RPG Retrospective: The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG

 On this day in 1981, 45 years ago, I went to see the newest George Lucas/Steven Spielberg collab called "Raiders of the Lost Ark."  I went with my best friend Steven and it was a life changer for both of us. Steven watched it and wanted to become a big Hollywood director. I watched it and wanted to become a university professor. We both got to our dreams, more or less. Steven became an art director and is now fed up with Hollywood. I became a professor, but sold my soul to the dot-com world during the late 90s/early 2000s dot-com boom. I, too, had become a little burned out on academic life. 

But Raiders of the Lost Ark still remains a perfect movie in our minds. One we still talk about to this very day.

It is just too bad the RPG was so, well, terrible. At least that was my recollection of it. But is that true? 

Let's pull out my copy and have a deep dive into the game and what it has to offer.

Fortune and Glory, Kid

When TSR picked up the license for Indiana Jones, it looked like a slam dunk. After all, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been a massive success, Temple of Doom was hitting theaters, and TSR was flush with cash and ambition. Iron Crown had Middle-earth. Doctor Who and Star Trek had a home at FASA, and now Indy was coming to Lake Geneva. 

And let us not forget, this was TSR we were talking about, the very company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, and, by 1984, the excellent Marvel Super Heroes game.

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out… pretty much everything. 

TSR put out The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game in 1984. David "Zeb" Cook and John Byrne, the comic book writer, are credited with the design.  On the surface, it’s a boxed set with everything you'd expect: dice, minis (well, cardboard cutouts you had to assemble), a rulebook, character cards, and an introductory adventure. Inside, you get a chance to live out pulp adventures in the style of everyone’s favorite bullwhip-wielding archaeologist. Sounds great, right?

Except here’s the first problem: you had to play Indy. Or at best, one of a handful of established characters like Marion or Sallah. The rules didn’t include any way to make your own characters. That’s like handing a bunch of kids the Star Wars RPG and saying, "No, sorry, you can’t be smugglers or bounty hunters, you can only be Luke, Han, or Leia." Half the fun of role-playing is creating your own hero to drop into wild situations, and this game just locked the door on that entirely. It gives you some movie characters and tells you, "don't mess them up."

One could argue the later Indiana Jones Judge's Survival Pack made amends by introducing rules for original characters along with the kind of chases, ruins, and vehicles that ought to have been in the core box from day one. But that was the patch, if you will. TSR coming around to say "Oh, you wanted to role-play." But by then, the writing was on the wall. The original set had already conditioned people to think of this as the game where you couldn’t make your own character, and that is the way it was remembered.

The system itself is light, almost perfunctory. There’s some resolution mechanics, a few skill checks, and some chase and combat rules, but nothing that feels like it captures the frenetic energy of Indy punching Nazis or dodging rolling boulders. Instead, it feels like TSR wanted a quick "introductory RPG" to tie in with the movies without giving much thought to longevity or depth. The end result is that it plays more like a board game that forgot to include the board. Or, more on point, an RPG that forgot to include anything about role-playing.

There are percentile skill rolls versus Strength, Prowess, or Backbone, and the like. Nothing too difficult really.

There are rules for "danger" and some perfunctory chase rules (it is Indian Jones after all). So don’t think of it as mechanically useless. The bones are all there, you just have to look past some rather peculiar design decisions. 

But let's not pretend here. This is really not a good game. 

It is a shame, really. The ingredients for an outstanding Indiana Jones RPG were right there. You had the ancient ruins, the lost temples, secret cults, and their terrible artifacts. Nazis, gangsters, and the odd occult society. University politics and rival expeditions. Mummies, curses, ghosts, forbidden manuscripts, hidden cities, and desert tombs. Zeppelins and seaplanes, and a map with a red line across the ocean. You could build a campaign from all that without breaking a sweat.

Yet TSR produced an Indiana Jones game that was far too fixated on the man himself and not enough on his world. West End Games would get it right with Star Wars some years down the line. They grasped what was important: the player doesn’t want to be Luke or Han or Leia. He wants to inhabit the universe, with his own ship and his own Imperial entanglements and the kind of awful plan that somehow comes off.

Indiana Jones called for a World of Indiana Jones, as West End would call it later. All we got from TSR was the star when what we wanted was the stage.

The Problem with Being Indiana Jones

The system is just one problem. Take Indiana Jones: he lives because he is who he is. You don’t have to worry about him being put down by some guard in scene two or perishing in a truck chase. Even if he comes up short, it is in service of the plot. In a film, that is how it should be. But in a role-playing game it is another matter. The TSR version makes an effort to keep that sort of movie logic intact, but at the cost of any real peril. 

There is "Danger" but no real danger. 

Sure, Indy can have his moments, but the game will bend to accommodate him. Your heroes are not the run-of-the-mill pulp types putting their lives and limbs on the line; they are movie stars sporting a kind of narrative armor. I get why they went about it that way, but it doesn’t work for me.

What is the point of a pulp adventure if your character can’t come to grief? Maybe you shoot the swordsman, maybe you are the one who drops the gun. You could put your trust in the wrong guide or be unceremoniously thrown from the back of the truck. That is where the fun is. When the game goes to such lengths to shield the movie, it gets in the way of playing.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this RPG. It aspires to be an Indiana Jones movie when a good one ought to let you have an adventure in his style. They are not one and the same.

What It Gets Right

I wouldn’t want to be entirely unfair about it, though. There is much I like in this game.

To start with, it has the sense that Indiana Jones is a pulp character and makes no pretense of being a scholarly archaeological simulation. Good. What you get instead are your villains, your action, the clues and exotic locales, some perilous artifacts, and a kind of cliffhanger pacing. It puts Indy in his proper context, the same vein as Doc Savage or The Shadow, or one of those odd interwar stories from Republic serials and lost world fiction, where there is a blank spot on the map and someone is off on a secret expedition.

Then there is the speed of the thing. A slow, tactical affair would have been a disaster for an Indiana Jones game, so the fact that this is built for pace is important. Sure, it can be clunky at times, but it isn’t going to have you work out the tensile strength of your whip before you put it to use over a chasm. As it should be.

The Diana Jones Award and Nazi™

You could argue the afterlife of this game is nearly as good as the thing itself.

Game historians and fans know that TSR eventually had to pulp unsold copies of the boxed set after losing the license, which only adds to the mystique. One of the last copies to be burned was salvaged and became the Diana Jones Award. Which itself has been a focus of some gamer legend, with the original award now lost somewhere in the mail. 

There is a certain poetry to it, bordering on the mythic. The temple is destroyed but the artifact endures, you pull the relic from the ashes and it is handed down as a prize from one year to the next. In a way it has more of an Indiana Jones feel to it than the game did.

Then you have the old legend of the "Nazi™" figure that has been going around as long as anyone can remember. It is about as accurate as any gamer tale is, but then again, it is funnier for it. It has a ring of truth to it, the sort of thing a big 80s product with a name on it would get up to by mistake. The facts don’t have to be tidy for it to become part of the folklore.

