Weirdly World News: SATANIC LESBIAN WITCHES INVADE SALEM, ORE!

 What's on the tabloid news racks at your local grocery store in August of 1985? Jackson, IL is not ready for this! This is gold for my Jackson, IL NIGHT SHIFT Night World and Weirdly World News introduced in the Night Companion. 

Article text.

SATANIC LESBIAN WITCHES INVADE SALEM, ORE! 

Is Middle-America Next?
By Sean Ridire, Weirdly World News
Chief Staff Writer

SALEM, ORE.: It was a strange affair at an Oregon state park, according to the police in Salem, Ore. Some 150 nude women were there for what witnesses described as a ceremony of a bizarre nature, complete with symbols they put down to Satanism. While authorities looked into claims that the women were fondling each other, officers have determined no law was transgressed.

But occult specialists are cautioning that this is not just a West Coast phenomenon. They point to small towns in Middle America as potential hotbeds for secret covens to go about their business unobserved by the common man. With old cemeteries and woods on the edge of town, plus a rising vogue for witchcraft and local lore to add to the mystery, these places make for convenient cover.

One has to wonder if the quiet hometown is next. Do not be fooled by appearances; the witch in your neighborhood may bear little resemblance to the stereotype. She could be the teacher or the housewife, or perhaps a college student, even the one who sits with your daughter in homeroom.

As it turns out, this is a true story!

Article text.

Friday, August 9, 1985

Naked Witches

Salem, Ore.

Police say about 150 nude women fondled each other and joined in a ceremony involving the display of symbols associated with satanism at a state park, but no laws were broken.

Associated Press

It was an article from 10 Aug 1985,  Red Deer Advocate(Red Deer, Alberta, Canada).

And confirmed by Wikipedia.

I mean. This is too good NOT to use in my Jackson, IL game. 

I can see each of my witch NPCs reading the article separately (by Aug 9, 1985; they have not met just yet).

Stephanie: "This is so stupid."
Larina: "There are so many inaccuracies with this article."
Faye: "Why don't they tell us where this is exactly?"

Some more background lore for Jackson, IL. Hat tip to former White Wolf game designer Kraig Blackwelder for digging this gem up.

Witchcraft Wednesday: The Threefold Goddess Tradition

 With Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I have had in mind a certain goal: to give the witch traditions the weight of actual occult practice. I do not want it to be a matter of "this witch has fire, that one has healing." There is more to it than that; it is about how one comes to terms with magic and divinity, with their coven, the world, and the self.

In pursuit of that, I have been drawn back to an old friend of my witch material, the Triple Goddess.

"Maiden, Mother, Crone" by Ben Honeycut

For some time now the Maiden, Mother and Crone have served as my way of putting the threefold form of the Goddess into words. It is a familiar shorthand that says something essential about the craft. Yet as I put in the work on Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I came to see that this was no longer an idea or conjecture to be just a background notion. It could stand as a tradition in its own right.

Hence The Threefold Goddess Tradition.

It is not to be confused with a neo-Pagan convenience or the simple equation of witches worshipping Diana. Nor is it only a Triple Moon affair, though the moon holds center stage. What I am building is a framework, both magical and theological, by which a witch can make sense of many goddesses and many kinds of magic under one sacred pattern.

So I am going to steal a LOT from the Christian Trinity. Consider the contradiction:

The Goddess is the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone.

And yet the Maiden is not the Mother, nor the Crone the Maiden. All are the Goddess.

There is no problem with that. The point is precisely there. I am perfectly happy with contradictions.

I call it the Threefold Sign. One might be tempted to take the logic of the Shield of the Trinity diagram – where each is God but not the other, and apply it here. And the logic would hold up. But the visual language would be off. This is not Christian theology in a black dress with a moon pendant. It is witchcraft and requires a witch’s symbol.

So we use something on the order of a triquetra, or three circles interlinked. In the overlap of two you will find their mysteries touching; where the three come together is the Mystery of the Goddess herself, beyond any name.

Some covens will inscribe the words Maiden, Mother, Crone in those circles. Others will put the names of goddesses there, or three moons (crescent, full, dark), or perhaps three ravens, three keys, three wells. The symbol is meant to instruct the initiate that while the Goddess is whole, her faces are not to be conflated. The Crone is not simply an aged Mother, nor the Maiden a young one. They are distinct, they are complete, they are divine. They are unique and they are unified. Like I have said before, I like my gods messy.

To treat it as a puzzle is to miss what is happening. It is a mystery for the witch to enter into.

The most usual expression of the tradition, of course, is to honor the Goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone. 

One might call the Maiden the start of things. She is the first step and the new moon, the road left untraveled. She is the huntress and the girl in the woods, the rebel and the initiate, the question put to you that no one wishes to hear. There is a danger in her youth; she is not without power but is perilous in her becoming. The Maiden is the threshold and the keeper of the threshold. Through her there is deeper understanding of the beginning. 

