Witchcraft Wednesday: Larina at 16, the Girl in Jackson, IL

Larina Stephanie Nichols at 16

 On Monday, I talked about Larina and her genesis in 1986 and before. On Friday, I am going to talk about the character's future. So today I thought, what about the present? What is Larina doing right now, and how does she affect my game design? So *who* is the Larina sitting on my desk now as I write?

Well‚ unless this is your first day here‚ the current incarnation of Larina is the one in Jackson‚ IL‚ set in 1985-86‚ and she is not the witch queen, not yet and se might not ever be․ She is often more frightened than not. Well‚ not that she'd tell you․ She only knows two spells and has a handful of books on witchcraft. And now, she and her dad just moved to Jackson‚ IL‚ the most haunted town in the Midwest․

There are a lot of really good reasons to go back to an earlier version of this character․ For starters‚ as I have hoped to point out‚ this was when she began in real life‚ so it would make sense to explore the character becoming who she is․ Not the legend․ Not the queen․ Not the character who has shifted through AD&D‚ Chill‚ WitchCraft‚ Mage‚ and NIGHT SHIFT‚ but just simple Larina‚ the sixteen-year-old trying to figure out why every shadow in the town knows her name․

I have had forty years to get to know the person Larina is. But in 1985-86, when I play Jackson Larina, it is an altogether different matter. At sixteen, fresh to town, left to make sense of her magic on her own. She has some friends who become her coven and are like sisters to her, and other friends she will fiercely defend. But the monsters here always have the upper hand.

Back in real 1986, Larina was not nostalgia. She was immediate. She was a character I needed at the table, a witch-shaped answer to a question AD&D had not quite answered for me yet. Today, writing Jackson Larina as a sixteen-year-old in a fictional1986 is something else. It is not just returning to the character. It is returning to the age when I first imagined her.

That changes everything.

I was the same as Larina when I first put her on the page. Being a teenager in 1986 is no exercise in imagination for me; I was living it. The music and books, the games and the anxieties that came with them, the moral panic, the cheap notebooks where I would scribble down character ideas, the disputes over rules, the feeling that the world was a far stranger place than the adults would have you believe, all of it was right there. Larina is a product of that time.

With Jackson Larina, I can return to those days, but from a different vantage point. I am not sixteen any longer, nor am I looking ahead from 1986. I am looking back. It puts her in an altogether different position in my writing and in the games I make. She is more than a younger iteration of a familiar character; she is a means of inquiring what she was before the weight of mythology and design had a chance to settle on her. And honestly, I like her that way.

There is utility in stripping away the power one has accrued over the years. Jackson Larina does not have a host of powerful allies or old enemies to call upon, no lost loves, no artifacts or cosmic scars to speak of. What she has is her father, a few spells, some books and a good deal of stubbornness. And an instinct telling her something is amiss in Jackson, and that if she does not put two and two together, someone will be the worse for it. That is a witch of a different sort. 

She does have friends. Stephanie and Faye are her coven. Candy and Denise are loyal even if they need saving more often than help, but they are still there. Even later characters like Andy, Rowan, Ami and Valentino have their places in her life. Much different than her Dark Places & Demogorgons counterpart.  

Which is precisely why she is so useful in my game design. I can have all these versions of her.

While Larina is always a feature in my design work, here she plays a more crucial role. She is my test of the rules and setting for other characters, the character others might use. Characters you might use. If the rules only work when a witch is already powerful, then they do not work. If the setting only makes sense once the character has become legendary, then the setting is too thin. Jackson Larina asks a more basic question: can a beginning witch survive here?

That is what I need to know.

You will not find high-level characters in Jackson, IL. This is a town of teenagers and their teachers and parents, of record stores and public libraries and old cemeteries, of college lore and haunted houses and things best left unencountered after midnight. A witch operating in this environment must be able to conduct research, protect her friends, and make mistakes. The game has to let her be clever, not invincible.

So the fact that this Larina knows only two spells is of consequence. It makes me, as a designer, consider what witchcraft is apart from a laundry list of abilities, powers and spells. What does she suspect? What has she read that is beyond the others? What does she see when they are not looking? And at what cost? Those are the questions that matter to Jackson Larina, not the damage a spell might do. With this version, I am able to create a witch as a playable character rather than a pre-packaged archetype. She ought not come across as the inferior of an older one, but as one who has only just started on a perilous education. Jackson Larina is my means of testing that proposition. She shows me if a novice has sufficient mystery to hold a player’s interest, or enough to offer an adventure and a group.

Larina also serves as a reminder that knowledge is among her most ancient of powers. Even in the days of AD&D she was never simply a matter of spellcasting. She was the one with the books and the lore, the one with the questions, the translator of ancient languages. If there was a symbol on the door or an old name in the grimoire, or a ghost that made its annual appearance, it was she who sought to make sense of it. Jackson Larina refines that. Her two or three spells are beside the point; her strength is in what she pays attention to. She reads and listens and connects one weird detail to another.

