Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic and the Secret Appeal of Forbidden Books

I am currently reading Manly Wade Wellman for my Witches of Appendix N. He has a lot of occult investigators and talks a lot about dangerous occult texts. There is a strange magic to being told a book is dangerous.

Not real magic. Not the kind the pamphlets warned us about. Not the sort of thing that appears when you mispronounce something in Latin while standing in a chalk circle at midnight. I mean the older, more human kind of magic. The kind that happens when an adult lowers their voice, points at a book, and says, "You should not be reading that."

For a certain sort of kid, that is not a warning.

It is an invitation.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately while working on my Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL projects. I have also been going back through some old Satanic Panic videos, both vintage and retrospective. Some are from the era itself. Some are modern looks back. One or two are modern warnings that feel like they could have been broadcast in 1986 with very little editing.

I am not here to dunk on them. Well. Not entirely.

Some of this material is ridiculous. Some of it is unintentionally hilarious. Some of it is sad. Some of it is built out of real grief aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it comes from people who were clearly frightened by a world changing faster than they knew how to handle.

But all of it circles the same idea 

The fear was not really just about Dungeons & Dragons. It was not just about heavy metal. It was not just about horror movies, Smurfs, He-Man, E.T., or some plastic wizard in the toybox. The fear was about children having access to an imaginative life that adults could not completely supervise.

And that, I think, is where the forbidden book gets its power.

I have written about the Satanic Panic before. Back in 2024, I said I was fascinated by it because I had lived through it and, as someone who was not religious, the whole panic was confusing to me. I also admitted something else that still feels true: my own teenage reaction to all of it absolutely influenced my early D&D games. Lots of undead. Lots of demons. And, yes, lots of witches. Immature? Sure. I was a teenager. That was practically my job. But it was also fruitful. Some of that old material has never really left me. It just waited for better books to live in.

The Panic in the Toybox

One of the great artifacts of the era is Turmoil in the Toybox. If you have never seen it, it is one of those videos that feels like it was assembled in a church basement, a public access studio, and a fever dream all at the same time. Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips seem convinced that the devil is hiding in every toybox, or at least making a pretty serious attempt to franchise there.

• The Smurfs? Suspicious.
• Masters of the Universe? Dangerous.
• E.T.? Worth a second look.
• Dungeons & Dragons? Obviously trouble.

The whole thing is amazing because it does not merely worry about D&D. It worries about the entire imaginative ecosystem of childhood. Toys, cartoons, commercials, fantasy symbols, magic words, Saturday morning television, action figures, and role-playing games all become part of one invisible machinery. The toybox is no longer a toybox. It is a grimoire with plastic hinges.

That sounds like a joke, but that really is how the panic worked.

The D&D section is especially perfect. The game pieces, they tell us, include witches, wizards, necromancers, clerics, evil magic-users, and all the usual suspects. Good versus evil becomes white witchcraft versus black witchcraft. Someone even claims that when game pieces are burned, screams come out of the fire because spiritual forces have inhabited them.

Now, look. That is nonsense. But it is also myth-making.

The panic did not merely misunderstand Dungeons & Dragons. It mythologized it.

That is the funny thing. The adults who wanted to make the game smaller made it larger. They turned rulebooks into occult manuals, dice into ritual objects, miniatures into idols, character sheets into dangerous documents, and the Dungeon Master into some sort of suburban necromancer with graph paper.

For the average kid, D&D was a game. A weird, wonderful, sometimes confusing game with too many charts and not enough hit points at 1st level.

But after the panic got hold of it? 

Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.

The Book They Told You Not to Read

The Satanic Panic did not create the fire of D&D’s mystique, but it poured gasoline on it.

The books already looked strange. The Monster Manual was full of demons, devils, dragons, undead, and things with names that sounded like they had crawled out of some medieval marginalia. The Dungeon Masters Guide felt like an occult textbook even when it was mostly explaining initiative, treasure tables, magic item creation, and why you should never let the players get away with too much.

Then the grown-ups started saying these books were dangerous.

Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.

In the 1980s, D&D books became contraband grimoires in the popular imagination. They were passed from hand to hand, argued over in churches, hidden from certain relatives, discussed on television, condemned in pamphlets, and defended at kitchen tables by kids who were absolutely certain that none of the adults understood what was actually happening.

Most of the time, the kids were right.

The game was not teaching us how to summon demons. It was teaching us how to imagine consequences. It was teaching us how to map darkness. It was teaching us that monsters had names, rules, weaknesses, treasure types, and armor classes.

That is powerful. Not Satanic. Not corrupting. Powerful. And power is always frightening to someone.

Or as my mom once so eloquently said about D&D, "This is nothing but Mythology and math!"

The Wrong Demons

One of the more painful parts of looking back at the Satanic Panic is realizing how often adults named the wrong demons.

There were real kids in pain. There were real families struggling. There were real cases of depression, isolation, abuse, grief, mental illness, and fear. But instead of asking harder questions, too many people blamed the game, the records, the horror movies, the toys, the novels, the black t-shirts, the dice.

That is the actual horror.

Not that adults believed in demons. I write about demons all the time. My newest book, Codex Qliphothica, is full of things no sensible person would want crawling out of the wrong side of creation.

The horror is that they named the wrong demons.

That is something I touched on in my 2022 A-to-Z post. In the real world, there is no worldwide Satanic conspiracy. There are no secret armies of Satanists trafficking children through every daycare, pizza parlor, and game store. But in a horror game, there can be demons, devils, evil spirits, and worse. The trick is not to make the panic true. The trick is to understand that people are often looking in the wrong direction. Sometimes the evil is not a cult at all. Sometimes it is perfectly ordinary people who use fear to hurt the "undesirables" in their own community.

