Mirror Monday: The Women Who Made My Old School

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time looking back at the origins of my witches, both in Advanced Witches & Warlocks and in my Jackson, Illinois setting. Last time, I discussed why witches have been such an important part of my gaming and writing for nearly forty years. My fascination began with books on mythology, folklore, magic, and the supernatural, eventually finding its way into my games and the characters I created.

But no one creates these things in a vacuum.

When I look back at the books, illustrations, games, and stories that helped shape my understanding of witches, something interesting emerges. A remarkable number of the people who influenced me were women. Some were writers, some artists, some game designers, and others helped establish the hobby before many of us even knew what a roleplaying game was.

Their contributions helped define what fantasy, horror, the occult, and old-school D&D looked like to me.

More importantly, their work contributed to the mixture of ideas that eventually became my witches.

Some of these connections are obvious. Others are things I have only begun to recognize after decades of gaming, reading, and writing. And in a few cases, I discovered that someone else had been exploring the same ideas long before I knew about their work.

That seems especially appropriate for a Mirror Monday.

The Women of Appendix N

I have been discussing Appendix N quite a bit, particularly in my Witches of Appendix N series. One thing that continues to impress me about the history of fantasy and horror is how many women helped establish the literary traditions that would eventually inspire D&D.

Gary Gygax included three women in Appendix N of the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide: Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Margaret St. Clair. All three have become increasingly important to my understanding of the history of fantasy gaming, and each has contributed something different to how I imagine witches.

Andre Norton is perhaps the most obvious connection. Her Witch World stories place witches and their magical traditions at the center of an entire fantasy setting. The witches of Estcarp are not simply another group of spellcasters. They have their own history, social structures, obligations, and relationships with the powers they command.

That is something I have tried to capture in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A Witch needs more than a spell list and a few special abilities. She needs a magical tradition that feels as though it belongs to the world she inhabits. Norton helped demonstrate how witchcraft could be part of a culture rather than merely something an individual character practices.

I've already discussed Norton at length in my Witches of Appendix N: Andre Norton post, so I won't repeat all of that here.

Margaret St. Clair brought something different to the mixture. Her fiction, particularly Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People, combines occult traditions with hidden realities and worlds that exist beneath or alongside our own. There are witches, secret knowledge, and supernatural forces that suggest that everyday reality is only part of a much larger and stranger existence.

That concept has become fundamental to my approach to witches. In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, occult magic is distinct from both the arcane magic of Magic-Users and the divine magic of Clerics. In Jackson, the ordinary world and the supernatural are separated by a Veil that is sometimes dangerously thin.

St. Clair didn't create those ideas for me, but her fiction belongs to the same traditions that helped me imagine them. Her occult worlds suggested that the supernatural could be an entire hidden reality, not simply a collection of monsters waiting to be encountered.

Leigh Brackett gave us something else entirely. Her Eric John Stark adventures are filled with strange civilizations, ancient powers, dangerous women, and the sort of hard-bitten action that would be perfectly at home in a sword-and-sorcery campaign.

Brackett demonstrated that a writer could create traditionally masculine pulp heroes while also populating their worlds with formidable women possessing ambitions and desires of their own.

I find that particularly important when considering the kinds of stories I want to tell. Larina, Stephanie, Faye, and the women of Jackson are not interesting because they are more powerful than the men around them. They are interesting because they are characters with their own histories, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses.

The same is true of the men.

And I shouldn't leave out C. L. Moore. Although she wasn't included in Appendix N, Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories are essential to understanding the early sword-and-sorcery tradition. Jirel was confronting supernatural terrors and venturing into strange otherworldly realms in the 1930s, long before D&D existed.

These women were not outsiders arriving later to revise an established fantasy tradition.

They were helping create it.

The Women Who Gave Fantasy Its Look

Literature was only one part of the equation. The artwork mattered just as much.

When I was younger, I could spend hours looking at the illustrations in fantasy books, old pulp magazines, mythology collections, and gaming supplements. Sometimes the artwork was what drew me to a book in the first place. A single image could suggest an entire world, a character, or an adventure.

Margaret Brundage was one of the artists who helped establish the visual identity of weird fantasy and horror. During the 1930s, her covers for Weird Tales featured beautiful women, sinister sorcerers, monsters, violence, and supernatural danger. Her work could be sensual, frightening, grotesque, and provocative, often all at once.

Brundage frequently signed her paintings simply "M. Brundage," and some readers were unaware that the artist responsible for these images was a woman.

I find that rather fascinating.

The classic pulp aesthetic, with all its beauty, sexuality, danger, and occasionally outrageous imagery, was not exclusively the product of male artists. Women were helping define it, too.

I've always enjoyed those older artistic traditions. I don't think fantasy or horror needs to avoid beauty, sensuality, violence, or the grotesque. But those elements are most interesting when they contribute to a larger world or story.

For my witches, Brundage represents an important part of the visual tradition of fantasy: the combination of beauty and danger, the supernatural and the sensual, the familiar and the monstrous.

Pamela Colman Smith represents another side of that artistic heritage.

Her illustrations for the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, first published in 1909, helped establish one of the most recognizable visual languages of modern occultism. The High Priestess, the Magician, the Moon, and the other cards are filled with symbolism, ritual objects, colors, and imagery that suggest hidden meanings.

When I think about the symbols, tools, and imagery associated with my witches, I can see that influence. The occult should look and feel different from conventional D&D magic. A witch's tools and symbols are not simply decorations. They help communicate her relationship with the powers she studies.

It is worth mentioning that the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot also has another connection to my work. The High Priestess, the Moon, the Queen of Swords, and other cards have become part of the symbolic language I associate with various witches, including Larina and Taryn.

Then there is Rosaleen Norton, the Australian artist and occultist often called the Witch of Kings Cross.

Norton's artwork was strange, visionary, frequently erotic, and sometimes profoundly unsettling. Her paintings and drawings explored pagan deities, spirits, supernatural beings, and occult experiences. They challenged conventional ideas about what religious or spiritual art ought to depict.

I find her work fascinating because it reminds me that the occult has never been entirely comfortable or respectable. There is something transgressive about witchcraft as it appears in folklore and fiction. Witches deal with things that other people fear, reject, or refuse to acknowledge.

That doesn't necessarily make them evil.

But it does make them interesting.

The imagery of Brundage, Smith, and Norton contributed different things to my imagination. Brundage brought the sensual danger of pulp fantasy. Smith provided a symbolic vocabulary for magic and ritual. Norton demonstrated how unsettling and otherworldly occult art could become.

None of them gave me a finished Witch class.

But all of them contributed to what I wanted witches to feel like.

The Women of Early D&D

The original Dungeons & Dragons emerged from a predominantly male wargaming culture. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson drew upon miniature warfare, historical simulations, fantasy literature, and their own experiments with new forms of gaming.

That history is well established, and I have no interest in changing it.

But the history of D&D is larger than the handful of men whose names appear most frequently in accounts of its creation.

Women played, wrote, illustrated, designed, organized, and helped the hobby grow almost from its beginnings.

Even the Gygax household, where some of the earliest games were played, included Gary's daughters Elise, Heidi, and Cindy. Their participation in the family's gaming history is worth remembering, even if the surviving accounts of those earliest sessions are understandably incomplete.

Lee Gold began publishing Alarums & Excursions in 1975, providing one of the earliest forums for roleplaying gamers to exchange ideas, discuss rules, and develop new approaches to this strange hobby.

