The main design idea behind Advanced Witches & Warlocks is simple.
The Witch was already a part of AD&D.
However, she had yet to receive an official class.
After all, she didn't really fall under the same category as other classes, such as the Magic-User, Cleric, Druid, Illusionist, Assassin, Monk, Ranger, or Paladin. But the Witch had a presence.
If you know how to find her, you will encounter her in the spells, in the monsters, in the implied setting, and even in Appendix N. She hides within the text itself. Like an occult figure.
AD&D already contained curses, charms, familiars, potions, polymorphs, magic circles, haunted mirrors, hags, night creatures, demons, devils, spirits, evil temples, forbidden books, and strange old women living on the fringes of the map. Welcome to witch country.
All that was really left was to make the formal class.
That is why I don't think of my Advanced Witches & Warlocks as trying to force a modern witch concept into a retro-style game. AD&D has its own style, its own rules, and its own unique feel. If you drop a modern witch into AD&D's framework, it wouldn't work. The two things simply don't gel.
Instead, the real question is: What sort of witch does AD&D want to nurture?
And that is why Appendix N plays such an essential role here.
While writing my Witches of Appendix N posts, I am doing far more than merely collecting witches in an inventory list. In reality, I am attempting to identify the essential concepts that were formed by early fantasy, weird fiction, horror stories, and sword-and-sorcery before D&D codified magic into game rules.
And once you start looking, the witches are everywhere.
Notably, not all witches will go by that name. They might be referred to as sorceresses, enchantresses, priestesses, hags, mothers, queens, oracles, temptresses, psychics, necromancers, or any other female with unusual powers. They are more than just distaff wizards; they have their own unique presence.
Not all witches will be villains either. In fact, sometimes, they are the only ones capable of interpreting the strange events taking place. Whether that places them on the side of "good" or "evil" is often too simple of a question.
That is important for gaming design purposes.
The witch of AD&D doesn't have to be confined to folklore alone. She doesn't have to be a village healer, a wicked stepmother, a pagan priestess, an enchantress, or the mysterious old woman of the woods.
She is all these things combined.
Take, for example, the Satanic Witch featured in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. The story takes place within a setting full of Christian, pagan, faerie, and infernal elements. The witch's magic is powerful because it has spiritual, moral, and social implications. Both the satanic witch and Morgan Le Fey of this tale stand apart AND stand between all these other groups.
A witch doesn't simply cast a spell. A witch makes contact with beings that want something from her. She makes social contacts.
Here is another vital lesson for our witch design in AD&D.
- Magic-Users learn the arcane.
- Clerics petition divine power.
- Druids follow the ancient rites.
- Witches make contact.
She makes contact with spirits, patrons, ancestors, elder gods, demons, the dead, the moon, the earth, and whatever else lies beyond naming.
Of course, this doesn't mean every witch is inherently evil. That would be sloppy game design and even worse, boring.
Here we see the magic of Fritz Leiber, where the main antagonist of one of the first Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories isn't some evil mage, but Fafhrd's mother. Mor isn't just a boss in the dungeon, but family, power, culture, and control. She created that whole world for him, and escaping her is an accomplishment not unlike slaying monsters. Mor is not really evil. She is controlling; she is a matriarch after all, but she isn't harming Fafhrd; she is just not letting the youth run free.
In Leiber's The Conjure Wife we see another witch, Tansy. She navigates her own "dungeon," only this time it is the challenges of a suburban housewife/witch facing other witches for dominance over their husbands' mundane careers at a University. Like Mor, Tansy is not about flashy magic; her magic is about something else.
That brings us to the third thing we learn:
The Witch is social.
She has family members, a coven, social and economic obligations, rivals, apprentices, enemies, taboos, and reputation. People know she exists before meeting her. People talk about her in hushed tones. People avoid her home, yet people end up visiting her.
- They visit when the child is ill.
- They visit when the cow stops giving milk.
- They visit when their husband takes a lover.
- They visit when their crops fail.
- They visit when the ghosts keep coming out.
These things aren't mere background flavor; they're solid adventure hooks.
The Witch should cause rumors. She should be a reason why villages need adventurers. She should affect villages in tangible ways.