That idea matters a lot to me, especially for Jackson, IL. In a town like Jackson in 1986, it is easy to imagine a parent seeing a TV preacher or a warning video and suddenly looking at everything in their kid’s room differently. The D&D hardback. The heavy metal cassette. The horror VHS tape. The plastic skeleton warrior. The fantasy paperback. The notebook is full of strange names. The girl at school who wears a triple-goddess necklace and knows too much.

Most of the time, the adults are wrong.

But this is Jackson. Sometimes they are wrong in the direction of something true.

That is the sweet spot for horror.

In the real world, the panic was destructive because it mistook imagination for corruption. In fiction, though, we can ask the more interesting question: what if the panic was wrong about the cause, but not wrong that something was there?

• What if the book was just a game book, but the thing watching from the closet was real?
• What if the record was harmless, but the voice on the blank tape was not?
• What if the toy was just plastic, but the child was right when she said it moved after midnight?

That is not the Satanic Panic being correct. That is horror using the emotional vocabulary of the panic and aiming it at better targets.

Click to get your own!

 My Life With the Satanic Cult

This is where it stops being only media history for me.

I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois. In 2024 I wrote about a moment from around 1985 or 1986 when someone supposedly found a "satanic altar" in a cornfield south of my high school. I remember the panic ripping through the school. I remember being fascinated and horrified by it. Fascinated by how fast everyone reacted. Horrified by how quickly it changed people. The next day, people wore homemade "Satan Busters" armbands featuring an inverted cross within a red buster circle.

That is the kind of detail no amount of research can invent better than memory.

I was already a D&D kid. I was already interested in witches, monsters, demons, horror, occult books, and the kinds of things polite adults thought you should probably not be reading. I was also an atheist in a place where the average person on the street did not know, or care to know, the difference between atheist, Satanist, witch, gamer, metalhead, or just "weird kid."

The assistant principal, who was a decent guy, told me and some of my gamer friends that we should keep our D&D books at home until all this stupid shit blew over. He was probably right. I still hated it.

I hated the idea that something I wanted to read had to be hidden because a mob of scared idiots had decided books were dangerous.

That feeling has never really left me.

And yes, as I wrote before, my love of psychology was probably strengthened then. So was my love of witches. No one was trying to burn me, not literally, but they were trying to burn the things they feared. And there were book burnings in town. Real ones. People on the conservative religious side burning D&D books and other things they did not understand.

That matters.

Because once you have seen people burn books, you never look at forbidden books the same way again.

Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf

By 1986, the forbidden book was not alone. It had a lot of company.

There was the forbidden record album, especially if someone claimed the lyrics meant something different when played backward. There was the forbidden horror movie from the video store, the one with a cover more dangerous than the movie itself. There were forbidden toys, forbidden cartoons, forbidden symbols, forbidden bands, forbidden fantasy novels, forbidden magazines, forbidden games.

The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.

That is why a movie like Trick or Treat is such a perfect artifact of 1986. It takes the heavy metal panic seriously enough to turn it into a horror plot. A dead rock star comes back through a record. The music really is dangerous. The adults' warning about Satanic rock is, inside the logic of the movie, kind of right.

That is hilarious. It is also revealing, and wonderful for my games.

Horror loves taking the thing adults are panicking about and saying, "Fine. But what if it really was haunted?"

• What if the record really does speak something backward?
• What if the toy really does know your name?
• What if the book really does open a door?
• What if the game really does teach you something you were not supposed to know?

That is not how the real world works. But it is absolutely how good horror works. It is very much how Jackson works.

The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away

The funny thing is, the Satanic Panic did not completely vanish. It changed clothes.

In 2022 I wrote that if you think this "corn-filled nugget" was left behind in the 1980s, I had some news. The panic’s old shape involved Satanists, daycare centers, trafficking, cannibalism, and ritual abuse. Later versions involved Pizzagate, QAnon, and other conspiracy nonsense that kept recycling the same fears in new packaging. 

That is why a modern Christian response to D&D can still feel so oddly familiar. The video is new. The anxieties are old. Role-playing as spiritual danger. Spellcasting as a gateway. Tiamat as proof of pagan contamination. D&D books as corrupting objects. Christian parents being warned to keep the game out of the house. It is all there, just with better lighting, HD resolution, and modern YouTube pacing.

I do not say that to mock people’s faith. I know plenty of Christians who play D&D, write horror, love fantasy, and understand perfectly well where the game ends and the real world begins.

But the panic itself? That old habit of flattening every strange symbol into “Satanic”? That is still with us.

And honestly, from a horror writer’s point of view, it is hard not to be fascinated by it.

The Witch Was Always There

Here is the part that matters most for Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

The panic kept pointing at the Witch.

Even when people were talking about D&D generally, the real charge was around magic. Spellcasting. Divination. Necromancy. Enchantment. Demons. Spirits. Symbols. Curses. The old gods. Forbidden knowledge. Books that teach you things.

Again and again, the panic caught sight of the Witch's shadow and recoiled.

I want to do the opposite. I want to look directly at her and say, "Yes. You belong here."

The Witch was always part of fantasy gaming, even when the game did not quite know what to do with her. She was there as the evil enchantress, the village wise woman, the hag in the woods, the priestess of the old gods, the herbalist, the oracle, the charm-worker, the necromancer, the woman everyone feared and visited anyway.

• She was there in the margins.
• She was there at the edge of the village.
• She was there in the spell list.
• She was there in the panic.

The mistake was reducing her to "evil spellcaster" or treating her as merely a monster. The Witch is older than that. Stranger than that. More useful than that. She is better than that.

The Witch belongs to the place where folklore, religion, fear, healing, social suspicion, forbidden knowledge, and personal power all overlap. Which is to say, she belongs in D&D perfectly.

That is what Advanced Witches & Warlocks is about. Not making the panic true, but reclaiming the imaginative territory the panic could not stop pointing at.