Final Thoughts

There are some movies you can put on at any time, and they are just right; Raiders of the Lost Ark is still one of my perfect films. Put on that John Williams', score, and I am instantly 12 again, back in the Illinois Theater with my best friend. We were two kids looking at the same movie but seeing our own futures in it. He was watching the camera work, I was thinking of the classroom, yet we both saw the adventure.

You won’t get that from the TSR Indiana Jones RPG. It doesn’t come close to the feeling and perhaps never could. There is a fascination to its failure, though, in how instructive it is. It puts the distinction between adapting a story and a world in sharp relief. You see why player freedom has to be there, and that no license in the world is going to prop up a game if it loses sight of what players want to do when they sit down at the table.

They aren’t there to watch the hero. They want to be him. Or make their own kind of hero out of it, with his own hat and scars and bad decisions, and an impossible way out of a temple coming down around them.

For all that, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game isn’t some lost classic. More of a lost opportunity. I don’t mind owning it for that reason. A failed artifact has its place in a museum, or on my game shelf at the very least.

Indiana Jones and the Cauldron of Hecate

Create a character for a game with no character creation rules? Of course, I can't resist a challenge like this. Yes, there were character creation rules introduced later on, as I mentioned, but it was too little too late, really. Plus, I don't have those rules, so I can check them out. 

I mentioned above that watching this movie made me want to be a University professor, which I did for many years. So it would seem natural for me to want to stat up Prof. Scott Elders, my erstwhile self-insert character. Really, he is perfect since I have a Call of Cthulhu version where he is at a University researching occult artifacts. 

He is almost too perfect, in fact. The name of the game is "Indiana Jones," and bringing along Dr. Elders would be about the same thing as inviting Solar Pons into a Sherlock Holmes RPG to solve a case with Sherlock. No, I need someone who can look up to Indy, ask questions like "What is that, Dr. Jones?" and stand on their own.

I have the perfect choice, and she is a lot on my mind lately. Enter graduate student of ancient religions, Larina Nichols, from the University of Chicago.

How would she work this into this adventure? Simple, Indy has discovered some sort of clue that leads to the mythical "Cauldron of Hecate."  In typical movie tradition, I am also going to blend the myths of Hecate with the Cauldron of Cerriweden, in that it can be used to bring forth an army of undead soldiers, so of course, the Nazis, excuse me, Nazis™, want it.  Indy heads back to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to speak to Prof. Scot Elders, who was a grad student when he was there. Dr. Elders is not there, but his star grad student, Larina Nichols, is. She is able to translate the fragment and tells Indy she will tell him the rest of the translation when they get to Greece and Turkey! 

And off they go to Turkey, Greece, and wherever else, with Nazis hot on their tail and an army of the dead at the end. Plus, Indy, as far as I know, has never had to deal with a redhead before.

The best Indiana Jones adventures always have a few elements:

• A legendary artifact.
• A historical mystery.
• A rival faction.
• An expert who knows more than they admit.
• A supernatural truth hiding behind what everyone thinks is merely legend.

This has them all!

Larina Stephanie Nichols

Graduate student of Ancient Religions at the University of Chicago. 

Attributes (Normal/x2/½/¼)

Strength 46/92/23/11
Movement 52/104/26/13
Prowess 60/120/30/15
Backbone 76/152/38/19
Instinct 80/160/40/20
Appeal 92/184/46/23

Movement Rate (running): 20 squares (5 areas)/turn
Weapons: Knife
Money: $100
Languages: English, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Aramaic, Hittite
Irrational Fears: Fire
Notes:

I completely guessed at these. I figured she was slightly better at fighting than Willie (but only a little), a little under Indiy in intelligence, but she knows more languages. That is her "in" in this adventure; she speaks the languages Indy doesn't. Though I would say she is every bit as smart as Indy, if not smarter (that is her thing), but Indy is still the star of the show...er adventure. 

Since I have been going over her 1986 character sheet in detail recently, I am also bringing back her fear/fascination of fire here. 

She has a knife, likely a ritual blade she picked up somewhere, but this is a grad student with no training in weapons. She is not carrying a gun. 

In truth, I like this version a lot. I might try this version out as a 1930s Call of Cthulhu character one day. She needs her own theme music!

Jackson, IL: NPCs, The Ones Who Know

One of the big hooks in the Jackson, IL NIGHT SHIFT game I am using is that the adults in the game know a little bit of what is going on. That is to say they know Jackson has more than its fair share of weirdness going on. 

Case in point. Devil Chairs or Witch Chairs. These are chairs found in many cemeteries across the Midwest. If a cemetery has one they typically have one, or maybe two. My real hometown of Jacksonville, IL (which Jackson is based on) has five. That town isn't normal. (Normal is about 120 miles NE of Jacksonville!)

There are also other teens who have figured out what is going on. These NPCs will interact with the PCs but may or may not get involved for their own reasons. 

Roderick Morgan, II, aka "Morgan Highstar"

Morgan, as he is known, is the "protector" of St. Michael's Catholic School and Academy. The "Academy" part is the older name and is used by the honor students. Morgan (and never, ever "Rod") is a psychic and covers the same role that Stephanie, Faye, and Larina cover for Jackson Public High School. 

Morgan, though, is a reluctant protector. Not because he can't, he is more than capable. He is reluctant because he doesn't really want to protect anyone. Well...he is doing it to prove his intellectual capabilities and his psychic ability, not because he actually likes any of the students at St. Michaels. On the contrary, he actively dislikes most of them. But it would wound his pride if a poltergeist or a demon got into the school. 

Morgan is a psychic and a rationalist. He doesn't believe in the supernatural. All the phenomena he encounters, he thinks, are the result of psychic interference. So ghosts, demons, hags, and the lot are all manifestations of the townspeople's own fears and psychic garbage. Psychic patterns or matrices. They believe the town is haunted, so they find ways to make it so. He finds it deeply offensive that others can't have the same mental discipline he does.

He also can't stand witches. 

Not hate per se. But they represent everything he thinks is wrong with this town. They feed into the superstitions and believe them themselves. The problem is also is that they are effective. He would argue that they are effective because they contribute to the problem. So it galls him anytime someone with magic shows up. And it destroys his world anytime Larina beats him in chess.

Concept: Psychic and intellectual snob with grades to back it up.
Song: "Subdivisions" by Rush
Quote: "A haunting is not a mystery. It is an unresolved pattern with delusions of personality."

Morgan is a 4th-level Psychic. He is a little more powerful than the other NPCs, but he is also doing all the work on his own. He is based on Morgan Highstar. 

Morgan is related to the Morgan Chemical family. His father, Roderick Morgan I, was not directly involved but is a professor at MacAlister College. They have a name and money.

Vera Rook

Vera is another witch at Jackson Public High. She and Stephanine go way back to Kindergarten together where they have always been rivals. She picked on Faye for loosing her parents and now she has set her sights on Larina as her newest target. 

Very is smart, incredibly cool, and popular. If this were the 2000s she would be described as a "mean girl." In the 1980s, we would have just called her "stuck up." 