The Mother represents fullness. Think of the full moon, the hearth, or the field. She is the queen and the lover, the teacher and the protector, the witch at the coven’s heart. She has the power to create and to bless, yet do not mistake her for being soft. Those who consider the Mother harmless have never been on the receiving end of a mother defending her young.

Then there is the Crone, the ending and the memory. She is the waning and dark moon, the graveyard and the crossroads, the winter and the final spell. She is the truth from which there is no escape. Feared for what she knows and honored for what she remembers, she is the keeper of ghosts and curses and all final wisdom.

In concert they are the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. It is a cosmology I have used for a very long time. Witches do not tend to view death as some sort of reward or punishment; to them it is part of the great turning, along with rest and rebirth. The Crone is not an end to the story so much as the one who readies the soul to start over. This is also the same reason why my witches can't be raised from the dead.

I have found a particular utility in what I term the Lunar Mask. In my campaign notes, there was a moon-priestess who came to see a deeper pattern in the goddesses she revered. She did not forsake her faith, but understood her goddess to be but one aspect of something older and more complete.

For Advanced Witches & Warlocks I cannot employ deity names from other published settings, though I have no need to. Our own real-world mythic structure is far superior. So for the Lunar Mask I have settled on:

Diana as the Maiden. The crescent moon and the silver bow. She is the wild wood and the fierce independence of the untamed, the arrow in the dark and the way into the forest.

Selene as the Mother. The luminous presence and the dream-giver. She is the tide of blessing, the lover, the full moon shining down on everything.

Hecate as the Crone. The torch and the key, the ghost road and the witch-night. She is the figure at the crossroads where the living must make their peace with the dead.

This serves as a clean substitute for the triad in my own play and is more broadly useful for the book. It also allows for a clear delineation between the larger tradition and individual covens. One coven may give its honors to Diana, Selene and Hecate; another will have different names for the same Threefold Goddess Tradition.

The Triple Moon Goddess Heresy

I find the notion all the more compelling here.

During a recent campaign discussion, I put forward the concept of a priestess who makes an unsettling discovery: the moon goddesses of her world are not distinct and unconnected powers as she has been taught. Rather, they are three aspects of some deeper lunar enigma.

The temples would call it heresy. The witch calls it revelation. One has to make that distinction. This is no case of a goddess making a thunderous appearance to confirm you are right, nor is it a tidy prophecy. It is a matter of scholarship and risk, of intuition and ritual. The priestess will pore over old songs for matching symbols or spot the same moon-shape in the carving above a long-forgotten door. She hears how a forbidden hymn in one temple is answered by the orthodox prayer of another. She starts to think the line drawn between the goddesses is not so much false as it is incomplete.

That is the sort of heresy I have for my witches. Where a cleric is content to uphold the temple’s version of the truth, a witch wants to know what the temple has left out.

In this way the "Triple Moon Goddess Heresy" can be made to work for the Threefold Goddess Tradition. It is not something every coven must accept, nor does it have to be true in every campaign. But it puts a fine tension on the tradition. For the Threefold Goddess is not simply a matter of old women in the woods with their rites; there is a dangerous theology to it. A witch-priestess might look at three rival temples and tell them they are all correct but have no idea why. That is very much in keeping with a witch.

Beyond the Moon

I am inclined to stick with The Threefold Goddess Tradition as the name precisely because I do not want to confine things to moon goddesses alone.

There really is no better symbol for the witch than the moon. It is the perfect sign in that it can change its shape and yet remain itself; it vanishes and comes back again. It is the ruler of tides, night, magic, madness, and fertility.  The connections are so deep and so ancient I'd be a fool to fight them.

But the Threefold Goddess is a bigger entity than the moon. Other covens will have their own triadic powers to honor her with. A Brigidine coven might see her in poetry, healing and smithcraft, three flames to one fire. Or a Morrígan coven in battle, sovereignty and prophecy, which is to say three ravens and one fate. A Hecatean coven could honor her at the road, the threshold and the grave; a mystery cult as maiden of descent, mother of grain and crone of the underworld. A coven of fates may view her as Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, and Atropos the Cutter. 

They are not the same coven, and they are free to disagree, even to charge one another with misapprehending the Goddess. Again, I have no objection to such contradictions when it comes to divinities. If anything, it gives the tradition an older, more vital feel.

The Daughters of Aradia

This also provides a good home for the Daughters of Aradia, a tradition I have been working on. I had considered them a tradition of their own, and they can still be, but this fits well enough. I have come to the view that they are better suited as a sub-tradition of the Threefold Goddess, or perhaps a coven of some power and mystery. In any case, their take on the threefold pattern is not the same as the Lunar Mask.