High School Is the Real Haunted House

The Satanic Panic also helped sharpen something else for me: the horror of being a teenager and having adults decide what your symbols mean before you get to explain them.

I came back to that in my Monsterhearts post, where I talked about Larina in 1986. High school is already horrifying. Add the Satanic Panic, a sleepy Midwestern college town, and a girl everyone already suspects is out in the woods sacrificing animals and calling up demons, and you have something that feels very close to the emotional center of Jackson, IL. The truth, of course, is smaller and stranger. Larina is more likely to be in her attic room listening to her dad’s Yes albums than leading a coven in the cornfields. But rumor has never needed truth to grow teeth.

That is the Jackson mood. I talked about this in detail last week.

The town does not need every parent to believe there is a demon in the toybox. It only needs enough of them to wonder. Enough to whisper. Enough to throw away a book, forbid a game, search a bedroom, call a pastor, or look twice at the quiet girl with the strange necklace and the too-old eyes.

And the kids? The kids know the adults are wrong. Mostly.

These Are the Books You Were Warned About

So here is my cheeky little sales pitch, and I am only half joking.

These are the books you were warned about in 1986.

Codex Qliphothica is on the way out, and it is very much a demon book. But it is not a "everything dark is Satanic" book. That was always one of the dullest parts of the panic. It flattened everything. Devils, demons, pagan gods, witches, ghosts, occult symbols, fantasy monsters, and rock music all became one big smear of "darkness."

Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.

The Qliphoth are not generic devils. They are not just demons with a different coat of paint. They are shells, refuse, wounds, corruptions, anti-creation, things that should not have survived the making of the world and yet did. They are what happens when the cosmos has a scar and something learns to live inside it.

That is much more interesting than "the devil is in the toybox."

Advanced Witches & Warlocks comes from the other side of the same forbidden bookshelf. It asks what old-school fantasy gaming looks like when the Witch is not a joke, not a monster, not an afterthought, and not simply a reskinned magic-user. What if she had been there properly all along? What if the game had made room for occult magic as something distinct from arcane study and divine authority?

And Jackson, IL is where all of this comes home.

Jackson is 1986 as a haunted town. It is school lockers and church warnings, mall bookstores and strange kids, rumors and records, public access panic and real shadows behind the gym. It is the place where adults blame D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and witchcraft because those are the monsters they know how to name.

But Jackson has older monsters. Jackson has quieter monsters. Jackson has the things that were listening while everyone argued about the wrong books.

The Secret Appeal

The secret appeal of forbidden books is not that they are evil. It is that they promise the world is larger than you were told. That is the real danger.

A forbidden book says there are secret doors. It says names matter. It says monsters can be known. It says the dead might speak, the old gods might stir, the map might continue past the edge, and the strange kid might not be strange for nothing.

That is why the warnings failed. They told us the books were dangerous. We believed them; we just understood danger differently.

For some of us, danger meant possibility. It meant mystery. It meant there was something behind the ordinary world, something the adults were either too frightened or too tired to see.

That is the heart of fantasy gaming. That is the heart of occult horror. That is the heart of every witch story worth telling.

In 1986, that promise might have been sitting on a bookshelf with a dragon on the cover.

• Or in a toybox.
• Or in a record sleeve.
• Or on a VHS tape from the back room of the video store.
• Or in the hands of the quiet girl at school who knew more than she should.

And if someone told you not to open it?

Well...You were probably going to open it.

Mirror Shard: The Jackson Satanic Panic

I feel like I have talked about this one a lot already. Partially in posts here and all weekend at EGG Con. In "Am I Evil," the Satanic Panic comes to Jackson, but not in the way the town's folk expect. It is in the form of Moria Elizabeth Zachary. She looks like a nice girl. She wears fuzzy sweaters. She is polite. She has an ugly dog she holds. And she is utterly evil.

Darren Vale acts evil, but he is really sort of a joke. Sylvia Velasco is evil, but not the way everyone thinks she is. People even think Faye Thorne is evil, she isn't, but her family is. 

As my co-creator of NIGHT SHIFT, Jason Vey, commented this past weekend, the Satanic Panic in Jackson takes on new dimensions. 

And of course I have my own real-world history from the real-world Jacksonville. Sure, it is not as dramatic as some other tales of the Satanic Panic, but it has the advantage of being mine. 

There is just too much material here to use. Really...there is too much material NOT to do this. 

Links

Videos

• D&D is Satanic, from the classic "Turmoil in the Toybox." A must-watch!
• Trick or Treat (1986) The Satanic Panic of the 1980s (Retrospective)
• The Satanic Panic: A Brief History. A great retrospective and overview of the Satanic Panic and D&D's place in it.
• KSTP Twin Cities Live August 1986: Satan is in your Child’s Bedroom. From the day, the Satanic Panic sealed in amber for us to enjoy.
• Christian Concerns about Dungeons & Dragons, newer, but it shows that 40 years later, people still keep making the same nonsensical mistakes.

My Posts

• Satanic Panic!
• A to Z of Witches. O is for Occult Panic and Obeah. Links to Turmoil in the Toybox
• AtoZChallenge2022: S is for Satanic Panic
• AtoZChallenge2024: S is for Satanic Panic

Fantasy Fridays: Larina for Advanced Witches & Warlocks

Advanced Witches & Warlocks by Eugene Jaworski

 I have spent the better part of this week talking about my witch character, Larina. Mostly about where she has been and who she has been. Today I want to share the next Larina. A little bit like the cameo of the 12th Doctor in "Day of the Doctor." Is this the same witch as my Dragon #114 Larina or the AD&D 2nd Ed Larina? Yes. And maybe. 

