RPG Retrospective: The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG

 On this day in 1981, 45 years ago, I went to see the newest George Lucas/Steven Spielberg collab called "Raiders of the Lost Ark."  I went with my best friend Steven and it was a life changer for both of us. Steven watched it and wanted to become a big Hollywood director. I watched it and wanted to become a university professor. We both got to our dreams, more or less. Steven became an art director and is now fed up with Hollywood. I became a professor, but sold my soul to the dot-com world during the late 90s/early 2000s dot-com boom. I, too, had become a little burned out on academic life. 

But Raiders of the Lost Ark still remains a perfect movie in our minds. One we still talk about to this very day.

It is just too bad the RPG was so, well, terrible. At least that was my recollection of it. But is that true? 

Let's pull out my copy and have a deep dive into the game and what it has to offer.

Fortune and Glory, Kid

When TSR picked up the license for Indiana Jones, it looked like a slam dunk. After all, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been a massive success, Temple of Doom was hitting theaters, and TSR was flush with cash and ambition. Iron Crown had Middle-earth. Doctor Who and Star Trek had a home at FASA, and now Indy was coming to Lake Geneva. 

And let us not forget, this was TSR we were talking about, the very company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, and, by 1984, the excellent Marvel Super Heroes game.

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out… pretty much everything. 

TSR put out The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game in 1984. David "Zeb" Cook and John Byrne, the comic book writer, are credited with the design.  On the surface, it’s a boxed set with everything you'd expect: dice, minis (well, cardboard cutouts you had to assemble), a rulebook, character cards, and an introductory adventure. Inside, you get a chance to live out pulp adventures in the style of everyone’s favorite bullwhip-wielding archaeologist. Sounds great, right?

Except here’s the first problem: you had to play Indy. Or at best, one of a handful of established characters like Marion or Sallah. The rules didn’t include any way to make your own characters. That’s like handing a bunch of kids the Star Wars RPG and saying, "No, sorry, you can’t be smugglers or bounty hunters, you can only be Luke, Han, or Leia." Half the fun of role-playing is creating your own hero to drop into wild situations, and this game just locked the door on that entirely. It gives you some movie characters and tells you, "don't mess them up."

One could argue the later Indiana Jones Judge's Survival Pack made amends by introducing rules for original characters along with the kind of chases, ruins, and vehicles that ought to have been in the core box from day one. But that was the patch, if you will. TSR coming around to say "Oh, you wanted to role-play." But by then, the writing was on the wall. The original set had already conditioned people to think of this as the game where you couldn’t make your own character, and that is the way it was remembered.

The system itself is light, almost perfunctory. There’s some resolution mechanics, a few skill checks, and some chase and combat rules, but nothing that feels like it captures the frenetic energy of Indy punching Nazis or dodging rolling boulders. Instead, it feels like TSR wanted a quick "introductory RPG" to tie in with the movies without giving much thought to longevity or depth. The end result is that it plays more like a board game that forgot to include the board. Or, more on point, an RPG that forgot to include anything about role-playing.

There are percentile skill rolls versus Strength, Prowess, or Backbone, and the like. Nothing too difficult really.

There are rules for "danger" and some perfunctory chase rules (it is Indian Jones after all). So don’t think of it as mechanically useless. The bones are all there, you just have to look past some rather peculiar design decisions. 

But let's not pretend here. This is really not a good game. 

It is a shame, really. The ingredients for an outstanding Indiana Jones RPG were right there. You had the ancient ruins, the lost temples, secret cults, and their terrible artifacts. Nazis, gangsters, and the odd occult society. University politics and rival expeditions. Mummies, curses, ghosts, forbidden manuscripts, hidden cities, and desert tombs. Zeppelins and seaplanes, and a map with a red line across the ocean. You could build a campaign from all that without breaking a sweat.

Yet TSR produced an Indiana Jones game that was far too fixated on the man himself and not enough on his world. West End Games would get it right with Star Wars some years down the line. They grasped what was important: the player doesn’t want to be Luke or Han or Leia. He wants to inhabit the universe, with his own ship and his own Imperial entanglements and the kind of awful plan that somehow comes off.

Indiana Jones called for a World of Indiana Jones, as West End would call it later. All we got from TSR was the star when what we wanted was the stage.

The Problem with Being Indiana Jones

The system is just one problem. Take Indiana Jones: he lives because he is who he is. You don’t have to worry about him being put down by some guard in scene two or perishing in a truck chase. Even if he comes up short, it is in service of the plot. In a film, that is how it should be. But in a role-playing game it is another matter. The TSR version makes an effort to keep that sort of movie logic intact, but at the cost of any real peril. 

There is "Danger" but no real danger. 

Sure, Indy can have his moments, but the game will bend to accommodate him. Your heroes are not the run-of-the-mill pulp types putting their lives and limbs on the line; they are movie stars sporting a kind of narrative armor. I get why they went about it that way, but it doesn’t work for me.

What is the point of a pulp adventure if your character can’t come to grief? Maybe you shoot the swordsman, maybe you are the one who drops the gun. You could put your trust in the wrong guide or be unceremoniously thrown from the back of the truck. That is where the fun is. When the game goes to such lengths to shield the movie, it gets in the way of playing.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this RPG. It aspires to be an Indiana Jones movie when a good one ought to let you have an adventure in his style. They are not one and the same.

What It Gets Right

I wouldn’t want to be entirely unfair about it, though. There is much I like in this game.