Jean Wells joined TSR in 1979 and contributed as a writer, editor, and designer. Her work on Sage Advice in Dragon magazine helped generations of players make sense of the rules. She also created The Palace of the Silver Princess, an adventure whose original version would become famous for being recalled and replaced.

Rose Estes helped introduce D&D to readers through the Endless Quest books, beginning with Dungeon of Dread in 1982. These books let readers make choices and experience fantasy adventures without a gaming group or a set of rules. For many, they served as an introduction to the imaginative possibilities of D&D.

Margaret Weis, working with Tracy Hickman, helped bring Dragonlance to life through novels that became enormously popular throughout the 1980s. The characters of Krynn became just as memorable as the adventures themselves, and the combination of gaming and fiction demonstrated how deeply players and readers could become invested in an imagined world.

Jennell Jaquays deserves more than a passing mention here. Her adventures Caverns of Thracia and The Dark Tower helped demonstrate just how intricate, layered, and imaginative old-school adventure design could be. Her dungeons were not simple linear sequences of rooms and encounters. They had multiple entrances, looping paths, vertical connections, competing factions, and the sense that these places existed before the player characters ever arrived. People still talk about “Jaquaying the dungeon” as shorthand for this sort of non-linear, living design, though even that phrase can feel too small for the full range of her contributions. Jennell was also a friend, which makes it even harder for me to reduce her work to a quick summary. What I can say is that she helped show me that fantasy environments should feel like places, not just encounter charts. That lesson matters in a dungeon, on a wilderness map, and even in a setting like Jackson.

And then there is Darlene Pekul, known professionally simply as Darlene.

Her 1980 World of Greyhawk map of the Flanaess is one of my favorite pieces of D&D cartography. I have spent a great deal of time studying that map over the years.

What Darlene created was more than a geographic reference. It was an invitation to explore. The kingdoms, rivers, mountains, cities, and wildernesses suggested that an entire world existed beyond whatever adventure the players happened to be experiencing.

That sense of a larger world has always been important to me.

Jackson may be a fictional Illinois town rather than a fantasy continent, but I approach it with much the same philosophy. The places exist beyond the immediate adventure. People have lives when the player characters aren't watching. The world has history, geography, and relationships that continue whether or not an adventure happens to involve them.

Darlene helped demonstrate how a setting could become a place that existed in the imagination.

These women contributed in different ways, but their work helped shape the games I grew up playing and continue to love.

Eldritch Wizardry and the Possibilities of Magic

One of the earliest D&D books that helped expand my understanding of the game was Eldritch Wizardry, Supplement III for the original Dungeons & Dragons, published in 1976.

It is a remarkable little book, filled with concepts that would become important to the game's future.

Druids. Psionics. Demons. Artifacts. Powerful supernatural forces that did not fit neatly into the original game's relatively straightforward categories.

For me, these were fascinating possibilities.

Druids suggested magical traditions rooted in nature, old religions, and relationships with the living world. Psionics suggested powers of the mind, neither conventional arcane magic nor divine intervention. Demons opened the door to older, darker supernatural forces, entities whose desires and purposes might be entirely different from those of mortal characters.

All of those concepts eventually contributed to my understanding of witches.

I wanted a magical tradition that was something other than another kind of Magic-User. I wanted witches to have their own relationships with spirits, supernatural powers, ritual practices, and hidden knowledge.

Eldritch Wizardry suggested that D&D was broad enough to accommodate more than one understanding of magic.

There is also the cover.

The original Eldritch Wizardry features one of the more provocative illustrations in early D&D, a nude woman bound to what appears to be a sacrificial altar. A young woman, Deborah Larson, created the painting for the cover.

It's an image unlikely to appear on the cover of a major D&D release today.

But I find its place in gaming history fascinating.

Who is this woman? Why is she there? What ritual is taking place? Who is responsible? Is she a sacrifice, a captive, a willing participant, or something else entirely? And what happens when the adventurers interrupt whatever is about to occur?

Those questions interest me far more than deciding whether the image is provocative.

The artwork suggests a story, and the book's contents suggest ways that story might develop.

That's what I have always loved about old-school D&D. The books weren't necessarily the final word on anything. They offered possibilities that we could explore, reinterpret, and develop into something of our own.

I didn't need to recreate every idea in Eldritch Wizardry exactly as presented.

I needed the doors it opened.

Lee Gold and the Craft of the Wise

Lee Gold deserves more attention because her work offers an unusual connection to my own research.

Gold was already helping build the roleplaying community with Alarums & Excursions in 1975. But she was also a designer, and in 1983 she published Lands of Adventure through Fantasy Games Unlimited.

I had wanted to examine that game for years before finally acquiring a copy. When I reviewed it in 2021, I was struck by how many ideas Gold and I had explored independently.

Lands of Adventure uses Culture Packs to adapt its rules to different historical and mythological settings. The original boxed set included Mythic Greece and Medieval England, both subjects I have explored extensively in my own writing.

Her Mythic Greece material was called Children of the Gods, the same title I had independently chosen for my own treatment of Greek mythology and Classical witches.

Her Medieval England material included witches, familiars, and coven casting. Gold drew upon sources such as Robert Graves and Margaret Murray, both of whom had also influenced my research.

I had used related material when developing my own Children of the Gods and The Craft of the Wise.

The remarkable thing is that I had developed those books without knowing how Gold had approached the same subjects.

We were looking at similar historical and mythological material, asking some of the same questions, and sometimes arriving at comparable conclusions.

Now, I should point out that some of these older theories about witchcraft, particularly Margaret Murray's historical witch-cult hypothesis, are no longer accepted by mainstream historians. But their influence upon twentieth-century occultism, fantasy literature, and gaming remains an important part of the history of fictional witches.

What I find interesting is how similar our creative approaches are.

Both of us were interested in magic as something shaped by culture, history, mythology, and religious practices rather than merely a universal list of spells.

I sometimes wonder how my own Witch books might have developed differently if I had encountered Lands of Adventure earlier.

Sometimes another creator's influence is direct. Sometimes we recognize it only in hindsight, when we discover someone else had been exploring the same territory.

And sometimes looking into that mirror tells us as much about our own work as it does about theirs.

Laura Hickman, Laurana, and Larina

Laura Hickman deserves special mention here.

Laura and Tracy Hickman helped create some of the most memorable adventures in early D&D, including Rahasia, Pharaoh, and Ravenloft. Their work brought a strong sense of story, atmosphere, and character motivation to adventures that might otherwise have been little more than collections of encounters.

Ravenloft is particularly important to my work on NIGHT SHIFT. The original 1983 adventure helped demonstrate how Gothic horror could function within the framework of AD&D, using atmosphere, a memorable antagonist, and a setting that felt alive beyond the encounters themselves.

But Rahasia is especially relevant to my witches.

Originally created by Laura and Tracy before its eventual publication by TSR as B7 Rahasia, the adventure features three dead witches: Karelena, Solorena, and Trilena. Their spirits possess living elven women, making them something quite different from the usual villains waiting at the end of a dungeon.

I discussed them in my review of B7 Rahasia, and I have considered incorporating them into my own War of the Witch Queens campaign.

They are exactly the sort of characters who intrigue me. They have magical power, histories, ambitions, and a supernatural existence that raises all sorts of questions about death, possession, and survival beyond the grave.

They also demonstrate that memorable witches were part of early D&D adventures long before I began developing my own versions of the class.