Advanced Witches & Warlocks

I wanted to be much further along on this than I am right now. I have been picking at it for a number of years. In truth, as soon as I finished my Basic Witch book. But OSRIC had not caught on like Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, or later on Old-School Essentials. But I kept at it, testing different ideas. Some of those ended up in other books, others got cut from drafts altogether, but the documents remained. I also had plenty of notes left over from other versions of my witch classes. Things I wrote, but never could get to work the way I wanted them to. Case in point: today's meta-topic. 

Advanced Classes

One of the ideas I introduce in AW&W is that of Advanced Classes. The examples were already there; the Thief-Acrobat, the Hierophant Druid, even the Bard to a degree. These are classes that start with one of the base classes and then move on to a specialization. I mean, I could have called them Specialist classes, but I like the sound of Advanced Classes. AW&W introduces three Advanced classes: the Archwitch, the Witch Priestess, and the Witch Queen. Each offers the witch something different. 

In playtests, it became clear that, with the restrictions I built in, the advanced classes were less powerful than the base class. To remedy this, I made some changes to spells and swapped out expanded spell lists at the cost of occult powers. Though there is the option to choose some occult powers later on, they are usually one of a choice of options. 

Of course, as you have all seen from my posts this week, this is exactly the sort of thing I use Larina for. In-game, and in my own history with her, she starts out as a witch but typically becomes more "faithful" and religious. She isn't just a witch, but a witch priestess in function. Now she can be that in form as well.

"Larina" by Djinn

I dabbled with the idea of making her a 13th-level witch and a 7th-level Witch Priestess. Taking the Witch Priestess levels later on, but in truth the differences were very minor save for choices of occult powers or other powers. The big difference is the choice of spells. Of course that also didn't track with the rules I wrote, but hey, sometimes my rules are not right, and I need to tweak them. In this case, though, my rules will stand. 

In this new book, there are spells common to every witch. There are other spells if the witch takes an advanced class, and there are spells unique to their tradition. So no two witches ever need to be alike in terms of the magic they have. This is less revolutionary and more evolutionary. We will see this with schools of magic and spheres of divine influence in AD&D 2nd edition, and we saw it in the Dragonlance Adventures book for the Schools of High Sorcery in AD&D 1st edition. This is just the logical middle ground between those two design choices. 

Traditions

Presently, the new traditions I am putting into this new book are The Atlantean Tradition, The Daughters of Baba Yaga, The Followers of Aradia, The High Order, and The Scaled Sisterhood. I am considering a sixth, but I want to work on it some more before I do. Five is a better number.

Each of these is considered to be "Higher" witchcraft. While many are depicted as older (Atlantean, Daughters of Baba Yaga, and Followers of Aradia), they set themselves above what they consider to be simple Hedge Witchcraft.

I suppose though that the Followers of Aradia *could* just be another type of Pagan witchcraft. Certainly their roots are there. I am still hashing that one out. Maybe Aradia is just the Witch Queen of the Pagan Tradition and not a Patron herself. 

See. Still work to do.

Larina Nix, Witch Queen of the High Witchcraft Tradition

Larina Nix, Witch Queen of the High Witchcraft Tradition

30th level Human Witch, Lawful Neutral
(7th level witch, 13th level Witch Priestess, 10th level Witch Queen)
Tradition: High Order Witchcraft

Secondary Skill: Translator (+1 language)

S: 10
I: 18
W: 18
D: 11
C: 11
Ch: 18

Paralysis/Poison: 3
Petrify/Polymorph: 3  
Rod, Staff, or Wand: 4
Breath Weapon: 6
Spells: 5

AC: -1 (Bracers AC 1, Amulet of Protection +2)
HP: 66
THAC0: 10

Weapon
Dagger +1
Staff +3, Staff of the Witch Queen

Familiar: White flying cat ("Cotton-ball")

Languages: Common, Lawful Neutral, Supernal, Elven, Draconic, Celestial, Infernal, Dwarven, Undercommon, Goblin

Occult Powers
1st level: Familiar
7th level: Circle of Warding (+2 to spell saves)
13th level (Witch Priestess/Divine Favor): Secret Formula* (one 4th level or below spell is always prepared)

19th level (Witch Queen/Occult Eminence): Witch’s Focus

Witch Priestess Powers
Divine Favor (Healing Hands, Nature’s Wrath, Invoke the Ancients, Occult Insight), Sacred Coven, Charge of the Goddess, Drawing Down the Moon.

Witch Queen Powers
Awesome Presence, Occult Eminence, A Thousand Faces, Timeless Body, Mantle of Sovereignty, Ninth Level Spells (5)

Spells
Cantrips: Clean, Dark Flame, Mend, Occult Mark
First level: Arcane Dart, Charm Person, Command, Faerie Fire, Glamour, Häxen Talons, Moonlight Veil, Sanctuary, Speak with Animals, Unseen Servant, Ceremony (Ritual)
Second level: Augury, Bless, I Told the Crows Your Name, Magic Broom, Mirror of the Self, Misty Step, Penny for Your Thoughts, Share My Pain, Sister to the Dark Ones, Spiritual Hammer (Witch's Hammer), Warding Circle
Third level: Call Lightning, Cauldron Sight, Circle of Rue and Iron, Curse of Withering, Eldritch Enchantment, Fey Bargain, Larina’s Eldritch Caress, Magic Circle, Power Word (Command), Tongues*
Fourth level: Analyze Magic, Coven Gate, Divination, Elemental Armor, Larina's Witchfire, Lunar Winds, Protection from Evil (10' radius), Scrying, Soul Snare
Fifth level: Circle of Sevenfold Flame, Coven's Might, Power Word (Pain), Speak with Hidden Folk, Two Places At Once, Witch Gate, Larina’s Word Beyond the Veil (Ritual)
Sixth level: Aspect of the Crone (Crone of Death), Blessings of The Morrigan (Greater), Guardians of the Watchtowers, Heal, Mind Fortress, Word of Return
Seventh level: Speak with the World Soul, Storm of Crows, Witch's Writ of Binding, Wave of Mutilation
Eighth level: Coven Eternal, Larina's Liberum Libre, Ritual of the Closed Veil (Ritual)
Ninth level: Bind Soul, Command the Coven, Power Word (Kill), Rewrite the Name, Seal the Gate

Theme Song: Night Bird and If Anyone Falls

Larina is a High Order witch. These occult scholars combine Arcane, Divine, and Occult practices into one esoteric philosophy. She has always honored the Triple Moon Goddess, and it was her introduction to the craft, but her "learning" of witchcraft began in a more academic way.  

