Mirror Monday: Why Witches?

 I have been writing about witches for a very long time. Anyone who has followed this blog for more than a few weeks probably knows that. Between Advanced Witches & Warlocks, NIGHT SHIFT, and my Jackson, Illinois, setting, witches occupy a considerable amount of my creative time. They have been part of my gaming life for nearly forty years, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

But why witches?

It is a fair question, and one I have asked myself (and have been asked) more than once over the years. Why have I devoted so much time to creating a Witch class for *D&D? Why do witches feature so prominently in my horror games? And why, when I decided to return to the Illinois of my teenage years and create a fictional town filled with supernatural mysteries, did I place a teenage witch named Larina Nichols at its center?

I think the answer goes back further than my games.

The Witch in the Library

My local public library was a second home of sorts when I was younger. I would make my way from one shelf to the next, book in hand, driven by a fascination with the supernatural: mythology, folklore, monsters, vampires, and ghosts. I read anything that put itself in front of me if it held out the promise of some kind of mystery.

Witches in particular held my attention. They had a way of occupying several worlds at once. You had the ones from folklore who were objects of fear and persecution; you had the literary variety, ranging from fairy tale villains to the great sorceresses of myth. And then there were those who actually made witchcraft part of their spiritual practice. Not to mention the ones I wanted to portray in a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

I found myself trying to reconcile these disparate notions. Some were at odds with one another or with my own beliefs, while others appeared to be different takes on the same fundamental ideas of power, nature, and knowledge. Reading and making sense of all this was how I came to think about witches. The notion arose in me that would later give birth to an in-game quote:

Morgan: There are things man was not meant to know, Nichols.
Larina: That's ok. I'm a girl. 

Larina, in my Jackson setting, is fond of the same reading material, poring over works on religion and magic to better understand her Wiccan faith and her own gifts. We put that knowledge to different uses. I was putting together an AD&D character and a magic system; she was forming an idea of where she stood in the world. Yet for all that, our methods were much the same. You will see why I have dubbed these Mirror Mondays.

The Witch Is Not the Wizard

I have long been of the opinion that a D&D witch should not be a distaff Magic-User or a cleric with better eyeliner. The Magic-User is concerned with the arcane; the Cleric has his divine power. But the Witch, as I have come to see her, is engaged in something else entirely. Her's is an occult art, one that is tied to spirits and hidden things and the relationships between them.

A Magic-User may know the right formula for an effect, and a Cleric can make his petitions to a higher authority. A Witch has to know what she is up against and what might be required of her in return. It is a more complicated business, and it has to be if she is to stand apart from the rest of the established classes in AD&D. Those distinctions are what allow for good storytelling. After all, magic ought to have its consequences. It is not merely a set of convenient skills on a character sheet. The risk is not always in a failed spell. Sometimes the problem is that something answers you.

The Witches of Jackson

With the development of Jackson, Illinois, and a return to Larina Nichols, I put the Witch in a new light.

In *Advanced Witches & Warlocks*, the questions were of an AD&D nature: what are her abilities, how does she advance? In Jackson, I was after the meaning of being a witch. What is it like to be sixteen in 1986 in a small Midwestern town and find out the supernatural is real? To see what others cannot? To have the monsters at your school or down the street rather than in some dungeon or a haunted castle in the Carpathians? Or to be the object of fear for being different?

Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are all witches, but they are not cut from the same cloth. Larina wants to understand. Stephanie is ambitious and confident in her power. Faye has older, stranger ties to the occult. I find their differences far more compelling than any common ground.

The same holds for the older set in Jackson. Sylvia, Kiera, and Natasha may have the power and knowledge to spare, but it has not made them happy or wise, nor has it made them particularly adept at getting along. You will find a past between them that is littered with unchangeable decisions.

Then there is Nida, and she has no desire to have anything to do with magic. And Vera who has been forbidden by her family to practice it.

In these characters, I can get at things a class description on its own never could. To say one has power is not to say what they will make of it. It does not indicate whether they will be kind or cruel, brave or frightened, generous or selfish. That is a question of character, not of the class they belong to.

Witches, Women, and Power

Witches have an aspect to them that has long held my interest. In fiction and in folklore, they are an odd mix of power, independence, knowledge, and femininity. They can be villains or heroes. Or they can be frightening for the simple reason that they will not behave as others expect of them.

I have never been one to think a woman of power has to shed her femininity to be taken seriously, nor do I see femininity as a synonym for weakness or passivity. Larina might be romantic and compassionate, or stubborn and terrifying. Stephanie is quite happy to be the center of attention in fine clothes and still be a formidable witch. Faye can be dangerous and vulnerable at once. None of them are, by any definition, "weak."

They can be wrong too, which is something I consider vital. I am not interested in characters who are put there to show how admirable or just how powerful they are. I want ones with flaws, who disagree and occasionally make a mess of things. The men in my stories are no different; a strong female doesn’t need a weak male counterpart any more than he needs the women around him to be helpless. There is room for all of them in fantasy and horror. Rowan, for example, is quite powerful in her own right, and she adores Andy. He is her rock, her bit of reality.  Valentino is also very capable. In one of his first adventures, he body-slams a zombie, and he also loves and protects Ami, even though she is every bit as capable as he is. These two complement each other.  Masculinity and femininity aren't competing resources.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing witches is that I don't have to limit them to any single definition of femininity. My witches can be beautiful, glamorous, romantic, sexual, maternal, ambitious, independent, or frightening. Often they are several of those things at once. They can wear elegant dresses and high heels, carry swords, summon demons, fall in love, raise families, and occasionally make decisions that shake the foundations of reality.

I have never understood why any of those qualities should be mutually exclusive. A woman doesn't become less feminine because she is powerful, nor does she become less powerful because she enjoys traditionally feminine things. Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are very different women, and I wouldn't want them any other way. They have their own personalities, interests, ambitions, and faults. Most importantly, they have their own choices to make.

Of course, not all my witches are good people, and even the good ones can do terrible things. Natasha Wilcox is one of the most intelligent and accomplished witches in Jackson, but that doesn't make her compassionate. Sylvia has paid dearly for some of her choices. Larina herself is perfectly capable of allowing her convictions to get in the way of understanding someone else's suffering. I don't need these women to be perfect, and I certainly don't need them all to agree with one another. Their disagreements, failures, and contradictions are part of what makes them interesting. Being a witch grants them access to power, not a monopoly on wisdom.

To me, that is what makes a character interesting. Not whether she conforms to someone else's expectations of what a woman should be, but whether she feels like a person who exists beyond the pages of the character sheet.

The Witch and the Monster

Horror has always had an interesting relationship with witches, often casting them as monsters. The charge of witchcraft was historically ruinous. In our stories, they have been cast as evil’s servants or wise healers, embodying generations of fear of the forbidden and of those who don’t fit in.

But being a witch doesn’t make my characters into monsters of their own accord. They might become so by what they do, by making a bad bargain or seeking power at too high a price. Or they may come across something in themselves they don’t like. But that is about action, not nature.

For Jackson, the distinction is key. The town has its share of the supernatural, but also plenty of human prejudice and anxiety. Those ordinary failings can be just as harmful as the monsters, and the witches have to deal with both.

There is also something wonderfully transgressive about the witch as a character. Witches are frequently associated with forbidden knowledge, dangerous bargains, ancient powers, and things that polite society would prefer not to acknowledge. Their stories can be bloody, violent, grotesque, sexually charged, and deeply disturbing. I don't shy away from any of that in my games. These elements are part of the long traditions of fantasy and horror that I love.

And I don't believe the presence of blood, gore, sex, or monsters automatically makes a story better. Those things are tools, and like any tools, their effectiveness depends on how they are used. A witch bargaining with a demon can be frightening because of the demon's appearance, but the real horror might lie in what she has promised in return. A monster can tear someone apart, but sometimes the more interesting question is why it chose that particular victim.

I don't see these darker elements as belonging to men or women. They belong to horror. And horror, like fantasy, has always benefited from writers and characters who bring different experiences and perspectives to it.

Tabletop Witches Don't Have to Be One Thing

Another thing I love about tabletop roleplaying games is the extraordinary freedom they give us to create. There is room for dark fantasy, heroic adventure, Gothic horror, cosmic terror, sword-and-sorcery, and just about anything else we can imagine. Not every game needs to appeal to everyone, and I certainly don't expect everyone to share my particular fascination with witches. But if you do, I'd love to hear from you!

