Design Diary: Cats of Los Alamos
Why do the Bast and Rakshasa in The Secret City work the way they do? Because I spent too long thinking about cat tails, tiger folklore, and better balancing the pros and cons of two Changeling Collectives for player characters.
Rebuilding Bast and Rakshasa for The Secret City
I've been playing Shadowrun since 1992, and one of the things I've always appreciated about the later editions is how Changelings (and metavariants) broke the old "pick one of five metatypes and that's it" mold. SURGE opened up the setting for more play options. The world had a bit more texture where a nightclub might have a Nartaki bartender, a Dryad fixer in the back booth, and a Minotaur bouncer at the door.
However, some of the Changeling writeups in The Sixth World Companion never quite sat right with me. When I was putting together The Secret City, I wanted to use this opportunity to revisit at least two Changelings: Bast and Rakshasa. Plus, I like cats.
Quick Changeling Primer
A quick primer for those unfamiliar with Changelings in Shadowrun RPG. Changelings first appeared in the Year of the Comet, published 2001. Haley's Comet return in 2061 causes mana to spike creating a second round of Goblinization called SURGE. Most of these are random changes except for a minority who shared commonalities grouped into collectives.
Game wise, this was a way for players to better customize their characters. Want an ork with horns and tail or a dwarf with a cyclopean eye? There you go. Lore wise, they are a second set of metatypes who would normally appear later as magic continued to rise in the world over the next century (or centuries). The mana spike forced a few to appear earlier than normal.
What Bothered Me
Here's the short version of the original writeups:
Bast (8 Karma): Metatypes: Elf, Human, or Ork Positive Qualities: Balance Receptor, Fangs, Low-Light Vision Negative Qualities: Aural Helix Dysmorphia (Feline), Unusual Hair
Rakshasa (15 Karma): Metatypes: Elf, Human, Ork Positive Qualities: Fangs, Functional Tail (Prehensile) Negative Qualities: Aural Helix Dysmorphia (Tigrine), Unusual Hair
Two things jumped out immediately.
First, the tails. Rakshasa have a prehensile tail, which is the kind you can hang from a tree branch with, and Bast don't have a tail at all. Look at any real cat and tiger, none of them can swing from a branch by their tail. Outside of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, this isn't a feature. Bast having no tail at all just felt odd despite its Egyptian goddess origins. Also, why do Bast have low-light vision but Rakshasa do not?
Second, the downsides barely cost anything in play. Aural Helix Dysmorphia and Unusual Hair are entirely cosmetic in a world where people walk around with pink mohawks, troll horns, and ork tusks. Looking a little weird doesn't read as a real drawback. For a 15-Karma package like Rakshasa, that's a lot of upside with almost no real cost, which I feel upsets game balance.
The Keystone: Dietary Requirement
The design move that made everything else click was adding Dietary Requirement (Real meat, weekly) to both packages.
This is the kind of negative quality I love, because it can be ignored in a pitch without not totally crippling a player. A weekly need for cooked animal protein or premium synth-meat (cheap soy-based meat or low quality vat protein won't satisfy) is a persistent, low-grade pressure on a character's life affecting their lifestyle. In the Sixth World, real meat is a luxury good with soy-based meat protein substitutes filling Stuffer Shack shelves. That kind of pressure has economic and social consequences, but not something that appears in every game session.
The Other Changes
With the keystone in place, I cleaned up the rest.
Functional Tail (Prehensile) → Functional Tail (Balance). Tigers use their tails for balance, not for swinging from branches. Giving both Bast and Rakshasa a balance tail solves the "why does one have a tail and one does not" question and grounds the trait closer to feline biology.
NOTE: The original tailless Bast design was almost certainly drawing on the iconography of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, who is frequently depicted in ancient art as a cat-headed woman on an otherwise human body with no tail. That's a legitimate source. However, when Bastet is rendered as an actual cat, she almost always has a tail.
Low-Light Vision for both. Both cats and tigers have exceptional night vision. It seemed weird one would have low-light vision while the other did not. So, I added it to Rakshasa alongside Bast.
Reflective Eyes as a shared negative. Cats' eyes catch light. This is one of the most immediately recognizable cat features, and it has a real tactical downside making them easier to spot in the dark. It's also a clean trade: you see better in the dark, and so does everyone looking for you.
Unusual Hair (Fur) as a shared negative. Same as in the original. Their bodies are covered in fur. Commonly, I imagine Bast having solid black fur while Rakshasa have the fur pattern of a Bengal tiger. However, that is not a rule so a solid black furred Rakshasa or tabby Bast would be possible, in my opinion.
Splitting the offensive power. Bast get Keen-Eared; Rakshasa get Claws (Razor). This is where I leaned into what separates a cat-derived Bast from a tiger-derived Rakshasa. It gave both packages distinct play styles rather than being "same thing, different fur pattern."
Both packages land at 16 Karma. The original Rakshasa at 15 Karma was undercosted for what it offered, and the Bast at 8 Karma was underpowered. My hope is that putting them at the same cost makes the choice between them more an aesthetic and roleplay decision rather than a min/max decision.
Who Ends Up as What
Here are my thoughts on how metahuman distribution would work out for Bast and Rakshasa changelings. Bast should skew taller and leaner. Rakshasa should skew broader and more muscular. So, most Bast found in the world were originally elf and human metatypes while Rakshasa skewed more to human and ork.
Here's the breakdown I settled on:
| Changeling | Elf | Human | Ork |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bast | 50% | 40% | 10% |
| Rakshasa | 5% | 50% | 45% |
The One I Left Out
I went back and forth on Twitchy.
Both cats and tigers use their tails for both balance and communication. Either's tail might do the same thing, unconsciously telegraphing their emotional state the way a real cat or tiger does. That can be a great character detail. Mechanically, folding Twitchy into the base package felt like it would push either Changeling into too much "mandatory drawback" territory.
While not in the base package, it remains a perfect thematic option for players: pick Twitchy, point at the tail, done. You've got a character whose poker face is undone by an appendage they might struggle to control.
Why This Matters for Los Alamos
The final payoff for all of this is that once the mechanical and cultural pieces lined up, the Cats of Los Alamos section of the sourcebook practically wrote itself.
Los Alamos has been quietly immigrating Bast and Rakshasa for twenty years under the cover of LANL's SURGE Genetic Tracing program. Why would these populations come? Because Los Alamos offers them something their home regions don't: acceptance, stable employment, and easy access to the real meat diet their biology demands.
That's why the community is "intensely loyal to town and Lab." It's a combination of propaganda tangled up with biological dependency and a surveillance state's social credit system that actively pushes down the discriminatory behavior they lived under back home.
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The Secret City is available [where you want to point them]. If you want to see the full Bast and Rakshasa writeups in context, along with the SURGE Genetic Tracing program that brought them to Los Alamos, that's where to look.