Mirror Monday: Local Legends Make Better Monsters

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

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

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

Naturally, one particular detail caught my attention.

Jackson County.

Sometimes the universe really isn't particularly subtle.

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

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

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

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

There's Something Out There

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1986?

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

That's it.

That's your evidence.

And tomorrow? The story will be even better.

The Crimson Cougar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is Where 1986 Becomes My Mirror

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

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

Information moved differently.

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

They have to talk to people.

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

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

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

Before there is a monster, there is a story.

The Monster Before the Monster

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

Now we've moved beyond zoology.

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

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

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

Jackson Has Its Own Monsters

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

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

Then there is MoChem.

MoChem goes back much farther for me.

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

Nobody agrees on what MoChem is.

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

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

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

Then there is Old Annie.

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

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

So everyone knows an Old Annie story.

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

Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who saw her.

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

Three monsters. Three different origins.

One begins with real wildlife.

One begins with childhood campfire stories and industrial anxiety.

One I invented completely.

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

No Sasquatches in Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, there are no Sasquatches in Jackson.

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

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

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

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

Not Every Monster Belongs Everywhere

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

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

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

I don't want that again.

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

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

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

Go to Where the Monsters Are

I think I finally have an axiom for this.

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

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

This lesson has also been following me through another project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the characters can go find them.

Let the Place Tell You What Lives There

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

Then listen.

Maybe you find a real local legend. Great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manly Wade Wellman, Jackson, Sunny Valley and Appalachian Gothic

 What started as an exercise for my Witches of Appendix N project has become a rather thorough immersion in the works of Manly Wade Wellman. I have spent more than a couple of months reading his works and listening to his books.  

I went in looking for witches and any number of useful ideas about magic, and to add another piece to the puzzle: the literary landscape behind Dungeons & Dragons.

I did not expect Wellman to start reaching backward into things I had already written.

But here we are.

The more I read Wellman, the more I could see bits of him reflected in two of my own settings, Jackson and Sunny Valley. Some of those similarities are pure coincidence. Others are the result of the same folklore and traditions influencing us from very different directions.

And in at least one case, Wellman handed me an idea that was simply too good not to use.

On the Matter of "Thorne"

Those who have been reading here for a while know Faye Thorne. You might also be aware that this is not, in fact, her real name. She is really "Fiona Voss."

As a child, she was stolen by the Blackthorne Hags and renamed Faye Thorne, to be remade into what I have been calling the "Thorn Child." The Blackthorn Hags took a witch child and tried to turn into a hag.

When I first put together Faye’s character sheet, "Thorne" was just part of the package. But then I came across some Manly Wade Wellman and made the acquaintance of his Rowley Thorne. It was too hard to ignore.

Now, I am inclined to write such things off as happenstance; after all, I had no intention of lifting from Wellman, and there were decades between us when it came to creating these characters. More to the point, when I created Faye Thorne, I had not yet read Wellman. But Faye has a history. The Blackthorne Hags were in the habit of taking children from two families in particular: the Vosses and the Thornes. The Blackthornes were related to the Thornes.

That gave the coincidence some weight. What if the two human families were related?

It led me to do some speculative genealogy. Let us say that Rowley Thorne at some point became involved with a Teutonic witch named Elsa Voss, and they had a son, Arthur Voss. Arthur would have his mother’s name but Rowley’s blood. Fast forward a few years and you have Fiona Voss, who is in every way a Thorne as well as a Voss. 

All of a sudden, the Hags’ fixation on both families is less random. They have been tracking a single bloodline. And the moniker they put on Fiona takes on a different meaning. "Faye Thorne" was never a legal formality. One might say the hags were not giving her a new surname so much as putting an old one back where it belonged. Knowing who she was, they made sure of it. There is something wonderfully unsettling about that.

It gives the whole Thorn Child concept more weight. The hags were not content to simply abduct; they were tending a bloodline like a gardener tends generations of roses, waiting for the right traits to show before they made their claim.