But Laura Hickman's influence goes even deeper.

Laura inspired Lauralanthalasa Kanan, better known as Laurana, the Golden General of Dragonlance. Tracy Hickman has confirmed this connection, and it has always delighted me.

Laurana was one of my favorite characters from the original Dragonlance Chronicles. She begins as a relatively sheltered elven princess, beautiful, romantic, and deeply in love with Tanis Half-Elven. But over the course of the story, she grows into a courageous warrior, a military leader, and one of the great heroes of the War of the Lance.

She never has to abandon her femininity to become heroic. Nor does her love for Tanis prevent her from becoming someone important in her own right.

And Laurana became one of the inspirations for Larina Nichols.

The characters are very different, of course. Larina was one of my first witches in AD&D and is now a teenage witch living in 1980s Illinois, not an elven princess fighting a war against dragons. But there is a creative lineage connecting them.

Laura Hickman inspired Laurana. Laurana helped inspire Larina. And Larina has now been part of my gaming and writing for nearly forty years.

In a very real sense, Laura Hickman is Larina's spiritual grandmother.

I rather like that.

There is also something wonderfully appropriate about Laura's connection to both Ravenloft and Dragonlance. Her contributions reach into two of the areas that have become most important to my own work: Gothic horror and the development of a heroic female character who eventually helped inspire my favorite witch.

Sometimes the connections between our influences and our creations are more direct than we realize.

Jean Wells, Duchess, Candella, and Jackson

There is another connection between early D&D and Jackson that I find particularly satisfying.

Jean Wells created two adventuring characters named Duchess and Candella, who appeared in her original Palace of the Silver Princess.

Duchess and Candella were thieves, and their adventures became part of my, and many others', own gaming imaginations.

More importantly, they eventually became the original inspirations for Denise Carver and Candy Mercer in Jackson.

Denise and Candy are now teenage girls living in Jackson, Illinois in 1986. They are friends, partners, and co-conspirators in every sense of the word. They have families, responsibilities, personal histories, and futures that extend decades beyond their high school years.

They are not simply copies of Jean Wells' characters. They have changed considerably as I've developed Jackson and explored who these girls are.

But the connection remains.

I especially enjoy that Denise and Candy aren't witches. Their importance to Jackson comes from their humanity, their relationships, and their willingness to stand beside their friends when the supernatural threatens their lives.

Denise, in particular, has become one of those characters whose strength comes from her convictions and her determination to protect the people she loves.

That is a long way from a pair of adventuring thieves in an early D&D module. But I can still see them in my characters, and I have Jean Wells to thank for that.

Jean Wells could never have imagined the lives Denise and Candy would eventually lead in my setting (well, I am sure she could have). But without Duchess and Candella, those characters might never have existed.

This is one of my favorite things about roleplaying games. Characters can move beyond the adventures in which they first appeared. They change, develop new relationships, acquire new histories, and become something their original creators never anticipated.

Sometimes they even find their way into entirely different games and settings.

Jean Wells also reminds us that women were actively creating D&D adventures and characters during the hobby's formative years. Their contributions weren't limited to illustrating someone else's ideas or playing supporting roles.

They were creating worlds and characters of their own.

Sometimes those characters still inspire us forty-five years later.

The Women Who Became My Witches

Looking back on these women together, I begin to see how their contributions helped shape my own vision of the witch.

Andre Norton demonstrated how witchcraft could be part of an entire society, complete with traditions, obligations, and history. Margaret St. Clair explored hidden supernatural realities and occult knowledge. Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore gave us dangerous worlds filled with capable women, strange magic, and heroic adventure.

Margaret Brundage helped define pulp fantasy's sensual, supernatural imagery. Pamela Colman Smith gave us a visual language for occult symbolism and ritual. Rosaleen Norton demonstrated just how strange, frightening, and transgressive magical imagery could become.

Darlene Pekul helped make fantasy settings feel like real places waiting to be explored. Rose Estes introduced readers to the possibilities of interactive fantasy adventures. Jennell Jaquays demonstrated how imaginative and interconnected dungeon environments could become.

Deborah Larson created one of the most memorable early D&D covers, while Eldritch Wizardry gave me ideas about druids, psionics, demons, and the expanding possibilities of supernatural power within the game.

Lee Gold showed another way to develop magic through historical and mythological traditions, often drawing on the same sources I would use years later.

Laura Hickman helped create some memorable early D&D witches, contributed to Ravenloft's Gothic horror, and inspired Laurana, who in turn inspired Larina.

And Jean Wells created Duchess and Candella, who eventually became Denise and Candy.

None of these women created my Witch class. None of them wrote Advanced Witches & Warlocks or imagined the supernatural history of Jackson, Illinois.

But each contributed something to the mix of ideas that shaped my work.

Some of those influences were direct. Others came through books, illustrations, and games I encountered long before I knew much about the people behind them. Still others were things I discovered later, when I recognized that someone else had been exploring the same ideas independently.

That is how creative work develops.

We read. We play. We study. We borrow ideas, reinterpret them, combine them with others, and occasionally discover something entirely new.

The Witch class I began developing decades ago wasn't the product of any single influence. It emerged from mythology, folklore, history, fiction, art, religion, and gaming.

Over time, those influences became something of their own.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, they became rules, spells, rituals, traditions, pacts, and the distinction between occult, arcane, and divine magic.

In Jackson, they became characters who live with the consequences of possessing supernatural powers. Larina, Stephanie, Faye, Sylvia, Kiera, Natasha, and the others are not simply examples of what a Witch class can do. Their magic affects their relationships, beliefs, ambitions, fears, and choices.

And the development continues in both directions.

Sometimes a character in Jackson suggests a new rule for AW&W. Sometimes a rule or magical tradition from AW&W suggests an entirely new story for Jackson.

The two projects are constantly influencing one another, just as the literature, art, and games that preceded them continue to influence both.

The Other Side of the Mirror

It's particularly satisfying to look back at my gaming history and recognize influences I didn't always appreciate at the time.

I knew I loved the Weird Tales covers. I knew Darlene's Greyhawk map was something special. I knew the Tarot imagery fascinated me, and I knew Eldritch Wizardry offered possibilities I wanted to explore.

I knew I enjoyed the stories of Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Margaret St. Clair. I knew I liked Laurana and that her character had influenced Larina. I knew Duchess and Candella had eventually become Denise and Candy.

But I didn't always stop to think about the people behind those creations or how their work connected to what I was doing.

Over the years, as I've studied the hobby's history and the literature that inspired it, I've become more interested in those creators and their contributions.

Not because I want to rewrite gaming history, but because I want to understand it more completely.

The women I've discussed here were not late arrivals to fantasy and roleplaying games. They wrote the stories, painted the artwork, designed the adventures, created the characters, and built the communities that helped establish the traditions I grew up with.

Their contributions were part of the old school from the beginning.

That doesn't diminish the contributions of Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, or the many other men whose work remains important to me. I still admire their contributions and find inspiration in them.

But the full history is richer and more interesting when we recognize everyone who helped create it.

I still love the old books. I still play the old games. I still write new material for them, and I continue to find inspiration in the same stories and traditions that first captured my imagination nearly fifty years ago.

I don't need to abandon any of that to recognize women's contributions to the hobby I love.

In fact, understanding those contributions helps me appreciate the old school even more.

