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.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986, The Final Girl and the Adventuring Party

Candy and Denise, in trouble again.

Jackson, IL is a place where 1980s horror rules apply.

I just finished watching "In Search of Darkness" on Tubi, and it was wonderful. It is about 4 and a half hours long and covers movies from every year of the 1980s. There are some fantastic movies, wonderful interviews (Barbara Crampton and Cassandra Peterson still look amazing!), and just a wonderful romp through some of my favorite VHS, and now Tubi, memories. 

They talked a lot about the "rules" of horror movies and how more recent movies still abide by them and/or try to send them up. They are useful and a lot of fun. 

I have no desire to go by the book on every one of those rules, though. Some of them are better left broken or put into question. Others ought to be hauled out behind the old school and put in the ground where the football field lights can’t find them.

Then there is the matter of the Final Girl. She still has her place.

She matters in that she is the one who spots the pattern. The locked door, the photograph that isn’t there, a name you keep hearing, a song in the wrong room, some sound the rest of them don’t pick up. She puts two and two together before the adults do and lives to see how the horror is done. When the game is well played, she will act on it.

Mina Murray Harker is still my favorite example of a Final Girl. It might seem an odd choice for a discussion of 80s horror, but she is the root of it for me. More than simply being the one to outlast Dracula, she makes sense of things. She organizes the evidence, types up the journals, and turns fear into something you can act on. I find that more to my liking than the "last girl alive" trope.

For the 1980s, we have Nancy Thompson. She is a prime case. She stops waiting for the grown-ups to come to her rescue and starts making ready for the fight herself, having learned Freddy’s rules. Or take Kirsty Cotton in Hellraiser; she doesn’t survive by overmatching the Cenobites but by knowing their rules well enough to make a better bargain than the one they offer. Or  Laurie Strode in Halloween, or Ellen Ripley in Alien (ok, 1979, but she still counts). 

That is what I want in my games. None of the lazy notion that survival is a form of moral superiority, no purity or punishment for its own sake. The Final Girl endures because she learns and adapts and won’t let the monster have all the upper hand. That is good horror design and good adventure design.

In Jackson, the title of Final Girl does not belong to the witches. My playtests have shown it is usually Denise and Candy who are best at it. And that is as it should be.

They are NPCs, certainly, but they stand in for the kind of characters Jackson should be able to support. They are not here to supplant the ones at the table but to demonstrate the sort of arc you can get from the game. YOUR characters should feel like the Final Girl. At least that is my desire. 

Denise and Candy are not the stars of every Jackson game, but they are the proof of concept: ordinary people can stand in the center of the horror and still matter. In fact they can sometimes have the best clarity.

Denise and Candy are always in some kind of trouble. Not from any weakness or foolishness on their part, but because they are right in the human center of the horror. They are tied to the town and its consequences. The witches may spot the occult angles first, but Denise and Candy will see the human side of it. Who is being lied to? Who is missing? Who is afraid? Plus they just have a knack of being exactly where they shouldn't be. More Horror Movie logic.

What am I getting at? Survival is not always about power. It should be about noticing what is going on. 

It is what makes them targets and what makes them valuable.

The horror in this part of Illinois is not just about who wields the magic. It is about who comes through an encounter and doesn’t leave the vulnerable behind, the one you can run to later. That is where Denise and Candy count for most. They don’t just get through a bad night and disappear. 

I would call that a Final Girl arc, and I want one at my table. In a ways it is like The Hero's Journey, just with more AquaNet.

With this logic then there can be more than one "Final Girl." You will not find that in a film. A Slasher is built to whittle things down to a single survivor; a role-playing game has no need for such assumptions. The Game Master ought not to view the rest of the cast as so many bodies laid out to flatter one character’s significance. This is not a screenplay. It is a room full of people making their choices and rolling the dice to see if they can get through the scenario.

In Jackson, the Final Girl might be Final Girls. Or a boy. Or a coven. Or a whole lot of furious, battered teenagers who put up with the haunted school and then have to be in class on Monday. That makes for better play. The archetype is there, but the table is what counts.

And this is where we look at Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

In Gothic Horror, the Final Girl is often the helpless last victim. Mina Harker broke this mold. She is last, but she was never helpless. She was the hero.