As for whether Rowley Thorne is truly in Fiona’s past, I would rather she (and us) remain in the dark.

There may be a scrawled note from John Thunstone who once looked into the matter of Elsa Voss and Rowley, or an entry in an occult journal, or a family Bible in poor repair. Plausible, certainly. Proof, no. It is very Wellman of it, and suits Fiona.

For Fiona has spent her life spurning the notion that your blood writes your future. The Hags did their worst; gave her a name, taught her the art, ripped out bits of her soul to make her the Thorn Child. She put up with it and lived to tell of it. So even if she were to find Rowley Thorne in her family tree, it would not alter who she is.

Blood will tell you why the monsters want you. It does not account for the person you are. I can see Faye in the mid-90s seeking out an elderly John Thunstone and handling, and not being burned by, his famous silver sword blessed by St. Dunstan. Equally, I can hear Thunstone saying: "The silver knows nothing of surnames."

There is merit in that. Faye is not the sum of her biology. 

There feels something very Wellman about all this. All I needed was a book covered in human flesh and written in blood-red ink telling the Blackthorns what to do and how to do it.

Jackson and Wellman

Jackson is not Appalachia. That needs to be made clear first.

Jackson is a Midwestern town, and the particular flavor of its supernatural landscape developed out of very different sources.

But Jackson and Wellman's fiction share something important: the supernatural has been there all along.

The characters do not discover that magic has suddenly entered their world. They discover that the world they thought they knew was never quite the whole world.

Old stories turn out to have some truth behind them. Things dismissed as superstition prove to have practical value. The person who was considered eccentric because she hung something strange above her door may have had an excellent reason for doing so.

Where Jackson differs is in the reaction.

When the kids in Jackson find out there is something horrible living in the abandoned building, their first instinct is usually to find a flashlight, grab their friends, and go see what it is.

There is an almost heroic recklessness to Jackson. They run toward the darkness.

That is not how Sunny Valley works.

John Thunstone Comes to Jackson

The case can be made that Jackson is precisely the kind of town John Thunstone or Judge Pursuivant would put on their itinerary. I have no trouble imagining an invitation from Illinois Beecher College for John Thunstone to deliver a lecture. On paper it is all very respectable and academic, with a title like “Survivals of European Folk Belief in the American Midwest” or perhaps “Ceremonial Magic and the Persistence of Folklore in Modern America.” To the faculty he is a well-heeled independent scholar with a command of religion and the occult, spending his retirement years on a speaking tour.

But anyone who has read Wellman will know there is more to it than that. Thunstone does not concern himself with these matters as quaint holdovers from a less enlightened time; he studies them because some of them are true. Some of those truths need to be confronted. And that is what makes Jackson such a good fit. 

John Thunstone at Illinois Beecher College

Put him at a lectern in Beecher and he will be talking of witches and old gods and ritual objects and the like. The majority of his audience will think they are in for an entertaining bit of folklore. A few will understand he is being quite literal. Young Larina Nichols will be among them.

I can see her sitting there, this large and urbane man with an air of intimidation describing things she already knows to be fact. She will be listening intently and put in a word here and there. Not your run-of-the-mill questions on symbolism or history. Hers will be a little too precise for comfort.

Thunstone will pick up on it. He may well pause after one of her remarks and fix his gaze on the red-haired girl in the crowd to see that her curiosity is not of the academic sort.

This is Jackson. It is where the supernatural can be put under a microscope. There are the college archives and the libraries, the hospital records and the old newspapers with their forgotten scandals and family histories, and enough people around to spot the impossible when it happens. Judge Pursuivant or Thunstone could come to town and have no end of work.

Of course the local kids would tend to complicate matters. Thunstone might want to spend three days doing his homework on an abandoned house before he so much as steps on the property. By then Candy has already picked the lock, and Larina and her group will have been inside for some time. 

Wellman and Sunny Valley

I can’t help but wonder what bits of synchronicity led me to be listening to Wellman on audiobook while driving through the Appalachian Mountains recently. But even if I hadn’t, the connections abound. Indeed, I found myself driving through some of the very mountains Wellman had talked about and driving to the area of the county Wellman called home.