Under this arrangement, Diana is the Moon-Mother and wellspring of witchcraft; Aradia the Daughter, the liberator and teacher sent out into the world; Hecate the Crone, holding the night roads and what power is hidden from view. It is a more pointed and politically charged stance for the Daughters of Aradia. They are not simply moon witches but agents of resistance, secrecy and teaching. Their myth holds that mortals were given witchcraft to stand up to tyranny as much as to bless and heal. 

Do they get along with witches of the Lunar Mask of Diana-Celene-Hecate? Some might, others might think their way is right, and the other is a dangerous cult of apostates. Can't wait to have some arguments at my table on this. 

You will not find the quiet feel of a lunar coven of seers here, yet there is no reason both cannot exist under the wider umbrella of the Threefold Goddess Tradition. That is the kind of thing I am after in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A tradition should be specific enough to give rise to strong covens and rivalries, but broad enough to serve as the basis for many characters and adventures.

Using This in Advanced Witches & Warlocks

For the purposes of the book, I would make the Threefold Goddess Tradition one of the principal ones. Mechanically, its witches are adept at divination, protection, healing, charms, dream work, transformation, curses, and dealing with spirits. There is a synthesis and mystery to their power that you do not get with the rigidity of the High Secret Order, the wildness of faerie ways or the grimness of the Daughters of Baba Yaga.

Their special abilities ought to reflect the threefold nature:

• The Maiden for courage, movement, discovery and warding off fear.
• The Mother for fertility, guardianship, healing and the protection of the coven.
• The Crone for prophecy, spirit speech, death-wisdom and defense against necromancy.

When a witch of this tradition reaches a certain level, she can call on the hidden center of the Threefold Sign. Not as Maiden or Mother or Crone but as the Goddess in her Mystery. It should be a rare and potent thing, bound up with the moon or some rite of initiation. Her highest Occult Power.

It also provides good material for roleplaying. A Threefold witch might be a midwife in one village and a forbidden priestess in the next. She could be put in the position of having to defend herself against accusations of heresy or syncretism, carrying three holy symbols and declining to offer clerics who want clean doctrine any explanation.

That is how I want to set witch religion apart from the clerical sort. Clerics have their temples and orders to serve their gods. Witches come to the divine through bloodlines, signs, dreams, and the mysteries of the coven, things that do not always conform to temple law. Witches are not just clerics with better fashion sense and killer eyeliner.

In the end, the Threefold Goddess is not three, nor is she one in any simple way. She is the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. The moon is merely the sign by which we have learned to know her.

Three circles. One mystery.

Links

• Gods of the New Game
• Nothing Like The Sun...
• OMG: Greek (and maybe Roman) Mythos, Part 3 Hecate
• One Man's God: Syncretism and the Gods
• One Man's God Special: Syncretism Part 1, The Gods of Faerûn
• Review: N5 Under Illefarn: Bad Moon Rising
• Witchcraft Wednesday: Étaín Moonshadow

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic and the Secret Appeal of Forbidden Books

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

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

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

It is an invitation.

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

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

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

But all of it circles the same idea 

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

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

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

The Panic in the Toybox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But after the panic got hold of it? 

Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.

The Book They Told You Not to Read

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

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

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

Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.

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

Most of the time, the kids were right.

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

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

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

The Wrong Demons

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

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

That is the actual horror.

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

The horror is that they named the wrong demons.

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

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

Most of the time, the adults are wrong.

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

That is the sweet spot for horror.

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

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

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

Click to get your own!

 My Life With the Satanic Cult

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feeling has never really left me.

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

That matters.

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

Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf

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

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

The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.

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

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

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

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

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

The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Witch Was Always There

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

The panic kept pointing at the Witch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High School Is the Real Haunted House

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

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

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

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

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

These Are the Books You Were Warned About

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

These are the books you were warned about in 1986.

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

Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Appeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if someone told you not to open it?

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

Mirror Shard: The Jackson Satanic Panic

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

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

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

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

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

Links

Videos

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

My Posts

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

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986, The School as Haunted Castle

Despite its smallish size, my old hometown had three high schools. There was the public school, Jacksonville High School (JHS), the Catholic school, Routt, and Westfair Christian Academy. But there was also a fourth one. Or more accurately, a first one. The Newton Bateman High School was the home to JHS for many years. It had students who had seen WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It had history, stories, and legends. 

It was also scary as hell by the mid 1980s.

Jackson Public High School by day and after dark. Mouse over the image, if you dare.