To start with, it has the sense that Indiana Jones is a pulp character and makes no pretense of being a scholarly archaeological simulation. Good. What you get instead are your villains, your action, the clues and exotic locales, some perilous artifacts, and a kind of cliffhanger pacing. It puts Indy in his proper context, the same vein as Doc Savage or The Shadow, or one of those odd interwar stories from Republic serials and lost world fiction, where there is a blank spot on the map and someone is off on a secret expedition.

Then there is the speed of the thing. A slow, tactical affair would have been a disaster for an Indiana Jones game, so the fact that this is built for pace is important. Sure, it can be clunky at times, but it isn’t going to have you work out the tensile strength of your whip before you put it to use over a chasm. As it should be.

The Diana Jones Award and Nazi™

You could argue the afterlife of this game is nearly as good as the thing itself.

Game historians and fans know that TSR eventually had to pulp unsold copies of the boxed set after losing the license, which only adds to the mystique. One of the last copies to be burned was salvaged and became the Diana Jones Award. Which itself has been a focus of some gamer legend, with the original award now lost somewhere in the mail. 

There is a certain poetry to it, bordering on the mythic. The temple is destroyed but the artifact endures, you pull the relic from the ashes and it is handed down as a prize from one year to the next. In a way it has more of an Indiana Jones feel to it than the game did.

Then you have the old legend of the "Nazi™" figure that has been going around as long as anyone can remember. It is about as accurate as any gamer tale is, but then again, it is funnier for it. It has a ring of truth to it, the sort of thing a big 80s product with a name on it would get up to by mistake. The facts don’t have to be tidy for it to become part of the folklore.

Final Thoughts

There are some movies you can put on at any time, and they are just right; Raiders of the Lost Ark is still one of my perfect films. Put on that John Williams', score, and I am instantly 12 again, back in the Illinois Theater with my best friend. We were two kids looking at the same movie but seeing our own futures in it. He was watching the camera work, I was thinking of the classroom, yet we both saw the adventure.

You won’t get that from the TSR Indiana Jones RPG. It doesn’t come close to the feeling and perhaps never could. There is a fascination to its failure, though, in how instructive it is. It puts the distinction between adapting a story and a world in sharp relief. You see why player freedom has to be there, and that no license in the world is going to prop up a game if it loses sight of what players want to do when they sit down at the table.

They aren’t there to watch the hero. They want to be him. Or make their own kind of hero out of it, with his own hat and scars and bad decisions, and an impossible way out of a temple coming down around them.

For all that, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game isn’t some lost classic. More of a lost opportunity. I don’t mind owning it for that reason. A failed artifact has its place in a museum, or on my game shelf at the very least.

Indiana Jones and the Cauldron of Hecate

Create a character for a game with no character creation rules? Of course, I can't resist a challenge like this. Yes, there were character creation rules introduced later on, as I mentioned, but it was too little too late, really. Plus, I don't have those rules, so I can check them out. 

I mentioned above that watching this movie made me want to be a University professor, which I did for many years. So it would seem natural for me to want to stat up Prof. Scott Elders, my erstwhile self-insert character. Really, he is perfect since I have a Call of Cthulhu version where he is at a University researching occult artifacts. 

He is almost too perfect, in fact. The name of the game is "Indiana Jones," and bringing along Dr. Elders would be about the same thing as inviting Solar Pons into a Sherlock Holmes RPG to solve a case with Sherlock. No, I need someone who can look up to Indy, ask questions like "What is that, Dr. Jones?" and stand on their own.

I have the perfect choice, and she is a lot on my mind lately. Enter graduate student of ancient religions, Larina Nichols, from the University of Chicago.

How would she work this into this adventure? Simple, Indy has discovered some sort of clue that leads to the mythical "Cauldron of Hecate."  In typical movie tradition, I am also going to blend the myths of Hecate with the Cauldron of Cerriweden, in that it can be used to bring forth an army of undead soldiers, so of course, the Nazis, excuse me, Nazis™, want it.  Indy heads back to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to speak to Prof. Scot Elders, who was a grad student when he was there. Dr. Elders is not there, but his star grad student, Larina Nichols, is. She is able to translate the fragment and tells Indy she will tell him the rest of the translation when they get to Greece and Turkey! 

And off they go to Turkey, Greece, and wherever else, with Nazis hot on their tail and an army of the dead at the end. Plus, Indy, as far as I know, has never had to deal with a redhead before.

The best Indiana Jones adventures always have a few elements:

• A legendary artifact.
• A historical mystery.
• A rival faction.
• An expert who knows more than they admit.
• A supernatural truth hiding behind what everyone thinks is merely legend.

This has them all!

Larina Stephanie Nichols

Graduate student of Ancient Religions at the University of Chicago. 

Attributes (Normal/x2/½/¼)

Strength 46/92/23/11
Movement 52/104/26/13
Prowess 60/120/30/15
Backbone 76/152/38/19
Instinct 80/160/40/20
Appeal 92/184/46/23

Movement Rate (running): 20 squares (5 areas)/turn
Weapons: Knife
Money: $100
Languages: English, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Aramaic, Hittite
Irrational Fears: Fire
Notes:

I completely guessed at these. I figured she was slightly better at fighting than Willie (but only a little), a little under Indiy in intelligence, but she knows more languages. That is her "in" in this adventure; she speaks the languages Indy doesn't. Though I would say she is every bit as smart as Indy, if not smarter (that is her thing), but Indy is still the star of the show...er adventure. 