In AD&D the Final Girl is the adventuring hero. To make her only the Witch would be too self-serving, too narrow. The Witch has her part to play: she is the one who knows the monster’s true name or reads the omen the others missed. But let the Fighter hold the door. Let the Cleric be the one who won’t abandon the dead. The Thief can spot the way out, the Magic-User the spell that turns the tide, the Ranger can follow the horror to its lair, while the Paladin stands at the threshold. The Gallowglass, the Warlock, the Magus, they all get their due.

The adventuring party in AD&D are all potential Final Girls. Fantasy and horror mix well because the dungeon is a haunted house with rules you have to learn or die by. D&D is different in that it allows your characters to be more than mere survivors. They become the ones who go back in.

You have Nancy setting traps for Freddy, or Kirsty haggling with Hell and coming out the other side. Mina is the one who collects the evidence to put Dracula to the sword. Laurie and Ellen telling the monster, "No." Then the party comes to the crypt with lanterns and spells, and someone says to the monster: "We know what you are now. And we know how to fight you."

That's D&D for "Get away from her, you bitch!"

That is the moment I am after. Not because I want to make horror easy. If the creature is reduced to a bag of hit points, you have lost the tone. But if the characters have put in the work, survived the first pass, and figured out the pattern, then acting on that is no betrayal. It is their reward for paying attention.

The Final Girl isn’t the one the scenario lets off the hook. She is the one who has learned how it works. She knows the rules. And at the table, that can be anyone, or all of them.

Mirror Shard: The Survivor’s Rule

There are times in an adventure, be it in Jackson, IL, or with Advanced Witches & Warlocks, or with your own horror game, when the horror is thick, and the characters have come face to face with the main threat and put up with it. In those cases, put this rule into play.

Let a player who has just survived a run-in with the central horror put in one question to the Game Master about the creature’s weakness, its limits or how it operates. You must give a straight answer. It doesn’t need to be exhaustive, but it has to be true. The character has been there and seen what the rest of the party has not. This is their reward for paying attention. For surviving. 

Some good ones to ask might be:

• What does it invariably do before making an attack?
• Is there a name that will make it pause?
• What has it left in its wake?
• Who is it after, really?
• Where won’t it go?
• What old mistake has it made?
• What compels it to follow a certain rule?

In Jackson, you can think of it as genre knowledge born of fear. The survivor has picked up on the rhythm of things; she knows the hallway is quiet when it should not be, or what tune precedes the ghost. She can tell the adult is lying because she has heard the lie from him before. With the Advanced Witches and Warlocks, it is more of an old-school affair. They have put themselves in harm’s way to see how the monster behaves, to watch it choose or reveal itself.

But don’t let the rule be a way of handing them the answer. Make it the basis for their next dangerous decision.

It is horror movie logic, gamified. 

It is the desire to survive against terrible odds, certain death, or worse. 

The "or worse" is important. In AD&D, death is something that happens a lot, and there are ways to raise the dead. In Jackson, death is a much bigger deal. A death can shut down a community, and there are no Raise Dead spells here. Dead is dead.

But Player Characters are not Horror Movie Characters. So the fear may never be as real to them. I keep thinking about "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors". Those kids are still in terrible danger. Freddy is still Freddy. But once they understand that the dream gives them a kind of power, the game changes. They are not safe. They are not invincible. They are just no longer completely helpless.  That is what the Survivor’s Rule is meant to do. It gives the players a small edge, earned through fear and attention. The Big Bad can still be bigger and badder. In fact, it probably should be. In the end Freddy still gets most of them. 

That is why I keep coming back to the Final Girl. Not as a fixed role, and certainly not as a body count waiting to happen, but as a way to think about play. Horror gaming works best when the characters are frightened, outmatched, and still paying attention. Jackson, IL gives me Denise and Candy as my working examples of that. Advanced Witches & Warlocks gives me the adventuring party as the fantasy version of the same idea. Different clothes, different weapons, different rules, but the same moment at the table: the monster has shown itself, the players have survived long enough to understand it, and now someone gets to say, "We know what you are." That is when horror becomes adventure.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Familiar Is Not a Pet

Calling a witch’s familiar a pet is like calling a spellbook a notebook. It is technically close enough to be wrong.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the familiar is one of the key things that separates the Witch from the Magic-User. A Magic-User might have a familiar as an arcane aid. A Witch’s familiar is a relationship. It is part ally, part omen, part witness, part magical bond, part eyes and ears of their patron, and sometimes part debt.