In my personal, real-world history, the Newton Bateman building (named after a local educator) opened its doors in 1921 and then closed them in 1982. Meaning I never walked those halls, and it sat like a grim reminder of a different age. My High School, also then called the "New" High School, was brand new. Slick. The halls were all carpeted, and the HVAC system was brand new. We had, for the time, a state-of-the-art Science Center named for astronaut Neil Armstrong, which included great chemistry labs and a planetarium. We had a great computer lab stocked with all sorts of new TRS-80 computers. And one of the best theatres in all of downstate Illinois. The place was massive and impressive.

It made the "Old" High School, then abandoned, look even older and more grim.

In my Jackson, IL setting, I rather shamelessly copy all of this.

There is the Public School, Jackson Public High School (JPHS), and the Catholic School, St. Michaels Catholic School (formerly called St. Michaels Academy and still called that by some). No stand-in for Westfair, really. I really didn't know much about that school and didn't even know it existed until they posted their graduating class in my then local newspaper.

There is the old High School building, the Thompson-Morgan building, paid for and built by the Thompson and Morgan families back in the 1910s and long before the two families had their falling out. 

The official word in Jackson is that the school closed because it was unsafe. Asbestos, lead, radon, or something. The students would spread rumors that the Morgans used it to dump chemical waste (at least that explains the food in the lunchroom) or that the Thompsons used it for their evil magic to stay in power. The Class of 1983 was the last class to graduate from there. The deaths of Selene "Lena" Marquette and Keely "Q" Ellison were the final judgments on the school. Everyone began the 83-84 school year in the new school.

But the Thompson-Morgan school was not torn down. And the reasons for its closure were never really revealed. 

When my "Tales from Jackson, IL" began, it was this school that called to all the supernatural creatures in the area. The witches, Stephanie, Larina, and Faye, all heard the old bell ring, even though it could not ring. Candy and Denise heard it as well, even though they are not supernatural.

The bell is the important part. A school bell tells students where to go, when to move, when to stop, when to gather, when to leave. In a haunted school, the bell does the same thing. It still gives orders. The problem is that no one knows who is ringing it anymore. 

In the new high school, both in Jackson and in my real-world school, the "bell" was an electronic beep. I mean yeah, it was bell-like, but it was also very, very 1980s. It had more in common with an 8-bit video game than a bell cast in iron or even brass. 

The old school had a proper bell. 

The old school has become something akin to a haunted castle in my game. Old, abandoned, and scary.

In teen horror from the 1980s, one of the unspoken but important characters is the High School itself. Look at the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, or even newer takes like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (80s in all but name) and even "School Spirits." The High School *IS* an important place.

But I get to play around with that idea some. Yes, there are scary things happening at the new High School. But those are not old hauntings. They are new monsters coming to school because, well, supernatural things are attracted to the angst and melodrama of teens. You say "Sturm und Drang" and a supernatural creature hears "Bon appétit."

The new high school is always busy, day and night, so there are plenty of opportunities for me to use it.

The old high school, though, is the Mines of Moria, Dracula's Castle, The Caves of Chaos. Vampires can be nesting in the basement, or the sub-basement with tunnels connecting to the hospital tunnels underground where things still live. There are ghosts in the hallways from 70+ years of student deaths. 

The new high school is where the town is still pretending everything is normal. The old high school is where that lie went to die.

The place isn't just haunted. It is haunted haunted.

And there is no good reason to go there unless you have to.

The cops keep an eye on it all the time. If anything is seen there, well, the newer cops will investigate. The older ones on the force will call it in and then stay the hell away.

Many years ago my younger sister called our hometown a "sinkhole of evil." This was long, long before anyone ever said the phrase "hell mouth." And I want to keep that idea; it isn't just the high school; it is the whole damn town. The high school just has a high concentration of weirdness.

In truth, I have avoided the urge to fill it with monsters. Yes, I know there are plenty of ghosts in the place; that is a given, but I am waiting to see what else *needs* to be there. I think the Hollow King is there, feeding off of the residual emotions of the place, but so far he is the only one I know for sure. 

That is a compelling image, really. All these ghosts, all these monsters, and they are afraid of something hiding in the lowest level (or maybe the Bell Tower). What scares the monsters?

Should it scare you as well?

Mirror Shard: The Bell That Should Not Ring

There has not been a student in the Thompson-Morgan school building since Spring 1983. The place is dark, the windows are boarded up, and the doors have chains on them. Even the bell tower had been out of commission for years before the school closed.

Yet at times the bell will ring.

Not everyone, though, can hear it. Witches and sensitives will hear it, as will ghosts. But some ordinary folk do too, and that is always worse. Denise and Candy heard it, and they had no right to be hearing a dead school calling their names.

When characters hear that bell, something has shifted in the old building. A door stands open where it was shut. A ghost has had a recollection. Perhaps a monster has made its way in or a room has come back into being. Maybe a student who died there is once more in the halls, or the Hollow King needs feeding.