I debated whether her advanced class should be Witch Priestess or Archwitch, and there are really good arguments for both. Archwitch had the advantage of sounding cool and reflecting her origins as a Magic-user, but in the end I went with Witch Priestess because it better reflected how she had been played over the years. She always stood in for a cleric in many of my games. If given the choice between what is optimal and what sounds better for the character in my head, I will always go with the character-serving option. 

So her start was in the High Order due to her academic bent and the learning she did from books at the magic school library. As she progresses in her witchcraft, she becomes increasingly spiritual and takes up the Witch Priestess advanced class. 

Larina the Witch Queen

I am also giving out some spoilers for spell names like "Circle of Rue and Iron," "Lunar Winds," "Coven Eternal," and a personal favorite, "I Told the Crows Your Name." 

There will also be a few more Secondary Skills. Larina is a translator because of her gift for languages. Alchemist or Herbalist might have been the more meta-game choices, but I am playing her as a character here, not a min-maxing experiment. 

Her stats were what I rolled back then. I had three 18s, something like a 1-in-12,340 chance using the 4d6 drop-the-lowest method, and I knew the dice were telling me to do something special with her. Aside: I wonder what happened to the other characters I rolled up that day? I NEVER rolled up just one; it was always a group. I have the ones from right before (rolled up for my birthday game) and the ones after, including my next attempt at a healer. I wish I had kept those "classmates" or even "near Larinas." Somewhere in that lost stack might have been another character I would still be talking about forty years later. I did find her ex-husband and one of my other drow characters who apparently hated her. They were from my birthday game back in June of 1986, though. 

AD&D Characters from the 1980s and early 1990s

It seems rather fitting to me that Larina, who was featured as a 6-year-old witch girl in my first-ever publication, would go on to be the witch queen of my next *D&D-compatible witch book.

It only took me 40 years.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. What I Learned from 40 Years of Larina

The Witch Queen and the Girl in Homeroom: What I Learned from Forty Years of One Character

I created Larina in July, 1986. 

That sentence feels simple enough, but it carries a lot of weight. It means she has been with me through six editions of D&D, most of high school, college games, new systems, abandoned campaigns, resurrected notebooks, lost files, new editions, new worlds, and more than a few versions of myself. She has been a magic-user, a witch, a sage, a horror heroine "last girl", a multiversal constant, and occasionally the person in the room who knows far more than she should.

I have known her longer than my kids have been alive, and I met her 15 months before I met the girl I would one day marry.

I wish I could remember the exact date, but failing that, and for reasons that make sense to me, I'll say it was 40 years ago today. July 6, 1986.

At some point, a character stops being just a character sheet. At some point, she becomes a mirror to what I am doing at the time. 

And Larina has always been a mirror.

Larina was not my first character. She was not even my first "witch" character. But over the years of playing her and using her in many games, she quickly became a favorite of mine.

If you like, you can read some more about her here on her own page and all the versions of her I have posted here over the years.

The Character You Start With Is Not the Character You Keep

That first version of Larina was nothing special at the time. Not really. She was a "witch" but only in the respect that she was a collection of ideas I had about witches. Some notes, some ideas, a rough draft. Her class at the time? Magic-user, 1st level. This was July 1986. I would use her a few times, but my main "wizard" was Phygora-Cronus. He was, and let's be honest here, my Doctor Who-ripoff character. A traveler who messed with the lives of others. Phygora did eventually become his own thing. But that very, very first version of Larina barely saw any adventures. Phygora even stopped traveling to be Larina's "advisor" at the magic school. 

Larina 1st Ed AD&D Character Sheets

Still, there was something that drew me back to her. She saw some play, but not a lot really. I am hard-pressed to remember any of her adventures between that summer and the Fall. 

Then came October 1986 and the release of Dragon Magazine #114 with its new take on the witch class. I really can't overstate how much that issue affected my ideas of how to play a witch. That put an end to her as a "fake-wizard". I made her into a 1st-level Magic-user/1st-level Witch right away with a brand-new sheet. I figured out that she had been to magic school, but the tuition was too much to keep up. Sound familiar? I was in the same boat with one school, so I took my second choice. Another mirror.

So I gave her a backstory to fit. She was working in the school library to make ends meet, and she picked up her witchcraft on the side. Libraries have always been where I study things on the edge of belief, so it was only natural. It was another mirror of my own situation.

That little bit of backstory did a lot more work than I realized at the time. It explained why she knew things she was not supposed to know. It explained why she had access to odd books, old languages, half-forgotten rituals, and dangerous scraps of lore. It made her something other than a spell list. She was not just a student of magic. She was a student of forbidden shelves, closing-time whispers, and books that should probably have been locked up better.

Looking back, that is where Larina really started to become Larina. Not by virtue of better hit points or power, but because she was the one who knew where to find the book. She was the one with the answers. 

This early Larina was hardly the best version of herself. Beginnings seldom are. But she had a spark. Her core was there.