Laura Hickman inspired Laurana, who inspired Larina. Jean Wells created Duchess and Candella, who eventually became Denise and Candy. The witches of Andre Norton and Margaret St. Clair informed my understanding of occult traditions, while the artwork of Margaret Brundage, Pamela Colman Smith, and Rosaleen Norton shaped how I imagined those traditions might look.

In a very real sense, the witches of Advanced Witches & Warlocks and the young women of Jackson have a much larger family tree than I ever realized.

And I am still discovering new branches.

Perhaps that is another thing these Mirror Mondays are teaching me. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries aren't about what has changed.

But rather what was there all along.

Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #3

We are back with my October exploration of Coven 13. The first issue established Arthur H. Landis' vision of a modern successor to Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, while the second made his editorial philosophy even clearer. The supernatural should not simply be dropped into a story because the author needs a monster. It should be part of the world around it, with its own history, rules, and consequences.

Now we get to Issue #3, dated January 1970, and are now into the decade that would see the 70's Occult Revival, "The Exorcist" and "The Wicker Man", not to mention "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and Dungeons & Dragons, and all the other material I return to in these pages.

Coven 13, Issue #3, January 1970

The contents page actually labels this "Vol. 1, No. 2," even though the November issue was already #2 and the following March issue is #4. I am going to chalk that up to a simple production error. More importantly, this issue gives us Alan Caillou, Ron Goulart, Robert E. Howard, Dennis Quinn, Pauline Smith, James Benton Carr, and Part Three of James R. Keaveny's "Let There Be Magick!" We also get another installment of Bell, Book and Tarot, two poems by Wade Wellman (son of Manly Wade Wellman), and an essay on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

Landis' editorial is once again worth reading because he continues to define what he thinks Coven 13 should be. This time he complains about the number of manuscripts arriving that simply recycle vampires, werewolves, pacts with the Devil, and familiar monsters. He isn't rejecting those subjects. What he wants is originality. He again insists that writers should look at the world around them rather than simply copying the "mouldering pages" of earlier writers, pointing specifically to Rosemary's Baby, Bell, Book and Candle, and Psycho as examples of stories that combine the strange with contemporary life.  

The rest of the editorial concerns the less glamorous problem of magazine distribution. Landis explains how printing tens of thousands of copies means little if large numbers never make it onto newsstands, and how long publishers can wait before actually getting paid. His declaration that "COVEN 13 WILL MAKE IT!" reads a little sadly in hindsight. There is only one more issue of Coven 13 in this form before the magazine changes hands and eventually becomes Witchcraft & Sorcery.

It is a supply-and-demand issue we still see today in the RPG publishing industry. 

Let's get to the stories that did make his cut.

The lead novelette is "Leona!" by Alan Caillou, again illustrated by William Stout. Christian Althing has lost his daughter Leona and refuses to accept her death. He has an old magical book, an altar, ritual tools, sacrifices, a cauldron, and a growing belief that he can use all of this to bring her back. His grief gradually consumes every other moral consideration.  

This one gets at something I have been thinking about quite a bit in my own games. Death should matter. Witches can speak with ghosts, summon spirits, learn secrets from the dead, and get into all sorts of trouble with necromancy, but actually restoring the dead to life is another matter entirely. "Leona!" is essentially about what happens when someone refuses to accept that boundary. Christian does not want to understand death. He wants to force death to return something it has taken from him, and the results are appropriately (and predictably) horrific.

In my Advanced Witches & Warlocks book, I specifically keep spells like Raise Dead and Resurrection out of witches' hands. It violates their moral and ethical systems. If a witch gets to the point where she wants to bring someone back from the dead like that, she either needs to get a cleric or be satisfied with necromancy.

We also get two poems, "Song of the Undead" and "Nightmare," by Wade Wellman. An important distinction here is that this is Wade Wellman, the son of Appendix N author Manly Wade Wellman. The poems themselves fit comfortably into Coven 13: graves, undead things, banshees, haunted houses, moonlight, and the dead walking where they shouldn't.    

The latest "Bell, Book and Tarot" by Jean Cirrito turns to the Evil Eye, and this is probably my favorite nonfiction installment so far. We get the Italian mal'occhio, protective gestures, amulets, serpents, horns, crescent moons, horseshoes, rue, animal charms, and other ways people have tried to protect themselves against an envious or dangerous gaze. The piece ranges from classical mythology to European folk practice and customs still familiar to the writer in the twentieth century.

This is exactly the kind of material I want for Sunny Valley. Folk magic works best for me when it consists of small things people have always done: a sprig of rue, a hand gesture, a charm over a doorway, something your grandmother insists you carry even though she also insists she does not believe in such nonsense. That feels much more convincing than everybody knowing elaborate ceremonial magic.

"The Strawhouse Pavilion" by Ron Goulart brings us back to Landis' idea of the contemporary supernatural. A modern couple is being haunted by Wendy's dead father, but he does not simply appear as a transparent ghost. He was a bandleader, so he brings an entire 1940s dance pavilion with him, complete with music, cars, dancers, and the atmosphere of another era. Eventually Wendy realizes that her father has essentially brought back the whole ballroom because merely appearing as a ghost would not have been impressive enough.   

I love this idea! It feels like something that could happen in Jackson without changing the setting at all. A haunting does not have to be a figure walking down a hallway. Maybe an entire building comes back. Maybe music plays from a ballroom demolished thirty years ago. Maybe a street looks exactly as it did in 1947 for ten minutes and then snaps back to normal. That is a much more interesting supernatural event than another chain-rattling ghost.

In fact. Jacksonville has a rather famous band stand/gazebo. It was supposed to have been dismantled and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution. I can't recall if it was or not. BUT I have very distinct memories of it, especially sitting on it and reading "The Best of Dragon vol 2." Also, when the infamous "I attack the Gazebo" rumor was floating around in the early days of the internet, that was the image I had. So thank you, Ron Goulart. Jackson now has a ghost gazebo. 

Next comes the biggest literary name in the issue, Robert E. Howard, with "The Little People." Howard died in 1936, making this a very posthumous publication, and this January 1970 appearance was the story's first publication. The story explicitly invokes Arthur Machen's "The Shining Pyramid" and plays with the idea that stories of elves, trolls, fairies, and other "little people" might preserve distorted memories of an older population driven into caves and remote places by later peoples.     

There is plenty here that has not aged well, particularly Howard's racial and pseudo-anthropological assumptions, and I have no interest in importing those into my games. But there are some very solid ideas as well. What does interest me is the underlying weird-fiction idea that folklore may remember something real without remembering it correctly. That comes close to ideas I have been developing for Jackson and Sunny Valley, where an old legend might describe something genuine while completely misunderstanding what that thing actually was.

That does not make Howard's Little People my Ur-humans, nor do I want to collapse either of them into Faerie or the Sidhe or even the Sr. Wellman's Shonokins. What interests me is the older literary tradition of asking what might exist behind the folklore. Howard also gives us the direct Appendix N connection in this issue. I am still not suggesting that Coven 13 influenced D&D, but once again we can see these literary circles overlapping just a few years before D&D appears. It would have certainly influenced me had I been in Gygax's shoes. In January 1970, at just six months of age, I am not even sure I owned shoes yet. ETA: Asked my mom, I had a little pair I wore in an "Olan Mills" photo portrait. I was a chunky monkey back then, and my little fat fingers weren't well suited for typing.

This issue does solidify the connection to the earlier pulps that Landis loved so much. Securing the first run rights to this tale must have been a wonderful feeling for him. 