Since I have been going over her 1986 character sheet in detail recently, I am also bringing back her fear/fascination of fire here. 

She has a knife, likely a ritual blade she picked up somewhere, but this is a grad student with no training in weapons. She is not carrying a gun. 

In truth, I like this version a lot. I might try this version out as a 1930s Call of Cthulhu character one day. She needs her own theme music!

Jackson, IL: NPCs, The Ones Who Know

One of the big hooks in the Jackson, IL NIGHT SHIFT game I am using is that the adults in the game know a little bit of what is going on. That is to say they know Jackson has more than its fair share of weirdness going on. 

Case in point. Devil Chairs or Witch Chairs. These are chairs found in many cemeteries across the Midwest. If a cemetery has one they typically have one, or maybe two. My real hometown of Jacksonville, IL (which Jackson is based on) has five. That town isn't normal. (Normal is about 120 miles NE of Jacksonville!)

There are also other teens who have figured out what is going on. These NPCs will interact with the PCs but may or may not get involved for their own reasons. 

Roderick Morgan, II, aka "Morgan Highstar"

Morgan, as he is known, is the "protector" of St. Michael's Catholic School and Academy. The "Academy" part is the older name and is used by the honor students. Morgan (and never, ever "Rod") is a psychic and covers the same role that Stephanie, Faye, and Larina cover for Jackson Public High School. 

Morgan, though, is a reluctant protector. Not because he can't, he is more than capable. He is reluctant because he doesn't really want to protect anyone. Well...he is doing it to prove his intellectual capabilities and his psychic ability, not because he actually likes any of the students at St. Michaels. On the contrary, he actively dislikes most of them. But it would wound his pride if a poltergeist or a demon got into the school. 

Morgan is a psychic and a rationalist. He doesn't believe in the supernatural. All the phenomena he encounters, he thinks, are the result of psychic interference. So ghosts, demons, hags, and the lot are all manifestations of the townspeople's own fears and psychic garbage. Psychic patterns or matrices. They believe the town is haunted, so they find ways to make it so. He finds it deeply offensive that others can't have the same mental discipline he does.

He also can't stand witches. 

Not hate per se. But they represent everything he thinks is wrong with this town. They feed into the superstitions and believe them themselves. The problem is also is that they are effective. He would argue that they are effective because they contribute to the problem. So it galls him anytime someone with magic shows up. And it destroys his world anytime Larina beats him in chess.

Concept: Psychic and intellectual snob with grades to back it up.
Song: "Subdivisions" by Rush
Quote: "A haunting is not a mystery. It is an unresolved pattern with delusions of personality."

Morgan is a 4th-level Psychic. He is a little more powerful than the other NPCs, but he is also doing all the work on his own. He is based on Morgan Highstar. 

Morgan is related to the Morgan Chemical family. His father, Roderick Morgan I, was not directly involved but is a professor at MacAlister College. They have a name and money.

Vera Rook

Vera is another witch at Jackson Public High. She and Stephanine go way back to Kindergarten together where they have always been rivals. She picked on Faye for loosing her parents and now she has set her sights on Larina as her newest target. 

Very is smart, incredibly cool, and popular. If this were the 2000s she would be described as a "mean girl." In the 1980s, we would have just called her "stuck up." 

Vera's deal is that she is a witch, and she could help, but she won't unless it somehow benefits herself. So there will be times when she pitches in and a lot more times when she just won't.  

While I don't want to make her into a cliché, I do admit I am having fun playing with the clichés. She is the worst qualities of the other witch NPCs distilled into one character with wit and flawless eyeliner.

Concept: Rival witch.
Song: "Cities in Dust" by Siouxsie and the Banshees
Quote: "And I care...why?"

Vera is a 2nd level witch. But don't expect her help or anything. Vera is brand new, but I rolled up her Pathfinder 2nd Ed and AD&D 1st edition character Veyra Shadowraven. Yes, more clichés! Might need to post all three stats one day.

Stephanie: "Ugh! Why is she such a bitch?"
Larina: "Why won't she help?"
Faye: "Why does she look so cool?"
Stephanie and Larina: "What?"
Faye: "What?"

The Rooks are also an old Jackson family. She would be a family tradition witch.

Kyra Bellamy 

Kyra: "There is evil in this town. It's old, and it is angry."

Kyra Bellamy is sharp, watchful, and not nearly as willing to take people at face value as they might hope. She has a serious streak, a cautious intelligence, and the habit of looking at the people around her like she is trying to solve them before they become dangerous. That wariness makes her seem distant, but it is born more from care than cruelty. Kyra wants the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, and she has little patience for sentimentality when the stakes are real. In a town built on secrets, that makes her both valuable and dangerous.

Kyra is the daughter of Rev. Jonah Bellamy, III. Preacher at "The Old Landmark Missionary Baptist Church", a predominantly African-American Baptist church. Kyra loves her church. Sundays are a day of dressing up, singing, worship, and, of course, the Sunday-afternoon cookout her father hosts. Yes, Kyra ends up working, giving out food, and is on her feet all day in a dress, but she still loves it, and when the local children ask "Miss Kyra" really nicely, she gives them extra Mac n Cheese. Ok, she gives them extra even if they don't ask.

The trouble is, Kyra is having a crisis of faith. Jackson is evil. She knows this. And there are witches walking the halls of her school. Some, like Faye and Vera, are easy to spot. Others wear a friendly face like Stephanie, and others look nice, like Larina, but Kyra sees the barely contained magic underneath. She doesn't understand how these girls can be allowed to walk around like they are normal.