Every Edition Reveals Something Different

I have done this with all of them. I currently have Vera Rook sitting on my desk, and I have six character sheets for her, maybe seven soon. I showed you all this as an experiment with Elowen Hale.  Vera began with a concept and then character options were used to support that concept. Elowen was built by looking at character options across the games and choosing the concept that fit them all. Every game and edition offers a chance to redefine a concept. With Elowen and Vera, it was a matter of deliberate design; with Larina, it has been a decades-long process.

Larina, 2nd Edition AD&D, the Witch Priestess

I have some 75 versions of her in posts for various systems now, each one a test to see if I could make a proper witch. For example, in AD&D 2nd Edition, she took on more of a priestess role. I called it her Wiccan side (to put it in modern terms) as she found her faith. The mechanics were simply there to put it on paper. 

And in a way, it was another mirror: while she was getting deeper into the supernatural, I was embracing my atheism and skepticism. There is a contradiction in all this that I have always found amusing. The further I put distance between myself and belief, the more exacting I became with hers. She became the High Priestess of faith and belief, while I rejected such ideas for myself. 

Perhaps that was her utility. She let me get at faith, ritual, gods, spirits, and the like without having to put my own stock in them. Where I was skeptical she could be sincere, she could stand in the circle and invoke the Goddess in earnest while I was on the periphery with a notebook to put in a word: "Yes, but what are the game terms for that?"

If you want an honest appraisal of my witch writing, there it is. I don’t need to believe in a thing to see its power.

I will ask her different questions depending on the game. D&D wants to know what she can cast. A horror game will ask what she has endured to survive. Superhero games make you wonder how much power she truly has. Sci-fi asks what she knows of the universe. Modern horror asks what she does when the monsters are not locked in some dungeon but are down the street. And so on. Every answer tells me how to play her and how to bring her into whatever comes next.

Converting a character is never a mere numbers game for me. You can have your fun making sure a 7th-level spell translates to the equivalent power in another system, but that is not the work. The task is to determine what the game deems important. Some games are about combat or social standing, others about trauma or whether you can afford rent and still be at the ritual on time. When I convert Larina, I am not just changing her stats; I am letting the game have its say with her.

Forty years on, she still has something to say.

Long-Lived Characters Become Mythology

Larina has been with me long enough to take on a mythic quality in these worlds. My players and my kids’ players are familiar with her. I have minis and 3D prints of her in the game room, art on the wall, even a Monster High doll someone went to the trouble of modifying for me (people love this post). Here, you will hear her name in the same breath as "The Simbul," "Circe," or "Tasha/Iggwilv."

I won’t pretend she is on their level in the annals of game history or literature, but at my table, she occupies that space. She is one of the names the young witches talk about in hushed tones. She is the woman who has already had her bout with the thing you have just come across, the one whose notes you find in the margin. She may be of assistance, or she may decide you are not ready for the truth.

Tea with the Witch Queens by Brian Brinlee

That is what mythology is. Not official canon or a publication record. It is what a name means when enough people at the table understand it.

It also means the little details start to matter more. Her red hair, the purple clothes, the dragon tooth necklace, the Triple Moon Goddess tattoo, and the scar below her left collarbone. Or the way she will tell you her birthday is Halloween when in fact it is the 25th of October. Things that were once just bits of color are now like relics. 

After a while, the details are no longer decoration; they are signs.

And because Larina has so many versions, those signs are what tell me she is still Larina. The stats can change. The edition can change. The cosmology can change. She can be in Mystoerth, Jackson, West Haven, WitchCraft, NIGHT SHIFT, Wasted Lands, or some far future starship-adjacent nonsense that probably started with me watching too much Doctor Who and WAY too much Star Trek. But if she is still the woman with the books, the questions, the occult knowledge, the stubborn compassion, the terrible habit of putting herself between people and the dark, and biting her nails, then she is still Larina.

Larina by Jeff Dee

She Taught Me What a Witch Is

Every Witch class I have ever written has Larina’s shadow somewhere in it. Sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, but always there. Elowen is an "adopted daughter"; Vera is a dark shadow; Marrissia is the mother of hers that devours.  Even Sinéad, to a degree, is "what if Larina had been raised in the Forgotten Realms?" All these witches are part of what I call her extended coven. Which is more growth for her because from the start she was a solitary witch learning via books she borrowed from her library. 

My witch books don’t just appear out of a vacuum; they are born of a lived-in experience I have with her. One feeds the other. Another mirror.

Larina made it clear to me that a witch is more than a woman with magic, a druid who has taken to the indoors, a wizard with better jewelry, or a cleric with the wrong holy symbols.

A witch is a relationship.

That was a revelation when I first saw it. Which is odd since what I was looking at were my own notes and writings. But there it was. Was it my writing or hers? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

The witch is a relationship. With power and place and memory. With old gods, false ones, and things that were never gods. With a coven, be it made of ghosts, familiars, past lives, a very patient cat, and the odd book.

That informed my design. A witch needs magic, but she also requires the rituals, the pacts and taboos, the marks and the consequences. She needs to be able to heal, curse, bind, and banish. And most of all, to know. Intelligence is important. Wisdom informs. But it is Charisma that sets it all into motion. 

Larina was never at her finest when she was flinging the largest spell in the room. She was best when she could tell you what the monster was and where it came from, what book made a passing mention of it, and why you should have heeded the old woman at the start of the adventure. 

That is the witch I keep writing.

The witch girl and the Witch Queen

A Good Character Can Outlive the Campaign

This is something of a big deal. Groups disband, people move on, editions are replaced, files go missing, and books get sold. Most campaigns have an end. Yet some characters endure.

