chameleon, Bojosar's right hand and leader of the Cult of the Molt, which worships the Swamp Beast
- Sir Peck: a wandering knight duck, romantic and clumsy, with his squire Toqué at his side
- Toqué: a toucan, squire and traveling companion to Sir Peck