A magic-user has access to the Find Familiar spell at 1st level, but few in practice take it at 1st level. It uses up a spell that could have been Magic Missile or Sleep. And as someone with typically the lowest hit points in the party, the loss of a familiar is a dangerous prospect. Though for AD&D, the spell is a good choice. Wizards are associated with familiars, but not as much as witches are. 

In Jackson, IL, the familiar becomes even more personal. It is the cat that keeps showing up outside the school. The crow on the power line. The dog that growls at a teacher no one else distrusts. The thing under the porch that only one girl can understand. The familiar is proof that the witch is no longer alone, but also proof that something has noticed her.  In Jackson, having magic means you can see things, but things can also see you. 

I will be honest. I have not thought a lot about familiars for my Jackson, IL game. I suppose technically my three witch NPCs (and stand-ins for your characters) have familiars. Larina very often has her white cat "Cotton-ball" and I have jotted down some ideas for him, but that is really about it. NIGHT SHIFT does have familiar rules, and with the Arcane Bond power, I can make them really special, but I just haven't yet.

If I had Elowen in Jackson, she would have Mirepoix. But I have not added her, and I am not likely to, since in my mind she always plays the role of Larina's adopted daughter. That is fine, she plays a bigger role in my West Haven games anyway.

Like everything else I have been talking about here, familiars are a relationship.

The familiar is not just a cute (or weird) animal that sits on the witch’s shoulder while she casts spells. It is not an accessory. It is not a mascot. It is not there to make the character look more witchy.

The familiar is a sign that the supernatural world has seen the witch.

Familiars are an extension of their patron. In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, patrons are often active and known to the witch. They have traditions, they beseech their Patrons. In Jackson, though, they may not be known at all. In fact this is one of the features of the Jackson setting; witches are never 100% sure where their power comes from. A familiar is proof that the patrons are there, but not very forthcoming. 

OR

Maybe the familiar was already there waiting. That animal is always there where it shouldn't be. The one that shows up right before things get really, really strange. 

Of course, it isn't really an animal at all. Not really. It is a spirit wearing the shape of an animal. This is why it can't really be a pet. A pet loves you. A familiar knows who you are.  

A pet will sleep by the witch's bed. A familiar sleeps by her bed because it knows that the Night Hag visits every night at 3:33 am. 

In fantasy, the familiar is part of the witch’s mythic presentation. The black cat on the shoulder. The raven in the tree. The toad in the garden. The serpent in the sleeve. The owl watching from the rafters.

In Jackson, the familiar has to live in the ordinary world.

That makes it stranger.

A cat can enter a teenager’s bedroom in a way a demon never could. A crow can watch the school from the football field lights. A dog can follow the characters down a street and make everyone think nothing odd is happening. A mouse can live in the walls of the library. A spider can listen in the girls’ bathroom.

A demon or a monster in the school hallway changes what the adventure is about in a rather dramatic way. A cat? That is different, but which one is more "supernatural?" Which one is a larger portent of what is going on here?  A cat in the hallway changes nothing, until it turns to look at the witch and she hears it say, "Not that door."

Most of all familiars tell me two things.

First, while AW&W and Jackson, IL as projects feature witches (and in a couple of cases the same witch), they can take on very different tones and be very different sorts of witches.

Secondly, while I have a lot figured out, I still don't have it all figured out yet. Familiars are a perfect example. 

Mirror Shard: Cotton-ball, the Mirror-Cat

On the surface, Cotton-ball in Jackson is an unremarkable white cat. Which is as it should be; it is his finest defense. He is small and soft with bright eyes, and he has no objection to being underestimated. The characters will find him where he has no business being, or gone in an instant when the adults come looking for him. He has a way of putting himself to sleep on top of whatever book or hand mirror Larina (or your characters) needs at the moment.

The majority of folks are under the impression he is nothing more than a cat. Yeah. That is exactly what I want.