There is a reader's letters column that is a fun read. 

The issue also includes Arthur Jean Cox's essay on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Cox digs into the famous question of whether the ghosts are actually present or whether everything is being generated by the governess herself. The essay is valuable less because I need another interpretation of James and more because it demonstrates what Coven 13 wanted to be. This was not simply a magazine printing spooky stories. It wanted readers to think and argue about supernatural fiction as well.

Then we get "Witch Fish" by Dennis Quinn, which may be my favorite story in this issue. Abat is a witch who transforms himself into an enormous brook trout as part of a revenge scheme against the warlock Marag. That is strange enough, but the real fun for me is the background Quinn casually establishes.

The New England countryside has places known by one set of names to ordinary people and another set known only to witches and warlocks. There is a Federation, a Grand Council, magical territories, familiars, regulations on the use of magic, and punishments for breaking those rules. Abat has only recently finished serving a twenty-year ban on practicing witchcraft.      

That immediately gives me ideas for Jackson and West Haven. There is the map everyone sees, and then there is the map witches know. Same roads, same rivers, same cemetery, but with completely different meanings and boundaries. The mundane map tells you where a place is. The witches' map tells you what happened there and why you should not cross a particular boundary after dark.

"Last Rites" by Pauline Smith is another very 1969/1970 occult story. It even comments on witchcraft, necromancy, divination, parapsychology, and "Cosmic Consciousness" entering colleges and universities. From there we get young people experimenting with the Key of Solomon, the Atharva Veda, ritual circles, lunar timing, a photograph, and a cat. Really captures what I feel was going on in the early 1970s.  

One little detail really captures the entire Coven 13 approach. The old magical texts recommend isolated crossroads, forests, caves, abandoned houses, and other secluded places for ritual work. The characters note that in the age of automobiles and subdivisions, finding such places has become increasingly difficult.

Ancient magic has to deal with modern zoning.

That may be the most Coven 13 idea in the entire issue! 

"Don't Open 'til Xmas!" by James Benton Carr takes us into contemporary urban occult horror. Paul Benton is planning to spend Christmas with his younger girlfriend when a mysterious package arrives. He initially thinks it is from her, but it actually comes from his estranged wife Helen, who has recently been to Haiti. Inside is a doll, and Paul eventually realizes that Helen has used magic to transfer him into it.    

Some of the treatment of Haiti as shorthand for sinister magic is very much of its period, but the basic concept fits perfectly with Landis' editorial philosophy. The occult doesn't require a ruined castle. It can arrive by special delivery at a modern apartment. Sometimes the witch just needs your mailing address.

It also fits well with the themes I have been exploring all month of "Horror comes Home."

Finally, we return to Part Three of "Let There Be Magick!" by James R. Keaveny. By now the story has become increasingly recognizable as the sort of fantasy environment an RPG player could enter without much explanation. We have knights, sorcerers, strange animals, magical wards, hostile creatures, reanimated dead, castles, wilderness travel, and a wizard's stronghold.

What continues to interest me is how the protagonist approaches magic. He sees something everyone else accepts as supernatural folklore and immediately starts asking how it actually works. The "dead-alives," for example, are terrifying to the inhabitants of Camelot, but he begins testing assumptions about them, separating what they actually do from what people believe they do. That is exactly the sort of thing players do in an RPG.

Again, this is not evidence that Coven 13 influenced D&D. What it shows is how many of the ingredients were already circulating together before 1974. Sword & Sorcery, Science Fantasy, occultism, weird fiction, ghosts, witches, monsters, magical societies, necromancy, and ancient forgotten peoples were all part of the same imaginative landscape.

Final Thoughts

Of the three issues I have covered so far, I think this one brings the various pieces together the best. We have a warlock trying to defeat death, a ghost who brings an entire ballroom with him, folk protections against the Evil Eye, a hidden society of witches, young people experimenting with grimoires, Robert E. Howard reaching back into the older Weird tradition, and a Science Fantasy serial becoming increasingly recognizable as the sort of world fantasy gamers will soon inhabit.

Coven 13 still doesn't seem particularly concerned about whether something belongs to horror, fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, folk horror, occult fiction, or Science Fantasy. It is all part of the same supernatural landscape. And frankly, that is fine with me. 

In fact, that is probably what I like most about it.

Sadly, only one more issue to go.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. What I Learned from 40 Years of Larina

The Witch Queen and the Girl in Homeroom: What I Learned from Forty Years of One Character

I created Larina in July, 1986. 

That sentence feels simple enough, but it carries a lot of weight. It means she has been with me through six editions of D&D, most of high school, college games, new systems, abandoned campaigns, resurrected notebooks, lost files, new editions, new worlds, and more than a few versions of myself. She has been a magic-user, a witch, a sage, a horror heroine "last girl", a multiversal constant, and occasionally the person in the room who knows far more than she should.

I have known her longer than my kids have been alive, and I met her 15 months before I met the girl I would one day marry.

I wish I could remember the exact date, but failing that, and for reasons that make sense to me, I'll say it was 40 years ago today. July 6, 1986.

At some point, a character stops being just a character sheet. At some point, she becomes a mirror to what I am doing at the time. 

And Larina has always been a mirror.

Larina was not my first character. She was not even my first "witch" character. But over the years of playing her and using her in many games, she quickly became a favorite of mine.

If you like, you can read some more about her here on her own page and all the versions of her I have posted here over the years.

The Character You Start With Is Not the Character You Keep

That first version of Larina was nothing special at the time. Not really. She was a "witch" but only in the respect that she was a collection of ideas I had about witches. Some notes, some ideas, a rough draft. Her class at the time? Magic-user, 1st level. This was July 1986. I would use her a few times, but my main "wizard" was Phygora-Cronus. He was, and let's be honest here, my Doctor Who-ripoff character. A traveler who messed with the lives of others. Phygora did eventually become his own thing. But that very, very first version of Larina barely saw any adventures. Phygora even stopped traveling to be Larina's "advisor" at the magic school. 

Larina 1st Ed AD&D Character Sheets

Still, there was something that drew me back to her. She saw some play, but not a lot really. I am hard-pressed to remember any of her adventures between that summer and the Fall. 

Then came October 1986 and the release of Dragon Magazine #114 with its new take on the witch class. I really can't overstate how much that issue affected my ideas of how to play a witch. That put an end to her as a "fake-wizard". I made her into a 1st-level Magic-user/1st-level Witch right away with a brand-new sheet. I figured out that she had been to magic school, but the tuition was too much to keep up. Sound familiar? I was in the same boat with one school, so I took my second choice. Another mirror.

So I gave her a backstory to fit. She was working in the school library to make ends meet, and she picked up her witchcraft on the side. Libraries have always been where I study things on the edge of belief, so it was only natural. It was another mirror of my own situation.

That little bit of backstory did a lot more work than I realized at the time. It explained why she knew things she was not supposed to know. It explained why she had access to odd books, old languages, half-forgotten rituals, and dangerous scraps of lore. It made her something other than a spell list. She was not just a student of magic. She was a student of forbidden shelves, closing-time whispers, and books that should probably have been locked up better.

Looking back, that is where Larina really started to become Larina. Not by virtue of better hit points or power, but because she was the one who knew where to find the book. She was the one with the answers. 

This early Larina was hardly the best version of herself. Beginnings seldom are. But she had a spark. Her core was there.