Sunny Valley has several attributes that are very much in the Wellman Universe.  There is an isolation to this Appalachian community, old mountains all around it, and its own brand of local lore with a tinge of the cosmic at the edges. It leaves you with the sense that those who have put down roots here know things an outsider never will.

The kind of horror one encounters is not some import from a gothic chateau; it is of the land itself.

In that respect, Wellman’s touch is what sets Sunny Valley apart from Jackson. With Jackson, you have a propensity to head straight for trouble. In Sunny Valley, there is an awareness of the things in the hills that are not to be trifled with, and a need to abide by traditions that may seem irrational until they do not, if one is to survive.

Silver John Comes to Sunny Valley

 Silver John would arrive in Sunny Valley very differently.

Nobody invites him. He just comes walking down the road.

Maybe he is looking for a meal and somewhere to sleep. Maybe he plays his guitar at a church social or on somebody's porch. Maybe someone offers him supper because that is what you do when a traveler comes through.

He is there to listen, which is the point of it. Someone will bring up the lights on the ridge, or the cow that has gone dry, or the sound of knocking from under the old bridge once the clock strikes twelve. John does not scoff when an old woman says nobody is foolish enough to take the northern trail after dark. He makes no assumptions that a rule is without meaning just because no one can say why it was made. He asks about it.

Perhaps the old woman can recite the words to a song her grandmother put in her head but has long since lost the melody for. John has the melody. This is how things would work for Sunny Valley.

He is not like Thunstone, who brings his scholarship to bear. John is armed with memory. He does not come with some answer from the outside world; the answer has been here all along, living on in a bit of custom or a rhyme that has eluded everyone else. John is the one to recognize it.

What he does with that knowledge varies. He may fight, or make use of silver, or sing the right song. At times he is wise enough to keep off the mountain.

In time, the folk of Sunny Valley will have only a hazy notion of him. "That fellow with the silver strings," they will say. "Nice enough man. Put up with the Carters for three nights." They might note he was gone the morning the lights on Buckhorn Ridge went out. But then they will be on to other things. The valley has had its share of oddities.

Sunny Valley becomes one more tale in John the Balladeer's story. John is one more strange visitor in Sunny Valley's strange history.

Wellman has given me cause to think again on how music keeps folklore alive. I have come to like this idea from Silver John. Explanations get lost and books burn, but a song endures. A hymn in a hollow will have a verse you won’t find elsewhere; an old fiddle tune can chart a safe way through where one ought not to go at night. The ones singing them don’t know they are holding onto occult knowledge, nor do they need to. The song has preserved it.

People forget. The song remembers.

The Shonokins

Take Wellman's own Shonokins. These "near-human" people are described as descended from another prehistoric hominid lineage, not Homo sapiens. They were in America before the native Americans, likely before homo sapien left Africa. Maybe something that explains the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon. 

I don’t need to transplant the Shonokins into Sunny Valley, but I do want their effect. It is a world of difference between "there is a monster in that cave" and "something has been living in that cave since before we came along." The first is an encounter. The second is history. And for Sunny Valley, that is a vital distinction. 

Not just a "monster," something that thinks, reasons, and maybe even feels like we do. But they are not a part of the "we." Even a hillbilly with generations of inbreeding is still human. There should be things in the Appalachians that are not even that.

Maybe something like a human-troglodyte, or a grimlock or aglæca. Something really old, living up in those mountains. It looks human, mostly, but isn't.  

Maybe I can dip into that other Appendix N mainstay, the near-human. Not an "ape-man" or even a "sub-human," but an "other-human" or "ur-human." Something that would serve the same ecological niche as the Shonokin or even "the old man of the mountains." But make him less Hillbilly, and more Woodwose or Lovecraftian. Like the fishmen of Innsmouth.