Vera's deal is that she is a witch, and she could help, but she won't unless it somehow benefits herself. So there will be times when she pitches in and a lot more times when she just won't.  

While I don't want to make her into a cliché, I do admit I am having fun playing with the clichés. She is the worst qualities of the other witch NPCs distilled into one character with wit and flawless eyeliner.

Concept: Rival witch.
Song: "Cities in Dust" by Siouxsie and the Banshees
Quote: "And I care...why?"

Vera is a 2nd level witch. But don't expect her help or anything. Vera is brand new, but I rolled up her Pathfinder 2nd Ed and AD&D 1st edition character Veyra Shadowraven. Yes, more clichés! Might need to post all three stats one day.

Stephanie: "Ugh! Why is she such a bitch?"
Larina: "Why won't she help?"
Faye: "Why does she look so cool?"
Stephanie and Larina: "What?"
Faye: "What?"

The Rooks are also an old Jackson family. She would be a family tradition witch.

Kyra Bellamy 

Kyra: "There is evil in this town. It's old, and it is angry."

Kyra Bellamy is sharp, watchful, and not nearly as willing to take people at face value as they might hope. She has a serious streak, a cautious intelligence, and the habit of looking at the people around her like she is trying to solve them before they become dangerous. That wariness makes her seem distant, but it is born more from care than cruelty. Kyra wants the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, and she has little patience for sentimentality when the stakes are real. In a town built on secrets, that makes her both valuable and dangerous.

Kyra is the daughter of Rev. Jonah Bellamy, III. Preacher at "The Old Landmark Missionary Baptist Church", a predominantly African-American Baptist church. Kyra loves her church. Sundays are a day of dressing up, singing, worship, and, of course, the Sunday-afternoon cookout her father hosts. Yes, Kyra ends up working, giving out food, and is on her feet all day in a dress, but she still loves it, and when the local children ask "Miss Kyra" really nicely, she gives them extra Mac n Cheese. Ok, she gives them extra even if they don't ask.

The trouble is, Kyra is having a crisis of faith. Jackson is evil. She knows this. And there are witches walking the halls of her school. Some, like Faye and Vera, are easy to spot. Others wear a friendly face like Stephanie, and others look nice, like Larina, but Kyra sees the barely contained magic underneath. She doesn't understand how these girls can be allowed to walk around like they are normal.

Now, please keep in mind, Kyra is a good kid. She is just mistaken about what a witch really is. 

Kyra also likes things she knows her father would never approve of. She is on the track team, and she is quite good. She likes secular music and is enthralled by MTV when she goes over to friends' houses. And what confuses her most of all is she thinks she also likes Meriko in a more than just-friends way.

Concept: The Preacher's Kid
Song: "Dear God" by XTC
Quote: "Just because I’m polite doesn’t mean I agree with you."

Kyra is a 1st-level Theosophist. She is based on the Pathfinder iconic cleric Kyra. Kyra is here to provide some tension. She is not evil, quite the opposite, but she also wants to protect her family, her church, and her town. She isn't 100% sure where the evil is coming from. 

Spoiler: Kyra manages to come to terms with all her doubts. Later on she becomes a preacher of her own church, one that is a little more welcoming. 

Meriko Hayashida

Meriko: "So what is your deal? You are all witches, right?"

Meriko Hayashida is composed, intelligent, and far more perceptive than most of her classmates realize. She comes from a family that values discipline, accomplishment, and maintaining appearances, and she wears that training with quiet elegance. But Meriko is no passive observer. She notices patterns, remembers details, and understands more than she says. There is a calm confidence to her that makes her hard to rattle, and when she finally chooses to speak plainly, it tends to matter. She may not seek the center of the story, but she is far too smart to remain at its edges for long.

Meriko's father is a professor at MacAlister College. She has an older brother at Mac. Her parents want her to be more traditional, like her brother, but that is not Meriko's way. She discovered that dressing in what she calls "Ninja wear" or what Americans think Japanese people wear, she can really get under her parents' skin. She is also a tech junkie and shows off the new CD player "she got from Japan." Actually, she bought it in St. Louis, but since it's a Sony, it technically comes from Japan. 

Meriko is also something of a kleptomaniac and often shoplifts. She doesn't need these things, her family is very well off, but she likes the thrill of it. On the rare times she catches her, she fakes crying and speaking in Japanese, explaining she doesn't understand American customs and don't send her home to her super strict parents, she will dishonor them, and she lays it on so thick that most shop owners tell her to forget it just so they can get this hysterical girl out of their shop. The second she is out, she drops the act and shows the thing she actually stole.

Her best friend is Kyra. They relate because their families are both so strict and conservative. Meriko makes mixtapes for Kyra and labels them "French Lesson 1" and "Chemistry Notes" Kyra doesn't like the lies, but she loves the music Meriko picks for her.

Meriko also feels like Kyra is "more than a friend," but doesn't know how to act on that.

Concept: The Sharp One
Song: "Voices Carry" - 'Til Tuesday
Quote: 仕方がない。 Shikata ga nai. "It can’t be helped."

Meriko is a 2nd-level survivor. She is based on the Pathfinder iconic thief Merisiel.

Renee Sylvi Jäneläinen

Sylvia: "Now there is a face I did not expect to see darkening my threshold."

Renee: "Hello. Godmother."

Renee Jäneläinen is a girl of winter light and long dark nights, carrying with her the sense that she belongs to colder places and older tales. Thoughtful, self-contained, and a little mysterious even when she is being kind, Renee has the air of someone raised to respect things most people would laugh off until it was much too late. She is not dramatic, not loud, and not interested in making herself the center of attention, but there is depth in her that people feel even before they understand it. In Jackson, where so many dangers hide behind familiar faces, Renee stands out precisely because she seems to understand that the world has always been stranger than it looks.

If asked why she came to Jackson from her hometown of Jakobstad in Finland, she will say something simple like "I wanted to perfect my English," but she is already better than some of the locals. Or something odd like "I LOVE American Rock n' Roll," which is technically true; she has knowledge of classic rock that even impresses Faye.  In truth, Renee is not completely sure why she picked Jackson, other than that she was drawn to it. When she got here and felt the town's magic she knew she had picked the right town. 

AND for reasons I have not 100% figured out myself, I introduced her by having her walk into El Espejo Oscuro, and saying to Sylvia Velasco, "Hello. Godmother." I am not sure what I was thinking, other than it hit me one day, and I could not put it down. I still need to figure this one out.

Concept: The Foreign Exchange Student
Song: "In Silence" by Fra Lippo Lippi.
Quote: "Voin ymmärtää ja kunnioittaa pimeyttä ilman että tulen osaksi sitä."
"I can understand and respect the darkness without becoming a part of it."

Renee is a 2nd-level witch, but she tries to hide it. Renen is a nod to all the great foreign exchange students we used to get and all my friends who also went off to become foreign exchange students as well. Renee is also a witch and has her own reasons to keep her power quiet. Renee is based on Rhiannon. So it is possible that she and Morgan will have some dealings in the future. Likely not positive ones. 