Cotton-ball is Larina’s familiar in Jackson, though whether she understands that at first is another matter. He begins as the cat that follows her home, waits outside the school, appears on the library steps, or watches her from the cemetery fence. He is not dramatic. He does not arrive in lightning. He arrives like a cat.

Cotton-ball has an affinity for mirrors. He knows which ones are ordinary and which ones are pretending. He will not look into some mirrors at all. Others he stares into for long minutes, tail twitching, as if something on the other side is talking to him. When a mirror is about to show more than a reflection, Cotton-ball is often already in the room. Waiting and watching.

When you are running a game in Jackson, make of him what you will: a guide, an omen, a little agent of the Veil. But don’t have him laying things out for you. He is a cat. Let him communicate by knocking something off a shelf, by the way he looks at you, or by refusing to go through a doorway. He will be there at the worst possible time.

He can put Larina on notice that magic is in the air. He has a nose for ghosts, hags, and other witches, and can put himself in places she has only seen in her dreams. 

There are things he doesn't like: church bells, wet shoes, cheap perfume, or anyone who has been making deals with the things under the town. Give him cream and warm laundry and moonlight and old books, and he will be happy enough, particularly if there are secrets being told and he can listen in.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the Mirror-Cat can be used as a special familiar. It appears most often to witches with mirror magic, moon magic, spirit sight, or ties to other selves. A Mirror-Cat grants the witch an instinctive awareness of false reflections, glamours, scrying attempts, and spirits using reflective surfaces.

The Mirror-Cat cannot answer every question. It can tell the witch where to look. And that is usually enough. Or, more to the point, that is usually all you are going to get. 

Again. I still a lot more work to do on this idea. 

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Public Library as Dungeon

 There is a very good reason my main witch character, Larina, is often cast as a librarian.

My introduction to “real” witches was in the library. Not the kind made of flesh and blood, but the ones you find in the pages of a book, in history, or in mythology. You could say libraries are where witches live, and I am not using that as some kind of metaphor all these years on. That is simply how it was for me.

The public library was among the first places where the world seemed to expand and grow stranger at once. You would come in off a perfectly ordinary Midwestern afternoon, make your way past the desk and the new books and whatever they had on display for the month, and then in the stacks you were liable to run across ghosts, demons, gods, vampires, lost cities, ancient rites, and other things your school teachers never thought to mention and certainly never on the "staff picks" section. 

There is a trick to a library. It is meant to be safe. Quiet, ordered, respectable. It has its rules and its due dates and its card catalogs. The librarians know where everything is. But this is precisely what makes for a fine dungeon.

Because a dungeon is more than a hole in the ground with monsters in it. It is a place of hidden knowledge, danger, and memory, with its maps, keys, locked doors, old names, and false leads. A good one will have treasures that alter the person who brings them out. An old public library has all of that.

Take my fictional Jackson, which is rooted in the real Jacksonville, Illinois. The Public Library there has the right bones for it. As a Carnegie library, built in 1902 and put to use in 1903, it has the sort of grand Classical Revival air about it that suggests books are of consequence, and perhaps a touch perilous if you give them any thought. It feels like it is holding secrets even before you start making any up. A building like this isn’t holding just ordinary books; it has something special. 

I don’t want the library in Jackson to be sinister, though. There is a difference between "evil" and being "important". It is not a haunted mansion in disguise. It is doing what it does: preserving, collecting, cataloging, remembering. There is enough danger in just that.  I mean, didn't the Satanic Panic try to teach us that books were dangerous?

A town or a local family can tell you lies, or what they want you to hear. A church can. A newspaper will be careful with what it puts in print. But the library keeps things. Not without fault; you will find things misfiled or stolen or damaged or just plain forgotten. But in a game, that is useful. A missing book means someone saw fit to put it away. A yearbook with a face marked out says more than the picture alone.

For the purposes of Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the library is the old occult archive. A Magic-user will be after his spellbooks and grimoires, a Cleric his demonologies and forbidden heresies. But a Witch? She sees relationships. The volume on local flora sitting beside one on funeral rites. A genealogy that seems to orbit the same three names over and over. Consider the old map with a road that curves for no reason. Well. No apparent reason. The church record is missing a winter. A travel diary, making note of a hill nobody goes to anymore. Or a trial transcript where they all seem to be talking around one particular fact.