I have always been fascinated by the assumption that fantasy gaming belongs to a particular kind of person or that there is only one proper way to approach it. I came to D&D through a lot of the same books, rules, and traditions that inspired so many other gamers of my generation. I loved the combat, the monsters, the dangerous dungeons, and the strange worlds waiting to be explored. But I was just as fascinated by the magic, mythology, folklore, and characters who didn't fit neatly into the traditional heroic mold. The old wizard, the wise cleric, the heroic paladin, and the mysterious witch were all on equal footing to me.

For me, none of these things were contradictory. They were all part of the same wonderful hobby. I didn't have to choose between Conan and Circe, between fighting monsters and studying magic, or between writing about powerful warriors and powerful sorceresses. Those interests complemented one another, and they still do. 

My love of witches didn't take me away from old-school gaming. It took me deeper into it.

But I have never believed that someone else's enjoyment of the hobby diminishes my own. There is nothing preventing me from playing AD&D the way I played it in the 1980s, or from creating something new that draws upon those same traditions. The fact that other people might prefer different characters, stories, or playstyles doesn't make my games any less meaningful.

I want more people to discover these old games and the literature that inspired them. I want them to read Appendix N, explore the old rules, and find something that excites their imaginations. They might discover the same things I did, or they might see possibilities I never considered. Either way, the hobby is richer for their participation.

I've spent far too many years exploring fantastic worlds to believe there is only one correct way to enjoy them.

The Two Sides of the Mirror

Working on Advanced Witches & Warlocks and on Jackson, I have come to see how much the two feed off each other. A rule I put down for AW&W clarifies what Larina and the rest are up to. An adventure from Jackson makes me re-examine what an ability means to the one who has it. A character will point out a flaw in the rules, or a new rule will introduce a role-playing element I hadn’t considered.

I will be the first to admit that, even after forty years, I can look at one of my own creations and learn something new from her that I didn’t know before. And I don’t see that ending soon.

I don't write about witches because I want to change what fantasy gaming is supposed to be. I write about witches because they have always been part of the fantasy, horror, and folklore I love. I don't see them as alternatives to the warriors, wizards, clerics, and rogues who have populated my games for decades. I see them as part of the same rich tradition. There is room in my games for Conan and Circe, for Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, for ancient sorceresses and teenage witches trying to survive high school. 

There always has been.

There are mysteries out there beyond the familiar world, and more to be said about what people do when they find them. I suppose that is why I am drawn back to witches' time and again. They let me get at the unknown, the very things that pulled me into gaming and mythology in the first place.

In some ways, I am still that boy in the library hunting for a book on witches. Only now am I the one writing the books, and I am still finding new ones.

Mirror Mondays: When the Mirror Becomes a Door

 Back in May, when I put out the first of my Mirror Monday pieces, I was preoccupied with two projects: Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL. I called that first post "Two Books, One Spell," and it was highly appropriate. I still think it is a pretty good description of what I was doing. One book was about what the Witch should look like in AD&D. The other was about what it would actually be like to be a witch, particularly a teenage witch, in 1986.

I made the case then that the two were informing each other. If anything, the case is stronger today.

The fundamental question for each remains unchanged: what does a witch look like through a 1986 lens? With Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I am after the kind of Witch class and occult mechanics that would have been at home with the AD&D books I was running back then. With Jackson, I take Larina, Stephanie, Faye, and company, and consider their type of witchcraft: the old school building is your dungeon, the road out of town is the wilderness, and a curious volume from the library is all the occult knowledge you have.

Those sound like very different questions and lines of inquiry. They are not.

Two Books, One Spell, Again

My job on Advanced Witches & Warlocks is to put on my old-school game designer hat. What sets the Witch apart from a Druid or an Illusionist? What are her spells and her limitations? How do you handle covens, pacts, rituals, and familiars? AD&D demands answers, if not always perfectly drawn ones. But *I* need to be able to say how something works or why the witch can’t do it. The distinction between her magic and the Arcane or Divine must be more than just something in my notes.

Jackson allows for some ambiguity, which is often preferable in horror. Larina has no use for the percentage odds of a ritual’s success. There is no spell list on Stephanie’s character sheet when she steps in front of a friend to shield them from danger. And Faye doesn’t care to know which page of the rulebook details what the Blackthorne Hags have done to her soul.

But I do need to know. Or have some idea of it, at any rate.

In that respect, Advanced Witches & Warlocks has been of great service to me in writing Jackson. It compels me to get under the hood of the supernatural. Where is the power coming from? Why can one witch do what another can't? Is it inherited or given? What are the terms of a bargain with something beyond her? Jackson can let the characters wonder about such things while the other project makes me think about what is going on behind the curtain.

Then again, the dynamic is not one way.

What Jackson Has Taught My Witches

This has been a big one. I am not sure I can adequately capture what I have learned over the last few months. 

I have been at this long enough to have written witches for most of my life, longer than some of my readers have been around. Over the years, I have put pen to paper (or, more to the point, fingers to keyboards) for Basic-era games, AD&D, d20, Unisystem, NIGHT SHIFT, and many others in between. In the course of that work, I have produced Witch classes, traditions, spells, and monsters; I have written Witch Queens and more than my share of demons, enough to last a few lifetimes.

Jackson keeps reminding me that witches are people.

It is a painfully obvious statement, but one game design has a habit of making you overlook. It is all too simple to view a Witch as a collection of class abilities: at this level she has this spell, at that one she has those restrictions on her magic items, and so on. When I am crafting an AD&D-compatible class, these details are vital, yet they say little about who she is.

Jackson makes me deal with the questions in a different order.

Who was her teacher? Who can she trust? And when things go horribly wrong, who does she call? What does she make of her own magic? What is her friends' reaction when they are afraid of what she is capable of, or, worse, how does she handle being afraid of it herself?

I have let some of those considerations seep back into Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A coven is no longer just an organization bestowing abilities; I think about what it means for a witch to have a place to belong. Pacts have real consequences rather than simply being a way to "gain power X." And a familiar is a relationship, not a list of bonuses with fur.

Jackson has been adept at getting me to consider why a Witch would act a certain way, not merely if the rules permit it. The reverse is true as well. Putting together the AD&D Witch has made me examine Jackson with a critical eye. Larina, Stephanie and the rest cannot do as they please because "witchcraft" demands it. If anything can happen at any moment, magic ceases to be magical and is little more than an excuse. There is value in limits and costs; they give weight to a choice.

The two projects end up correcting one another.

And so to Land of Confusion.

Welcome to the Land of Confusion

I have mentioned the Land of Confusion adventure before; if somewhat obliquely. The basic idea is exactly the sort of thing that happens when I am left unsupervised with my own characters for too long. With my villain Darren's help, the folks from Jackson have been transplanted into a proper Dungeons & Dragons world.

Yes. As in "Hey, look, A Dungeons & Dragons ride!"

Not some D&D-ified version of Jackson with orcs out by Sal’s Pizza. An actual fantasy world.

In that sense, Land of Confusion is the most straightforward crossover I have done between Jackson and Advanced Witches & Warlocks. I have taken people built to confront supernatural horror in 1986 small-town Illinois and put them where the assumptions of AD&D are fact.

This creates a problem I find absolutely irresistible.

Strip away Jackson Public High School, Paula’s Book Store, Strawberry Fields, the telephones, and the cassette tapes, and what is left of Larina Nichols? Or Stephanie, for that matter? Rowan? Vera? Candy?

The easy answer is to convert their character sheets. I mean, many of these characters began as D&D characters. Give them classes, assign some ability scores, figure out their equipment, and move on. I am doing all of that, naturally. I am a game designer. Stat blocks are one of the ways I amuse myself. But the easy answer is not the interesting one.

What I want to know is what makes the journey through the mirror.

When the Reality of Magic Is Common Knowledge

I find there is a certain distinction that is worth noting. In Jackson, magic is kept under wraps. You could say it is not the best-kept secret in some quarters, but for the most part people live their lives with the firm belief that witches and demons and the like are figments of the imagination. Should something odd occur, social mores will see to it that an alternative explanation is found. It is, in every sense of the word, Occult.

This is what gives Jackson its character; the inhabitants are privy to truths the rest of the world is not.