Now, please keep in mind, Kyra is a good kid. She is just mistaken about what a witch really is. 

Kyra also likes things she knows her father would never approve of. She is on the track team, and she is quite good. She likes secular music and is enthralled by MTV when she goes over to friends' houses. And what confuses her most of all is she thinks she also likes Meriko in a more than just-friends way.

Concept: The Preacher's Kid
Song: "Dear God" by XTC
Quote: "Just because I’m polite doesn’t mean I agree with you."

Kyra is a 1st-level Theosophist. She is based on the Pathfinder iconic cleric Kyra. Kyra is here to provide some tension. She is not evil, quite the opposite, but she also wants to protect her family, her church, and her town. She isn't 100% sure where the evil is coming from. 

Spoiler: Kyra manages to come to terms with all her doubts. Later on she becomes a preacher of her own church, one that is a little more welcoming. 

Meriko Hayashida

Meriko: "So what is your deal? You are all witches, right?"

Meriko Hayashida is composed, intelligent, and far more perceptive than most of her classmates realize. She comes from a family that values discipline, accomplishment, and maintaining appearances, and she wears that training with quiet elegance. But Meriko is no passive observer. She notices patterns, remembers details, and understands more than she says. There is a calm confidence to her that makes her hard to rattle, and when she finally chooses to speak plainly, it tends to matter. She may not seek the center of the story, but she is far too smart to remain at its edges for long.

Meriko's father is a professor at MacAlister College. She has an older brother at Mac. Her parents want her to be more traditional, like her brother, but that is not Meriko's way. She discovered that dressing in what she calls "Ninja wear" or what Americans think Japanese people wear, she can really get under her parents' skin. She is also a tech junkie and shows off the new CD player "she got from Japan." Actually, she bought it in St. Louis, but since it's a Sony, it technically comes from Japan. 

Meriko is also something of a kleptomaniac and often shoplifts. She doesn't need these things, her family is very well off, but she likes the thrill of it. On the rare times she catches her, she fakes crying and speaking in Japanese, explaining she doesn't understand American customs and don't send her home to her super strict parents, she will dishonor them, and she lays it on so thick that most shop owners tell her to forget it just so they can get this hysterical girl out of their shop. The second she is out, she drops the act and shows the thing she actually stole.

Her best friend is Kyra. They relate because their families are both so strict and conservative. Meriko makes mixtapes for Kyra and labels them "French Lesson 1" and "Chemistry Notes" Kyra doesn't like the lies, but she loves the music Meriko picks for her.

Meriko also feels like Kyra is "more than a friend," but doesn't know how to act on that.

Concept: The Sharp One
Song: "Voices Carry" - 'Til Tuesday
Quote: 仕方がない。 Shikata ga nai. "It can’t be helped."

Meriko is a 2nd-level survivor. She is based on the Pathfinder iconic thief Merisiel.

Renee Sylvi Jäneläinen

Sylvia: "Now there is a face I did not expect to see darkening my threshold."

Renee: "Hello. Godmother."

Renee Jäneläinen is a girl of winter light and long dark nights, carrying with her the sense that she belongs to colder places and older tales. Thoughtful, self-contained, and a little mysterious even when she is being kind, Renee has the air of someone raised to respect things most people would laugh off until it was much too late. She is not dramatic, not loud, and not interested in making herself the center of attention, but there is depth in her that people feel even before they understand it. In Jackson, where so many dangers hide behind familiar faces, Renee stands out precisely because she seems to understand that the world has always been stranger than it looks.

If asked why she came to Jackson from her hometown of Jakobstad in Finland, she will say something simple like "I wanted to perfect my English," but she is already better than some of the locals. Or something odd like "I LOVE American Rock n' Roll," which is technically true; she has knowledge of classic rock that even impresses Faye.  In truth, Renee is not completely sure why she picked Jackson, other than that she was drawn to it. When she got here and felt the town's magic she knew she had picked the right town. 

AND for reasons I have not 100% figured out myself, I introduced her by having her walk into El Espejo Oscuro, and saying to Sylvia Velasco, "Hello. Godmother." I am not sure what I was thinking, other than it hit me one day, and I could not put it down. I still need to figure this one out.

Concept: The Foreign Exchange Student
Song: "In Silence" by Fra Lippo Lippi.
Quote: "Voin ymmärtää ja kunnioittaa pimeyttä ilman että tulen osaksi sitä."
"I can understand and respect the darkness without becoming a part of it."

Renee is a 2nd-level witch, but she tries to hide it. Renen is a nod to all the great foreign exchange students we used to get and all my friends who also went off to become foreign exchange students as well. Renee is also a witch and has her own reasons to keep her power quiet. Renee is based on Rhiannon. So it is possible that she and Morgan will have some dealings in the future. Likely not positive ones. 

These five NPCs are here to either help or impede the PCs as needed. Their motivations are complex.  While they have basic concepts, they are not basic characters. 

Project Updates. Codex Qliphothica, Advanced Witches, and Jackson IL

 It's a Projects Update Witchcraft Wednesday! So let's get to it.

Codex Qliphothica

This did a LOT better than I expected, so I have turned around and started buying a bunch more art for it, and I am expanding the page count. I just need to make some tweaks to the layout to accommodate it. I am really happy with how it has turned out so far, and I am looking forward to getting it out to everyone.

Advanced Witches & Warlocks

My first *real* "AD&D" book. I mentioned in the past that I am going back to the drawing board on my witch class and challenging all my assumptions about the witch and warlock classes and what they should actually do in an AD&D game. 