Appalachian Gothic

It brings me back to the notion of Appalachian Gothic. These are geologically old mountains, having seen worlds unrecognizable to us, seas come and go, continents collide. Life has come and gone while they have stood there. A decaying manor or ruined abbey might preserve the sins of the past in traditional Gothic, but here the landscape does the job. The mountain and the woods remember. The creek by your house has likely been on its course since before any human walked the Earth.

That lends the supernatural a quality that is at once folkloric and cosmic. An old woman will tell you not to cross a stream after dark. She may not be able to put a cosmological significance to it, but her grandmother told her and her grandmother’s grandmother knew better. Someone in the line learned the reason. That suffices.

I have taken much from Wellman in this regard. Local horror need not be small. One can be tied to a single valley or family and still be made aware of forces that predate us. Grounding the cosmic in the local only makes it more potent. You cannot leave it behind by heading somewhere far off. This is home.

The Old Rules

There is a particular relationship with tradition in Sunny Valley because of it. You follow rules without question. Don’t whistle in the woods when it is dark. Don’t answer a call from the ridge. Leave the stone. Don’t take the left fork after sunset. An outsider may hear superstition, but a local hears instruction.

Not every one of them is true, and that is more interesting. Some are nonsense, some have been warped by time. But enough of them hold up.

You don’t require an occult order or a secret Vatican library to make sense of it all. No global conspiracy or team of hunters with ledgers on every species is necessary. The fact that the folks in a valley have been doing something odd for two centuries is record enough. Perhaps they had their reasons.

They likely have very good reasons.

Sunday Morning and the Old Ways

There is another Wellman quality I want Sunny Valley to retain: nobody feels obligated to sort every supernatural belief into a neat theological system.

Take the old woman in the front pew come Sunday morning at church. She is as likely to be there as she is to be the one cautioning you against answering if your name is called from the ridge.

She has her faith in Christ and wears a silver cross. You will find iron over the door, and she can rattle off three or four of the charms her grandmother put in her head. At the same time, she harbors no conflict in believing there are things under the mountain that predate man.

An outsider may have a go at putting labels on it: Christian, pagan, superstition, folk magic, Pow-wow. But she would consider such an exercise a waste of time. She knows what is needed for the safety of her family, and that is sufficient.

Jackson Runs Toward It. Sunny Valley Knows Better.

I have said it before.  If I were to put a fine point on the difference between the two settings, it is this: in Jackson the supernatural is a challenge to be met. In Sunny Valley it is simply part of the environment.

The kids in Jackson see an abandoned house and are curious as to what is within. The people in Sunny Valley already know something is in there. They may not be precise about it, but they know enough.

One setting breeds monster hunters, the other survivors. Both have their witches and their old secrets and things that ought not to be. But the approach is fundamentally different. After spending time with Manly Wade Wellman, I am in no doubt as to the nature of that difference. The trip through Appendix N was well worth it for that alone.

The Land Remembers

Wellman has put a finer point on the difference between Jackson and Sunny Valley for me.

In Jackson, it is the events that tend to haunt you. A crime was done, or a bargain struck. Someone died or went missing. The past has a way of intruding on the present when there is unfinished business.

Sunny Valley is haunted in another way, by its very places. No one can tell you what transpired at the old hollow; for all anyone knows, nothing did. Or perhaps it was just always wrong. There are stones left by the creek and an unspoken rule not to climb the western face of the mountain after dark, yet nobody can say who first made that decision or why. The origin is gone, but the custom endures. It is what lends Sunny Valley a particular kind of age. One might say Jackson has history while Sunny Valley has memory, and memory is older than history.

Bringing Wellman Back Around

It would be wrong to think I came up with Jackson or Sunny Valley because I had been reading Manly Wade Wellman. The oddity of it is that both were already in existence before I was even acquainted with his work. What he provided was a vocabulary for my own endeavors.

Plus, I have been talking about both settings for a long time now.

Consider the questions. In Jackson, one wants to know: who did this? What is it, and how do we put a stop to it? Sunny Valley poses entirely different ones: what rules have been left for us here? What will come of it if we are forgetful?