Treat the bell as an adventure call, but do not make it so straightforward that it amounts to "go to the school and have your fight with the monster." It should convey that something is underway, and that ignoring it is to invite something worse later on. 

The Bell is not a call. It is a warning. But a warning the characters have to answer sooner or later.

After the bell rings, the characters might notice something like these:

• The clocks at the new high school are all stuck on 3:33. 
• An old hall pass from the Thompson-Morgan 3rd floor is found in a student’s locker (the new school only has a single floor). 
• A yearbook lies open to the Class of 1983 of its own accord. 
• The school nurse puts down her work to hear students laughing in an empty corridor. 
• By morning, a window at the old school has been unboarded, and unbroken. 
• There is a name on the detention list from 1974. 
• Or the ringing follows one home.

In AD&D terms, this is your haunted castle or ruined abbey bell, the kind from a village chapel whose tower fell thirty years ago, or the warning from the old keep for those with a curse on them.

But in Jackson it is a school bell. And it still expects obedience. It expects the high school students to obey it as they did in the old days.

Fantasy Fridays: Larina for Advanced Witches & Warlocks

Advanced Witches & Warlocks by Eugene Jaworski

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

Advanced Witches & Warlocks

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

Advanced Classes

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

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

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

"Larina" by Djinn

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

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

Traditions

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

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

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

See. Still work to do.

Larina Nix, Witch Queen of the High Witchcraft Tradition

Larina Nix, Witch Queen of the High Witchcraft Tradition

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

Secondary Skill: Translator (+1 language)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theme Song: Night Bird and If Anyone Falls

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

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

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

Larina the Witch Queen

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

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

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

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

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

It only took me 40 years.

This Old Dragon Retrospective: The Road to the Witch

 Larina is a Dragon Magazine witch. But not in the way that you might initially think. 

My witch class and Larina went through many design phases and had many influences, as I have talked about here, but the truth of the matter is her genesis and my witch class's evolution owe a lot to the pages of Dragon Magazine, all long before Dragon #114 landed on the store shelves and ultimately my gaming table. 

So for today's "This Old Dragon," I am not going to do a deep dive into one issue, but rather the issues between Dragon #85 and Dragon #114, 1984 to 1986, not just some of my prime AD&D playing years, but when I did the most work on my various classes.

Since this is also a bit of an "In Search Of..." post in tone and flavor, I'll explain why this search is important to me.

Now, keep in mind, I did not read every Dragon when I got them and think, "What can I add to my witch?" I *DID*, however, read each new one and thought, "What can I add to my game?" As it turns out, I found the articles on magic, clerics, and new monsters the most useful. 

Now I did go back when I got my Dragon CD-ROM archive and look specifically for witch-related and witch-adjacent material. But that was in the 2000s. It helped inform my Basic Witch, but a lot of those concepts were already present in my earlier works. It was, however, a wonderful bit of archaeology. 

Class is in Session

To refresh everyone's memory and to set the stage from 1983 to 1987, I was in high school in Jacksonville, IL (no, not Jackson...exactly). During this time, I played in a regular group where I took turns on DM duties, usually about half-and-half. I had been working on a few new classes: The Healer, The Sun-Priest, the Necromancer, and The Witch. I saw each as related classes where clerical and wizard magic were blended. The Healer never really manifested the way I wanted, though I have played a few healers from the Werper family. The Sun-Priest eventually found life as an AD&D 2nd Edition Kit, and, using the rules as written, I have played some Sun-Priest-like characters in both D&D 4th edition and D&D 5th edition. Again, usually members of the Werper family, often sister-and-brother healer-and-Sun-Priest teams. The Necromancer finally found some life as the Profane Necromancer in my Monster Mash book. 

The witch, however, has been my runaway success. When I got the above classes into a playable state, each had what we would call today an iconic character. There was Celene the Healer, younger sister of Johan II the Sun-Priest and Paladin. The Necromancer was Magnus, and, really, the most unassuming of them all was Larina the witch. Of the four, she went on to true immortality here.  I suppose, though, the writing was all there. Luna Mondgott, Johan's and Celene's mother, was played as a witch using Cleric rules, and Johan's wife, Cara, was played as a witch using Illusionist rules. The witch was more or less inevitable for me.  

But the form it took was not. 

So let's look at one factor that shaped the class, and the character: the pages of Dragon Magazine.

Dragon #85 -May 1984

Why am I starting with this one? Good question. This is the first Dragon I ever owned and used regularly. It was in the pages of Dragon that I saw additions and changes to rules. They were not set in stone; they could be changed. I had already created many new monsters by this time, and the idea of new classes seemed not just reasonable, but actually required.

Dragon 85 was where I saw this. This issue gave me the highly valued Cleric Collection. Clerics were my main class of choice, and I played them less like holy men and more like occult scholars. So, less fighting, holy man, and more Van Helsing. 