Larina is my means of keeping old games from being set in amber. She is continuity, if sometimes of a confusing sort. I have four timelines for my main computer to make sense of what she has been up to since 1986, which is no small chore. In fact, trying to account for her "lost years" and sort out one of those timelines is what first put the notion of an updated Advanced Witches & Warlocks in my head. If you look at one of my playtest notebooks, you will find nothing but character sheets of her from various stages and reams of notes. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Why did she begin to embrace witchcraft as a practice and a religion more?

Will any of this make it to print? No, not all of it. Does it inform what does? You bet.

Those campaigns are history now. I am the only one left alive from some of them. But she has been here with me all along, my witness to the fact that it all happened. She was the chronicler of those long-lost campaigns. The people who were there are gone, but I have the notes I kept in her voice still tucked away in one of my 3-ring binders or stapled to a character sheet. It is strange when I read something like "Must talk to Killian" or "Find out what Morgan Highstar knows." Notes on Larina's sheet by her (by me for her) directed at characters who can no longer answer. Another mirror: Larina, when she is a GMPC or DMPC, often acts as the party's translator or chronicler. There is a certain sadness to it, and a comfort as well. Knowing that she is still bearing witness to deeds of glory.

Old campaigns are like ghosts. You hold on to the recollection of the character deaths and the lucky rolls, the big set pieces and the arguments over rules, not to mention the maps we were sure we would have for all time, only to mislay them. And the dumb jokes. But memory is no good at archiving; it will let go of what you once deemed important and hang on to the odd bits.

She reminds me that those games happened. Those people sat at those tables. That we cared very much about things written in pencil on loose-leaf paper. That we spent entire afternoons arguing over what a spell could do. For a little while, the world was bigger than the room we were sitting in, and the room we were sitting in was bigger than the world outside.

Larina is not the campaign itself, but you can smell it on her clothes.

The trick with an old character is not keeping her exactly the same. It is letting her change without letting her become someone else. Larina from 1986 is not the same character as Larina from 2026, because I am not the same either.

She has become something of a creative engine for me. What she needs is what my books need. It may sound mad, but then again, I once put in some time as a QMHP at an institution for schizophrenics, so perhaps it rubbed off. Or I just know this character well enough to tell the difference between what works and what I might want.

The WitchCraft RPG made clear to me the distinction between her magic and her psychic side, and I carried that over to Ghosts of Albion with its separate Magic and Faith abilities. From her I got the Wicca and the Witch Priestess for Advanced Witches & Warlocks, and the Witch Queen for Liber Mysterium and my 3rd Edition book. She was the six-year-old in my AD&D Complete Netbook of Witches & Warlocks. 

Which is the strangest thing of all: the adult Witch Queen and the girl in homeroom with glasses, wearing her watch on her right wrist, are one and the same. Not in any tidy, linear way, but in the manner of a dream or a myth, or an RPG you have been at for a while.

The child answers the call. The teenager comes across the book. The young witch puts up with the vampire. The adult who becomes the teacher. And the Witch Queen who becomes the warning. 

And somewhere in there is a guy (also with glasses) with a notebook, trying to figure out what all of that means in terms of saving throws, spell levels, and whether or not this really belongs in the next book.

Forty years on, and Larina is still around. 

I don’t hold on to her out of stubbornness (though there is a lot of that too); she has a way of showing me something new. Just when I think I have had my fill of her lessons, another one of her turns up. A stat block in a folder I have not opened in ages. A picture. Some class feature that is there only because, at some point, Larina did that at the table. A spell that is logical in a way only she could make it so.

Maybe that is the real lesson.

The best characters are not the ones who stay frozen on the page. They are the ones who follow us out of the dungeon, through the years, and into whatever strange country comes next.

For me, Larina has been a witch, a mirror, a witness, a test case, a mythology, and a creative engine.

Not bad for a little 1st-level magic-user girl from July of 1986.

Larina by Claudio Pozas

The Mirror Shard: The Dark Anima

This one is a little bit different than other mirror shards. Those typically cover concepts I can use in both my Occult D&D campaign and my Jackson, IL campaign, even if they appear different in each. 

I have talked about this before, but it is worth bringing up again here because it is part of Larina’s genesis.

My first foray into psychology was in the mid-80s. I went the way of most people and began with Freud and then Jung. Freud had his Id, Ego, and Superego, all very serviceable concepts. Jung I found a bit more philosophical, or at any rate more to my liking as a writer and a gamer. From him I took the archetypes, the Shadow, synchronicity, the Animus, and the Anima. That was what resonated. 

The Anima, in Jungian terms, is the inner feminine image in a man’s psyche. The Animus is the inner masculine image in a woman’s psyche. Now, I am not going to pretend this is modern psychology, or even particularly good psychology by today’s standards. This is armchair Jung, filtered through a teenage gamer in the 1980s who was reading books he only partly understood and immediately turning the interesting bits into D&D characters.

In a way, that was all I really needed then.

But the notion of the Anima held me. Jung would have you believe it is the inner feminine in a man’s mind (the Animus being the woman’s inner masculine). I wanted to know what mine looked like, and not in the pedestrian sense of an ideal type of woman. I was after something darker and more symbolic. If the feminine side of my imagination were to step into a dungeon with a spellbook and some secret she wasn’t in a hurry to share, who would she be?

Larina was the answer. Or perhaps she was there first, and I put the question to her later. In college, I worked on my undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees in Psychology. All the while, I had Larina by my side. Informing me, informed by me. I read Jung in highschool, I read it again in college and discussed him in History of Psychology classes I was in. Her first "publication" may have been a paper I wrote about the Anima with the Witch as archetype. That would have been at least 1989 or 1990. 

She is not simply “the girl character.” Sure, I like witches, and I have played a lot of women over the years, but that is not why she is here. She was curious and intuitive. She was compassion made into a weapon. She was the part of me still open to magic while the rest of me was being weaned off it. A useful tension.

