THERE’S A BIT OF THE SPOKEN VERSE, it comes rushing like a memory of words you’ve never spoken, when you find yourself humming and hawing on the long and lonesome road, far from home; dreary and bleary, with a heavy heart that keeps you going further than you should.
It says: “Dim the old campfire light and sink into slow slumber, let the torch smoke climb towards the blue-black sky and the stars twinkling like fireflies in deep, dirty love. Let the memories of gloom fall into the river that climbs across the land like a stumble-drunk child, leading always and only into the blissful waters found under the moon.
Lay down your sleepy head, and all your burdens. You’re lost, but the music is calling to your soul and it tells you that down here by this old river you’ll never again study war or feel that need to climb a mountain tall. This is a place of comfort you’ll find, do a service to kit and cat in kind, and all will be well, and all will be swell, once Catland makes you mine.”
Now, the who that is Catland making you theirs is not known to most; those who get out of that place where they hide blades in their beans and hunger in their smiles don’t rightly know who is the who. Maybe it’s Catland speaking in the third person, maybe it's something fouler, maybe its the river, maybe it's the moon, maybe it's the cold comfort of thinking you could ever belong to Catland who is the who you should know.
Who's to say?
But now that you're here; you gotta get out of this place...
WHAT IS THIS?
This is the Catlands Jazzband Gazeteer; a micro-setting within the Dreaming Autumnal Wilds. The cats here, inbetwixt their nine lives, felt lonely. They stole jazz, in concept; and it has begun doing strange things to the mortal souls they've drawn in. It is a preview, in a sense, to a much larger setting of nostalgic hooks and wayward wanderers; inspired by the likes of Big Fish, Over the Garden Wall, Nightmare Before Christmas, O, Brothere Where Art Thou, and other misremembered tales of yore and youth spent in rural living.
WHAT IS INSIDE?
A little over 70 pages of tools and setting for a Cat-infested sprawl within a oneirous realm. Ample strangers, local color, and character generating tables. Catlands is a pit stop in the weird; a realm to escape once inside, all generated for Troika.
THE TEAM:
Created by: Brian Yaksha
Illustrations by Lulu Van Hoagland & Evlyn Moreau