Put those same characters in an AD&D setting and the dynamic changes. Everyone is aware of magic. The fellow at the tavern table next to you could be a bona fide Magic-User. The priest in his temple has the power to heal with a touch. An old woman on the edge of the village might curse you if she is so inclined. There are monsters in the woods, and the local lord would have no qualms about publically putting a price on their heads for any adventurer willing to do the job.

Which raises the question: what is it that makes Larina stand out?

It is a good question, and one that brings to mind Advanced Witches & Warlocks. If my Witch is just another spellcaster she will be indistinguishable in a fantasy world teeming with them. She needs to be different, not more potent, not more knowledgeable, but certainly different. One finds that in the pacts, the rituals, the traditions, and the kind of old magic that does not belong in a Cleric’s church or a Magic-User’s tome.

In Jackson, these things set her apart from the common world. In D&D, they set her apart from her peers.

The witch is the same, only the mirror is different.

Consequently, Land of Confusion is evolving into something of a stress test for both endeavors, rather than simply an opportunity to put fantasy versions of my Jackson NPCs. I have to be able to explain what makes her a Witch in an AD&D context, as well as in Jackson. Or if an ability in Advanced Witches & Warlocks works on paper but is not something Larina would ever put to use, then I need to re-examine it. The rules put the characters to the test and vice versa.

1986 Through the Looking Glass

Somehow this always leads me back to 1986.

There was a reason for choosing that year for both projects. It is an interesting juncture in D&D history and in my own. AD&D was well established yet in flux. Rules were being added. Some of the original designers were out. Locally, we call the post-Unearthed Arcana era AD&D 1.5 (note: Not then, but now). I was busy playing the game and making up characters, devouring any horror or fantasy I could find, taking in the movies and the music and all manner of ideas without any inkling which ones would be with me forty years down the line.

Larina herself is a product of that time. A character made for AD&D in the eighties (July 1986) became the teenage witch of Jackson, Illinois in 1986. Now I am sending that girl back into a D&D world. I could not have planned that in 1986 if I had tried.

Then again, Land of Confusion is not an exercise in determining which Larina is real. I have long since let go of such concerns. The one in AD&D and the one in Jackson are both Larina, shards of the same concept fashioned by different games and even different versions of myself. My characters were always a bit of a psychological experiment.

Placing the Jackson version in a D&D world does not make her the AD&D character.  It doesn't even make her the younger version of that character. That would be too simple. I want to see what happens when the girl from Jackson is forced to be an adventurer. That is where the fun is.

With all these "looking glass" metaphors, I can't help but think I need a character named Alice. Or Brandy. ETA: I figured out who Alice and Brandy are.

The Mirror Opens

Mirror Mondays began with the mirror as a metaphor. On one side was Advanced Witches & Warlocks, on the other Jackson. I could look at the Witch in one and see something of value reflected from the other.

Over the last few months, that has become less metaphorical than I expected.

My work on Jackson has altered how I view the witches in Advanced Witches & Warlocks, while the latter has provided a way to understand the behind-the-scenes workings of Jackson. Answer a question for one project, and I seem to spawn two for the other.

Land of Confusion is where they meet.

What started as a reflection between the fantasy witch and the teenager is now seeing one of them cross over.

The mirror was never just a mirror.

It's more of a door.

Mirror Mondays: The Past is a Foreign Country

I recently went back to my old hometown of Jacksonville, IL, to visit my mom and dad. My dad is 96 and will be 97 in just under two months. He is doing pretty well, if you ask me. But this was also my first trip back to Jacksonville since my Jackson project had taken full steam.

Jacksonville of 2026 is not the same as Jacksonville of 1986. And neither is the same as Jackson, IL, of 1986.

But if you look hard enough, you will see the similarities.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Jacksonville is trying very hard to improve its image. So they are rebuilding the downtown area. Bringing in new shops, restoring buildings.

But they have a long way to go. This is not really uncommon for towns of this size in Illinois. We see it in nearby Ottawa, IL. It's about the same size, same sorts of history, and there is a booming tourist trade. Same with Woodstock, IL, and Long Grove, IL. So I think Jacksonville is doing all the right things; they just need what a lot of places need. More money.

Jacksonville, IL is an old town. Established in 1825, it has some history. This also gives me a good excuse to say Jackson was established in 1827, or whenever I publish, to say it was 200 years ago. But that age is showing. Buildings that were merely old back in 1986 look positively ancient and run-down now. I found a tree I used to play around, and the bark is completely white. The places I used to hang out are gone; new ones have taken their place.  Some things are the same. A lot is different. But I will say that this newfound desire for the town to explore its own history is making my job here a lot easier. The image above provided some good research material, and I picked all of that up at my hotel.

Jacksonville of 2026 is not the same place as Jacksonville of 1986. Buildings have disappeared. Businesses have changed. Roads and commercial development have altered how people move through town. Especially in the downtown. Trees have grown or vanished. Signs, parking lots, lighting, storefronts, cars, clothing, and dozens of things tell you that you are looking at 2026. The people are different too. 

The real Jacksonville of 1986 also isn't Jackson. Jackson is deliberately a mirror.

All The World's A Stage

Jackson is like a model I am kitbashing. I have all the pieces to say the Enterprise A and D, but what I am building is something more akin to a ship from the same period as the Enterprise A, but it is really the USS Challenger. And...this is something I am actually doing, so this analogy feels really right to me, even if it might not be all that clear to you, the reader. Sorry. 

I have a stage (Central Illinois), I have the set (Sal's Pizza, Jackson Public High, MacAlister College, Oak City), and I have my supporting characters (Larina, Stephanie, Rowan, Andy); I am just missing those all-important lead characters. That's you, by the way. The people who will pick this up and move forward.

But the "kits" I bought to build this stage are all labeled "Jacksonville." And the pieces are "Leo's Pizza," "JHS," "MacMurry College," and "Elm City." I am just reassembling them. But these pieces have been in storage for 40 years, and my instructions are a combination of old, faded instructions (memory) and new instructions for the newer models I find online (the real Jacksonville of 2026).  

So...my stage looks different. It is built from memory. That is not just fine. That's good world-building.

It means I have something as a placeholder (memory) until I can get more creative with it. 

But not everything in Jackson is coming from Jacksonville, and not everything is coming from the 1980s

Renee Sylvi Jäneläinen is based on a couple of people I knew, one of the (many) Rhiannon's from my AD&D games, and the oft-mentioned but so-far-never-seen Renee of Renee's Tea Shoppe. 

I wanted to bring Renee's Tea Shop over to Jackson, but I was very recently reminded why that would not work in Jackson of 1986. First, I wanted Renee as a teenage foreign exchange student. Secondly, I was sitting in an upscale coffee shop in Jacksonville last weekend (Elm City Roastery) and telling my wife how I would have killed for a place like this 40 years ago, but it never would have worked because that is not where Jacksonville "was" back then. I mentioned the tourism above, and Elm City Roastery is exactly one of the things that make Jacksonville of 2026 work. So Renee's Tea Shoppe has to wait. 

"Strawberry Fields" as a record store, and a maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't head shop is based on a very real place. Penny Lane in nearby Springfield, IL. But Penny Lane was important because it was where I could get records I couldn't find in Jacksonville. And there was the appeal of going somewhere "forbidden."  

But there is also more. 

Jackson remembers things Jacksonville never experienced. It remembers the Crimson Cougar stalking the edge of town. It remembers teenagers encountering the Mochem. It remembers the Mauvaiseterre Hag. It remembers Larina Nichols walking into Paula's on a Saturday afternoon, Candy Mercer driving far too fast through town, and the Mercers' cat, "Pringles", sitting in a window watching something no one else can see.

Jackson works well as Jacksonville 86 + supernatural goings-on. But it has to be more than that. 

And I think that distinction is important. I am not trying to create a historically perfect reconstruction of Jacksonville in 1986. I am not writing a history book. I am building a place where people can play a horror game.

Don’t misunderstand me in that history is unimportant. It is the other way around: the real history is what gives Jackson some weight.  The streets need to feel right. The colleges need histories of their own. The old houses need to look like they have been standing there for generations. The downtown needs to feel like a Midwestern downtown in 1986, not like someone dropped a collection of "80s stuff" into a modern town. If I get those things right, then when I add a witch, a haunted house, or something moving through the cornfields at night, those things have something solid to stand on.

Then again, being authentic and being accurate are two different matters.