This is what we call occult knowledge. It is not just about fireballs and lightning. It is the kind of thing you can see if you know how to read the shape of it, right in plain view.

Which explains the witch’s affinity for libraries. She is after more than spells; she wants to find the pattern that runs under the town, the detail everyone has overlooked because they haven’t asked the right question about it yet. In Jackson, IL, this is all the more pressing.

Take a teenage witch in 1986 like Larina. There is no internet to comb through at midnight, no way to put ten sources side by side in half a minute, or access some digital archive. If she wants to understand why the cemetery has an empty grave, or why a teacher’s name is in a yearbook from two decades back, or what happened to the old road’s name, she has to make the trip. She has to go down into the dungeon.

The public library provides something modern games are too quick to discard: a place for your information. And that is a big deal. If the answer is in the library, your characters have to be there. They have to put in the work to be seen, to ask for help, to charm the librarian or wait for the building to quiet down so the ghosts can move between the shelves. They have to get their hands on the old book.

It makes research physical. Gameable.

You can have encounters in a library. Not necessarily combat, but the real sort. The librarian who holds her tongue when she knows better. The classmate watching which book you check out. Some old man with his newspaper who puts you on the spot about your family. A child tells you there is a lady in the local history room, but you see nothing. You might come across a locked cabinet, a missing index card, a book out of place in the children’s section, or the smell of candle smoke by the microfilm.

Sometimes the library is of more use than a haunted house. One will give you a secret; the other gives you the town’s secrets, all sorted by subject. I put them in my own witch work for that reason. My Appendix O is littered with books on everything from vampires and monsters to Jung and the supernatural. Some were dubious (ok, more than some), some were serious, and some you would be a fool to call scholarship, but all are worth mining for a game.

A library does not just put facts in your head. It teaches you to wander. You start out for one title and end up with three. You put down a tome on mythology and pick up one on ghosts. You are looking into witchcraft, and before you know it, you are in demonology, then horror films, then local history, until you have found something that nags at you and becomes a character or a spell years down the line.

That is how you build a witch. Shelf by shelf. Book by book.

You won’t find much of an accident in Larina’s vocation as a librarian. If anything, it is one of the most honest things about her. She is meant to be with books because that is where you will find the doors; the doors to rooms in your mind. Some are opened with a sword, some with a spell, but a library card will open more than either of those if you have the patience and curiosity for it and are just a little reckless.

It is also where Jackson, IL, and Advanced Witches & Warlocks come together.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the occult library is your hoard. Not of gold, but something better: names, maps, rituals, marginalia, correspondences, the weaknesses of monsters, forgotten gods, and that single bit of information which makes a hopeless fight a dangerous proposition. In Jackson, the public library is all that and then some, only with fluorescent lights, carpet, and summer reading posters. You won’t be in a ruined tower; you’ll be downtown. Your mother could drive by while you are in there, or your English teacher might be at the desk. Someone from school may well notice what you are holding.

There is a danger to a forbidden book in a fantasy dungeon, sure. It might call a demon. The same book in Jackson is dangerous because it can do that and get you grounded into the bargain. Both are problems you don’t want.

Then there is the matter of democracy. A wizard’s tower is his, for the cleric the temple is the god’s, and a witch has her house. The library claims to belong to the town. Anyone can put in an appearance and make a private discovery. The smart girl, the jock with nothing to do, the kid skulking from bullies, the would-be warlock after a shortcut, the old woman with her genealogy, the teacher who has put in too many hours. Even the monster in human skin who comes in on Thursdays to read the obituaries. For a horror game, it is hard to beat a public place like that. Harder still in 1986.

The card catalog has the feel of a summoning machine. You can tell who had a book before you by the checkout card in the front. The microfilm reader puts out a hum like some kind of artifact; the local paper archive is a time tunnel, and the yearbooks are grimoires of social magic with their dedications and signatures and people making an effort to look normal for posterity. The library holds these like a silent guardian of bygone truths. 

It keeps the version of the town that wants to be remembered and the one it couldn’t quite put away. That is where the witches fit in. She will spot the failure. The crack in the catalog, the year with an odd number of obituaries, a family name that vanishes and reappears under a different spelling. She will see the photograph was cut, not torn, and the map folded so often along one road the paper is thinning.