That distinction was there to begin with. Wellman merely helped me to see it. Which is as good an influence as any. Not the kind of writer one sets out to imitate, but the sort who causes you to examine your own work and come to an understanding of why it is the way it is.

And if nothing else? He gave me plenty of good ideas to make these two "80s teen horror" settings more distinct from each other. 

Mail Call Tuesday: Larina Nix KibiFig

A little bit ago, I was approached by KibiFig after they saw my review here about the figures I had ordered. I had also spoken out online about how pleased I was with the figures in general.

They offered me an upgraded figure, 6" or 15 cm. There was no expectation of a review afterward so I dug through some images and found one I liked.

Last Friday, the figure came in the mail. 

I already knew what it looked like because Kibifig had been using my little Larina in their most recent ads. I have to admit, it is always kind of fun to see her out and about.

The ordering process was simple, and I opted to spend the extra five or so dollars to get the custom box. In retrospect, the box is better for giving these figures as a gift than, say, a collector's box.  Besides, she is going to sit on my desk.

I had considered this an older version of my Jackson Larina, say circa 1995. But this Larna isn't wearing glasses, and she has a red cell phone that was not in the original image. That's fine. They got her necklace and her T-shirt right, so this very easily could be my WitchCraft RPG or Chill RPG version. In the end, though, it doesn't matter; she looks fantastic.

I went ahead and stuck her to her base. She stands well enough without it, but I tend to knock over figures on my desk all the time, and the base will keep her from falling over.

The online ads. These showed up online around September 7. I got my figure notification the day before and delivery on September 18. Considering it was shipped from China and it went through the Chicago mail system, I call that pretty good.

Yeah. I am pretty happy with her.

Mirror Mondays: The Witch as a Liminal Figure

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

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

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

Neither One Thing Nor the Other

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

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

The Witches Outside of Town

Faye Thorne

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

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

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

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

The Thorn Child

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

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

Stephanie and Larina

Here is where you have to consider Stephanie and Larina.

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

Choice. 

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

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

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina

Fiona Voss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witches and Boundaries

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

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

High School Is a Liminal Place

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

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

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

The Witch in the Doorway

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

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

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

The Equinox

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

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

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

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

And standing there is the witch.

Tales of Jackson: In Cold Blood

 It is February 1986 in Jackson, IL, and Dr. Andreas Gelé is visiting both Beecher and MacAlister colleges to give lectures on the exciting field of cryonics and its use in surgery.

The town is unseasonably cold, even for February, and the townsfolk are worried that they are in for a repeat of the Winter of 1985.

February 14th, Friday night, sometime after the school dance, Valerie Beaumont leaves the school, walks to her car, and is not noticed missing until the morning of Monday the 17th, when the police are alerted that her car was still in the lot. Her keys, purse, and most importantly, her coat are still in the car. Police suspect foul play, but the crime scene is already overrun with students coming to school. 

What the police record, but barely comment on, is that her sword is in the back seat of her 1983 Chevy Citation.  The characters know that Val would walk coatless and barefoot in the Illinois snow, but she would never, ever leave that sword behind.

The next two days, both Sylvia Velasco (2/19/86) and Renee Sylvi Jäneläinen (2/20/86) went missing. 

The police interview everyone. Valerie did not have a boyfriend; neither did Renee. If Sylvia does, no one seems to know who he is. It is also 1986; they are not asking about other options. 

One thing is certain. Someone is hunting magical women. 

I also wanted an adventure where Candy and Denise were NOT the monster bait for once. Though my players did miss them.

--

Cold Blood is the next adventure I played for Jackson, taking place in February of 1986. It features the NIGHT SHIFT debut of my frozen little misanthrope Dr. Andreas Gelé, aka the Refrigerator. I had to change his usual raison d’être here, since it didn't really fit Jackson's horror vibe. Oh, his normal modus operandi is horrific enough; I just needed something closer to Jackson. So he is not collecting women and freezing them to preserve their beauty; he is instead collecting and freezing witches to understand their magic and, more importantly, their ability to age more slowly. 