My memory can be faulty. I may have mixed up a building in my mind or conflated two stores into one, or carry a memory of 1985 as if it were timeless. Or I will come across something in Jacksonville’s actual past that I was unaware of back when I was living there and think Jackson ought to have its own take on it. At times I make changes simply because the town calls for them.

This is where the mirror is involved.

Jacksonville gives me the shapes. Memory gives me the colors. Forty years of gaming gives me the monsters hiding in the shadows. That is Jackson.

I went to Jacksonville looking for Jackson.

I didn't find it.

I found something better.

I found the place I remembered as Jackson.

I don't need a historically accurate Jacksonville, circa 1986, for Jackson. I just need a Jackson that feels like a believable Midwest town in 1986.

And then I can leave it all to you to bring it to life.

Mirror Monday: Local Legends Make Better Monsters

Sometimes the real world hands you a story at exactly the right time.

A little over a week ago, ABC7 Chicago reported multiple mountain lion sightings in southern Illinois. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources received reports from both Union and Jackson counties and believes they are likely sightings of the same animal.

Mountain lions are rare in Illinois. According to the report, this is only the twelfth confirmed mountain lion sighting in the state since 2002. But we (Illinoisans) have always known about cougars, mountain lions, and even panthers in Illinois. 

Naturally, one particular detail caught my attention.

Jackson County.

Sometimes the universe really isn't particularly subtle.

There is another connection here too. Carbondale, Illinois, the real-world inspiration for my fictional Carbon Vale, is in Jackson County. Official Jackson County sources identify Carbondale as one of the county's two largest cities. But I don't need the news to tell me this. I lived in Carbondale and Jackson County for seven years.

So we have Jackson County, Carbon Vale, and my fictional Jackson, Illinois, all suddenly connected by a mountain lion wandering into an area where mountain lions are not particularly common.

That immediately got me thinking about monsters. Especially with October on the very near horizon and my desire to get back to Monstrous Mondays.

More specifically, it got me thinking about why local legends make better monsters.

There's Something Out There

There is something wonderfully useful about a monster that occupies the space between "that doesn't live here" and "except sometimes it actually does."

That is where stories grow. There aren't mountain lions around here. Except my uncle saw one. Or my cousin's friend said his dad did.

There aren't supposed to be any. Then what did he see?

And now we have a local legend, or at the very least a fun rumor.

For Jackson, this gets even better because I am increasingly trying to look at the setting through the eyes of 1986. 

Today, when someone sees an unusual animal, everybody immediately reaches for their phone. There are photographs. Video. Social media. Trail cameras. GPS locations. Within hours, people are arguing online over whether the thing in the picture is a cougar, a bobcat, somebody's dog, or three blurry pixels and wishful thinking.

In 1986?

Your friend tells you that her older brother saw something behind the school.

That's it.

That's your evidence.

And tomorrow? The story will be even better.

The Crimson Cougar

The mascot of Jackson Public High School is the Crimson Cougar.

When I first came up with that, it was mostly because it sounded right. Plenty of high schools use big cats for mascots. Plus, there are the whole courgar/moutain lion/panther rumors I grew up hearing.

But once I started developing Jackson's local folklore, the Crimson Cougar became something else.

In Jackson, stories of the animal go back long before the high school adopted the name. Farmers and hunters told stories about a great red cat seen near fence lines, creeks, and fields. Some claimed it appeared before disasters. There were stories connecting it to a train wreck, a cholera outbreak, and the burning of Holmwood Hall at MacAlister College.

Eventually the town did what towns sometimes do. It took something people once feared and made it a mascot. Now it is painted on the gym walls. It is on football and marching band uniforms. It's on the cover of the yearbook.

That history was already part of my Crimson Cougar write-up earlier this year. The actual mountain lion sightings this month make me like the idea even more.

• Was the thing somebody saw outside Jackson really the Crimson Cougar?
• Was it just a mountain lion passing through?
• Was it a big bobcat seen under bad lighting?
• Was it something else? 
• It was seen when the old High School bell rang.

Excellent. I don't want to answer that question too quickly. Uncertainty is doing most of the work for me.

This Is Where 1986 Becomes My Mirror

One of the things I keep coming back to with Jackson is that 1986 can't simply be decoration. It can't just mean cassette tapes, Members Only jackets, malls, Reagan on TV, Duran Duran, and cars with terrible gas mileage.

The year has to affect how the characters experience the world. 

Information moved differently.

If someone tells Larina there is a cougar behind the football field, she can't pull up the Illinois Department of Natural Resources website. Stephanie can't check Facebook to see if anyone else reported it. Faye can't search Reddit. Vera can't ask whether somebody's Ring camera caught it.

They have to talk to people.

• Who saw it?
• Who told you?
• Do you trust them?
• Who did *they* hear it from?
• Why is their version different from the version we heard yesterday?

Rumors have geography. They have social groups. The cheerleaders know one version. The football team knows another. The teachers have heard something else. The police aren't saying anything. Some old guy at Jones' Diner on Morgan remembers somebody seeing the same thing in 1956. The college kids hanging out at Big John's say it was just some bad LSD going around.

And Larina is suddenly asking questions. That is how I want mysteries in Jackson to develop.

Before there is a monster, there is a story.

The Monster Before the Monster

If I were running a Crimson Cougar adventure, I would resist showing the creature for as long as possible. First there are stories. Somebody sees eyes reflecting in their headlights. A dog refuses to go outside. Someone finds scratches on a tree. A freshman swears something followed him home. A mutilated deer or cow carcass turns up. Then someone says his grandfather saw the Crimson Cougar forty years ago.

Now we've moved beyond zoology.

Maybe there really is a mountain lion around Jackson. In fact, I think that makes the whole thing better. Every piece of evidence now has two explanations.

• Those look like cougar tracks. Probably.
• That sound could have been a cougar. Sure.
• Something killed that deer. Cougars do that.
• But why did it leave the heart behind? ...

Ah, now we have something. That little mystery that pushes Jackson out of the pages of National Geographic and into the pages of the National Inquirer. Or Weirdly World News, to be more specific. 

Jackson Has Its Own Monsters

The Crimson Cougar also helped me understand something about Jackson itself.  Jackson already has monsters. More importantly, they are Jackson's monsters.

That does not mean every one of them comes from documented Jacksonville folklore. They don't. What they have in common is that they grow out of the place. The Crimson Cougar begins with real Illinois wildlife and the uncertainty surrounding big-cat sightings.

Then there is MoChem.

MoChem goes back much farther for me.

I created the original version when I was ten years old, after reading Daniel Cohen's monster books and deciding that my hometown needed a monster of its own. The Jackson version connects childhood campfire stories from my time in the Boy Scouts to the real chemical plant outside of town. That became the fictional Morgan Chemical. Yes, the same Morgan Chemical where Candy's mom worked, and the same Morgan as Roderick Morgan.

Nobody agrees on what MoChem is.

• Maybe it was created by chemical waste.
• Maybe it was once a worker.
• Maybe it was a deformed child.
• Maybe it was a reporter who came to investigate Morgan Chemical and discovered something he wasn't supposed to know.

Those contradictory stories are important. In fact, they are vital. 

MoChem isn't just a monster living in an abandoned chemical plant.  MoChem is what happens when generations of kids are told not to go near the abandoned chemical plant.

Then there is Old Annie.

Old Annie is entirely my invention. I created her whole cloth, but she is built out of things that belong to Jackson and things I remember from Jacksonville.

Part of the inspiration comes from Jacksonville's inordinately large homeless population. Part comes from the old state hospital. Part comes from the waterways and low ground around the Mauvaisterre, the "bad land" that has become increasingly important to my fictional Jackson.

So everyone knows an Old Annie story.

• She was a homeless woman.
• She escaped from the state hospital.
• She drowned her children.
• She drowned herself.
• College kids made her up as a prank.
• There never was an "Annie."

Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who saw her.

The truth, at least in my game, is stranger. Old Annie is the Mauvaisterre Hag, an ancient corrupted spirit associated with the land and water around Jackson.

Three monsters. Three different origins.

One begins with real wildlife.

One begins with childhood campfire stories and industrial anxiety.

One I invented completely.

But all three belong to Jackson. That distinction is becoming increasingly important to me.  A local monster does not have to be an authentic piece of documented folklore. It needs **roots**.  It should feel like something people in this particular place would tell stories about.

No Sasquatches in Jackson

This brings me to something else. I would love to put Sasquatches in the woods outside Jackson. Seriously.