I don’t want a magic shop or a wizard school for the Jackson Public Library. I want a building with a long memory where you can walk in broad daylight and sense the dungeon beneath you. Where the ghosts are to be found under Local History. A place of better questions than answers. There is an occult section, not a big one, but you will somehow come across the very book you were dreading to put your hands on. For the Advanced Witches & Warlocks crowd, it is the same with the fantasy game. Any town that has a witch in it ought to have its library.

It could be a shelf in the priest’s study or a chest of scrolls under the wise woman’s bed. A ruined scriptorium. A set of bones with names carved in them. Or perhaps a ring of old women who commit nothing to paper and remember everything; I would call that the most dangerous library of all. The Witch doesn’t just read the book. She reads the silence about it, the hand that made the note in the margin, the missing page, the town trying to put it out of mind. In that sense the public library is a dungeon. The doors are open, the treasure is there for the taking and so are the monsters, who can read as well as anyone.

The Mirror Shard: The Locked History Room

Take the case of the Locked Local History Room. Every haunted town has one. It needn’t be locked in any literal sense. It may be behind the desk or in the basement. Maybe they only let you in during certain hours, which is its own kind of lock. Or maybe it is wide open, but no one under eighteen is to go in uninvited. That suffices.

Jackson uses this room for the things that don’t make the official tour: the old yearbooks, the church histories, the funeral cards and maps, the donated family papers and clippings. There are photographs in here no one bothered to label because at the time you knew who they were. And horror has a way of living in “at the time.”

In your game, this is the village archive, the temple record room, the witch’s cabinet of names. This is where you get the first true account of the curse, not the tavern version. In Jackson, IL, a young witch discovers that the town has been lying by omission.

The room is quiet in a way that feels wrong. It is not empty, it is listening. You can smell the dust and old print on the carpet. The file cabinets are stiff, and the table bears pencil marks from the long dead. On a shelf are yearbooks with cracked spines and an excess of smiling faces.

A good clue from this place should make the mystery personal, not put an end to it. A young witch comes across her own surname in a clipping from before she was born. A player spots his grandmother next to a man who was dead by 1935. They find a map of Mauvaisterre that someone has tried to rub out, or a yearbook with the words “You heard the bell too” scrawled in it.

There is usually a guardian to the room, though not always a monster. It could be the librarian, a retired teacher, a ghost, or a rule in red ink on an index card. He won’t tell you, “you can’t come in,” that is too simple. He will ask, “What are you looking for?” which is far worse. In a room like this, the wrong answer can still give you exactly what you are looking for. Just maybe not in the way you expect it should.

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.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. Occult Magic Before It Had a Name

It is June 1st, and June has always been prime D&D time for me.

Summer was either already here or almost there, depending on where you lived and how hot it was. By then, we had stopped pretending school mattered. Days felt slow, and nights seemed endless. Any place, a friend’s house, the basement, the porch, your bedroom floor, or the dining room table, could become a world of adventure for an afternoon or a weekend. It was a time to sit back and properly read that new Dragon Magazine.

And that was the point. Summer is what makes adventure happen.

Riding your bike to a friend’s house felt like a real journey. The library became a place for research. The woods behind the neighborhood felt wild, and the old cemetery was like an unfinished adventure. If a thunderstorm rolled in, your house could turn into a dungeon.

In Jackson, IL, June 1986 was when the possibilities opened up.

School was over, but its presence lingered. Empty classrooms always felt strange compared to when they were full. The public library was chilly and filled with books on topics teenagers weren’t supposed to care about yet. We had bikes, dirt roads, creeks, and long afternoons. Adults were at work, so we had free time, and free time could be risky.

For Advanced Witches & Warlocks, June 1986 was a different sort of opportunity.

It was a chance to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons the "right" way, at least, that is what we told ourselves back then. All you needed were the books, some arguments, your imagination, and the sense that the game still held some secrets.

Secrets are where you find Occult Magic.

I didn’t have a clear definition for it back then, but I knew it was there.

There is Arcane magic, the province of the Magic-User with his spellbooks and components and towers, the idea that intelligence and hard work can uncover power. And Divine magic for the Cleric, with his gods and prayers and holy symbols, where belief in the divinity is what matters. Mind you, we were not using those words back then. That is what hindsight has given us. But whether we called in Arcane magic or wizard magic, divine or priestly magic, they were the same.

