u/Sir_Tainley

I’m building a fantasy culture of humanoid cats, and I’d love feedback on whether this family structure feels like a believable social institution rather than a contrivance.

In this culture, the ideal household is called the Paw and the Three Claws: one wife and three husbands.

Each husband traditionally fills a different role.

• First Husband (Protector): Provides the home (which becomes the wife’s property) and is responsible for defending the household.
• Second Husband (Hunter): Provides food, wealth, and luxury goods.
• Third Husband (Maintainer): Manages the home and helps raise the children.

A common saying is: “If you want a career, find a third husband.”

Each marriage requires the consent of the existing household, so the family grows in stages as its needs expand.

Children belong to their mother’s lineage, and biological paternity is not emphasized. Children are born, typically, in groups of two or three. About a year after birth, each kitten is ceremonially assigned one of the husbands as a father. Children may grow up calling their fathers by affectionate titles such as Big Abi, Fast Abi, and Soft Abi.

My goal is to create a society where this is not unusual or scandalous, but widely viewed as the ideal household structure.

My reasoning is that:

• Multiple adult males increase the survival chances of the mother and kittens.
• Labor is divided among defense, provisioning, and childcare.
• Matrilineal descent reduces conflict over inheritance and paternity.
• Children benefit from several dedicated parental figures.

My questions:

1. Does this feel like a family structure that could plausibly become the social ideal for an entire culture?
2. What social, economic, or emotional pressures might support or undermine this system?
3. Can you imagine folktales, songs, and proverbs celebrating the “Paw and Three Claws” as the image of domestic happiness?
4. What details would make this feel more believable?

I’m especially interested in whether this feels like an institution that people would genuinely aspire to, rather than something that exists only because the author wants it to.

My passion project — a TTRPG setting, loosely system-agnostic but with a specific ruleset license in mind — has me stuck on a question I can't shake: how do people actually use these things?

Last night I needed to look up a rule and just Ctrl-F'd the PDF. It worked. But it made me wonder if I'm fooling myself about what "a book" even means in this hobby anymore.

I've been writing in Obsidian, which naturally breaks everything into linked, navigable chunks. It's been great for the writing process. But when it comes to the idea of finalizing and publishing — I'm now bumping into a question: is the traditional format (prose, in a specific order, on pages) actually the best way to present and sell this kind of work? Or are we mostly just making PDFs shaped like books out of habit?

I love the idea of a book. The pages, the concreteness, the art, the physical limits that force good editing. I grew up with them — literally, that's all there was when I started playing TTRPGs. But I'm increasingly unsure they're the right answer for how people actually sit down and run a game.

Has anyone thought seriously about this? Is there anything on the market that handles it meaningfully differently? I'm especially curious whether a more wiki-style or hyperlinked approach has worked for anyone, and what the tradeoffs looked like in practice.

Than the Great War was from the Death of Napoleon (1821).

These shockingly recent/surprisingly distant in time facts are always fun for me. Have you got any to share?

(We are closer in time to the tyrannosaurs walking the planet, than the tyrannosaurs were to stegosaurs walking the planet, is another fun one)

I've been having fun developing what numbers have what spiritual values for the anthropomorphic cats of my world, and idioms that reflect this. Came up with values for one through 13, and then other fun numbers after that might give an average cat pause.

(49 is very unlucky, seven squared!)

Anyway, I've decided, because it's a setting for a D&D-style TTRPG world, for reasons not explainable through theology, or arithmancy, that 20 is "the Gambler's number" and considered very lucky. "Natural 20!" is something cats will exclaim when some lucky occurrence happens.

I figure my players will have an easy time adopting that idiom 😄.

Has anyone else worked on lucky or unlucky numbers, or special dates, or anything like that for their worlds, or peoples, with thoughts to share?