Every Edition Reveals Something Different

I have done this with all of them. I currently have Vera Rook sitting on my desk, and I have six character sheets for her, maybe seven soon. I showed you all this as an experiment with Elowen Hale.  Vera began with a concept and then character options were used to support that concept. Elowen was built by looking at character options across the games and choosing the concept that fit them all. Every game and edition offers a chance to redefine a concept. With Elowen and Vera, it was a matter of deliberate design; with Larina, it has been a decades-long process.

Larina, 2nd Edition AD&D, the Witch Priestess

I have some 75 versions of her in posts for various systems now, each one a test to see if I could make a proper witch. For example, in AD&D 2nd Edition, she took on more of a priestess role. I called it her Wiccan side (to put it in modern terms) as she found her faith. The mechanics were simply there to put it on paper. 

And in a way, it was another mirror: while she was getting deeper into the supernatural, I was embracing my atheism and skepticism. There is a contradiction in all this that I have always found amusing. The further I put distance between myself and belief, the more exacting I became with hers. She became the High Priestess of faith and belief, while I rejected such ideas for myself. 

Perhaps that was her utility. She let me get at faith, ritual, gods, spirits, and the like without having to put my own stock in them. Where I was skeptical she could be sincere, she could stand in the circle and invoke the Goddess in earnest while I was on the periphery with a notebook to put in a word: "Yes, but what are the game terms for that?"

If you want an honest appraisal of my witch writing, there it is. I don’t need to believe in a thing to see its power.

I will ask her different questions depending on the game. D&D wants to know what she can cast. A horror game will ask what she has endured to survive. Superhero games make you wonder how much power she truly has. Sci-fi asks what she knows of the universe. Modern horror asks what she does when the monsters are not locked in some dungeon but are down the street. And so on. Every answer tells me how to play her and how to bring her into whatever comes next.

Converting a character is never a mere numbers game for me. You can have your fun making sure a 7th-level spell translates to the equivalent power in another system, but that is not the work. The task is to determine what the game deems important. Some games are about combat or social standing, others about trauma or whether you can afford rent and still be at the ritual on time. When I convert Larina, I am not just changing her stats; I am letting the game have its say with her.

Forty years on, she still has something to say.

Long-Lived Characters Become Mythology

Larina has been with me long enough to take on a mythic quality in these worlds. My players and my kids’ players are familiar with her. I have minis and 3D prints of her in the game room, art on the wall, even a Monster High doll someone went to the trouble of modifying for me (people love this post). Here, you will hear her name in the same breath as "The Simbul," "Circe," or "Tasha/Iggwilv."

I won’t pretend she is on their level in the annals of game history or literature, but at my table, she occupies that space. She is one of the names the young witches talk about in hushed tones. She is the woman who has already had her bout with the thing you have just come across, the one whose notes you find in the margin. She may be of assistance, or she may decide you are not ready for the truth.

Tea with the Witch Queens by Brian Brinlee

That is what mythology is. Not official canon or a publication record. It is what a name means when enough people at the table understand it.

It also means the little details start to matter more. Her red hair, the purple clothes, the dragon tooth necklace, the Triple Moon Goddess tattoo, and the scar below her left collarbone. Or the way she will tell you her birthday is Halloween when in fact it is the 25th of October. Things that were once just bits of color are now like relics. 

After a while, the details are no longer decoration; they are signs.

And because Larina has so many versions, those signs are what tell me she is still Larina. The stats can change. The edition can change. The cosmology can change. She can be in Mystoerth, Jackson, West Haven, WitchCraft, NIGHT SHIFT, Wasted Lands, or some far future starship-adjacent nonsense that probably started with me watching too much Doctor Who and WAY too much Star Trek. But if she is still the woman with the books, the questions, the occult knowledge, the stubborn compassion, the terrible habit of putting herself between people and the dark, and biting her nails, then she is still Larina.

Larina by Jeff Dee

She Taught Me What a Witch Is

Every Witch class I have ever written has Larina’s shadow somewhere in it. Sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, but always there. Elowen is an "adopted daughter"; Vera is a dark shadow; Marrissia is the mother of hers that devours.  Even Sinéad, to a degree, is "what if Larina had been raised in the Forgotten Realms?" All these witches are part of what I call her extended coven. Which is more growth for her because from the start she was a solitary witch learning via books she borrowed from her library. 

My witch books don’t just appear out of a vacuum; they are born of a lived-in experience I have with her. One feeds the other. Another mirror.

Larina made it clear to me that a witch is more than a woman with magic, a druid who has taken to the indoors, a wizard with better jewelry, or a cleric with the wrong holy symbols.

A witch is a relationship.

That was a revelation when I first saw it. Which is odd since what I was looking at were my own notes and writings. But there it was. Was it my writing or hers? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

The witch is a relationship. With power and place and memory. With old gods, false ones, and things that were never gods. With a coven, be it made of ghosts, familiars, past lives, a very patient cat, and the odd book.

That informed my design. A witch needs magic, but she also requires the rituals, the pacts and taboos, the marks and the consequences. She needs to be able to heal, curse, bind, and banish. And most of all, to know. Intelligence is important. Wisdom informs. But it is Charisma that sets it all into motion. 

Larina was never at her finest when she was flinging the largest spell in the room. She was best when she could tell you what the monster was and where it came from, what book made a passing mention of it, and why you should have heeded the old woman at the start of the adventure. 

That is the witch I keep writing.

The witch girl and the Witch Queen

A Good Character Can Outlive the Campaign

This is something of a big deal. Groups disband, people move on, editions are replaced, files go missing, and books get sold. Most campaigns have an end. Yet some characters endure.

Larina is my means of keeping old games from being set in amber. She is continuity, if sometimes of a confusing sort. I have four timelines for my main computer to make sense of what she has been up to since 1986, which is no small chore. In fact, trying to account for her "lost years" and sort out one of those timelines is what first put the notion of an updated Advanced Witches & Warlocks in my head. If you look at one of my playtest notebooks, you will find nothing but character sheets of her from various stages and reams of notes. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Why did she begin to embrace witchcraft as a practice and a religion more?

Will any of this make it to print? No, not all of it. Does it inform what does? You bet.

Those campaigns are history now. I am the only one left alive from some of them. But she has been here with me all along, my witness to the fact that it all happened. She was the chronicler of those long-lost campaigns. The people who were there are gone, but I have the notes I kept in her voice still tucked away in one of my 3-ring binders or stapled to a character sheet. It is strange when I read something like "Must talk to Killian" or "Find out what Morgan Highstar knows." Notes on Larina's sheet by her (by me for her) directed at characters who can no longer answer. Another mirror: Larina, when she is a GMPC or DMPC, often acts as the party's translator or chronicler. There is a certain sadness to it, and a comfort as well. Knowing that she is still bearing witness to deeds of glory.

Old campaigns are like ghosts. You hold on to the recollection of the character deaths and the lucky rolls, the big set pieces and the arguments over rules, not to mention the maps we were sure we would have for all time, only to mislay them. And the dumb jokes. But memory is no good at archiving; it will let go of what you once deemed important and hang on to the odd bits.

She reminds me that those games happened. Those people sat at those tables. That we cared very much about things written in pencil on loose-leaf paper. That we spent entire afternoons arguing over what a spell could do. For a little while, the world was bigger than the room we were sitting in, and the room we were sitting in was bigger than the world outside.

Larina is not the campaign itself, but you can smell it on her clothes.

The trick with an old character is not keeping her exactly the same. It is letting her change without letting her become someone else. Larina from 1986 is not the same character as Larina from 2026, because I am not the same either.