These five NPCs are here to either help or impede the PCs as needed. Their motivations are complex.  While they have basic concepts, they are not basic characters. 

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Midwest Witch

Some cold has a way of altering a place. I am not talking about the sort that calls for a heavier coat. I mean the kind of cold that comes sweeping across miles and miles of prairie that only seems to get colder the longer it travels.  The kind of cold where an old house will complain about in its very walls, or that will harden a field to iron under a grey sky and make the road out of town seem a good deal longer, and harder to travel, than it is.

That is where you are likely to find my witch.

She is not from Salem. Nor New Orleans. She is from the Midwest.

If you put "witch" and "America" in the same sentence, most folks will think of Salem (and I don't even need to say "Salem, MA"). It has a way of pulling you in with its gravity. You have the Puritans, the judges, the gallows, the confessions, and the fear. History. The whole national myth of the American witch seems to orbit around this one spot. Say the word "witch", and Salem takes notice.

Then there is New Orleans, which is only natural. That city has a deep magic of its own. Voodoo, Marie Laveau, the Catholic saints, the river fog, jazz funerals, Anne Rice, the heat and the perfume and the blood and the rumor. It is as beautiful and dangerous and theatrical as can be; you hardly need to put in a vampire when the city has already supplied enough ghosts for an entire country. But we do keep adding more.

But not all our witches are from those parts. For what I want to put in Jackson, Illinois, or for Advanced Witches & Warlocks, they won’t do.

I need a witch a bit farther west and north. A touch more stubborn and less given to display. One who lives under a big sky and can tell you what the weather is up to before the man on the television does. She is familiar with spring mud and gravel roads, brick schools and old courthouses, county fairs and church basements, lake fog and potlucks, and the sound an adult makes when they is not going to be honest with you.

That last bit is important.

Salem offers us the witch as a public accusation, a name bellowed in court, the terror of being seen. New Orleans gives you the mystery, the ritual, and the glamour, a sacred performance of sorts.

The Midwest gives you silence.

Not empty silence. The kind that comes over a kitchen at the mention of an uncle no one wants to discuss. The kind on a county road after dark, or in a farmhouse once the furnace has shut down and the wind is blowing across the fields.

You don’t need a castle or a ruined abbey for Midwestern horror. No Carpathian storm required, a storm moving across an Illinois plain is every bit as terrifying. In Illinois, a winter field can be as gothic as Transylvania. An ice-caked creek will keep a secret that a crypt could not. And if your headlights pick something up at the edge of the corn on a lonely road under a full moon, well...may whatever gods you believe in help you. February is enough. 

It is a matter of scale. Too much land, too much sky, a town so small everybody knows their neighbor, but nobody says everything.

Make of it what you will, it is fine "witch country." Which is why the Midwest means something to me in the games I like. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, holds a spot in my RPG heart for all it did to bring us Dungeons & Dragons. You could call it an impossible little miracle of a game, the one Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson put in our hands. With it came dungeons and dragons, gods and devils, polearms and treasure charts, not to mention the wandering monsters, the maps you would be drawing on graph paper at two in the morning, and the inevitable arguments over rules.

They gave us all that from the Midwest. I find that significant.

It is not some New York or Hollywood affair. You will not find a polished, glamorous origin story here with an air of "look how clever we are." This was from towns in the Midwest where people would make their rulings, settle their disputes, and draw their maps, then do it all over again the following week. There is something right about that.

By 1986, AD&D had long since outgrown its Lake Geneva beginnings, yet it never quite left them. It had gone national and worldwide. You can still sense a fine tension in D&D between the practicalities of a basement sandbox and cosmic myth. Devils and ten-foot poles. Artifacts and encumbrance. That is the sort of space Advanced Witches & Warlocks occupies.

The witch I am after is not the Salem type. She is not the New Orleans type. She is broader and more local than that. Sure, she could be the wise woman on the edge of the village, but she is also the prairie medicine woman, the midwife, the retired teacher or the farmer’s wife. The immigrant grandmother with her own charms the priest would not approve of. The kind of woman who can tell you what this town was called before the town fathers put a name to it, which creek is going to flood, and what sort of winter is coming.

That is where her power lies.

Midwestern witchcraft has its layers. You have your English and French, German farmers, and Irish railroad men, the Scandinavians in town. The African-American communities putting down roots for their churches and businesses in places not always keen on it. And the Indigenous peoples whose history is older than any courthouse or white-painted farmhouse or county line.

Then there are the mounds. 

I want to be very precise about this because it is important. They are not props for an adventurer to dig up a cursed idol or some spooky "mystery Indian" set dressing. They are the remains of civilizations and ceremonies, of deaths and memories, from long before the American town began to identify itself. A proper supernatural setting in the Midwest, Jackson, IL, for instance, needs to understand that. Or else it is just a haunted town with a couple of eerie names slapped on it. I want better than that. I grew up around mounds of this sort. Prehistoric, ancient. A people who lived, thrived, and died before a white man ever knew who they were. Those ghosts are old.

History is not a single stratum. It is written and oral tradition, things misfiled and buried, old photographs and newspaper clippings, church registers, and the stories your grandmother let drop and then changed her mind about. This is all great material for a witch.

She knows the geography and the history are connected, even if they don’t get along. She knows the street and the road that preceded it. She knows which cemetery is empty of ghosts and which is not as empty as you might think. She knows why nothing is planted on the east side of the field and where the first church was. She knows the old mound is a place of death and should be left be, not treated as a picnic spot for souvenirs.

That is power. And it makes for a very good game.

There is a point in Jackson, IL, where the witch ceases to be an exercise in classification and becomes part of the town’s very machinery. One could say she is part of its immune system. At least that is how she is working in Jackson right now.

Jackson has the proper soil for such a tale. You have the old school and the colleges, the Carnegie library with its surprisingly good occult section, Magical Mystery Lane, the Witch Chairs, and the Crimson Cougar. Then there are the stories people will laugh at until a kid finds a newspaper clipping that shows the adults were either lying or not telling the truth very well.

That is Midwest horror. The thing in the next town. The house on your street. The local cemetery or the abandoned hospital out by the edge of town. A mascot you can’t be sure was ever just a mascot. The road your parents put their foot down about. The local legend they all make fun of until you check the archives.

It is why I have an affinity for Chill.

Pacesetter Games put it out in 1984 as a modern investigative RPG for ordinary folks up against the supernatural. Their S.A.V.E. society gave you a license to go after monsters and poke around where a sensible person would have been home watching Knight Rider. But what I remember is not so much the society or the creatures as the proximity of it all. The feeling that this could happen close by.

And there is something to that. Pacesetter was from Wisconsin; Mayfair, who published 2nd edition, was in the Chicago suburbs. Like Lake Geneva, it made a difference. These were games from places I knew, with basements and long winters and highways and pizza joints and the kind of adults who know more than they let on.

Chill put an idea in my head that I still hold to: local horror works.

You don’t need to dress every hero up as a monster or have some glamorous darkness. I am sure there is room for a nightclub full of immortals in expensive coats quoting poetry at one another, but that is not Jackson. Here, you want ordinary people with the courage to be extraordinary.

