Curbtailers are city-born beast-folk who know that every metropolis has a second shape hidden beneath its official streets. They carry news through riots, find missing children by listening to alley cats, and remember which doors once opened onto rooms that no longer exist. A curbtailer adventurer brings the instincts of a courier, the caution of a neighborhood guardian, and an intimate understanding of how ordinary people survive beneath grand institutions.

Curbtailers are compact beast-folk with expressive feline features, flexible ears, whiskers, digitigrade legs, and long tails suited to balance in crowded spaces. Their coats range from soot-black and brick-red to cream, gray, brindled brown, and mottled silver. Urban life has shaped them toward practical variation rather than a single ideal form. Some are lean and long-limbed, others broad-shouldered and heavy-pawed. Their clothing is layered for weather and work, commonly including many pockets, soft-soled shoes, scarves, belts, and colored cords that identify neighborhood, trade, or family affiliation. A curbtailer's eyes often reflect light sharply in darkness, giving their expressions an unnerving intensity.

Curbtailer society is organized around neighborhoods rather than bloodlines. A person may belong to a birth family, a household, a trade circle, and a neighborhood council at once. Their most important social virtue is reliable presence. Showing up with food, carrying news, watching a child, or helping repair a damaged door may earn more respect than wealth or eloquence. Disputes are settled through witness circles, in which each side names what they saw, what they fear, and what they need to happen next. Curbtailters are famous for informal information networks. They trade rumors carefully, distinguish gossip from warning, and consider knowledge a communal resource that must be protected from both tyrants and fools.

Curbtailer spirituality is practical, local, and ancestral. Many honor household spirits, unnamed city saints, protective beasts, or the remembered dead who first cleared a dangerous route. Their ceremonies include washing doorsteps, sharing the first meal of a new season, and ringing small bells for those who have not returned home. Curbtailers tend toward neutral or good alignments, valuing mutual obligation and personal freedom, though some become fiercely pragmatic after years of surviving among predatory institutions.

Curbtailers rarely build isolated settlements. Their homeland is the layered city itself: alleys, courtyards, markets, tenements, bridges, abandoned stations, and rooftops connected by generations of informal knowledge. Their homes are compact but ingenious, often concealed behind workshops, above bakeries, inside old gatehouses, or between the walls of larger buildings. Curbtailer architecture favors folding partitions, communal kitchens, hidden storage, narrow balconies, and multiple exits. A household may occupy only a few rooms while claiming a much larger social territory of nearby stoops, rooftops, wells, and market stalls.

Curbtailers are usually woven into the lives of many peoples. They often serve as interpreters between established communities and newcomers, especially in districts where official authority is weak. They respect hardworking tradesfolk, distrust institutions that cannot explain themselves, and maintain cautious but useful relationships with criminal organizations. Curbtailers may seem nosy to reclusive peoples and evasive to highly formal cultures, yet even their critics often admit that a curb-tailter is the person to call when someone has vanished, a street has become unsafe, or a city official has begun abusing power.