Far From Home | A Clan Creation Guide

Building a Clan - Extras

If you need any help thinking of names, I have a naming guide as well! Check it out for a list of prefixes (sorted in alphabetical order and by pelt colour) and suffixes.

There is a very big span of ages in Warriors that are sometimes hard to wrap your head around. The passage of time seems to disappear in the series and its hard to keep track, but as a writer you should have a general idea of how old your characters are.

My Age Guide
Kits = 0 - 6 moons
Apprentices = 6 - 12/15 moons
Warriors* = 12/15 - 120 moons
Elders = 120+ moons

*also includes deputies and queens, though not necessarily leaders

120 moons may seem like a lot, but that's really only 10 years - and that's a really long time for a battle-fighting, famine-surviving, cold-escaping warrior. Any cat lucky enough to live to that age deserves their place in the elders den, and that's a fact.

This age guide is not set in stone, though, so you could potentially make elders closer to 8 years old (96 moons) or 12 years old (144 moons). Anything over 12 years might be a little bit of a stretch for feral cats.

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Pointers for Adding Ages:
- She-cats are pregnant for around two months and, in Warriors, stay in the nursery for another six before their kits become apprentices; it is also safe to assume that they don't immediately go back to the nursery afterwards and would probably wait to have another litter until their previous one achieves warrior ranking. This means that there would usually be at least a 14 - 18 moon gap between close set litters, and more between those born further apart.
- The minimum age for a she-cat to have kits (in Warriors) would probably be around 18 moons, though that is still quite young. I generally go with 23 and up.
- There is no age where sterility occurs
- It is up to your preference how far apart in age the mates in each couple are; for me, it doesn't really matter if they're a year or more apart, it just means that one of them was being born while the other was almost a warrior. I don't think it really matters to feral cats, to be honest...
- Apprentices don't become warriors once they hit a certain age, as ranking is based on skill. Some become warriors around 9 moons, other at 12 and still others at 15. It all depends on their assessments and their behaviour towards the warrior code.

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Unrelated to age are the general rules a Clan or family follows when choosing mates or choosing to have kits. Some rules are ingrained within the warrior/medicine cat code and others are up to your personal preference.

- Medicine cats are, under the medicine cat code, not allowed to have mates or kits.
- Depending on how you feel about the subject, your female leaders and deputies can or cannot have kits. This is a highly debated topic and, while I believe female leaders and deputies shouldn't have kits, as it takes them away from their duty to the Clan, there is a strong counter-argument that I'm willing to believe, in which the deputy would take over the leader's duties while the leader was nursing her kits.
- Again, up to your preference, but I personally don't like to see cats mating with their parents, littermates, aunts/uncles or cousins. But, since they are living in a Clan with a rather small gene pool, it is almost unavoidable that some pairings will be somehow related to each other (like a tom with his older cousin's daughter). If they're a second or third cousin, that's usually alright (again, no one's really following along your family trees as they read).

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Your apprentices will also need mentors! The only general rule I try to follow is to avoid having parents mentor their children, as they are likely to have a subjective view of their training rather than an objective one. It is always safer to give the apprentice to someone unrelated.

When dispersing apprentices right after you've formed your Clan, it is also important to remember that some she-cats may have still been in the nursery when these apprentices were apprenticed. Therefore, giving them an apprentice wouldn't make very much sense. If you have younger warriors, remember that they were apprentices however many moons ago as well, which means that they had to have mentors at one point. If their apprenticeship overlaps with the apprenticeship of a younger apprentice, they can't have had the same mentor.

To illustrate my confusing point:
Redthorn is sixteen moons old and has been a warrior for three moons. Poppypaw is a ten moon old apprentice.
Pheasantclaw is a warrior of sixty-two moons, the mentor of Redthorn.
Since Redthorn was still an apprentice three moons ago, Poppypaw must have been seven moons old, which means she was apprenticed already. Pheasantclaw can't be mentor to her because he was still mentoring Redthorn at the time.
Similarly, Quailfeather, the mother of the recently named Brownpaw and Smallpaw, can't be Poppypaw's apprentice because Brownpaw and Smallpaw were only two moons old when Poppypaw was apprenticed. Quailfeather would have been in the nursery and not available to mentor.

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Lastly, with so many kittens lounging about, it's probably a good idea to have some sort of system of keeping track of them. This could be done digitally, on paper, or however else you like!

What I do is put all my info into a spreadsheet editor like Microsoft Excel or Mac's Numbers. It's super easy to keep track of all the cats in your Clan because they're in a nice, organized table. Each row contains all of the information I need for each cat, including their name, appearance, age, parents, littermates, mate, children, mentor and apprentice, along with some other info. The picture attached to this chapter is a screenshot of RockClan's spreadsheet (the Clan in The Coming Storm). *May contain spoilers.

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The next section will deal with genetics.