Life in Jackson goes on in ways you can put your finger on. Folks work the factories and farms and offices and hospitals, they run the small businesses, they raise a family, and have a slice of pizza after the football game. The librarian can tell you which of her students are in the occult section come October. The old woman next door has known them all since they were born and holds onto memories she ought to let go of. When trouble comes, everyone is in on it more than they will say.

This is the horror experience I want from Jackson. It does not make a noise about it. It is patient.

The Salem witch is public fear and accusation. In New Orleans, she is ritual and reputation. But the Midwest witch is useful, if unsettling. You may not put your trust in her, but you will be at her door. You will call her odd and then ask for the tea. You will whisper and then take the charm. They will tell you she is not right. Then they will want to know: what does it mean when you hear something at the screen door every night at 3:17am?

I also want that kind of witch in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. Not some cleric with a pot of herbs, or a druid who has taken up residence indoors, or a magic-user with a better hat.

She is part of the community in a social and supernatural sense. She is privy to the local dead and the old bargains, to the land spirits and the family curses and the lies people spin when they are half dead with fear.

In Jackson, you won’t find her on the school board or any church committee. There is no sign in the window with “WITCH” on it. She may not even use the word. She could be a retired teacher for all you know. An aunt. A widow. The farmer’s wife. A former nurse or the owner of the bookstore.

You might see her in a white farmhouse out past town, or in a small brick place by the college. Or in an apartment above a shop that is closed up, where the curtains don’t move but the porch light is on. When the creek runs black in June, you have her number.

There is an emotional quality to it I am after.

Salem is public and touristy now. New Orleans is humid, mythic. But the Midwest is cold. It has a way of freezing things. You can be smiling at one another in church and then give each other the wide berth in the grocery store. Grown-ups will say “we don’t talk about that” and leave the children to wonder what “that” was. Old wrongs become like the weather, settling into the walls of the town.

Winters here are not for show; it is a monster. It punishes and isolates. It will trap the poor inside and the careless outside. It breaks roads and pipes and batteries, howls in the old houses, and makes the timbers talk at night.

A witch who puts up with that world knows practical magic. Nothing pretty or for the stage. The sort of magic that turns a fever or keeps the pipes from bursting. To keep despair from taking root. To make sure a spirit doesn’t cross your threshold or to spoil the milk of someone with ill intent.

The Salem witch is bound to a national myth. The one in New Orleans to another. But the Midwest witch is of a dozen smaller ones: the immigrant charms and Protestant superstitions, the Catholic saints and the river ghosts, the prairie weather and the silence of the mounds. The railroad deaths, the school legends, the things kids talk about because the adults won’t.

This is the witch I want.

Photo by Arian Fernandez

Mirror Shard: The Prairie Wise Woman

The Prairie Wise Woman. You will find one in every town.

Try to put a description on her, and you won’t do it justice. Is she a witch? A healer? Or just an old woman with too many cats and nothing better to do with her time? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. You can tell enough by the way the elders of the town don’t so much as say her name unless they are put to it.

She keeps to herself, well away from the center of town, literal and figurative. You might find her where the pavement ends and the gravel begins, or near the creek, or the cemetery. Some would say next to that old mound, the town has no respect for. Her place is hardly a showpiece; in fact, it could be called a mess if you were looking for tidiness, though “dirty” isn’t the word for it. It is simply not put together for other people’s comfort. The porch is swept, the garden is for use and not for show, and the windows have a way of watching you.

In the pages of Advanced Witches & Warlocks, she is defined as the frontier equivalent of the village witch, suited to the plains and borderlands. No royal wizardry here, no temple priestess. She is who you go to when the proper channels have run dry.

Take Jackson, IL. She is the de facto authority on local lore there. One never knows her history: ex-nurse, schoolteacher, farmer’s wife, or maybe she put in some years at the library. She was around when the Old Jackson High was still just a school and not yet haunted like they all seem to get.

She is familiar with the lot of it: fever teas and warding knots, grave dirt and iron nails, red thread and saints’ medals. And the gods that predate the settlers.

She knows who has witch-blood in them and which land is under a curse. She knows what went down on Magical Mystery Lane and why you should leave the Witch Chairs be. She is aware that the Crimson Cougar is more than a bit of school spirit, and she can spot the teenager who has already started to see things.

That makes her useful in Jackson. Don’t expect an answer machine or some NPC to lay out the plot because you missed your clues, and everyone is worn out. She is there to let you know the kids aren’t making it up. Maybe she will help. Maybe not. There is something afoot. Something old and local that knows your name.

Come to see her, and she will hear you out. She might put on the coffee, or make a point of inquiring after your mother. If you are rude in asking for help, she will have you sort out your manners first, and rightly so. Should you bring up the supernatural, she will act as if her ears are full of wax.

But in her own time she will put the question to you: "What did you see, and who put it in your head not to?"

She is the Prairie Wise Woman. She may hand you a charm of iron and red thread, or advise you to keep off the old road once the sun is down. She’ll tell you the ghost is only lost, not mad, and that some spirits are not for you to bind or banish.

If Larina or Faye come by, or any of the young PC witches in training, she might just remark, "You’ve begun to see it." And leave it at that.

There is a difference between what is hidden and what is buried. The former you can find. The latter was put there for good reason. In the Midwest, that is how a witch lives.

Jackson, IL: Pride (In the Name of Love)

Yes, I *DO* know what the U2 song "Pride (In the Name of Love)" is about; it also fits here.  

Photo courtesy of the Peace News Archive/University of Bradford, Special Collections

With Pride Month here, my thoughts keep returning to Jackson, IL.

I’m not talking about the real Jacksonville in Illinois. I mean my version of Jackson from Night World, a college town in the Midwest during 1985-86, where the Veil is thin, the high school is haunted in both mundane and supernatural ways, and some students are witches, psychics, monsters, monster-hunters, or just unlucky enough to know the truth.

It keeps reminding me of Monsterhearts.

I have said before that what makes Monsterhearts a good game is its take on the horror of adolescence. There is the “monster of the week” variety, to be sure, but more so the intimate horror of being sixteen and unsure of your own identity. Or you know who you are, but you are not ready to put it into words. And if you do, you find others have decided they can define you for you.

Many horror games only hint at this, but Monsterhearts really understands it. The monster is a metaphor, but it still feels real. The original World of Darkness does this well, and so does the Buffy RPG, but a lot of games focus only on fighting the monster.

That’s the foundation Jackson, IL is built on.

In a NIGHT SHIFT Night World like Jackson, IL, supernatural characters are outsiders by nature. A witch notices things others miss, a psychic hears thoughts that are better left unsaid, and a werewolf knows what’s inside him might break free at the worst time. There’s the vampire with his hunger, the ghost with unfinished business, the faerie who never quite fits in, and even the monster-hunter, marked and haunted by what he knows.