So there has been a lot of play-testing. I have stated up witches and warlocks of every level from 1 to 32. Each has slight variations of the rules, and I have been playing them. That's just one binder. The other two are my notes, and the other is a variation of the witch class that I have been playing to see how it feels under the AD&D rules. My goal is to have a witch class that everyone would want to play, regardless of how you want to play her.

I have tried a lot of different ideas too. 

And some ideas didn't make the cut. So no, there won't be any cenobites in this book. In truth I have enough here for a bunch of books, but I don't want a bunch of books. I want one REALLY good one. 

What's that mean?

It means I am NOT going to have this ready for October 2026 like I wanted. More like 2027. I am disappointed. There are so many other projects I want to get done, and this one has to be done first. I also want it done right. So, maybe Walpurgis Night 2027. I *might* still have something for Halloween 2026. I have written so much text here and I just need to get it transcribed (yes, it is in pencil, I REALLY went back to the drawing board) into my word processor and then into layout. It's going to take a bit. 

I want this to be *THE* witch book for AD&D.

Gods. I need a project manager over here. 

Jackson, IL

Ok, this one is still very near and dear to my heart. I have about 46k words written. I have a soft agreement to get this published. But I need to get more done. I have a whole history written for the town, but I need to make it more "gameable" and less like a history textbook with monsters. 

But I am enjoying it a lot. I can't wait to introduce you all to things like the Witch Chairs in Jackson's cemeteries and ponder questions like "what is stealing love in town?" and "who is the thorn-child?"

No game for me this past weekend, but I did create two new NPCs. They are not antagonists, but they are not here to help your PCs either.

Mail Call Tuesday: Authentic Thaumaturgy

 I picked this up on Facebook Marketplace. I had a copy in the past, but sold it when I was in grad school. I think I paid now what I sold it for back then, so I guess that is fine.

Authentic Thaumaturgy was written by a professional occultist and high druid, Isaac Bonewits (the only person to get a degree in Magic from UC Berkeley). It is...interesting. 

The book is dense and suffers from a strong case of physics-envy. It tries to be a game book, particularly for GURPS, but doesn't really succeed. I get the feeling that the game material, which actually makes the most sense, was written by Steve Jackson.

Back in the early days of the Internet, I talked to Bonewits and asked a little about this book. He was kind of a jerk to be honest. But in his defense, he could have been at the early days of his cancer and that would make anyone cranky. Though I do recall this was the 1990s and he passed in 2010. 

Anyway, I have the book back now and hopefully I can mine it for some ideas on my Jackson, IL game or my Occult AD&D one. 

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Midwest Witch

Some cold has a way of altering a place. I am not talking about the sort that calls for a heavier coat. I mean the kind of cold that comes sweeping across miles and miles of prairie that only seems to get colder the longer it travels.  The kind of cold where an old house will complain about in its very walls, or that will harden a field to iron under a grey sky and make the road out of town seem a good deal longer, and harder to travel, than it is.

That is where you are likely to find my witch.

She is not from Salem. Nor New Orleans. She is from the Midwest.

If you put "witch" and "America" in the same sentence, most folks will think of Salem (and I don't even need to say "Salem, MA"). It has a way of pulling you in with its gravity. You have the Puritans, the judges, the gallows, the confessions, and the fear. History. The whole national myth of the American witch seems to orbit around this one spot. Say the word "witch", and Salem takes notice.

Then there is New Orleans, which is only natural. That city has a deep magic of its own. Voodoo, Marie Laveau, the Catholic saints, the river fog, jazz funerals, Anne Rice, the heat and the perfume and the blood and the rumor. It is as beautiful and dangerous and theatrical as can be; you hardly need to put in a vampire when the city has already supplied enough ghosts for an entire country. But we do keep adding more.

But not all our witches are from those parts. For what I want to put in Jackson, Illinois, or for Advanced Witches & Warlocks, they won’t do.

I need a witch a bit farther west and north. A touch more stubborn and less given to display. One who lives under a big sky and can tell you what the weather is up to before the man on the television does. She is familiar with spring mud and gravel roads, brick schools and old courthouses, county fairs and church basements, lake fog and potlucks, and the sound an adult makes when they is not going to be honest with you.

That last bit is important.

Salem offers us the witch as a public accusation, a name bellowed in court, the terror of being seen. New Orleans gives you the mystery, the ritual, and the glamour, a sacred performance of sorts.

The Midwest gives you silence.

Not empty silence. The kind that comes over a kitchen at the mention of an uncle no one wants to discuss. The kind on a county road after dark, or in a farmhouse once the furnace has shut down and the wind is blowing across the fields.

You don’t need a castle or a ruined abbey for Midwestern horror. No Carpathian storm required, a storm moving across an Illinois plain is every bit as terrifying. In Illinois, a winter field can be as gothic as Transylvania. An ice-caked creek will keep a secret that a crypt could not. And if your headlights pick something up at the edge of the corn on a lonely road under a full moon, well...may whatever gods you believe in help you. February is enough. 

It is a matter of scale. Too much land, too much sky, a town so small everybody knows their neighbor, but nobody says everything.

Make of it what you will, it is fine "witch country." Which is why the Midwest means something to me in the games I like. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, holds a spot in my RPG heart for all it did to bring us Dungeons & Dragons. You could call it an impossible little miracle of a game, the one Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson put in our hands. With it came dungeons and dragons, gods and devils, polearms and treasure charts, not to mention the wandering monsters, the maps you would be drawing on graph paper at two in the morning, and the inevitable arguments over rules.