She has become something of a creative engine for me. What she needs is what my books need. It may sound mad, but then again, I once put in some time as a QMHP at an institution for schizophrenics, so perhaps it rubbed off. Or I just know this character well enough to tell the difference between what works and what I might want.

The WitchCraft RPG made clear to me the distinction between her magic and her psychic side, and I carried that over to Ghosts of Albion with its separate Magic and Faith abilities. From her I got the Wicca and the Witch Priestess for Advanced Witches & Warlocks, and the Witch Queen for Liber Mysterium and my 3rd Edition book. She was the six-year-old in my AD&D Complete Netbook of Witches & Warlocks. 

Which is the strangest thing of all: the adult Witch Queen and the girl in homeroom with glasses, wearing her watch on her right wrist, are one and the same. Not in any tidy, linear way, but in the manner of a dream or a myth, or an RPG you have been at for a while.

The child answers the call. The teenager comes across the book. The young witch puts up with the vampire. The adult who becomes the teacher. And the Witch Queen who becomes the warning. 

And somewhere in there is a guy (also with glasses) with a notebook, trying to figure out what all of that means in terms of saving throws, spell levels, and whether or not this really belongs in the next book.

Forty years on, and Larina is still around. 

I don’t hold on to her out of stubbornness (though there is a lot of that too); she has a way of showing me something new. Just when I think I have had my fill of her lessons, another one of her turns up. A stat block in a folder I have not opened in ages. A picture. Some class feature that is there only because, at some point, Larina did that at the table. A spell that is logical in a way only she could make it so.

Maybe that is the real lesson.

The best characters are not the ones who stay frozen on the page. They are the ones who follow us out of the dungeon, through the years, and into whatever strange country comes next.

For me, Larina has been a witch, a mirror, a witness, a test case, a mythology, and a creative engine.

Not bad for a little 1st-level magic-user girl from July of 1986.

Larina by Claudio Pozas

The Mirror Shard: The Dark Anima

This one is a little bit different than other mirror shards. Those typically cover concepts I can use in both my Occult D&D campaign and my Jackson, IL campaign, even if they appear different in each. 

I have talked about this before, but it is worth bringing up again here because it is part of Larina’s genesis.

My first foray into psychology was in the mid-80s. I went the way of most people and began with Freud and then Jung. Freud had his Id, Ego, and Superego, all very serviceable concepts. Jung I found a bit more philosophical, or at any rate more to my liking as a writer and a gamer. From him I took the archetypes, the Shadow, synchronicity, the Animus, and the Anima. That was what resonated. 

The Anima, in Jungian terms, is the inner feminine image in a man’s psyche. The Animus is the inner masculine image in a woman’s psyche. Now, I am not going to pretend this is modern psychology, or even particularly good psychology by today’s standards. This is armchair Jung, filtered through a teenage gamer in the 1980s who was reading books he only partly understood and immediately turning the interesting bits into D&D characters.

In a way, that was all I really needed then.

But the notion of the Anima held me. Jung would have you believe it is the inner feminine in a man’s mind (the Animus being the woman’s inner masculine). I wanted to know what mine looked like, and not in the pedestrian sense of an ideal type of woman. I was after something darker and more symbolic. If the feminine side of my imagination were to step into a dungeon with a spellbook and some secret she wasn’t in a hurry to share, who would she be?

Larina was the answer. Or perhaps she was there first, and I put the question to her later. In college, I worked on my undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees in Psychology. All the while, I had Larina by my side. Informing me, informed by me. I read Jung in highschool, I read it again in college and discussed him in History of Psychology classes I was in. Her first "publication" may have been a paper I wrote about the Anima with the Witch as archetype. That would have been at least 1989 or 1990. 

She is not simply “the girl character.” Sure, I like witches, and I have played a lot of women over the years, but that is not why she is here. She was curious and intuitive. She was compassion made into a weapon. She was the part of me still open to magic while the rest of me was being weaned off it. A useful tension.

As my Anima, Larina, is not merely soft and healing. She is dark. Not evil; there is a distinction. She is the witch standing at the periphery of the firelight; the one standing in the liminal space. The one who tells you there is more to it than you see. The librarian who will hand you a cursed tome because you need the lesson. The red-haired woman in purple who smiles when the monster misnames her.

Forget the seductress or the evil queen; they are too convenient and too cliché. The Dark Anima is your guide to the underworld. Think of Beatrice with a black cat, or Persephone once she has memorized the map of Hell. She won’t rescue you from the dark; she will show you how to navigate it. She is Innana and Ereshkigal. 

That is why she has a habit of appearing in my work as a sage, a mirror, or a teacher. She is the voice in my head that says the monster is a symbol, a wound, an old story in new clothes.

It also makes for good company with Nigel. He is my Id, all impulse and violence, the one who will put a blade to the problem and leave the philosophy for another day. Larina is his interpreter. She understands his danger and his necessity. Between them, I have Phygora as Animus, Johan as Super-ego, Retsam as Ego… a full psychological adventuring party in my head. It may not be entirely healthy, but it has given me my share of characters.

But Larina is the one who has stuck.

The Anima is no ordinary character. She is a mirror. She shows you desire and fear, and the things you put aside for being inconvenient. And as the person looking in the mirror changes, so does she. In a very literal sense, she has been my mirror, reflecting my turn away from religion, my skepticism, my fondness for libraries, my urge to codify the occult for a game, and my fascination with women who know more than they ought not to.

She is not me. But she is mine in a way my other characters are not. 

I suspect that is the reason for her forty-year run.

Barking Alien's RPG CAMPAIGN TOUR CHALLENGE! Day 26

Day 26 - Dramatic Events

Day 26-Are there any dramatic events from the campaign you can share?
Tell us about a moment of exciting action or tense thrills that has happened during your game. When and where did it take place?

Elowen's Journal

"Some stories are told softly, even when they involve blood and thunder.

When I first came to West Haven, I noticed Larina’s left eye. It is a different, paler blue than her right, and she has a scar that runs over and through it. I asked about it once, carefully. She does not like to talk about it.

She only said, 'That was the night Aisling came home.'

I could not believe the story when I first heard it. Not really. So I asked people who had been there. I listened to the ghosts. I believe it now.

Céline told me about the night the wards screamed and fell. Émilie told me about potions brewed so fast they cracked their bottles. The witch knight Rowan told me about fighting creatures out of nightmares, holding the line with sword and will alone. Rebecca swore she saw Strix witches tear enormous Olitiau bats out of the sky, fur, feathers, and blood raining down like black snow. The ghosts told me that Mara witches used them as soldiers to fight demons and devils against their will. 

Cassandra and Celeste spoke quietly about the healing of a broken and near-dead Aisling. About how close they came to failing. About how Katrina took risks, channeling magics so powerful no one else would ever have dared.

But everyone told the same part the same way.

They say that Larina ran out of a Gate and into the night, carrying a broken girl in her arms, and called every witch in West Haven to her side.

They say the devil, who had claimed Aisling, came to take her back. They say he brought monsters with him. They say the sky burned and screamed.

And they also say Larina stood in the center of it all. Beautiful. Powerful. Terrible. Levistus struck her, tearing her flesh and eye with a claw. She fell back, and everyone thought she was down for good. 

Then, the kind witch who sang in her kitchen and laughed too loudly was gone. In her place stood the ascendant Witch Queen, unbound. She rose up several feet off the ground to tower over Levistus. 