As my Anima, Larina, is not merely soft and healing. She is dark. Not evil; there is a distinction. She is the witch standing at the periphery of the firelight; the one standing in the liminal space. The one who tells you there is more to it than you see. The librarian who will hand you a cursed tome because you need the lesson. The red-haired woman in purple who smiles when the monster misnames her.

Forget the seductress or the evil queen; they are too convenient and too cliché. The Dark Anima is your guide to the underworld. Think of Beatrice with a black cat, or Persephone once she has memorized the map of Hell. She won’t rescue you from the dark; she will show you how to navigate it. She is Innana and Ereshkigal. 

That is why she has a habit of appearing in my work as a sage, a mirror, or a teacher. She is the voice in my head that says the monster is a symbol, a wound, an old story in new clothes.

It also makes for good company with Nigel. He is my Id, all impulse and violence, the one who will put a blade to the problem and leave the philosophy for another day. Larina is his interpreter. She understands his danger and his necessity. Between them, I have Phygora as Animus, Johan as Super-ego, Retsam as Ego… a full psychological adventuring party in my head. It may not be entirely healthy, but it has given me my share of characters.

But Larina is the one who has stuck.

The Anima is no ordinary character. She is a mirror. She shows you desire and fear, and the things you put aside for being inconvenient. And as the person looking in the mirror changes, so does she. In a very literal sense, she has been my mirror, reflecting my turn away from religion, my skepticism, my fondness for libraries, my urge to codify the occult for a game, and my fascination with women who know more than they ought not to.

She is not me. But she is mine in a way my other characters are not. 

I suspect that is the reason for her forty-year run.

Vecna Must Die!

 I just watched the Season 4 finale of Critical Role's "Vox Machina" on Amazon Prime. Don't like Critical Role? Here's 50 cents; call someone who cares. I enjoyed the hell out of it. They set up their Big Bad for Season 5, The Whispered One. Or, as most of us who followed the stream, Vecna.

Vecna is getting some solid multiversal play. He is threatening Exandria; this winter, he was threatening Hawkins, IN, in the final season of Stranger Things. He even had a new multi-versal adventure arc for D&D 5e.  He even had some hits in AD&D 2nd Ed. His name dates back to Original D&D. 

Vecna is a bad dude.

So it seems really strange that I have never run an adventure where he is the Big Bad. I have never even run one where he has been featured to be honest. Oh, I have started some, but by the time they went from idea to notes to something written to the table, it changed. Usually the Vecna "bits" are given over to The Necromancer.  Given his importance to the history of D&D, and in-world history too, it feels like I am missing out.

Trouble is, Vecna, as a threat, is an order of magnitude (or more) above most threats your typical AD&D/D&D5 character would face. Strahd's motivations are easy to grasp; that's what makes him a great villain. Even Iuz has an understandable point of view. Same with Szass Tam, Lord Soth, Areelu Vorlesh, or the myriad other bad guys that litter the D&D multiverse. 

What does Vecna want?

Once I can answer that question, I know what my adventure needs to be. Because whatever it is Vecna wants, it will not be good for the worlds the PCs live in. 

It can't be something as mundane as control. Or even godhood. Casting down all the other gods would get the entire multiverse up in arms against him. No. It has to be qualitatively different. 

What do I want?

That is also a good question. I want something that feels epic in scope and in play. I really don't want a MacGuffin hunt. I mean, it works, yes, but if Vecna has a plan to gather all the Dragon Balls Vestiges Artifacts, then why hasn't he done this already, quietly?

When I say epic, I mean EPIC.

I want it to cross universes, to cross genres, something when the players are done they feel like this was the best adventure of their lives.

What Features Would I Like?

This is a slightly different question. Vecna, as a topic, needs epic gestures, grand plans, multiversal-changing events. Or...more to the point. I need that. I have done hundreds of "small" adventures. Clear out the goblin nest, stop the orc raids, and then escalate. My players have fought Vampire Lords, Demon Princes, Dukes of Hell, and Witch Queens. I can do grand. But this needs to be bigger. I owe that to myself. A grand opus.

1. There needs to be world hopping. 

I said no MacGuffin hunts, but that does help here. I want to sample the worlds of D&D and I want to do it in a quality way. Vecna: Eve of Ruin does this, but I want to do it differently. 

2. I want a Tour of Editions

I have always wanted a campaign where the characters and players switch editions. Start out in OD&D or Basic and work your way up to 5th edition. Each major "Act" is a different edition. That would require me to be extra clever about the characters used and how to structure leveling up. Some pragmatic concerns include different leveling assumptions, i.e., max 20th level in AD&D 2, D&D 3 and 5, but 30+ in D&D 4 and BECMI. Also, class and species. Starting out in OD&D has limits on what classes people have access to. Want to play a Tiefling Warlock? Best I can do is a human magic-user. That being said, I would make allowances. If someone REALLY wants to play a Tiefling Warlock, sure, rules-wise maybe they start out as a human magic-user, but as play (and editions) progress they become that Tiefling Warlock. Which gets me to my next point.

2a. A Guided Tour

I *might* consider grabbing an iconic adventure from each edition and trying it out as part of this epic quest. It's just a thought.

3. I want the Players to have options

I want the players to feel invested in this campaign. I want them to care. The best way to do that is let them play what they want and leave it to me to figure out how to make that happen. SO I am not saying "No" to any reasonable request. So want to play a Teifling Warlock? Great! You can do that. I just need to figure out how to that in the BECMI part of the adventure arc.

4. The Stakes need to be High

None of this works unless what Vecna wants is so cosmos-altering that stopping him is never a question of "why do it?" but instead "how to do it?" The PCs need to stop him. The Players need to want to stopp him. 

What does this all add up to?

No freaking idea.

But it is a fun thought experiment. And it is certainly something I will do one day. I just have to keep picking at it. 

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.