They gave us all that from the Midwest. I find that significant.

It is not some New York or Hollywood affair. You will not find a polished, glamorous origin story here with an air of "look how clever we are." This was from towns in the Midwest where people would make their rulings, settle their disputes, and draw their maps, then do it all over again the following week. There is something right about that.

By 1986, AD&D had long since outgrown its Lake Geneva beginnings, yet it never quite left them. It had gone national and worldwide. You can still sense a fine tension in D&D between the practicalities of a basement sandbox and cosmic myth. Devils and ten-foot poles. Artifacts and encumbrance. That is the sort of space Advanced Witches & Warlocks occupies.

The witch I am after is not the Salem type. She is not the New Orleans type. She is broader and more local than that. Sure, she could be the wise woman on the edge of the village, but she is also the prairie medicine woman, the midwife, the retired teacher or the farmer’s wife. The immigrant grandmother with her own charms the priest would not approve of. The kind of woman who can tell you what this town was called before the town fathers put a name to it, which creek is going to flood, and what sort of winter is coming.

That is where her power lies.

Midwestern witchcraft has its layers. You have your English and French, German farmers, and Irish railroad men, the Scandinavians in town. The African-American communities putting down roots for their churches and businesses in places not always keen on it. And the Indigenous peoples whose history is older than any courthouse or white-painted farmhouse or county line.

Then there are the mounds. 

I want to be very precise about this because it is important. They are not props for an adventurer to dig up a cursed idol or some spooky "mystery Indian" set dressing. They are the remains of civilizations and ceremonies, of deaths and memories, from long before the American town began to identify itself. A proper supernatural setting in the Midwest, Jackson, IL, for instance, needs to understand that. Or else it is just a haunted town with a couple of eerie names slapped on it. I want better than that. I grew up around mounds of this sort. Prehistoric, ancient. A people who lived, thrived, and died before a white man ever knew who they were. Those ghosts are old.

History is not a single stratum. It is written and oral tradition, things misfiled and buried, old photographs and newspaper clippings, church registers, and the stories your grandmother let drop and then changed her mind about. This is all great material for a witch.

She knows the geography and the history are connected, even if they don’t get along. She knows the street and the road that preceded it. She knows which cemetery is empty of ghosts and which is not as empty as you might think. She knows why nothing is planted on the east side of the field and where the first church was. She knows the old mound is a place of death and should be left be, not treated as a picnic spot for souvenirs.

That is power. And it makes for a very good game.

There is a point in Jackson, IL, where the witch ceases to be an exercise in classification and becomes part of the town’s very machinery. One could say she is part of its immune system. At least that is how she is working in Jackson right now.

Jackson has the proper soil for such a tale. You have the old school and the colleges, the Carnegie library with its surprisingly good occult section, Magical Mystery Lane, the Witch Chairs, and the Crimson Cougar. Then there are the stories people will laugh at until a kid finds a newspaper clipping that shows the adults were either lying or not telling the truth very well.

That is Midwest horror. The thing in the next town. The house on your street. The local cemetery or the abandoned hospital out by the edge of town. A mascot you can’t be sure was ever just a mascot. The road your parents put their foot down about. The local legend they all make fun of until you check the archives.

It is why I have an affinity for Chill.

Pacesetter Games put it out in 1984 as a modern investigative RPG for ordinary folks up against the supernatural. Their S.A.V.E. society gave you a license to go after monsters and poke around where a sensible person would have been home watching Knight Rider. But what I remember is not so much the society or the creatures as the proximity of it all. The feeling that this could happen close by.

And there is something to that. Pacesetter was from Wisconsin; Mayfair, who published 2nd edition, was in the Chicago suburbs. Like Lake Geneva, it made a difference. These were games from places I knew, with basements and long winters and highways and pizza joints and the kind of adults who know more than they let on.

Chill put an idea in my head that I still hold to: local horror works.

You don’t need to dress every hero up as a monster or have some glamorous darkness. I am sure there is room for a nightclub full of immortals in expensive coats quoting poetry at one another, but that is not Jackson. Here, you want ordinary people with the courage to be extraordinary.

Life in Jackson goes on in ways you can put your finger on. Folks work the factories and farms and offices and hospitals, they run the small businesses, they raise a family, and have a slice of pizza after the football game. The librarian can tell you which of her students are in the occult section come October. The old woman next door has known them all since they were born and holds onto memories she ought to let go of. When trouble comes, everyone is in on it more than they will say.

This is the horror experience I want from Jackson. It does not make a noise about it. It is patient.

The Salem witch is public fear and accusation. In New Orleans, she is ritual and reputation. But the Midwest witch is useful, if unsettling. You may not put your trust in her, but you will be at her door. You will call her odd and then ask for the tea. You will whisper and then take the charm. They will tell you she is not right. Then they will want to know: what does it mean when you hear something at the screen door every night at 3:17am?

I also want that kind of witch in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. Not some cleric with a pot of herbs, or a druid who has taken up residence indoors, or a magic-user with a better hat.

She is part of the community in a social and supernatural sense. She is privy to the local dead and the old bargains, to the land spirits and the family curses and the lies people spin when they are half dead with fear.

In Jackson, you won’t find her on the school board or any church committee. There is no sign in the window with “WITCH” on it. She may not even use the word. She could be a retired teacher for all you know. An aunt. A widow. The farmer’s wife. A former nurse or the owner of the bookstore.