I want a "knower" in NIGHT SHIFT and in my Jackson work, not merely a caster who hurls magic at a monster without knowing why it is there. 

She doesn't have firepower. She has two spells and a library card.

The Larina on my Desk

There is a certain vulnerability in her that the older incarnations lack. An adult Larina can be fearsome, the Witch Queen mythic; some versions of her can enter a room and reality must bend around her. Jackson is not at that stage, she might never get to that stage. She can be overmatched or mistaken, in need of assistance, the new girl unsure whom to trust. That suits Jackson better. 

The town is at its best when the characters are not entirely in command. That is Horror Movie logic and Gothic Fiction logic; it is good for horror. They may be resourceful and brave, but Jackson should seem older to them. Dangerous. There are secrets in the place that predate their birth, colleges with ghosts, houses with memories, and adults who know either too much or not nearly enough. A sixteen-year-old Larina belongs in such a world; she has the power to spot the cracks but not always know how to put them right.

In a way, that is what Larina is worth to me today. She is no longer just the character from forty years back, nor the Witch Queen in waiting. For now she is the red-headed girl in Jackson with her couple of spells and a handful of books, some really great friends, an over-protective dad, and a nagging feeling the town is going to put everything she knows about magic to the test. As a designer, I need her to be there.

If Jackson Larina works, then the witch works. Not the high-level witch. Not the legendary witch. Not the Witch Queen. The beginning witch. The playable witch. The girl who has just enough magic to get herself into trouble and just enough courage to try getting everyone else out of it.

That is the Larina sitting on my desk right now, and after forty years, she is still teaching me how to write witches.

Two Spells and a Library Card

A natural question can be raised. Why her? I mean I have no shortage of witches. I even created a brand new one (more or less) just last week. I even have a witch that has a great background AND is about the right age in Elowen. 

So why go back to Larina?

I think part of that has been answered above. Larina, the character, is a product of the mid 1980s for me. A lot of what I wanted a witch to be in 1986 is her. So naturally, if I am going to have a witch character in 1986, why not her?

Also, Larina is always great for me because I know her so well. When I am running situations as a thought experiment or at the table, I know how she should react, not how I, as someone who knows the rules of the RPG, would react. That's important to me.

Also, Elowen has a very specific role in my mind. She is deeply connected to West Haven and very much Larina's "adopted" daughter. More so than Sinéad was, despite that being an early idea. 

Larina at 16, at least how I am using her in Jackson, is becoming something really fun and she can proudly stand beside her "sisters" (or Shards as I have been calling them) from Chill, WitchCraft, Mage, and the Witch Queen from AD&D. Even the other versions of her in NIGHT SHIFT. 

Other Larinas have crossed worlds and realities; the Larina of Jackson, IL has to get across town to St. Michaels for her Greek II class in her old purple 1977 VW Bug (which she has named "Eurydice" which makes no sense really). That is enough of a challenge.

And she is teaching me more this way.

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.

Tales of Jackson: Edge of Seventeen

 It might be fairly obvious now, but I am not doing any adventure here in order. Some are playtests; others are fully thought-out ideas...in my head, if not on paper. And some start out as one thing and then become something very, very different at some point.

Such is the case with Larina's birthday on October 25, 1986. 

Aaron and Larina share chips in her VW Bug.

The Edge of Seventeen

"Sometimes the ghost doesn't want to haunt you or scare you. Sometimes it just wants to share a bag of chips or for you to hold your hand before they move on."

One of the things I have been working on for my Jackson, Illinois setting is making sure that not every adventure follows the same formula. Yes, Jackson is a town filled with witches, ghosts, demons, monsters, and all sorts of supernatural trouble. And yes, the teenagers living there seem to have an uncanny ability to find themselves in the middle of it. But not every encounter with the supernatural needs to end in a fight. Not every ghost needs to be busted, every demon defeated, or every mystery solved.

Sometimes the supernatural is simply part of life in Jackson. Sometimes it can even give someone something wonderful, if only for a little while.

That is the idea behind my Season 2 adventure, "Edge of Seventeen."

Honestly, I was always going to do this adventure.

A Birthday Near Halloween

The adventure takes place between October 19 and November 1, 1986, during the 1986–87 school year. Larina Nichols, our resident teenage witch, is about to turn seventeen. Her birthday falls on Saturday, October 25, just six days before Halloween. 

Of course, she is just a stand-in for your characters, but it works well if their birthday is near Halloween.

For most teenagers, having a birthday that close to Halloween might mean a costume party, some scary movies, and plenty of candy. For a witch living in Jackson, Illinois, it means something else entirely.

The Veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is exceptionally thin around Halloween. Spirits can cross over more easily, strange things happen in places that are normally quite ordinary, and the dead sometimes walk among the living.

Naturally, a character would like to have a birthday party without anything supernatural getting involved.

Naturally, that isn't going to happen.