Robert E. Howard brings up a fourth point. His worlds are full of the vestiges of lost ages, dark cults, serpent-haunted ruins, vanished civilizations, sinister rituals, and sorcerers whose power seems to predate even mankind itself. His witches and similar beings appear almost to carry within themselves the weight of lost history. Their magic is not theoretical; it is something that has been practiced long before modern civilization.
This matters. Well, at least to me and my view of how witches work.
An AD&D Witch is not simply an academic wizard with a new label slapped on. This character must embody knowledge of forgotten lore that remains effective. The old magic still works.
Sometimes that involves healing. Sometimes it involves cursing. Sometimes it involves making deals with powers better left unawakened.
And here we begin to see how the Witch becomes distinct from the usual AD&D Magic-User. Whereas the latter is kept aloof from the world through scholarship, the former is involved in the world and its dark undercurrents.
- She knows the trees that were once used to hang criminals.
- She knows why the church bell has a crack in it.
- She knows who among the midwives was secretly buried beyond the cemetery walls.
- She knows what the nameless thing in the well is.
Once again, this isn't just flavor. It is essential to what the class is.
A Witch PC knows more than just whether there is magic around. She knows the history of that magic. She knows who left it behind. She knows why.
- What spirit cursed the bridge?
- What drives the wolves away from the north road?
- Why does the old woman who lives near the outskirts to put out milk on dark nights?
- Why does the baron’s daughter cast no reflection?
That's why Advanced Witches & Warlocks doesn't reduce the Witch to simply having a spell list. She is not a wizard with a broom. She is not a cleric with a pointy hat.
The spell list is important, however. AD&D is a game of rules, levels, spells, limitations, saving throws, and consequences. A class has to have some sort of unique footprint.
But a class needs something else too.
It needs a role in the implied setting and world.
The Cleric implies temples, deities, undead, holy symbols, and orders.
The Magic-User implies spellbooks, towers, apprenticeships, lost libraries, and rival magic-users.
The Druid implies sacred groves, circles, mistletoe, ancient faiths, and harmony.
The Witch implies cottage homes, covens, familiars, curses, enchantments, rites of the full moon, hidden grimoires, local superstition, wizened crones, prodigious children, the fool of wisdom, and the dangerous generosity of one who understands your predicament and the price of its resolution.
This is not merely an addition for AD&D. This is part of what makes it AD&D.
Consider the monsters.
The hags; Night hags. Sea hags. Greenhags. Lamias. Medusae. Harpies. Vampires. Succubi. Lycanthropes. Demons and devils who tempt mortals with power. The undead whose restless souls seek redemption. The fey whose customs of hospitality and revenge dictate their actions.
These are not random monsters.
These are elements of a world in which magic is dangerous, intimate, and transactional.
This is the world of the Witch.
Consider the spells.
Charm Person. Detect Evil. ESP. Clairvoyance. Polymorph. Geas. Bestow/Remove Curse. Speak with Dead. Animate Dead. Reincarnation. Contact Other Plane. Magic Jar.
These spells all have their roots in esoteric practices that involve dealing with spirits, transformations, fates, and taboo acts.
These spells all contain elements of witchcraft.
One cannot simply mix and match bits of the Magic-User and the Cleric classes, add a cat, a broom, and a pointy hat. One cannot create the Witch in such a lazy manner. The Witch should not be merely a Magic-User with a familiar or a Cleric without armor nor a Druid with a different robe.
A proper Witch demands her own mechanics and her own logic.
That logic for Advanced Witches & Warlocks is Occult Magic.
- Arcane magic is learned magic.
- Divine magic is authoritative magic.
- Occult magic is secretive magic.
The Witch recognizes magic as a complex tapestry, and one that might take notice if its strands are pulled apart.
And that's the other reason why Charisma remains my pick for the Witch's primary attribute. Not beauty, not popularity, but presence. Presence, as in the power of the self vis-à-vis others. Because the Witch must bargain, bind, curse, bless, threaten, pacify, command, and beckon across thresholds.
It is equally obvious why this applies directly to Jackson, IL. Our young Witch may well be one of the smartest people in the room, but we don't need to assume it, and our young Witch will certainly never be the wisest. But our young Witch will have presence. Sometimes it may be subtle. Other times it may be awkward. And it will most likely manifest only under the cover of darkness, fog, mirrors, and whispers of her name. In the context of a school, Charisma becomes not simply popularity but social gravity. The ability to pull others into a secret, intimidate a bully, unsettle a teacher, console a frightened child, or even make that mysterious dead girl in the bathroom listen.