You could say the LGBTQ character in a mid-80s setting is in much the same dramatic position. (Side note: I don't recall what the preferred term was back in the 1980s. So I am just using what we have today.) They might know something true about themselves that the rest of the world either can’t or won’t see. They have to make judgments on who is safe to confide in, pass in one room, and be open in another. There are friends in the know, adults with their suspicions, enemies who will make a weapon of a rumor, and strangers who would never get the whole story.

Now, I am not going to suggest that it is the same as being a vampire. I have no desire to flatten one experience into another or make the LGBTQ experience into a cosplay. But fiction, and horror in particular, has always had a way with the outsider. The one standing outside the circle tends to see it better than anyone in it.

That is the sort of thing I want to get at with Jackson, IL. Here, being different is not a kind of flaw. It is where you get your power and your story from. It is role-playing fuel.

Take my witch NPCs, Faye and Larina. Faye is a lesbian, and Larina is bisexual. These aren’t special episodes for their characters any more than dealing Faye’s white hair or Stephanie’s confidence are. They are who they are, down to the secrets under the town of Jackson itself. Their identities matter because they color how they and the world view each other, but they are not defined by them alone. Ok, maybe Faye's white hair is a bad example since it IS a side effect of her soul being leeched out by her aunties. Maybe a better example is why does Larina, who is right-handed, wear a watch on her right wrist?

Faye has a head start on living with a secret. Her Aunties raised her, and there is more to that than the people of Jackson know. They are not humans; they are Urban Hags and are forcing Faye to become a monster herself. She knows how to watch a room, to pick up on what is said when she thinks no one of consequence is around. She knows family can be your shelter and your danger in the same house. Being a lesbian doesn’t make her tragic; beng raised by monsters makes her tragic. It also makes her sharper, gives her cause to spot a mask or a threat or an act of kindness for what it is.

Then you have Larina. Her bisexuality is part of her liminal state. She is the weird witch girl with one foot in the everyday and the other in something much older. Some find her frightening because she won’t be simple. She is likes boys and girls alike, as well as records and occult tomes and whatever is calling from the other side of the Veil. In a way, she is all the things Monsterhearts is made of: hunger, fear, curiosity, power. If she is confused, it is not because of her sexuality. She is because she is sixteen and grieving the loss of her mother, and powerful and watched and wanted, and she is afraid of the price of wanting anything. There is danger in having the power to curse an entire bloodline and still not being able to legally drive. 

To me, that is the real stuff. And it makes for some fine role-playing. They are not "after-school special" topics; they are characters. 

Ally, Lesbian, and Bi in Jackson, IL.
Yes. I know those flags were not around in 1985-86, nor were supernatural monsters.

You have to be careful with the dramatic opportunities so as not to turn a character’s identity into some kind of penance or punishment. I am keenly aware of how LGBTQ characters have been portrayed since, well, forever, and that is not something that I am going to do here. Characters are nto going to be punished because of their sexual preferences. They will be punished for dabbling in the dark arts, or because the whole damn town is filled with monsters and ghosts. Characters are punished for bad choices in a dangerous, not because of their identity. 

The 1980s were a pressure cooker for any sort of identity. Adults wield power, and in those days, your reputation was everything. A misstep in the wrong corridor could haunt you for months. Thomas Avery, one of our teachers, is well aware of this. Being gay, he is cautious; he knows how fast a rumor can be turned into a weapon. He is a good teacher on account of his ability to listen, not because any suffering has made him noble. He will know when a student is trying to put something across without putting it into words. He is a good person and a likable guy. 

Then there is Elaine Bellweather. She is gay as well, but the world makes of her what it will, quite differently from Thomas. She is no front-line warrior. She teaches music and lives a quiet life, but she is one of the few adults in Jackson who keeps an eye on things and does not jump to condemn. In a town rife with secrets and monsters, you do not find many like her. And that counts for something. She is no one's "favorite teacher," but she does provide a space for the students (often read as Player Characters) to grow.

It is part of what makes for good LGBTQ representation in a horror game. An adult need not be attacking demons with a sword to be heroic. Sometimes, providing a space where a kid can get some air is enough. Sometimes the adult is the hero who just lets them feel safe, even for a little while. 

Monsterhearts has a way of putting it all in words. You have your strings for leverage or emotional debt, and your conditions for the labels people slap on you: "Freak." "Witch." "Creepy." "Queer." "Devil worshipper." In a high school horror set in the 1980s, those are as perilous as claws. But they can be put to the test. That is where the role-playing is. Not in having queer characters put through the wringer for being there, but in seeing what they do when someone tries to put them in a box. Do they run? Lash out? Or do they take the very label meant to hurt them and make it a banner?  A condition like ‘Freak’ might begin as hallway cruelty, but in play, it can become the moment when a character decides she would rather be feared honestly than accepted falsely.

There is your Pride. It is more than the parades and flags, as great as those are. It is the choice to stop making excuses for being real. Think of the witch who ceases to feign deafness to the dead, or the werewolf done with calling himself broken. Or the lesbian teen who sees right through the monster trying to work his charms on every girl in school, because what she wants is hers alone. A bisexual witch is figuring out that wanting two different kinds of futures doesn’t make her a fraud. That is not pandering; it is simply good character work.

I want the LGBTQ folks in Jackson, IL, to be part of the world. Some are ordinary, some are witches, some are teachers, some are students, and many are just regular people. Let them be messy and wrong about things and as complicated as the rest. Some are scared, some are not. Monsterhearts is adept at that; it won’t make adolescence neat and tidy or desire safe. It acknowledges that being young is intense and strange in its own right. We are putting that in 1986, with the Satanic Panic and some fine music in the background, where even a note passed in class feels like a spell.

For Pride Month, that is the part I want to acknowledge and celebrate.

The outsider is not outside because they are lesser. They know where that divide is because they have often been made painfully aware of it. They are outside because they can see the shape of the door.

And sometimes, in Jackson, they are the only ones who know how to open it. 

And to the kids I went to High School with in the 1980s who later came out and are much happier now, I am glad you found your happiness. 

The Witches of Appendix N: Gardner Fox

Gardner Francis Fox is an interesting member of the Appendix N canon. Fox is one of a small few I can find that has also published in the pages of Dragon Magazine (Issue #44 and Issue #55) (L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's "The Green Magician" was published after Pratt's death). He also had a celebrated career at DC comics, where he created some of my favorite characters, including Zatanna. 

Since today is his birthday, let's dive into his mentions in Appendix N. 

Kothar Series

Kothar is a giant blonde-haired, blue-eyed barbarian from the far north, weilding a mighty sword. His world of Yarth seems to exist at the very end of time. There are five Kothar books, and they are largely collections of shorter novellas. There is a continuity between them, so they do follow one from the other. Here, demons and gods are used somewhat interchangeably. 

The Sword of the Sorcerer

The first Kothar tale gives three different sorts of witches. First is Red Lori, the beautiful redheaded half-succubus witch; she is a proper witch whose skills seem to be both "necromantic" and "priestessly." She haunts Kothar throughout his series. She spends half her time wanting to kill Kothar, the other half taunting him, making me think she actually likes the barbarian. 