Small Illinois town. Wooded roads. Cornfields. Creeks. Something large moving between the trees. Honestly, it practically writes itself. 

But there is only one problem. They don't seem to belong there.  I went looking.

The North American Wood Ape Conservancy maintains a searchable database of reported Bigfoot, Sasquatch, or "wood ape" encounters. It even classifies reports based on factors such as corroboration, physical evidence, and witness reliability.

I checked the years that matter most to my Jackson. 1980 through 1987. I could not find anything in that database that gives me an Illinois Bigfoot tradition during those Jackson years. In fact, it is not until the 2000s that there is even one sighting in Peoria. 

That doesn't mean nobody in Illinois ever told a Bigfoot story, and it certainly doesn't prove anything one way or another about Bigfoot.  

It just means I went looking for a local tradition I could use, and I didn't find one where I needed it.

So, there are no Sasquatches in Jackson.

In fact, that has become something of a running joke among the kids who know about the supernatural.

Val: "My dad used to be a big-time Bigfoot hunter in the 1970s."
Larina: "There has never been a credible Bigfoot sighting in Illinois."
Val, smiling: "Yeah. My dad did a great job."
Candy: "Gods, Val, you are an idiot."

Honestly, I like the joke much better than simply putting Bigfoot in the woods. It tells me something important about Val. That he is not just the dumb jock of the group, despite Candy's assurances. It tells me something alittle about his dad. Does the senior Moreno know about the supernatural or was he just amused by the bigfoot craze of the late 1970? It tells me something about Larina. Because of course she already looked it up in newspaper archives. It definitely tells me something about Candy. 

But most of all, it tells me something about Jackson.  Jackson has its own monsters.

Not Every Monster Belongs Everywhere

That might be the larger lesson. If local legends make better monsters, then the monsters a place doesn't have are important too.

It would be very easy to turn Jackson into Cryptid Disneyland. Bigfoot in the woods. Mothman on the bridge. Chupacabra eating livestock. UFOs overhead. Jersey Devil flying over the football field.

Eventually the setting stops feeling like Illinois and starts feeling like somebody dumped a cryptozoology encyclopedia onto the map. I know. I guilty of that exact problem.

I don't want that again.

That doesn't mean I can't invent monsters. Old Annie proves that. MoChem proves it too. The difference is that when I invent something, I want it to grow out of the setting. Why is this monster here?

• What does it have to do with this road, this river, this factory, this cemetery, this school, or this town?
• Who has been telling stories about it?
• Who doesn't believe those stories?
• Who remembers an older version?

If I can't answer those questions, maybe the monster belongs somewhere else. And maybe I should go there instead.

Go to Where the Monsters Are

I think I finally have an axiom for this.

Go to where the monsters are. Don't bring them to you.

Jackson already has enough problems. I don't need to import any. If I want a different sort of monster, I can go to Carbon Vale or Sunny Valley. For example, I have also decided that while there are not a lot of vampires in Jackson, both Carbon Vale and Sunny Valley are sick with them. I actually can't wait to show my new Sunny Valley vampires, but they will need to wait for another post.

This lesson has also been following me through another project.

When I started working seriously on my new Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I naturally began adding monsters. It made sense. A book about witches and warlocks is going to have creatures associated with witchcraft and the occult.  Familiars. Spirits. Demons. Hags. Things summoned in rituals. Things witches bargain with. Things witches fight. Things witches accidentally wake up. 

So I added monsters. Then I added more monsters. And then some more.

Eventually something became obvious. The monsters didn't belong in Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

Not because they were bad material. Quite the opposite. There were enough of them, with enough ideas attached to them, that treating them as supporting material for the Witch and Warlock classes was making them smaller than they should be.

They needed their own place. That realization eventually helped push those ideas toward Codex Qliphothica and my other monster work.

The monsters stopped being accessories for witches. They became inhabitants of their world. 

That feels like the same lesson I am learning from Jackson.

A Witch book should tell me how witches work. A monster book should tell me about the monsters. And a setting should tell me **where those monsters belong**.

Then the characters can go find them.

Let the Place Tell You What Lives There

Maybe that is the real trick. Start with the place. Look at its history.  Look at its geography. Look at its animals. Look at its abandoned buildings. Look at its industries. Look at the stories people actually tell. Look at the stories they *could* have told.

Then listen.

Maybe you find a real local legend. Great.

Maybe you find a mountain lion wandering through a part of Illinois where mountain lions are rare. Even better.

Maybe you remember an old Boy Scout campfire story and realize it belongs beside an abandoned chemical plant.

Maybe you look at a river, an old hospital, and people living at the margins of town, and eventually Old Annie crawls out of the mud.

The monster doesn't need to be real. The folklore doesn't even need to be real. But the connection to the place should feel real.

That is what makes the monster feel like it was there before the player characters arrived.

And that matters. Because the Crimson Cougar isn't waiting around for Larina Nichols to have an adventure. People were seeing it before Larina was born. MoChem doesn't exist because the kids need something to fight. People were warning children away from Morgan Chemical before they started asking questions.  Old Annie doesn't haunt the Mauvaisterre because I needed a hag encounter. People have been telling each other not to go down by the water after dark for longer than anyone remembers.

The characters didn't bring the monsters with them. The monsters were already there.They just made the mistake of going looking.

And really, isn't that how the best horror stories begin?

It is 1986. Someone saw something in the woods. There aren't supposed to be cougars in Illinois. There definitely aren't any Sasquatches around Jackson. And somewhere, Larina Nichols just heard a story she absolutely should leave alone.

So naturally, she is going to investigate. So will the PCs.

Now, get out there and go where the monsters are.

Mirror Mondays: The Witch as a Liminal Figure

 With the Autumn Equinox upon us (tomorrow), we have a period in which day and night are on equal footing for a time. Neither has the upper hand. It is only fitting to discuss witches.

But not the kind you might think of as spellcasters or monsters, nor even those who dabble in the occult. I am talking about them as liminal figures. Those who make their home at the threshold. 

In Jackson, Faye Thorne is the prime example of that. Or should I say, Fiona Voss. So instead of ending with a Mirror Shard, I am going to talk about her throughout this post.

Neither One Thing Nor the Other

You will hear the term liminal bandied about these days to put a name to an empty mall or a hotel corridor, some place that feels oddly in between. The older definition is more expansive. A liminal space is a boundary, a doorway. It is where a thing has ceased to be what it was but has not yet transitioned to what it will be. Dawn and dusk are liminal. So is the shoreline, a crossroads, adolescence, and the Equinox. Witches have always been found there.

They occupy the space at the edge of the village or the forest. Between the living and the dead. Between healer and hexer. And in the case of the Thornes of Jackson, they are exactly what you would expect.

The Witches Outside of Town

Faye Thorne

Faye Thorne lives with her Aunties. Her mother and father died in an accident when she was a baby. To the world, they are the Thorne women, living well away from the schools and the respectable parts of town. Out past the neighborhoods where the road narrows, and the trees crowd in. You could hardly do better if you were looking up "stereotypical witch’s house" in the dictionary. 

Of course, "Thorne" is a ruse. The authies are, in reality, the Blackthorne Hags.

And the Blackthorne Hags have been at work on Faye. Not in the way one might imagine; they did not haul her into a circle to make a monster of her overnight. They have done something far worse by selling off her soul in small increments. A little of her soul here and there, through small compromises and bargains. The kind of losses that do not seem to matter until you look back and see what has been taken. Faye herself barely noticed until she did, but then so much of her was already gone.

It has left its mark. Her hair was originally black; now it is stark white. To the Blackthornes, she is the Thorn Child, the dangerous element among the pretty things. Prepared to become one of them. That is the intention anyway.

The Thorn Child

I really like the image of it. The sharp thing concealed under the beauty of a flower. But there is more to it. A thorn is part of the plant. It belongs.

Faye is being made to understand that the Blackthornes are her family, that their nature and magic are her own. That to join them is not so much a choice as the next logical step. It is how she will grow up. She is in a liminal space of her own, or more to the point, theirs. She is still a girl, still human. But something is being eroded, and something else is being put in its stead. She is not a hag yet, but she is no longer beyond their reach. There is a particular danger in a threshold when another is the one forcing you into it or over it.

Stephanie and Larina

Here is where you have to consider Stephanie and Larina.

They are not going to "fix" Faye by telling her who she ought to be. One could argue that would be no different from the Blackthornes' methods. No, they help her out of it. They show her there is an option she had not considered and, in doing so, allow her to take back what the Aunties have been chipping away at.