The reason why the Witch also works in Jackson, IL, just like in AD&D, is that she is powered by relationships. And there is perhaps no better place than high school for such power to operate.
Multi-faceted Non-Player Character Witches
That leads to yet another reason why this class is not too simplistic. Modern fantasy is often built around clear-cut heroes and villains, and both can do the job. However, AD&D requires something more nuanced.
The old-school Witch must be useful to the party, feared, necessary, and possibly suspicious.
She may be the party's best hope of countering the effects of a curse... while also being the very reason that curse exists.
She may heal a sick child in one town while being accused of causing a blight elsewhere. She may be neutral but remember that neutrality doesn't imply passivity but rather balance, debts, oaths, and repercussions.
She may be good yet be truly horrifying and evil, yet still cherished by someone she saved.
These are the roles that I want for my new class.
The Witch had to appear in Advanced Witches & Warlocks because of what AD&D represents.
- A dungeon door.
- A path through the woods.
- A forsaken altar.
- A burial site.
- A locked chamber.
- A mirror.
- An old and forgotten tome.
In all cases, the Witch understands that these are thresholds and must be named.
- She was there in Appendix N.
- She was there on the spell lists.
- She was there in the monster manuals.
- She was there in the rumors.
Advanced Witches & Warlocks does nothing more than greet her, provide her some rules, and give her a voice.
Shard: The Village Witch
She was in the game even before she became a class.
She was in the rumor table, though nobody called her by name. She was in the little cottage noted in the forest wilderness map. She was the old woman the people feared, and yet the one they visited under the cover of darkness. She was the stranger who knew the barrow’s true name, the seeress who told the party not to open the black door, the sole inhabitant of the town not showing any sign of surprise when the dead started walking.
There were always traces of her in the game. Her familiar lurking on top of a fencepost. The curse that no Cleric could lift, but she knew who placed it. Potion brewed from grave-moss, moonwater, and blood. Charm tied in red thread. Child born under an unlucky star. Ruined shrine where old rituals still work.
Introduce the village witch whenever the party arrives in a small town dealing with some problem they don’t want to face. She can be anywhere near the settlement – at the edge of the map, at the edge of the woods, marsh, ancient trail, ruin of the old temple, the last house in town before the fields become dark.
She is not automatically an enemy of the party. Nor is she always friendly towards everyone around her. She is not a monster, though the monster may fear her. She is not a Cleric, though the villagers seek her help whenever they get sick. She is not a Magic-User, though she casts spells that are unknown in academies. She is not a Druid, but uses all the old names for plants and trees.
She knows about what the villagers have done. She knows what the monster wants. She knows the secret the priest won’t talk about in public. She knows what the Magic-User failed to discover, because he was looking for written magic while ignoring oral magic. The magic that predates writing.
Maybe she cured the reeve’s son once, though the reeve still considers her a wicked witch. Maybe her familiar has encountered the monster, and refuses to venture into the forest at night. Maybe she knows the old name of the hill ruins, but calling it brings her blood loss. Maybe she has written down her secret spells in some old tome that gets written by itself whenever it rains thunderously.
Perhaps the village priest consults her in secret for the reading of dreams. She may have buried something beneath her hearth long ago and never talked about it for two decades. She may recognize one of the party members' birthmarks as a witch-mark. She may ask to have the curse removed only after somebody confesses.
She may inform the party that the haunting isn’t actually caused by the undead, but rather it is the grief made manifest. She may recall times when the ruined temple had worshippers. She may remember which tomb is empty, and why people keep flowers on it. She may not venture over moving waters ever since the last witch-hunt came to the town.
It shouldn’t give away rumors and heal the party for free like an automaton. She has her needs, debts, limits, and enemies. She may request to have a piece of hair, offer to protect someone, make a pact under the moonlight, retrieve a missing charm, or identify the liar among the villagers.
Most of all, she must have a price. Not gold, for sure. Rarely gold.
Usually, something only the PCs can provide.
But in any case, the witch is out there. Waiting.
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