It's a well-known trope that witches don't age like normal humans. This is true in many games and media featuring witches. And it is true here as well. The witch characters in the game just didn't know this yet. They learn about it when they uncover Gelé's notes. Not just notes, worked-up profiles on all the witch characters, including their suspected ages (he thinks they are older than they are and 'pretending' to be teens). These profiles are terrifying in their clinical detachment and their dehumanizing element. Witches are not people to him. They are things, and he can extract their essence to prolong his own life. He grabs Valerie, thinking she is a witch, knowing only that she has some magic and that he has evidence she is much older than she appears. Both of which are true, but he does not suspect she is immortal. Since she is not responding to his treatments as expected (she is not a witch, really), he freezes her solid to experiment on her later. This would kill a normal human. For Valerie, it just pisses her off. 

He goes after Sylvia and Renee next, assuming that as outsiders (an immigrant distrusted by the community and a foreign exchange student), they would not be missed.

This is the first time the witch characters in the game have learned this. They know Valerie is immortal. But other than that, they know nothing else. As my playtest characters, Stephanie knows that she has a grandmother close to 100 (she is actually much older), and Faye's "aunties" are really Urban Hags. Larina's own mother is gone, and her father only has the tiniest of magic (I have him making sparks with his hand at a later point). So none of my playtest witch players or characters know. 

Sylvia knows. Because, of course, she does. And it is also the sort of knowledge she wouldn't share unless she was given something for it. Renee knows. But she feels it is not her place to say anything. She is the quiet one, but Renee is also the one who is missed.

This brings in my other layer. 

Roderick Morgan, the psychic, knows she is gone. 

Morgan: "Where’s Renee?"
Larina: "What?"
Morgan: "Renee Jäneläinen. Where is she?"
Larina: "Why would I know?"
Morgan: "Because Valerie is missing. Sylvia is missing. Now Renee is gone. And every time this town starts eating people, there are witches standing near the teeth."

Morgan doesn't like witches. But not because he is a misogynistic jerk, but because witches are "untidy"; they are too chaotic, and he thinks their psychic baggage causes half the problems in town. He is not entirely wrong. Every time someone uses magic, it is like ringing a dinner bell for the supernatural elements in town. BUT some of the players were under the impression that Morgan hates witches and, by extension, women. I mean, he is an arrogant prick sometimes, but that is too far. I wanted to show that he is absolutely NOT Andreas Gelé, but he can see the road Gelé is on from where he is standing.

Faye: "Are you keeping tabs on us, Morgan?"
Morgan: "Don’t flatter yourself. I keep tabs on all potential threats."
Stephanie (tersely): "Renee isn’t a threat."
Morgan: "No. (quieter) She isn't."

I said before that Morgan and Renee are based on two old AD&D characters that have an uneasy history, Morgan Highstar and Rhiannon. At that time I didn't know what their reactions were going to be in their Jackson versions. Then it became obvious. Morgan likes Renee. At the end of this adventure, he should be a better person. Maybe not by much, but his classification of the witches in town is a little too close to Gelé's notes, and that should bother him. It has changed how I played him afterward. 

How Does it End?

At the end of the adventure, the witches and Morgan are standing together. My not-so-subtle message here? Together they are stronger, and that is where the magic is, not in a blood or tissue sample.

So, here is the problem I was having with my adventure. I have Gelé here. He has kidnapped Valerie, Sylvia, and Renee. In my game, they were rescued by Morgan, Larina, Stephanie, and Faye. Pretty much every bit of heavy firepower I have in this game. And Larina, at this point in her life, is pretty well known for her very poor anger management skills. She wanted to burn him alive at his first "Ah, Fräulein Nichols." How do I give the characters and the players a satisfactory ending and STILL make it so The Refrigerator could come back? 