Choice. 

I find that of more value than any spell in their repertoire. The true measure of victory has nothing to do with vanquishing the Blackthorne hags; it is Faye making the decision that she is not theirs. In time she will do something else entirely: she will take back her original name.

But there is a reason that in High School Faye is always in the middle of Larina and Stephanie. They protect her until she can choose.

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina

Fiona Voss

When Faye Thorne later becomes (or reclaims) Fiona Voss, do not mistake it for a disguise or an alias provided by someone else. It is reclamation. "Thorne" was put on her by the women set on turning her into something else, as was the Blackthorne destiny they had in mind for her. Fiona Voss is hers.

Of course, it does not undo what has been done. Her hair will not go from white to black, and the things the Blackthornes have taken are not going to regrow simply because she has made her escape. There are marks left by the threshold, and that is as it should be. We are fond of our transformation tales where one crosses over and is made new, but actual change is a messier business. You may escape, but you will not be exactly the same as before. Those bits of her soul are still gone. Fiona has Faye with her and the Thorn Child too, but she will not let the Blackthornes put a meaning on either.

But Faye, and then later Fiona, discovers that "gone" doesn't always mean "gone forever."

When she joins the coven with her childhood friend Stephanie and new girl Larina, she sees something. Three long black hairs where there had been only one before.

Maybe that is the real gift from Stephanie and Larina to Faye/Fiona. Not just choice, but the room to recognize that she has a choice. 

I don't need to speculate what would have happened to Faye if she had never met Larina or reconnected with Stephanie. I have my Carbon Vale setting to explore that if I wish. But I also have Yog where Faye is the Thorne Witch. She is what happens to Faye if her aunties got what they wanted. She dies the same night as the Ash Witch. In fact, she dies first. I know from these two examples that life for a soulless Faye is not a kind one to her. And the worst part? She is too far gone to even know that it could have been better. 

Witches and Boundaries

Folklore puts witches at the boundaries for good reason. The rules are less certain there. The forest is not the village, the night is not the day. The crossroads are both the roads, and neither. Yet they touch. That is the witch’s domain.

There is a difference, however, between standing at the boundary and being consumed by it. The Blackthornes know how to exploit a line, to turn one thing into another. Faye has a steeper lesson to learn: how to remain at the threshold and not let anyone else determine what she is to become. 

High School Is a Liminal Place

Faye is well suited to this for another reason: high school is a liminal environment. At that age, one is neither child nor adult, just in the process of becoming. And everyone is being told what they are by the whole apparatus of parents, coaches, cliques, boyfriends/girlfriends, churches, and social systems.

You are the jock, the nerd, the horse girl, the good girl, or the bad one. The freak. The witch. The monster. High school abounds with people eager to put a label on you. What Faye faces is the supernatural extreme of that. Her Aunties are not content to tell her what she is; they make it so, unless she puts a stop to them.

I have discussed this before: how the high school years are a perfect metaphor for dealing with the supernatural. OR is that the supernatural is the perfect metaphor for high school years and adolescence? 

The Witch in the Doorway

I am reminded of a certain picture of the witch (but could not find it for the life of me; I might be misremembering). She is in a doorway, with one world behind her and another ahead, belonging to neither and therefore able to see both. It is a position of power, if not also of some fear.

The Blackthorne hags have put themselves apart from ordinary life, living beyond the last streetlight like the dangerous sort of woman from old stories that children are steered clear of. Near the "far unlit unknown," as the great bards have told us. 

Fiona is of a different order. She will cross the line and return. That is the distinction between the hag and the witch: the hag wants to have you swallowed by the threshold, while the witch knows the way home.

The Equinox

Which is why I think of the Autumn Equinox. For a time light and dark are in balance as summer gives way to autumn and the world is in a state of flux. Then the balance is broken. Not a tragedy in itself. Change is not loss, and getting older does not mean you have to give in to whoever says they know what you should be.

Faye Thorne was at that boundary, and the Blackthornes had a word for what lay on the other side: the Thorn Child. But with Larina and Stephanie to point the way, she found she could pick a different course. And a different name. Fiona Voss.

Witchcraft is a threshold, as is adolescence. The peril is not in standing between worlds but in allowing another to choose your side for you. The choice, though, must be made. Unlike that witch of my memory, or my imagining (I have mentioned how funny memory is), you can't stand in a doorway forever. To quote the great bards again, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." 

The equinox comes. But so does winter right after that. "Changes are not permanent. But change is."

And standing there is the witch.

Mirror Mondays: The Seven Books That Made Me Want Witches in D&D

 I have spent a lot of time during these Mirror Mondays talking about where my ideas about witches came from.

Some came from D&D, obviously. Some came from movies and television. Some came from folklore, mythology, and religion. And more than a few came from simply being a kid in the 1970s and 1980s when the occult seemed to be everywhere. From the Occult revival to the Satanic Panic.

But most of it came from books.

And more specifically, most of it came from the public library.

I talked about the library as a dungeon back in June, and with good reason. My local branch had what struck me as an enormous amount of material on the supernatural: witches, vampires, ghosts, monsters, the whole lot. I made short work of them. I later discovered that we did indeed have more than our fair share. I went on to visit other libraries, and they had only a fraction of what my local one had. 

In those days, before the Internet, if one wanted to know about witches, one had to put in the effort and find a book on the subject. And that also often meant me getting on my bike and riding to the library. 

I was not being completely allegorical when I described the library as a place of quests. Should a book make mention of Jung or some obscure piece of mythology or psychic phenomena, you can bet I was off in search of more. One shelf would lead to another. In terms of shaping my Witch class, that process was likely of greater import than any rulebook from D&D. I did the legwork; I was on the quest.

Below are seven books that put the desire for witches in D&D in me. Don’t mistake them for the seven best on witchcraft; some are scholarly, and some are not, and one doesn’t really concern witches in any way. But they all added to the mix. Or as I often say, the alchemy that allowed the witch to grow in my mind. 

Daniel Cohen, Witchcraft, Superstition & Ghostly Magic (1974)

I went through everything Cohen had to offer at the library in my pre-teen years. He wrote the kind of thing I was after: unexplained happenings, monsters, the like. It was a last stand for a world of magic I wanted to believe in, even though I knew on some level it wasn’t true. Before I turned ten, I could still savor the notion of a secret world beneath the ordinary. That romantic notion has never left me, even if I know that the world is not hiding anything supernatural. 

Take Jackson, IL. The adults are at work, the kids are at school, everyone is shopping or complaining about the weather or worried about grades. But there are witches and ghosts and monsters in that town. Most are none the wiser. 

Cohen didn’t put that idea in my head, but he did a fine job of convincing a younger me that the world is more interesting if you allow for such possibilities.

C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1983 edition)

I have been a huge fan of Carl Jung. His psychoanalytic theories, especially regarding the collective unconscious and archetypes, have always appealed to me more than Freud’s. The witch is just one figure to come out of that, but the fact that certain stories and symbols have a way of reappearing has meant a great deal to my approach to fantasy.

There is an accident of library history here. In 1984, I set out to read Synchronicity. Yes, because I was a fan of the Police album of the same name. The library didn’t have it, so I made do with Man and His Symbols. In the end, perhaps that was the more fitting book for me to be reading at the time. Jung provided a vocabulary of sorts for what I was already putting my characters through. He made me ask why some of them have a way of coming back in my mind, or why I can spot an element of one witch in another. Why is it that a character can cross from one game to another, from one world or genre to the next, and still be unmistakably who she is? Those ideas had their genesis here. The witch not as a character but as a universal archetype. 

At the time, I was only aware of the patterns. I have reread the book many times and each time I walk away with different ideas and insights. It is not a great work of psychology, but it does provide a great lens in how we view the stories (or my case, games) we create.

Brendan Lehane, The Enchanted World: Wizards and Witches (1984)

One would not be surprised to see this on the list. I have put pen to paper about the Enchanted World series and this volume in particular, but the first had a profound impact on me. Lehane takes you from the wizards of old myth to the forbidden arts of the medieval magician and on to the witches. You will find Circe, Merlin, Roger Bacon, Baba Yaga, and the like all occupying the same broad magical space. Yet they are not all engaged in the same sort of thing. That is a distinction which matters.