But there’s something in between, too.

The red string charm. A name spelled backward and set alight. An old woman who knows what the Priest won’t tell you. A vision of the truth. Or a mirror that will only give you an answer under the darkest moon. The familiar in the room that seems to understand more than anyone else. A book nobody wants to claim to have read. A curse that stays until you right the wrong.

That is Occult Magic.

Don’t mistake "occult" for a costume. It is not a wizard with a penchant for wearing black, nor is it a cleric of an old god. It isn’t some word they put in to spook the parents. Pentagrams and black cats and Latin mumblings don’t automatically make it so. Occult is hidden. Concealed. Known only to those initiated.

This matters for the game. 

We’re talking about magic that’s forbidden or personal, knowledge kept through names, debts, and memories. Some people think it’s evil, but making it only about evil isn’t very interesting. Not everything forbidden is wicked. Sometimes it’s just dangerous. Sometimes it’s off limits because it’s embarrassing or because it reveals a lie. It might be forbidden to keep power away from those who aren’t supposed to have it, or because it belongs to people society prefers to ignore: women, outsiders, immigrants, queer people, or strangers.

This is what gives Occult Magic its import for an Advanced D&D Witch or Warlock.

A witch isn’t just another Magic-User with a different spell list. She’s not a Cleric without a temple, either. She needs her own way of understanding magic. Arcane Magic explains the physical world. Divine Magic is about asking gods for help. Occult Magic is about following hidden threads.

What lies underneath? Why put that charm under the threshold? How does a name echo through three generations? What did the villagers and the thing in the well come to an understanding over? Where has the baroness’ reflection gone? And why does the old road put itself out of sight when the moon is new?

A witch doesn’t ask, "What spell was cast?" She asks, "Who needed that to be hidden?" That changes the game completely.

Occult Magic has to do this if it is to alter how we play. It has to turn things into an investigation, making you care about names, places, and what is remembered. It puts the Game Master to work considering family curses, old debts, powers you won’t find on a map, or any old scrolls, and the like. It has to be something special, something hidden. 

Charisma remains the right primary stat for a witch on account of all this. Intelligence is for the Magic-User to pore over his spells, Wisdom for the Cleric to serve his god. Charisma allows the witch to stand at the circle’s edge and call on the unseen. She has to be able to bargain, bind, bless, curse, lead, and put people at ease. She needs to invest something of herself into this bargain, or there will be no bargain at all.

The same holds true in Jackson, IL.

Here, Occult Magic is more than finding an old book in your attic and casting spells. There is a structure to the town you have to read. You have to know the cemetery is not only just a cemetery, or that the library has its share of uncatalogued books. You can tell the school hallway is different once the last bell has rung. The man running the occult shop will have your name before you’ve given it to him. You understand the creek’s name is no accident and that it points to something bad.

For a young witch in Jackson, discovery comes before power. She doesn’t begin with a list of spells. She starts with an experience, a dream, a mark on her skin, a voice, a mirror, a dead girl in the bathroom, or a teacher who notices something in her and quickly looks away.

The magic is still a secret to her. But as she starts to follow the threads, the pattern becomes clear. The horror isn’t that magic exists, but that it’s always been there, while everyone else has ignored it or just survived it. 

This becomes important later on with the idea that some knowledge, either in books, games, or record albums, is just too dangerous to have. 

You could say the Satanic Panic had it all wrong. To them, "occult" was a byword for corruption: dangerous books, dark rituals, evil music, and demonic imagery. An adult would see a teenager with a fantasy novel and some heavy metal on, or one drawing occult pictures and talking of spells, and they would put two and two together and come up with something very wrong in their own imaginations.

But that is missing the point entirely. What you have there is adults who are terrified of young people having access to hidden knowledge. That kind of terror is right at home in Jackson, IL. Not on account of the claims being true, but because they are wielded as a weapon. The girl with her books is being watched. The boy making strange maps is put on the spot. A horror movie makes a teen look suspicious. Get a few friends together after school, and you are a "cult."

It is not supernatural, but it need not be. Jackson has horror enough of its own to go around.