You might see her in a white farmhouse out past town, or in a small brick place by the college. Or in an apartment above a shop that is closed up, where the curtains don’t move but the porch light is on. When the creek runs black in June, you have her number.

There is an emotional quality to it I am after.

Salem is public and touristy now. New Orleans is humid, mythic. But the Midwest is cold. It has a way of freezing things. You can be smiling at one another in church and then give each other the wide berth in the grocery store. Grown-ups will say “we don’t talk about that” and leave the children to wonder what “that” was. Old wrongs become like the weather, settling into the walls of the town.

Winters here are not for show; it is a monster. It punishes and isolates. It will trap the poor inside and the careless outside. It breaks roads and pipes and batteries, howls in the old houses, and makes the timbers talk at night.

A witch who puts up with that world knows practical magic. Nothing pretty or for the stage. The sort of magic that turns a fever or keeps the pipes from bursting. To keep despair from taking root. To make sure a spirit doesn’t cross your threshold or to spoil the milk of someone with ill intent.

The Salem witch is bound to a national myth. The one in New Orleans to another. But the Midwest witch is of a dozen smaller ones: the immigrant charms and Protestant superstitions, the Catholic saints and the river ghosts, the prairie weather and the silence of the mounds. The railroad deaths, the school legends, the things kids talk about because the adults won’t.

This is the witch I want.

Photo by Arian Fernandez

Mirror Shard: The Prairie Wise Woman

The Prairie Wise Woman. You will find one in every town.

Try to put a description on her, and you won’t do it justice. Is she a witch? A healer? Or just an old woman with too many cats and nothing better to do with her time? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. You can tell enough by the way the elders of the town don’t so much as say her name unless they are put to it.

She keeps to herself, well away from the center of town, literal and figurative. You might find her where the pavement ends and the gravel begins, or near the creek, or the cemetery. Some would say next to that old mound, the town has no respect for. Her place is hardly a showpiece; in fact, it could be called a mess if you were looking for tidiness, though “dirty” isn’t the word for it. It is simply not put together for other people’s comfort. The porch is swept, the garden is for use and not for show, and the windows have a way of watching you.

In the pages of Advanced Witches & Warlocks, she is defined as the frontier equivalent of the village witch, suited to the plains and borderlands. No royal wizardry here, no temple priestess. She is who you go to when the proper channels have run dry.

Take Jackson, IL. She is the de facto authority on local lore there. One never knows her history: ex-nurse, schoolteacher, farmer’s wife, or maybe she put in some years at the library. She was around when the Old Jackson High was still just a school and not yet haunted like they all seem to get.

She is familiar with the lot of it: fever teas and warding knots, grave dirt and iron nails, red thread and saints’ medals. And the gods that predate the settlers.

She knows who has witch-blood in them and which land is under a curse. She knows what went down on Magical Mystery Lane and why you should leave the Witch Chairs be. She is aware that the Crimson Cougar is more than a bit of school spirit, and she can spot the teenager who has already started to see things.

That makes her useful in Jackson. Don’t expect an answer machine or some NPC to lay out the plot because you missed your clues, and everyone is worn out. She is there to let you know the kids aren’t making it up. Maybe she will help. Maybe not. There is something afoot. Something old and local that knows your name.

Come to see her, and she will hear you out. She might put on the coffee, or make a point of inquiring after your mother. If you are rude in asking for help, she will have you sort out your manners first, and rightly so. Should you bring up the supernatural, she will act as if her ears are full of wax.

But in her own time she will put the question to you: "What did you see, and who put it in your head not to?"

She is the Prairie Wise Woman. She may hand you a charm of iron and red thread, or advise you to keep off the old road once the sun is down. She’ll tell you the ghost is only lost, not mad, and that some spirits are not for you to bind or banish.

If Larina or Faye come by, or any of the young PC witches in training, she might just remark, "You’ve begun to see it." And leave it at that.

There is a difference between what is hidden and what is buried. The former you can find. The latter was put there for good reason. In the Midwest, that is how a witch lives.

The Enchanted World: Spells & Bindings

 Time once again to return to the Time-LIFE series, The Enchanted World, and once again we deal with the topic of magic, in Spells and Bindings. 

Spells and Bindings

by Ellen Galford and Time-LIFE editors, 1985 (144 pages)
ISBN 0809452413, 0809452421 (US Editions)

Here we are treated to tales of magic, in particular spells cast that usually go awry.

Chapter One: Double-Edged Power

This chapter opens with one (of the thousands it seems) of the Celtic tales of star-crossed, ill-fated lovers. In this case, the tale of Tristan and Isolt (in this version, lots of variations of spellings). Here, a miscast spell, in the form of enchanted fairy wine, causes the two to fall in love and break their oaths to their sworn leaders. 

The Greeks treat us to the tale of Pygmalion and his statue, Galatea, though that name is not used here. His tale is compared to others of the ancient Egyptians, the Celts, and the French. I am reminded of the A. Merritt's tale "Burn, Witch, Burn" in which the protagonist, Dr. Lowell, discusses similar tales of human-like inanimate objects coming to life. 

If there is a message so far, it is that magic has a price. 

This moves on to magical items. Like the Banner of MacLeod, used to summon up a horde to help them in times of war, or the cloak and hood of Finn MacCumal, which could change him into a stag or hound as he needed. And going further afield, the magic carpet. 

We end this section with the tale of Rhiannon and her lost child. 

