THE MYTHOLOGY CODEX

Where the game's story comes from. Twelve guides to cats, gods, and four thousand years of reverence.

Why a game has a mythology section

BAST: Nine Lives isn't a cat game with an Egyptian coat of paint. The plot is lifted straight from the source: in the Book of the Dead, a great cat kills the serpent Apep beneath the sacred persea tree — order defeating chaos, nightly, forever. That single image is the whole game. You play the cat. Apep is chained beneath the sand. The nine lives you spend are the nine divine beings Atum-Ra was said to contain.

These twelve guides are the research that shaped it, written properly rather than scraped: who Bastet actually was and how she shifted from lioness to housecat, why Egyptians protected cats by law, what separates Bastet from Sekhmet, where "nine lives" really comes from, and how cats ended up in Norse chariots, Celtic wakes, and Japanese shop windows. Read them in any order — each one stands alone, and each one ends where the game begins.

The Twelve Guides