Queen Elfa is a Queen, but she is also described as a witch and the main antagonist of Red Lori. She has some sort of relationship with the witch Fristhia, who is our old, hag-like witch.

This tale also gives us hydras, dragons, and a lich. His other books follow a similar pattern of Kothar being broke, hungry, and/or thirsty (for ale, but yeah that other one too) and stumbling into trouble.

The Woman in the Witch-Wood. Here we get a witch, the Lady Alaine, and a warlock. 

The Demon Queen. Queen Candara of Kor is a Queen and part demon. She has some magic and serves a demon-god for youth and beauty. She serves demons, but not so much that she seems to be a warlock.

The Conjuer's Curse. We open the story with Stefanya, who is about to be burned as a witch. She served a wizard named Zoqquanor. Her life is linked to that of Zoqquanor so that if he dies, she dies, and vice versa. Stefanya reminds me a bit of Myrnis later on.  She isn't a witch, but that doesn't stop the angry mob.

There is a flashback to younger Kothar meeting a "wild woman" named Ursula. Later on, he meets another wild woman named Lupilina. They could be described as a "Bear Witch" and "Wolf Witch" respectively.  

In Kothar and the Wizard Slayer, we see Kothar team up with his "arch enemy," the witch Red Lori. I say in quotes because they have been having a love-hate relationship throughout the books. They travel and work together to see who is killing all of the mages and necromancers in the world of Yarth. 

I can't help but think about what I would have done differently with my own witches if I had read about Red Lori beforehand. Would Larina have ended up different? Maybe. Red Lori would have been something like a spiritual godmother to Larina had I read these first. Who knows, maybe some of Red Lori's DNA filtered down via the pages of AD&D to Larina anyway. 

Kyrik Series

Kyirk is, wait for it, a giant blonde-haired, blue-eyed barbarian from the far north, weilding a mighty sword.

There are three Kyrik books. Kyrik starts his tale dead. But we are not going to let that stop him. We actually get a witch, or a sorceress, Aryalla, before any other character. She finds a statue of Kyrik and, with the help of three demons, brings Kyrik back from the dead after a thousand years. 

His girlfriend, Myrnis, sometimes shows witch-like powers, but that usually happens when she is possessed by the demon-goddess Illis. 

Kyrik is described as a warrior-warlock. He does not cast spells, but he does get help from the demon-goddess Illis.  

--

So I have some issues with both series. In Kyrik's series, he was "dead" for 1,000 years, but he finds a gem in a room he had been in 1,000 years earlier, and his hunting lodge is still standing. Maybe if he had been trapped in the statue for 100 years, it would have been more believable. It is a complaint I have for many of Fox's tales. You can reduce any time he gives by 10x and get a better number. Same with Kothar, but here it is 100s of thousands of years. True Kothar is at the very end of time and would be more at home in the Hyperborea RPG than, say, Wasted Lands.

Kyrik seems a little more lustful for life than Kothar. Kyrik also finds the "Romany" girl, Myrnis, and stays with her for the whole series. The only time he is "unfaithful" to her is with a deposed Queen who looks exactly like her. Kothar, for all his lusting, seems relatively tame. Unless the girls he meets, he spends his nights with "off page", his only true obsession (and may I add equal) is the witch Red Lori. Sure, there are, that are more than implied, a serving girl and Queen Candara, for Kothar in particular.

Pretty tame, really, given he was also the author of "Cherry Delight" and "The Lady for L.U.S.T." vintage sleaze spy novels.

The biggest issue between these two tales is that Kothar and Kyrik might as well be the same person. Both are "giant" barbarians with blue eyes and blonde hair. Kothar has the sword "Frostfire," and Kyrik has the sword "Bluefang," both of which are described in remarkably similar ways. OH, take a drink anytime either is described like some sort of cat. You won't make it.

The stories are not great, but they are fun. Not every tale needs to be a full-course meal. These tales are sliders. Again, sometimes you want a steak, other times you want a slider. As far as sliders go, these are pretty good. I mean, it is hard not to like Kothar and Kyrik despite their clichés, or maybe even because of them. 

There is a lot here that is foundational to the AD&D experiences. Fighting demons, ghouls, and undead. Epic quests for gold, glory, and more. And lots, and lots of witches, wizards, and necromancers. "Lich" gets mentioned more than once and almost always in respect to a long-dead/undead wizard. Given everything from these books that did make it into AD&D, it feels odd that witches did not, given how much they feature in all these tales. 

There is one thing to consider. A lot of what made it into AD&D (and D&D) here also came from elsewhere. Kothar and Kyric feel like AD&D adventures because they are dipping into the great well of ideas that AD&D also dipped from: Conan. 

Oerth and its near clones are obviously influenced by Fox's Yarth. It would have been fun to see more of Kothar and Red Lori traveling together; him with Frostfire and her with her magic, going back and forth between wanting to kill each other and still ending up in each other's arms. Especially with the scene where Red Lori shows she is more than a match for Kothar.  I think, honestly, that would have been a much more interesting tale. Something that would have elevated this from just being a Conan clone. 

I wonder if there are any tales like that out there? I mean, there is Thundarr and Ariel from the Thundarr series, but there was never a love/hate relationship between the two of them. I suppose Silverglass also counts. Corson as our fighter/barbarian and Nyctasia as our witch, their relationship is fairly love/hate at the start until they gain mutual respect for each other. 

Final Thoughts

I was prepared to like these at first, but didn't, but once I got into them, I began to enjoy them a lot more. I have been a Gardner Fox fan for a while and these were a lot of fun. Just don't take them very seriously.

Jackson, IL: NPCs, the Adults in the Room

No game for me this past weekend. They were doing their "Pokémon meets D&D" game and no time for the 1980s. That's fine, I have a bit more world-building I need to do.

The thing about Jackson is that not every adult in town is clueless about the Supernatural. Many are, most are too thick to know. But there are some who know the truth, and some of them have fought these battles before. Here are some of the adults I want to put forward as my actual "Veterans of the Supernatural Wars." 

Old Jackson Public High School

Most of these adults don't really need stats; they won't be doing any fighting unless it is off-screen. Though it is possible that they could need them later on. For the most part, these are either 0-level humans or maybe 1st or 2nd level in something.

Lars Nichols

Lars is Larina's father. He is a good one to have in the game, whether or not Larina remains a named NPC. Like Larina as the New Girl, he is the New Teacher. He is a professor of Anthropology at MacAlister College, so he will make a good resource for the characters. 

Lars came to mind nearly fully formed. I knew he had the same hair color as Larina and that he had brown eyes. He sings, he loves music, he has an impressive music collection. And he LOVES Yes. Like obsessively so. And Larina is a complete Daddy's girl. Of course, "Larina" means "daughter of Lars." But Larina came first, and Lars came around later. Her mother is/was named Siân Stephens Nichols (my homage to Bewitched). She was blonde with blue eyes, the same eye color as Larina. I spent some time with Lars and Siân as OSE characters, and they were a blast. 

In Larina's original AD&D 1st ed version, her mom and dad both died when she was 19, necessitating her adventuring.  In my Dark Places & Demogorgons version, her parents are both still alive. Here, her mother died, and Lars and his daughter moved up from Southern Illinois so he could take a job at MacAlister. 