Well, as it turns out, I gave myself a "Rule of Two" roll that his machines would fail. I rolled a "1." A success that, in this case, is also a failure. The machines begin to blow up with Gelé melting before their eyes. Everyone got out, and I had Val toss out a 'See you in Hell, Andreas.' 

So, just like his horror godfather, Dr. Phibes, Dr. Andreas Gelé might return.

Presently, I don't have any plans to bring him back to Jackson, but he might appear in other NIGHT SHIFT games. 

Dr. Andreas Gelé by Eugene Jaworski

Dr. Andreas Gelé

5th level Inventor, Human Male

Background: Scholar

Base Abilities

Strength: 11 (+0)
Agility: 13 (+1) 
Toughness: 14 (+1) n
Intelligence: 18 (+3) A
Wits: 16 (+2) n
Persona: 10 (+0) 

Vit: 25 (1d6)
DV: 8
Fate Points: 1d8

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +3/+2/+1
Attack bonus (base): +2
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0

Languages: English, German, French
Skills: Medicine, Cyronics, Engineering

Saves: +4 to Intelligence and Wits saves. +1 to Toughness.

Inventions
Freeze Ray
Effects (1st-3rd level)
- Chill Ray
- Hold Person
- Sleep
- Slow

Effects (4th-6th level)
- Control Temperature
- Finger of Death
- Wall of Ice

Effects (7th-9th level)
- Destroy Life

Cryochamber
Effects (1st-3rd level)
- Hold Person

Effects (7th-9th level)
- Sleeping Village

Heroic Touchstones
Level 1: +1 to Toughness saves.
Level 2: +1 to hit with unique attack mode (Chill Ray gun)

Hair: Black with Gray streaks
Eyes: Blue
Height: 6'0"

Archetype: Science Nerd / Evil inventor
Quote: "Ah, you see Fräulein, only cold logic can prevail here."
Quirks: Arrogant and thinks he is smarter than everyone in the room. He is usually right about that. 
Theme song: Cold as Ice - Foreigner

And because I have not posted him yet and to show the similarities between these two. 

"Just Mogan."

Roderick Morgan

4th level Psychic, Human Male
Student at St. Michael's Catholic Academy and High School

Background: Nerd

Base Abilities

Strength: 14 (+1)
Agility: 14 (+1) 
Toughness: 10 (+0) 
Intelligence: 18 (+3) A
Wits: 16 (+2) n
Persona: 16 (+2) n

Vit: 20 (1d6)
DV: 8
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +3/+2/+1
Attack bonus (base): +2
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0

Languages: English, Latin
Skills: Computers, Writing 

Saves: +4 to Persona saves, +1 to Wits saves

Psychic Abilities
Danger Sense, Supernatural Attacks, Supernatural Power

Psychic Powers
Precognition 4 (Supernatural)
ESP 4
Biofeedback 1

Heroic Touchstones
Level 1: +1 to Wits saves
Level 2: Pick Locks skill (35%)

Hair: Black
Eyes: Blue
Height: 6'0"

Archetype: Student 
Quote: "Witches are messy. They are untidy and frankly get on my nerves."
Quirks: Arrogant. Never uses his first name; he prefers to go by "Morgan." 
Theme song: Tom Sawyer - Rush

Morgan isn't quite Andreas Gelé, but he can see the path from where he is standing. The thing that makes Morgan, ultimately, a good person is he chooses not to take that path. Oh, he can still be an asshole, but he's not an evil asshole.

I also had pulled out my copy of Beyond the Supernatural 1st Ed since I knew I was going to be stating him up eventually. Not done with his BtS sheet yet.

Night Shift^® is a registered trademark of Elf Lair, LLC.

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

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

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

But most of it came from books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Witchcraft by Montague Summers (1956 edition)

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

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

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

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelf by Shelf, Book by Book

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

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

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

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

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

The Mirror Shard: A Wrinkle Between Worlds

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

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

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

That is the kind of magic that appeals to me.

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

And in Carbon Vale, Siân lived. 

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

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

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

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

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

The Best of Both Worlds, when Creepy met Nix

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