It is an idea I am still mulling over in Advanced Witches & Warlocks; a Witch, a Wizard, and a Warlock ought to be more than three labels for a spell-caster. Their approach to magic is different. In looking back at Lehane, I can trace the origins of that notion. There are small things I have taken from the book into my games as well. The bit on witches’ flight, for instance, speaks of distaffs as well as broomsticks, and I have since made room for them in my own work. One reads something at the age of fourteen and finds it has been sitting in your game for forty years.

Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959)

Here is one of the major ones. I picked up my copy in a second-hand shop and it has proved indispensable when it comes to witchcraft and demonology. But with Robbins, the subject matter gets less comfortable. Witchcraft is entertaining when you are discussing familiars and old legends. The record of witch persecution is no fun at all. It is the story of men and children, but mostly women, being put to the sword or tortured on the say-so of someone who called them a witch. The witch stops being the wise old woman, the alluring temptress, or even the oh-so-clever teen in homeroom. She becomes the innocent woman tortured to confess something impossible and only has death to look forward to. 

You have the fantasy witch, the one from folklore, and then the individual who is accused. They are not one and the same. Robbins gave some historical heft to what might have been nothing more than a character class in a game. I have gone back to it more times than I can count; of everything here, it is the one I have used most as a reference for my writing.

I am not so vain as to say I write to avenge those wronged. But I keep them in mind with everything I do write. Maybe I read this stuff at too young an age (the ongoing joke that Gen X is the way we are because we read the wrong book way too young), and it imprinted on me. 

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts (Reader’s Digest, 1978)

My parents were/are voracious readers. Books filled every corner of my home growing up, and every room had at least one bookshelf; some, like the living room, had three. 

They, like many people of their generation, had a lot of Reader's Digest books. One, in particular, was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.

There was a copy of this in my parents’ house, and for years I could not put it down. At first it was my book of choice when I wanted to read about vampires, though over time I began to make use of it for witches too. 

This book should not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered good literature or even good research. It is, however, good fun and a fun read.

In a way, it was an education in the weird, a sort of giant compendium of everything. You have ghosts next to odd bits of history, monsters beside the unexplained, and folklore rubbing up against what is put forward as fact. 

One might open the volume with a particular aim in mind and turn twenty pages to find one’s thoughts on something else entirely. This is where I came up with the idea that *I* could figure out what REALLY happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia. (She died.)

It was much like wandering the library stacks. I suspect that kind of discovery has had more of an effect on my games than I gave it credit for at the time. I am fond of connections: the local ghost story tied to an old family, which in turn is tied to a witch and some strange occurrence out of town. The supernatural does not exist in a vacuum.

The History of Witchcraft by Montague Summers (1956 edition)

Like Robbins, Summers was indispensable to me as a starting point, but he is a very different source, and I found that to my advantage. Put in the hours reading on witchcraft, and you will see the books do not always agree. There are shifts in scholarship or the authors’ own assumptions at play. Where one man writes of literal truth, another may call it superstition or fraud or psychology. 

A researcher has his work cut out for him. As a game designer, however, I welcome it. There is no need for every source to concur, nor for every witch in my games to be of one mind. A demonologist with an old grimoire, a folklorist, a frightened priest, and a witch who took her lessons from her grandmother could all tell you of the same event in four distinct ways. They could be right, or they could be wrong. That notion is central to what I do now, and I can put it down to having read widely divergent takes on the same subject.

In my academic work I typically dislike contradiction. I like looking for the one true answer. My game design work though has taught me to embrace contradictions.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

An odd entry, perhaps, but then again maybe not. 

This is not a witchcraft tome in the same vein as the rest; it is children’s literature and theology and science fantasy and cosmic adventure all at once. 

But consider Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit. For a child with an obsession for witches there was no way I would not be drawn in. I can still recall the chills I first felt when I read Mrs. Whatsit’s thundering “WWEEE ARRE HHERRE!” 

I know a witch when I see her on the page.

L’Engle’s book put some things into perspective for me regarding distance. The world is stranger and vaster than it seems; two points can be worlds apart yet still touch. Will, memory, and love can get where ordinary travel cannot. Meg is not a witch, but she has power, and she is central to solving the problems of this tale. 

I did not have the vocabulary for it on my first reading. I do these days. And so I am led back to Jackson. That comes later in this essay.

Honorable Mention: The Witch’s Catalog (1976) by Norman Bridwell

This one has to be included. An odd volume, but it planted the seeds for much of my imagination when it comes to witches. Most of all, it did away with the notion of the child-eater; in its pages, the witch is a protector, a protector of children from scary things. There is an image of a witch night light that I can still picture as clearly as day 50 years later. It is witch, well a Bridwell witch, glowing with her hand out. She is keeping a trio of frightened-looking monsters away. The caption reads "scary things don’t go where the witch tells them not to go." That stuck with me. Compare that to the "mission statement" of NIGHT SHIFT. All the classes talk about how they deal with the "weird things," and the witch says, "I am the weird thing."

And it was published in 1976, the year I was six. Six is also the age at which Larina first realizes she is a witch in my games. You see where this is going? A coincidence, I am sure. But where is the fun in that?

Shelf by Shelf, Book by Book

You won’t find "my Witch" in any single tome. I cannot direct you to a chapter and claim that it is the origin of the class or of Larina. It was a more gradual process.

Daniel Cohen provided the secret world. From Jung, I took the archetypes. Lehane taught me that magic should vary in kind and gave me the mythic type. Robbins offered history and its consequences; Strange Stories, Amazing Facts made the connections. Summers was all contradiction. L’Engle supplied the sense of distance and the idea that an impossible chasm between two people is not so impossible after all. And Bridwell was there to make the case that a witch does not have to be a monster.

All of that ended up on the same mental shelf. Then, when D&D arrived, I had somewhere to put them. 

Perhaps that is why I return to the library in my writing. A wizard makes do with a spellbook, a cleric with his holy text.

As for the Witch, give her a library card and let her sort it out on her own.

The Mirror Shard: A Wrinkle Between Worlds

I put this concept out there for #RPGaDAY earlier in the year, though I have a bit more to go before it is finished.

Take Jackson Larina, "Nix," and his counterpart in Carbon Vale, "Creepy." They have found ways to talk to one another. Don’t imagine some grand magical rite or a crystal ball; no spell is required. They are just two teenagers after all, and they know a grand total of maybe five spells combined. 

All they need are two well-worn copies of A Wrinkle in Time. Put a message in one, and it will be in the other when you open it. The books are 220 miles apart and in two completely different universes.

That is the kind of magic that appeals to me.

Things get more complicated when Nix uses the book to warn Creepy about something that is going to happen. In Jackson, Larina's mother, Siân, died. Nix warned Creepy in Carbon Vale.

And in Carbon Vale, Siân lived. 

I have already said there will be a price for that. I don't know what it is yet. But there will be one.

For now, it is the book itself that matters. In choosing the object to bridge the divide between the two Larina Nicholses, I went with something I read as a kid. That doesn't feel accidental.

It feels Jungian, and maybe even a little bit of Bridwell too. 

The idea came to me while developing these two similar but distinct worlds. I knew they had commonalities and I knew they had a shared history. But there was divergence somewhere along the way. Game-wise, they allow me to play in similar worlds with different rules. But they kept informing each other on changes. It was like Jackson was talking to Carbon Vale. Or, as it turns out, Nix was talking to Creepy. In game it was innocent enough. Larina "Nix" was at the library. She saw a copy of "A Wrinkle in Time" sitting in the book return area and had the idea to write a note on  bit of paper "I love this book!" and slip it in. She thought that was a little silly, and went back to take it out. She did but now her note read "I do too!" And the handwriting was the same. The responder even used the same purple ink Larina was fond of. 

I am planning an adventure, "The Best of Both Worlds," that will be dual-stated that brings these two together in one world. But so far, that is planned for the first adventure of a "Season 2" after they defeat the Hollow King, so maybe Summer 1986. No idea what Season 2 is even about yet. 

The Best of Both Worlds, when Creepy met Nix

It should be rather ridiculous, and I am really looking forward to it!

Mirror Mondays: Jackson as a Mirror

 I just got back from a long trip to visit my in-laws, and I got to go to Jackson. Not Jackson, IL, but Jackson, OH. The real town. 

We were driving south to see my in-laws, and this was along the way. Of course, I had to stop. The town was just like I thought it would be...just not for Jackson, IL 

For Sunny Valley, OH.