Ancient Metamorphoses briefly covers tales of magical transformations. 

Chapter Two: Webs of Enchantment

Here, we get into the recurring theme of the series: that in a time before Christianity, there was more magic in the world and the coming of Christianity caused the old magic to disappear. Nowhere was that more obvious than in the British Isles. We learn about the Tuatha Dé Danann, the magical races of Ireland, and their connection to the Children of Lir. Lir was a chieftain and his wife Aeb bore him two sets of twins before she died. Grieving he sent for her sister, Aoife, to be his new wife and mother to her niece and nephews. Aoife however, never took to the children and one day took them to a lake to kill them. The children instead became swans for 300 years. Once the spell was broken, they aged to 300 instantly. 

The Tale of the Golem is also covered briefly as another magical creation. And Pandora ("all the gifts") was given to men by Zeus in another act of magical creation. 

In tales of transformation, we have the half-faerie Gerald, Earl of Desmond, who could transform into an animal. But his wife witnessed his transformation and called out in shock, cursing him to remain this way forever. More tales of Irish hero Finn MacCool (who seems to have enough tales for three heroes, really), though in this case, he was only part of the tale of Iollan, who left his faerie wife for a mortal woman. The faerie cursed them both, making Iollan a man who hated dogs and his wife into a hound. 

The tale of the Piper of Hameln is recounted with his magical pipes and warning to pay your debts. 

An Embowered Sleep is another tale of Sleeping Beauty. 

Chapter Three: Deliverance from Magic's Coils

Magical curses fill this chapter, starting with the Welsh tale of the Princess and the Frog. In this telling, the Princess doesn't kiss the frog, but must satisfy three tasks of the curse, including cutting off the frog's head to release the Prince. 

Staying in Wales, we get the tale of Sir Gawain and his son Gingalin sent to rescue a town from the fierce clutch of a dragon, only to discover the dragon was in fact a transformed Queen.

We cross the Channel to Paris and the tale of Bluebeard and his bride. Or, more to the point, his brides in death. And we are treated to one of the Ur-tales magical transformations and love with Eros and Psyche. 

In another tale of Sir Gawain, Arthur makes a deal with a lone knight in the woods that leads to a series of events in which an ugly woman, Dame Ragnell, is brought to his court. She chooses Sir Gawain as her betrothed and Gawain, who is known as the most curteous of knights, accepts. In doing so her curse is broken and she is one of the most beautiful women in the court.   

A Spell-Shackled Devotion is a similar tale and told next, again involving Finn MacCool and his follower Diarmuid. Diarmuid is betrothed to an ugly hag, but because he treats her with kindness, she is revealed to truly be a beautiful woman of faerie blood. But like Eros and Psyche, that is only the start of his trials to defend her life and love. Once Diarmuid finally completes all his quests to return health and life to his bride, he learns that because she is Sihde, she can't remain with him. Was he in love, or was it her magic that compelled him to love and thus heal her and break her curse? 

The message is clear. Magic is not something you want to mess with, and even happy endings are measured with a bit of sadness or betrayal.

These are many of the tales of our literary canon. Foundational to many of the myths and legends and modern tales we still have today. Even now, I look over the things I am working on and see these tales pop up almost unbidden. Do I see Eros and Psyche in my own Andy and Rowan? Yes, because there is an adversity there from their families. And like Eros (Cupid in the first tale I read of them) and Psyche, they do get the happy ending. 

Of course, unless my players get them killed in the next session.

The tale of Eros and Psyche had a strong effect on me and my own "D&D upbringing." I have mentioned many times that my "gateway drug" to D&D was D’Aulaire, I., & D’Aulaire, E. P. (1962). Book of Greek Myths. From there, I read other books of Greek myths, including one that had the tale of Cupid and Psyche. This was the same time I was learning and getting into D&D. Maybe I have always conflated the two. The idea that a character, through adversity, can obtain what their heart truly desires is a powerful one. And unlike my grim Celtic forefathers, I like to see true love prevail. Call me mushy or a sap or romantic or whatever. I like to see the characters "win." Since then I have go back to this story many times and have had different interpretations. There is a Freudian one that I think is rather fun, but beyond the scope here, but I STILL like to come to the conclusion that the ending is a happy one. 

If nothing else, that is something the Enchanted World series does really well. It takes these tales, sometimes very well-known tales, and lets me think about them in different ways. Sometimes it is the benefit of age, other times it is how the stories are arranged in conjunction with each other. I guess that is what makes them timeless, really. Their ability to be told and retold many times across the ages. 

Mail Call Wednesday: D&D Basic & Expert in Print

 The BEST version of Dungeons & Dragons in back in print now. The Moldvay Basic book and the Cook/Marsh Expert book are now available in Print-on-Demand formats from DriveThruRPG.

While maybe not as crisp-looking as the originals from 1980/81 are, they are still easy to read and great to have.

The books do compare well, and they allow me to keep them on my desk without worrying about ruining what I call my "museum pieces." 

The Expert book even has a nice little bonus.

A reprint of the 1981 Gateway to Adventure TSR Product Catalog. Though I suppose if I am being nit-picky, this is the one that came with the Basic set, since the one with the Expert set had a picture of Isle of Dread. 

The Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Dungeons & Dragons Expert books will run you $15.99 each. More expensive than 45 years ago, but I guess that is to be expected.

I just got these last night and have not shown them to my kids yet. I am sure my oldest will now want his own copies.

Dice not included.

Now, let's see the BECMI books in print!