This is also the first time I saw an ad for the Witch Hunt game.

Dragon #86 - June 1984

Gods of the Suel Pantheon and the Dragon Deities helped me rethink what gods could be in D&D terms. This issue also gave me new familiars to consider and the idea that they were not just a special pet. The article wasn't perfect, but it was a good start. The Ecology of articles were always great because it made me feel like there were "monster naturalists" in the various worlds studying these creatures.

Dragon #87 - July 1984

The big one here is the Ecology of the Dryad. I know this was a catalyst and one of the reasons why Cara and Larina are both redheads; Red hair = magic. The review for Stalking the Night Fantastic and the ads for Chill made me realize that horror in RPGs was a good option.

Dragon #88 - August 1984

This is another important one. We got Wee Jas ("Wee Yas" or "Ouija") as the Witch Queen, Goddess of Witches and magic. Plus she looked great. THAT was Larina's look for a long time. How could I have not fallen in love with her? And she is Lawful Neutral. The same alignment Larina is to this very day. I may not have known all my witches yet, but I knew who their goddess was. 

Dragon #89 - September 1984

Very helpful article in Many Types of Magic since it shows already that many types of magic are already baked into the system; it is just a matter of finding a spot for witchcraft. The ads for the Time-LIFE Enchanted World prominently feature their first book, Witches and Wizards, which gives witches legitimacy in the pages of Dragon. 

Dragon #90 - October 1984

This features the witch-coded Incantatrix. The name is related to Enchantress, and her ability to steal spells gives her a witch-like feel in a world already filled with wizards. I tried Cara out as an incantatrix for a bit, but didn't care for it for her, and she went back to being just an illusionist. Dragon is certainly circling around a witch-shaped center of gravity for me. Speaking of charm, this issue also has the definitive list of creatures that can be subject to the Charm Person spell. 

Dragon #91 - November 1984

We go darker here with a new demon from Gygax and more devils from Greenwood. Certainly material for masters of the occult.

Dragon #92 - December 1984

Double hit again from the Gygax/Greenwood tag team. Gary has more to say about clerics and I am all ears. This helps me figure out things for my clerics and paladins and ultimately my healer and witch classes. On the other end of the magic spectrum, Ed gives us more spells and has the audacity to introduce me to the Witch The Simbul without explaining anything else about her! 

Dragon #93 - January 1985

Real-world witch hunts come to D&D as told in Gary's “Thinking for Yourself.”  In fake worlds, “The Making of a Milieu” gave me strong advice about building a world where witches would live. This article, along with the two organization articles for Top Secret and Gamma World, gave me something I could build for Chill right away. Which in turn gave me more for D&D and witches. 

Dragon #94 - February 1985

The fiction section featuring Baba Yaga is a great addition to my witch mythos. Not a lot ton of information, but enough. The Ranger revisions also show me that classes don't have to be a static concept.  

Dragon #95 - March 1985

This one is useful as a perspective issue. Tolkien, Forgotten Realms material, non-combat experience, magic-item creation, and the religious response to RPGs in the form of DragonRaid, all feed the broader question of what fantasy gaming is allowed to be. The Denis Beauvais art for the fiction, Desperate Acts, gave me a character who was a contemporary of Larina and part of the same adventuring group. 

Dragon #96 - April 1985

I have to say, I never had much use for Dragon’s April Fools issue each year. This one was no exception; there was little in it of interest to me for the witch class, or to Larina in particular. The only thing that stands out is the FASA Star Trek vessel Ginny’s Delight. Which I low-key loved. It may not have a direct bearing on the witch, but then again, my reading and gaming habits were not so easily compartmentalized. Whether it was fantasy, horror, the occult or superheroes, I did not see them as distinct categories. The starship is part of the same milieu as all the other science fiction, and the like I was into back then.

Dragon #97 - May 1985

Another Pages from the Mages article. The implication here is that wizards are dynamic; they research, they record their work. And spell books are treasure, maybe worth more than gold by weight. 

Dragon #98 - June 1985

If nothing else, this issue reminds me that we are not, and certainly were not, bound by books. There is a lot of talk of playing RAW and rules orthodoxy these days; back then, that is not at all how we did it. There was a lot of experimentation. The “Creative Magic Items” article reminds us of this. 

Dragon #99 - July 1985

This issue covers Unearthed Arcana, and how it will change AD&D. This is a sign to me that AD&D IS a game that can evolve. The Neutral point of view helped me figure out how to play a Lawful Neutral witch when, say, a chaotic Neutral one would have been easier.  

Dragon #100 - August 1985

Classes are on Gary's and Frank Mentzer's mind with the Druid-Ranger, which seemingly breaks the rules. Well, if it is good enough for these two, who am I to argue? The Forum reminds me, though, that there are still people who refer to additions and changes to rules as "illegal."  