It is the right size, in the right location, and certainly has the right feel. It is set near enough to the Appalachian Mountains to get the right feel.

Driving through the Appalachians also gave me many ideas for both of my fictional towns for NIGHT SHIFT.

Jackson, OH, and Jacksonville, IL

These two towns are about 760 miles apart and don't have a lot in common.  

My fictional Jackson, IL, owes a debt to the real Jacksonville, Illinois. It is not a copy of it. Yet it provides the sense of place that I need. From Jacksonville, I get a Midwestern town of the proper proportions and the right kind of civic life: the streets, the neighborhoods, the schools, the churches, and businesses that serve as my point of reference. Jackson, IL and Jacksonville, IL are not exactly the same, but but walking around either during the daylight hours should feel the same.

With a population of 20,000 or so, Jackson is a small but substantial town. There are enough people for characters to lose themselves in the crowd now and then, and one does not know everyone. You have your different social circles, your hospital, your clubs and rivalries, and local institutions. Still, it is small enough to be recognized.

Sunny Valley is another matter. With only about 5,000 residents, the difference is considerable. Here, people will tell you where you were last night.

There may be a single high school and a grocery store that everyone patronizes. A modest downtown with a diner where certain families have been coming for generations, a few churches, a funeral home, a clinic, a library, and perhaps a hardware store older than anyone’s memory. And then the town just stops. The streetlights run out, and the houses give way to trees.

That is how Jackson, Ohio, began to make an impression on me. It had less to do with the town and more with the drive through the Appalachian hills of southeastern Ohio. Mile upon mile of ridges and valleys, of roads that wind into the woods where visibility is poor.

I found myself thinking that something could be out there. Not in the flippant sense of "the monster lives here," but because the landscape made it seem entirely plausible. The forest can put things out of sight; the hills have their secrets. In that moment, it occurred to me what Sunny Valley had been lacking.

Sunny Valley 1.0

Sunny Valley came before Jackson.

In the beginning, Sunny Valley was an exercise in putting together a supernatural teen milieu of the early 80s. I put it most simply by asking: what would Buffy be like if she were in Ohio in 1983-4?

It was a sound approach, and I had a blast with it. You had your share of kids and monsters, oddities in the woods, the kind of supernatural conundrums that make for a good teenage horror game. There was even a Hellmouth-ish sort of thing in Sunny Valley.

But when I put my mind to Jackson, things changed.

Jackson took on a life of its own. It put down roots in the form of history and old families, adults with more to say than they let on, and teachers looking out for their students. Witches, ghosts, conspiracies, and long-held grudges all came to the fore, building a whole community of the supernatural on top of the ordinary one.

Jackson was no longer just a venue for an adventure; it was a place.

I was of the mind for some time that Sunny Valley had run its course. It had provided the 80s campaign I needed to figure out what Jackson should be.

Until I made the trip to Jackson, Ohio, and drove through the Appalachian Mountains. 

Sunny Valley 2.0

I used to say Sunny Valley had a Hellmouth and Jackson had history. But I have come to see that as not entirely true.

Jackson has the history, certainly. Sunny Valley is defined by its geology.

It is a minor distinction, yet one that means everything to me. There is no need for a magical hole in the ground to account for the awful things that go on in Sunny Valley; the mountains will do just fine.

Take the Appalachians. Their story reaches back hundreds of millions of years, through mountain-building events older than anything in human experience. The Rockies were still in their infancy when these ranges were already ancient. They have been eroded and reformed over eons that put our recorded history to shame. 

The people of Sunny Valley like to think of themselves as an old town. The mountains have other ideas.

Sure, you can find a house or two in the valley that is close on two hundred years, or a family name from the first settlers, an abandoned mine, some pre-Civil War churches and old cemeteries. But to the mountains, all of that is from this morning, geologically speaking.

And with that, the nature of the horror is altered.

In Jackson, the supernatural is steeped in history. In Sunny Valley, it is prehistory.

Jackson asks: What if the weird kids were right?

Sunny Valley asks: What if your grandparents were right when they told you not to go up there?

That is the difference in a nutshell. Or perhaps there is an even more straightforward way to tell them apart: look at which way the characters are running. In Jackson, they tend to run to the trouble. In Sunny Valley, those with any sense put distance between themselves and it.

When you drive for a few hours in the mountains, you get a lot of ideas.

Sunny Valley 2.0 is not scarier because the monsters have more hit points. It is scarier because some things were never meant to be fought in the first place.

Two Different Kinds of Horror

Jackson is dangerous, but Jackson allows heroism.

That is the town where Rowan can ride Tempest into the final battle against the Hollow King while Andy announces her arrival by playing an 80s hair-metal song on his trumpet.

It is ridiculous. It is glorious. And it belongs in Jackson.

Jackson is a place where the kids eventually discover that they are not alone. Teachers protect them. Older witches know things. Friends show up. People choose sides. The supernatural can be terrible, but it can also be opposed.

Sunny Valley should not work that way.

If someone tried that sort of heroic entrance against one of the older things in the mountains, it might not even understand what the child was trying to accomplish.

At best, it might say, "Hush, child."

That is the kind of horror I have in mind for Sunny Valley. I am not after stronger monsters, but older ones. The sort who do not hate us because, to them, we are not worth hating. They predate the town and its first settlers, and likely predate any name we have given these mountains. Most should predate the concept of names.

You will find the folk stories here are less by way of explanation than survival instructions: don’t whistle in the dark; don’t answer a call from the woods if you can’t put a face to it; avoid the old road over the ridge once the snow comes; if there is knocking under the floor, you leave. Nobody can tell you why. They will only point out which families were the ones who didn’t heed the rules.

Sunny Valley is no longer "Buffy in Ohio." It is edging toward an Appalachian cosmic horror.

The numbers make a difference. Jackson is a place of 20,000 people with its layers; it has the critical mass for a supernatural community. Sunny Valley has 5,000 souls and an expanse of empty land around it.

There is a distinction here. Jackson is home to its share of old monsters, some of which predate the human race. Yet for all that they are comprehensible to humans in some measure, they have a history and motives, hungers and grudges, names and bargains. Even demons are tied to us in some way. They can hate us. Tempt us. Love us. Hunt us. Make deals with us. We matter to them.

Sunny Valley is not like that.

What one finds in the Appalachians is something else entirely. Those are things that were old in the time of the dinosaurs. To call them demons, gods, or ghosts is to apply a word humans have invented. They are of an older order.

Where Jackson’s monsters have a past, Sunny Valley’s have geology. And that makes for a different kind of coexistence. The town’s founders did not so much subdue the wilderness as come to terms with what was already there, learning the rules necessary to put down roots. Or it could be said the humans were merely put up with.

Jackson's oldest monsters remember humanity.

Sunny Valley's oldest monsters remember a world without us.

The Mirrors

Then there is the matter of the real towns in the mirror. I have no desire for my fictional Jackson or Sunny Valley to be stand-ins for Jacksonville, Illinois, or Jackson, Ohio. They are mirrors.

Jacksonville provides the texture and scale for my Midwestern setting. But Jackson, Ohio offered something else entirely to my Sunny Valley. Not in population, but geologically. One can walk those small-town streets and then drive out to the wooded hills and get a sense of the other half of the picture.

In a way I didn’t foresee, the process has come full circle. 

Sunny Valley was instrumental in making Jackson, and Jackson has shown me that a town must be more than scenery. Now a real Jackson has sent me back to Sunny Valley. Not to make it more like Jackson, but less so.

Take the places outside Sunny Valley that are well known, yet not in the manner of a tourist spot or a famous haunts. The old mine road, the logging trail abandoned for thirty years, the hollow where no house has been built, the fire tower visible from town but unclimbed by memory. A grandfather won’t bother with explanations about bad roads or bears, as an adult might to a teenager. He will be direct: "Don’t go up there." In Jackson, that is an open door to adventure. In Sunny Valley, it is sound counsel.

I think this covers the four comparisons without the need for separate essays.

Jacksonville to Jackson, IL is inspiration made into a community. Jackson, OH to Sunny Valley is inspiration turned to atmosphere. The evolution from Sunny Valley 1.0 to 2.0 is the shift from fighting the supernatural to surviving something very, very old. And between Jackson and Sunny Valley lies the question of what each can sustain as a horror story.

There is a line I want to keep: "Jacksonville helped me imagine where people live. Jackson, Ohio made me wonder what lives beyond them."