They say she fought like a sovereign defending her own blood. Even the demons ran in fear of her wrath unleashed. She screamed, and demons died on the spot. She cast sheets of fire and caused lightning to fall from the sky like it was rain. Her hair exploded, crowning her in a halo of flame. She summoned the Old Magic, the magic that binds all witches together. The devil's claim on Aisling became the noose around his own neck.  When he finally knew what was happening, it was too late. 

When I asked what happened to the devil, Larina only said, 'He won’t hurt anyone ever again.'

Esmé and Amaranth told me the truth later on.

They said Larina had Unmade him.

Not killed. Not banished.

Gone. Forever.

I asked Esmé why the Hells have not risen up against us, and she said it was because 'Levistus was incompetent, and Hell does not reward failure.' 

Aisling doesn't talk much about that night either. She just says, 'Witches bled for me. My own family never did that, so this is my family now.'

That night happened before I came to West Haven. But sometimes, when storms roll in hard from the mountains and the air feels tight, the ghosts remember it again.

So do the witches."

Designer’s Notes

This was the defining mythic event of modern West Haven. I wanted something to firmly establish Larina as a new Witch Queen. Prior to this event, she had been largely the same, a very high-level witch in my world.  I needed something to push her out of that role into something new. So I came up with the idea of having her rescue a new witch trapped in Hell. And I needed a big bad. My son and I jokingly said it should be Vecna. He is a fan of Critical Role's Vox Machina, and I am a fan of Stranger Things. Both featured a "Vecna." We laughed at that idea and decided that, no, as powerful as Larina is, Vecna is still way too much for her to deal with. I also like to think Vecna is the one thing that can still frighten her. 

So I used Levistus. I never liked the guy, so I came up with the idea that he had been capturing young witches, feeding on their magic, and draining their patrons through their link to break free. Mespitopheles noticed it most, since in my worlds, he is the Archdevil with the most pacts with witches and warlocks. 

Aisling was his last victim; she was "mostly dead." But Larina got there first and rescued her. 

It establishes Larina not merely as powerful, but as fiercely protective. Her authority comes from action, not title. The coven did not follow her because she commanded them. They followed her because she ran first into the dark. Utterly destroying an Archduke of Hell also didn't harm her position any. 

This event also anchors Aisling’s place in the world. She is not just a survivor. She is claimed, defended, and reborn through witchcraft and community. It also highlights the difference between my two "returned from the dead" characters. Aisling was born of blood and violence. Though she never lets that violence define her now. Why is this important? I typically don't have my characters come back from the dead. Dead is dead for my witches. These two are an exception, and even then, they came back before they were characters, really.

Larina also lost her left eye.

She has a replacement now, but the scar remains. This happened when painting a mini of her: my hand slipped, and I ended up with a streak of white through her left eye. It looked rather badass to be honest, so I kept it. It's also a nice, subtle tribute to one of my favorite R&B groups, TLC (I had a huge crush on Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes). We worked it into the game. That same mini fell off my shelf the weekend after the game and broke off her base. So I also said that she ended up with two broken legs. Don't worry, she had the best healers nearby, and I had plenty of super glue. 

Mechanically, this event explains:

• Why certain extraplanar forces avoid West Haven entirely
• Why Katrina’s influence rose sharply afterward
• Why Larina bears lasting scars that cannot be healed (other than it makes her look badass)
• Why the coven reacts instantly to threats against their own
• Raises Larina from powerfu, but local, witch to cosmic-level Witch Queen

It is the moment West Haven stopped being merely a refuge and became a sanctuary that fights back. I picked this one because things in West Haven have been remarkably quiet since then. 

In D&D terms, it also did a couple of things for me. It got rid of Levistus, which I have been wanting to do since forever.  Glasya then used this to take over Levistus' layer of Hell.  Mesphitopheles knows that Larina did this, thus protecting his own witches and warlocks, so he is actually rather pleased with this. Dispater, who in my mind despises impropriety of any sort, is pleased that Levistus was caught up in his own scheme and outmatched by a "mere human witch." 

Glasya felt she owed Larina a favor. Yes. Larina has called in that particular debt. But that is a tale for another day.

I focus a lot on Larina in this particular tale, but all my witches had something to do. Larina may have rescued Aisling, but it was Katrina who really gave her new life. The Larina-Katrina-Aisling dynamic is a bit like divorced parents and their adult child. 

Because nothing in West Haven should ever be clean cut. 

Elowen and Aisling at Renee's Tea Shop

Join Adam Dickstein of Barking Alien, and his RPG CAMPAIGN TOUR CHALLENGE 2026!

Old-School Essentials DEMON Month May!

 Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome and Old-School Essentials is releasing his long-awaited Demonic Grimoire for Old-School Essentials. And he is not alone.

https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/909d4351-ca9d-4206-834b-24d2b64a1249/landing?ref=home-page

From the promotional page:

What is the Demonic Grimoire?

A hotly anticipated major rules supplement for Old-School Essentials, expanding the game with demons, cults, and dark magic. Contained within this 176-page tome:

• 8 demon lords, detailed with their cults, minions, spells, and hellish domains.
• 60 new monsters, from lowly tormented souls to mighty lords of hell.
• 4 new classes: chaos knight, cultist, demon hunter, tiefling.
• 70+ new magic items of fiendish power.
• Demonology: magic circles, summoning, demonic pacts, familiars.
• Referee advice for building demonic campaigns.
• 120+ black & white illustrations, including a fully illustrated bestiary. Art by Lucas Korte, Kennon James, Tony Hough, Matt Stikker, and other leading old-school artists.
• Pristine control-panel layout to maximise ease of reference and minimise page flipping.

I mean that is cool enough right?

Well, like the man on the TV says, "but wait, there is more!"

Gavin is being joined by six more (at present) projects to expand on his demons book.

• Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire
• HELLCRAWL
• No Devil's Land
• Dinner with The Damned
• Emporium of the Damned
• The Black Spire Pact
• Codex Qliphothica: Demons of the Other Side for OSE

Sign up for them all!

If you like that last one, then I have some good news for you. That is my own contribution to OSE Demons Month.

The Codex Qliphothica will cover an entire new race of demons for OSE, the Qliphoth.

What Are the Qliphoth?

The Qliphoth are not merely demons; they are the discarded refuse of the first gods. When the Luminous Ones sought to transcend their flaws and ascend to perfection, they shed their wrath, envy, lust, and despair like snakes sloughing off dead skin. These husks did not dissolve into nothingness. They congealed in the dark cracks beneath creation, howling with the memory of rejection, and slowly grew into self-willed horrors. Where demons embody chaos and appetite, the Qliphoth are anti-creation, seeking to unmake what is whole, defile what is pure, and drag all things back to the Other Side from which they emerged.

The Qliphoth are encountered rarely, for they dwell far below even the demon lords' dominions, in a bleak plane called The Other Side. A nightmare realm of dead forests, cracked moons, and oceans of ash. When they do appear, reality itself seems to warp: sound dulls, color drains, and dreams turn to fevered visions.

My plan (and I am on track for this) is to have everything done to be delivered soon after the crowdfunding ends. Both the PDFs and physical print copies will be handled by DriveThruRPG. 

Cover subject to change, but I rather like this one. And Dean Spencer is really fantastic.

Most of the writing is done, and I am paying for the art upfront. I even have my writing play list ready!

See you on the Other Side!