"City Beyond the Gate" showed me something I already knew in theory, but this was great in practice; that AD&D is not confined to the quasi-medieval world. Now I remember playing this adventure; I remember many of the characters in it: Johan II, Nigel, and I know Larina was not there.  Too bad; she would have loved it. Marvel-phile gave a strong write-up in Dr. Strange and was a good model on what I wanted for my witches. The variant magic system was also quite fascinating. 

Dragon #101 - September 1985

The biggest draw for me here is the Creature Catalog III with some witch-adjacent monsters. "Sorry, Wrong Dimension" from Mike Manolakes covers alternate realities, a feature that would be important to Larina's many futures. 

Dragon #102 - October 1985

I have not done this one for a "This Old Dragon" because I don't have a copy anymore. This one does have some items that I considered important, but not in the typical manner. Ads for The Complete Spellcaster and Elvira/Chill had my attention. The "Valley of the Earth Mother" was good, but not one I ever ran.

Dragon #103 - November 1985

A look into the future here. Gygax discusses future editions of AD&D and the game's evolution. The article on the saurians catches my interest, but not for the witch. 

Dragon #104 - December 1985

The articles on the thief class are interesting and showcase the class beyond the charts and numbers. I will use similar logic to pull the witch further away from her "magic-user" roots. 

Dragon #105 - January 1986

Our first issue of 1986. I mention here that I recall January 1986 starting out really cold. I recently taken these memories to help form a new Jackson, IL adventure featuring my frozen misanthrope The Refrigerator, but more on that later.  "Seeing is Believing" by Geoffrey Meissner covers different types of invisibility. While this had immediate uses for my witch class, it served my DM and his Riddlemaster/Adept psychic classes even more. The magic in our worlds stopped being a monolith and became multiple expressions. 

Fraser Sherman's "A world of difference: The parallel concept expands gaming horizons" was the right thing at the right time for me, as I was really exploring the idea of parallel worlds at the time. This was the height of DC's "Crisis on Infinite Earths," so we really made extensive use of these ideas. Larina would later be in contact with some of her alternates via her Mirror, or "Shards," as I now call them. 

Dragon #106 - February 1986

Issue #106 matters to me because of "A Plethora of Paladins." That article showed that the paladin need not exist only as a single lawful-good archetype with an evil mirror image. There could be variations. There could be holy warriors shaped by alignment, ethos, patronage, and worldview. For someone building new classes, that is an important lesson. It says the game's iconic roles can be opened up, examined, and rebuilt.

That matters to the witch because the witch was never just meant to be the "distaff magic-user" or the "evil cleric" or the "NPC spellcaster from a fairy tale." She needed her own space and reasons to grow. Sure, I never used a lot of these paladins; I was pretty happy sticking to the Lawful Good ones and my single Anti-Paladin NPC, but I was thrilled to see them. 

"The Laws of Magic" and "Casting Spells for Cash" both feed into the idea of magic as something with rules, culture, economics, and social consequences. That connects nicely to Larina's earliest personality: a witch pretending to be a wizard-in-training. She is not merely learning spells. She is learning how magical society works, what it expects, what it permits, and how to pass inside it while being something slightly different.

Dragon #107 - March 1986

I have not reviewed this one yet, but it is sitting here next to me. I will get into it in detail in a future This Old Dragon, but the artifact from this one is a reference to Laurana from Dragonlance. That matters because Larina’s name almost certainly owes something to Laurana. Did I get the name from this issue? Probably not. It is much more likely that it came from reading the Dragonlance novels themselves years before. But #107 shows the name, or close enough to it, was in the air at exactly the right time.

This is one of those small pieces of character archaeology that I can't prove, but that's too interesting to ignore. Larina was not named Laurana, but the resemblance is obvious, and the timing is right. Somewhere between Dragonlance, Dragon Magazine, and my own teenage need to make the character mine, Laurana became Larina. In truth, Sinéad owes her overall look and part of her history to Laurana. 

Dragon #108 - April 1986

I would not call Issue #108 a major witch issue, though "Cantrips for Clerics" is an entry worth a mention. I had come to view divine and semi-divine spellcasters with more variety in mind than the run-of-the-mill cleric; one could see that same design impulse at work in the healer, the sun priest, the necromancer and the witch.

Clerical cantrips suggested that even minor magic could help define a caster’s identity. There is no need for every effect to be a miracle or some purpose for the dungeon or the battlefield. A few well-placed blessings, charms, and practical bits of magic speak volumes about how a character stands in relation to the supernatural.

This applies to witches as well. It is not enough for a witch to be judged by her top-tier spells; she must have that quality in her minor workings, too. Hedge witches need recognition as well and need to work into my systems of magic.