For Advanced Witches & Warlocks, this matters because witches are the class most misunderstood by others. She knows what people need but are afraid to ask for. She might heal a child and still be called wicked, or give a warning and get blamed when it comes true. That’s Occult Magic in a social sense. Hidden knowledge always has a price. In an adventure, it could be your name, a memory, a night’s protection, or a promise never to enter a certain room. In Jackson, the price is your reputation.

That’s why Occult Magic isn’t just about darkness. What matters is what’s hidden or forgotten. It can protect, bind, summon, or curse. It can reveal the truths people live by. It’s both good and dangerous. Magic should be both.

Of course, every spell having a risk is part of the fun, but magic is also dangerous because it changes how the witch relates to the community, to spirits, and to herself. Once something hidden is revealed, you can’t hide it again. And what you uncover might not let you go. Both projects should follow that idea.

In Jackson, IL, Occult Magic drives teenage horror. The town isn’t haunted because of scary spirits, but because the secret is out and the kids have noticed. June 1986 is the perfect time for this. The days are long, adults are busy, and the school doors aren’t always open. The creek is low enough to reveal its winter secrets, the cemetery grass is overgrown, and the roads out of town feel like an invitation. Summer is for adventure, and Occult Magic helps you find it.

The Mirror Shard: See the Hidden Thread

This spell is more of an adventure tool than a combat spell. You can use it as a low-level Witch spell in Advanced Witches & Warlocks, or as the first real magic a teenager tries in Jackson, IL. It won’t show you everything, but it will reveal the connection between something you see and a hidden entity nearby.

A locket might show you the thread to its owner’s grave. A bloodstain could lead to the person who made it. A teacher’s shadow might connect to an old yearbook photo. A charm under a door could glow with the color of the family who placed it there. Sometimes the thread looks like a red cord or black smoke; other times, it’s silver hair, ink, or music only the witch can hear.

The spell shows you what connects two things you aren’t supposed to know about. It won’t tell you what the connection means—that’s for you to figure out. It doesn’t replace real investigation in an AD&D game; if anything, it might lead you to make mistakes or ask tougher questions. If you use it in the halls of the local school in Jackson, you’ll see too much. Bully to victim. Principal to school scandal. Family name to the cemetery. The first time you cast it, you learn something important. The second time, you wish you hadn’t.

See the Hidden Thread
Occult Divination 

Witch Level 1
Range: 6"
Duration: 1 turn
Area of Effect: Special
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 3 segments
Saving Throw: None

Spell Effect

When the witch gazes through a fragment of silvered glass and speaks the Supernal syllable of revelation, the spell reveals a shimmering, metaphysical thread connecting a visible object or creature to a nearby hidden entity or significant location. The thread manifests in a form unique to the situation or the witch’s tradition, appearing as a red cord, a wisp of black smoke, a strand of silver hair, or even a faint melody only the witch can perceive.

Details

The spell illuminates the "Hidden Thread" between two things that are cosmically or karmically linked, regardless of whether the connection is secret or obscured.

• A locket might reveal a silver thread leading toward its owner’s forgotten grave.
• A bloodstain could show a pulsing red line trailing toward the individual who shed it.
• A charm tucked beneath a floorboard might glow with the specific color of the family lineage that placed it there.

The spell does not reveal the meaning of the connection or the identity of the hidden entity; it only proves that a link exists and shows the path to follow. This is an adventure tool meant to supplement investigation, not replace it. If used in a densely populated or high-drama area (such as a school or a town hall), the witch may see a chaotic web of threads that can be overwhelming and potentially distressing to the caster's psyche.

Material Components: A fragment of silvered glass that was a shard of a broken mirror and a drop of clear water.

More Insight From Daddy Rolled a 1

If you want another perspective of what was going on with AD&D in the mid-1980s then please check out Martin R. Thomas' blog and YouTube channel, Daddy Rolled a 1. 

• A Different Way to Look at the AD&D Hardcovers (Blog)
• Why AD&D Started Feeling Different in the Mid-1980s (Video)

Both discuss the same time period I am covering here, but with a different thesis statement. Both are also worth your time. By this reckoning, my project here is firmly in his Phase 3 camp. Which feels exactly right. I am pleased to see that we see this time period in roughly the same way.