Lars is likely a Sage, maybe level 4. Yeah, I know I said 0 or 1, but he is going to be a solid resource. Plus, Lars knows about the supernatural; he prefers to avoid it when he can, but that is difficult when his daughter is one of the most powerful witches in the game.  

I like Lars. He is a good guy and acts all happy, but he is still mourning his wife. Because of this he will be protective of the characters.

Archetype: The cool, but heartbroken, single father
Quote: "Love what you love while you can, and never apologize for playing the record one more time."
Quirks: Has a huge record collection. Loves Yes, still misses his wife.
Theme song: "Wonderous Stories" by Yes

Malcolm "Mac" McGowan

Malcolm "Mac" McGowan is first and foremost the grandfather of Rowan McGown, the presumptive Spirit Rider of Jackson. His son, Jake, was the Spirit Rider for this area, but he and his wife were killed in a car crash leaving only the baby Rowan to survive. She was supposed to die as well. They were killed by supernatural agents. Mac has always known this and has done everything in his mortal-mundane power to keep Rowan safe. But he knows that sooner or later she is going to need to take up the mantle if Jackson is to remain safe. 

He is an older man who moved here from Scotland many years ago with his Irish wife. Their son Jake was born here in Jackson, and they settled down. Mac got a job caring for the horses at the Thompson Stables, hired by Andy's grandfather, who always respected Mac. It was their idea to have young Anderson come to the stables to learn how to care for the animals and destiny was forged when Andy fell in love with Rowan.

Yes, that is the flannel shirt Rowan wears now. She stole it when she was 12 and never gave it back. Wearing it reminds her of her grandfather.

Mac likes Andy, he sees more of Andy's own grandfather in him than his father, which is good. He also knows he will be kind to Rowan.  MAc respects people who work hard, but has a lot of issues with those who deal with the supernatural, especially Valerie Beaumont. These two have a history, and he is one of the very few people who know her secret.  Valerie wants to train Rowan in sword fighting to prepare her for her role as Jackson's Spirit Rider, and conveniently keeping all three away from directly helping and stealing the spotlight away from the PCs.

Valerie: "Good morning, Mac. You going to invite me in for coffee or shoot me with that revolver you are hiding in your jacket?"
Mac: "I have not decided yet. Maybe both."

If Mac has a class, he would be a level 1 or 2 Veteran. 

Archetype: The Protective Grandfather
Quote: "Horses don’t care what you say you are. They only care what you actually are."
Quirks: Talks to horse like they understand him. Maybe they do.
Theme song: "The Skye Boat Song" - The Corries

There are a lot of parallels between Lars and Mac, just as there are between Larina and Rowan. Almost like they are similar characters with different paths and choices. I like to explore these ideas. If Larina and Rowan are very similar, it might also explain why, in my mind, they are friendly to each other, but not friends. 

Of course, none that might matter in the actual game. So far, the players and the characters have only seen them in the background.  The teachers in the school are more important right now.

Here are a couple more.

Thomas Avery

Mr. Avery is the school's "cool" teacher. He is known to be a little eccentric, a little odd, and his classes are a lot of fun. He teaches Classical Literature, Senior Honors Lit, and Freshman English. He quotes Shakespeare in class, and he directs the Fall plays. 

Mr. Avery's big secret is that he is gay. He tries to keep his personal life to himself because, well, it's just 1985-86 and people are still bigoted. When he was younger, and the AIDS crisis began, he got "The Talk" by the school board. He was so embarrassed and frustrated that he considered leaving teaching altogether. Now he makes sure he is never alone with a student, always meets in the open, and never, ever touches anyone. He knows how quickly misunderstandings turn into rumors and rumors become more.  To that end, Keri Moreau flirts with him openly and often, which he finds amusing. She told him that she was willing to do whatever was needed to ensure he was protected. She is also at his side during the school plays as the "Assistant Director" of the plays. The other English teacher, Glenn Daniels, wants him gone, but he is intimidated by Keri, and she makes sure he never has an excuse. 

Thomas Avery is a lot of students' favorite teacher, and they will say he is one of the few who listen to them. Really listens to them. Again, I like to think Avery is a good guy. He loves teaching and he loves when students read something that really means something to them. 

Thomas and Elaine have been sharing their observations, and they are coming to understand that some students are more than they appear. And there are some things that hide in the dark. 

Thomas is likely just a level 1 Sage. 

Archetype: The Fun Teacher
Quote: "Words are not harmless. That is why we teach them."
Quirks: Quotes Shakespeare whenever he can.
Theme song: “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel

Elaine Bellweather

Elaine: "Some things work whether you believe in them or not. That is why you must be careful."
Faye: "Are we still talking about Jazz, Miss Bellweather?"

Miss Elaine Bellweather is Jackson Public High School's music teacher. She teaches Music Appreciation and History, Choir, and is the orchestra conductor. She doesn't teach band, though. The students think she is a bit old-fashioned; she still dresses like she did in the 1960s, and most students think she is older than she really is. She is only 45. 

Miss Bellweather is from one of the "first families" of Jackson. Along with the Thornes, Thompsons, and Vales, the Bellweathers were among the first to settle on the Mauvaisterre Moraine that would become Jackson. She never married, so she will be the last Bellweather. Like the Vales and Thornes, the Bellweathers produced a number of witches. The Thornes are hags, though many don't know that, and the Vales have a history of magic. The Bellweathers were Hedgewitches. As Elaine would say, her "grandmother could see around a few corners."  Elaine herself has no magical ability, but I do say she has some sensitivity. In game terms I say she is a 2nd or 3rd level Sage. She knows a couple of simple spells. 

Elaine lives in a small house with Marian Fitzpatrick, her long-time friend from their days at MacAlister.

Elaine Bellweather is also gay, but she doesn't get the same level of discrimination that Thomas does. That is the double standard of the 1980s that, for once, works in her favor, just for the wrong reasons. 

Not many students consider her their "favorite teacher," but she loves her job, and music is her life. She keeps a detailed set of notes on all the strange things she sees. She shares these notes with Mr. Avery and Mrs. Gloria Haskel, the school Librarian. Between the three of them they know about the monsters and work where they can to protect the students.

Elaine would be at best a level 1 Sage.

Archetype: The Shockingly Perceptive Teacher / Hedge Witch
Quote: "No, I do not know magic. I know songs. People are always confusing the two."
Quirks: Never married. Grandmother was a witch.
Theme song: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by The Shirelles

Thomas and Elaine are also my subtle nod to the Monsterhearts game I played a while back, which was also almost like a Proto-Jackson. Much like Stranger Things did a flashback involving the previous generation, I like to think that Thomas and Elaine may have known something back when they were kids struggling on their own. I don't think they were in school together, at least I have not worked out their histories or backstories much more than what I have here, but I am leaving it all open. Mac would have been here, but he would have been an adult then as well. 

These are more of my "veterans of the supernatural wars." Just in this case, the last war.