Dragon #109 - May 1986

While I can easily point to Dragon #114 as a major issue for the witch, issue #109 might have been more influential. While I had a fairly good grasp of the math behind XP per level values, Paul Montgomery Crabaugh’s "Customized Classes" becomes the article where I can test my ideas. It was a pivot point in my home games. I created the witch, healer, and sun-priest XP values that spring. My DM Grenda used it to create his various Riddlemaster/Adept classes. That summer was spent playing and playtesting a lot of new classes. This article showed me not just that I could build a witch, but I could build a good one. 

The Barbarian Cleric by Thomas Kane even gave us a shaman-like class. Great for my ideas on what a primitive witch could be. 

Dragon #110 - June 1986

The Cult of the Dragon was a HUGE influence on the development of cults and heresies in my game. In fact, my very first notes on what would become my Scaled Sisterhood Witchcraft tradition were written down here. Ed also gives us some more background on Elminster himself and some spells.

The Norse Myth articles gave me Angur-boda, Grid, and Gullveig. All described as witches and all of whom have played some role in my writings and development. 

Dragon #111 - July 1986

The magic focusing items grabbed my attention right away, and certainly West Haven owes a little bit to the magical city Malachi. 

If DC was dominated by the Crisis on Infinite Earths at this time, Marvel had their Phoenix Cycle. Phoenix gets a write-up from Roger E. Moore and later on Supergirl gets one as well from Greg Gordon. Why are they important, well both are described as two of the most powerful beings in their respective universes and both to a degree had impacts on my later game writing in particular the work I did on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Dragon #112 - August 1986

I just covered this one last week. The big thing for me was that this was the first issue that let me know there had been a witch class in the pages of Dragon, and I was not creating something that no one would want.  I would need to wait for Dragon #114 to see it, but that was only a couple of months away; it wouldn't be until I picked up Best of The Dragon (Volume 1) that I saw the witch from Issue #5. And it would be even longer before I got the Dragon Magazine CD-ROM collection and then saw the witches from issues #20 and #43.

By the time Larina appeared in my notebooks in July 1986, most of the ingredients were already there. Dragon #112 showed me the magazine had older witches in its own past, and Dragon #114 gave me the first Dragon witch class I actually had in my hands.

Dragon #113 - September 1986

The last issue before the witch. The cover alone was enough for me since the swordsman reminded me of my Johan III character.  "Clout for Clerics" is a good article for expanding the Cleric's role and giving them some followers.  James Yates gives us lesser clerics and man-at-arms followers for clerics and explains why, out of all the classes, they should have them. I expand on these ideas for covens. 

There is also a great article on Hades. 

Dragon #114 - October 1986

And here she is. I have said so much about this particular issue that I am at a loss as to what more I need to add. So, here are some links to things I have already said, including Larina's involvement.

• This Old Dragon, #114
• Character Creation Challenge: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition
• Skylla: Dragon Magazine #114
• Larina Nix for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Dragon #114 version)

The Larry Elmore art of the "enchantress" became my stand-in art for Larina for decades. While this was the first Dragon Magazine witch I read about (like many others) it was not their first, nor as you can see from above, the first time witchy topics were discussed in the pages of Dragon.

In retrospect, there is an inevitability to Dragon #114. Not because TSR was always going to publish a witch class, but for over two years I had been reading in that direction. The magazine had put before me its share of god-bound clerics and odd familiars, goddesses of magic and spellbooks with a past, not to mention alternate and custom classes, the monsters of folklore, parallel worlds, magical cities and the sort of horror that lingers at the periphery of fantasy. Come October 1986, the pieces were all laid out on the table; I picked them all up and reassembled them into something more Larina-shaped. 

Special Mentions

While these do not fit inside the publishing window for the most part, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up Best of Dragon vol. I, II, and IV.

Best of The Dragon

This first collection reprints the witch from The Dragon #5. Great little bit of archaeology and shows that the witch has been haunting the pages of Dragon (and D&D) since the very beginning.

Best of Dragon, Vol. II

This one gave me the Anti-Paladin and the Healer class. Not to mention two different ninjas. I learned that classes are not a static thing.

Best of Dragon, Vol. IV

This is where I first saw the Death Master NPC class and compared it to my own Necromancer. I liked the Death Master quite a bit, and I actually approached Len Lakofka about it later on. We stayed in regular communication until his death.

Not all of these shaped Larina in particular or even my witches in general, but they did contribute to the environment in which my witches could grow, and Larina could be created and grow. 

That is why I say Larina is a Dragon Magazine witch, but not because one article created her. Dragon gave me permission, examples, arguments, monsters, spellbooks, gods, and the idea that classes could be built, tested, changed, and made personal. Dragon #114 gave me a witch. The previous two years helped make sure that when I finally found her, I already knew what to do with her.