In my game, Larina is a 16-year-old senior at Jackson Public High School who has been advanced academically, and she also attends advanced Greek classes at St. Michael's Catholic School. One afternoon, while eating lunch alone in her purple Volkswagen Beetle, she is approached by a handsome young man wearing a St. Michael's school uniform.

His name is Aaron Michaels. He's seventeen, with blond hair, green eyes, and a friendly smile. He sees Larina sitting alone and asks if she would like some company. Soon they are sitting in her Beetle, sharing a bag of potato chips and talking.  It's a perfectly ordinary meeting between two teenagers.

My players immediately distrusted him, calling him "Witch Bait."

And for Larina, who spends an extraordinary amount of her time dealing with extraordinary things, that's rather nice.

The Boy Who Wasn't There

Aaron and Larina hit it off almost immediately. He's intelligent, funny, thoughtful, and genuinely interested in her. They start spending time together, going on dates, listening to music, and doing all the things teenagers do when they discover they really like each other.

For once, Larina has a boyfriend who isn't intimidated by her intelligence, doesn't expect her to solve some supernatural crisis, and doesn't seem to have any ulterior motives.

So yeah.  Aaron has a secret. Aaron Michaels is dead.

He was the son of Professor Michaels, a chemistry teacher at MacAlister College and attended St. Michael's Catholic School. He died in a chemistry laboratory accident while saving two children who snuck in from exposure to chlorine gas. Aaron wasn't a criminal, a villain, or someone whose death was the consequence of some terrible supernatural bargain. He was a good kid who saw two children in danger and did what he could to save them.

Now, with Jackson's already thin Veil growing thinner as Halloween approaches, Aaron has somehow returned.

And this is where I want the adventure to depart from the usual ghost story.

Aaron isn't trying to haunt anybody. He isn't seeking revenge. He isn't possessing someone or attempting to drain the life out of Larina. For approximately two weeks, he is, for all practical purposes, alive again. He can eat, laugh, feel the autumn cold, hold Larina's hand, and experience the ordinary pleasures of life.

When he's with Larina, he even sometimes forgets that he's dead.

Is that because of Larina's magic? Is it because the Veil is particularly thin? Or is it because the two of them have formed a genuine emotional connection?

I don't know.

More importantly, I don't think I want to know. Some mysteries are better left unanswered.  Besides, all the other characters spend their time trying to figure it out. That is when they are not trying to plan a birthday party.

That is my design hook here. I have split the party. I have one character away (the Birthday girl) and the others planning the party and noticing this new guy who is taking all her time. Which is convenient since they use the distraction to get the party planning done.

Happy Seventeenth Birthday, Larina

Larina doesn't discover Aaron's secret until her seventeenth birthday party on October 25.

By this point, she has been dating him for almost a week and has developed genuine feelings for him. Aaron has become someone important to her, and suddenly she discovers that the boy she's falling for has been dead for years.

Naturally, Larina didn't take the news particularly well.  Though better than I expected.

She is hurt that Aaron kept the truth from her, confused about what is happening, and more than a little frustrated that the first decent boyfriend she's found in a while turns out to be a ghost.

Her friends, of course, have opinions. But here is the important part of the adventure. Larina doesn't reject Aaron because he's a ghost.

After they talk about it, she decides she still wants to be with him. She likes Aaron for who he is, not whether his name appears on a list of the living.

For the next week, they continue dating. Aaron even gets to give Larina a birthday present, a silver pentagram necklace that shows how much he respects her beliefs, despite his Catholic school upbringing.

They spend time together knowing that the approaching end of the Halloween season will separate them.

And that knowledge changes their relationship. They no longer need to pretend that everything is normal, but they also don't need to spend every moment worrying about what comes next.

Sometimes they just want to sit in her car, listen to the radio, and share another bag of chips.

Happy Birthday Larina!

The Ghost Who Doesn't Need Busting

Originally, Aaron wasn't supposed to be the main story of Edge of Seventeen.

My first idea involved a ghost girl who had died before her seventeenth birthday. With Larina's birthday approaching, the girl's spirit would return, threatening to steal the life or future she had been denied. That would provide the supernatural mystery and danger, while Aaron would serve as the romantic B-plot.

It was a perfectly serviceable supernatural horror adventure. There would be a mystery to investigate, a dangerous spirit to confront, and some sort of climax at Larina's birthday party.

But the more I developed Aaron, the more interesting his plot became. The more I had him show up, the more the players wanted to know more about him. 

I found myself spending more time thinking about the boy who had died saving two children than the ghost girl who was supposed to be the antagonist. Aaron didn't have an evil agenda or a sinister secret beyond the fact that he was dead. He was just a good kid who had been given an unexpected opportunity to experience some of the life he had lost.

And Larina was giving him that opportunity without even realizing it.

Eventually, I decided to drop the ghost girl entirely.

Aaron was promoted from the "B plot" to the "main plot", and Edge of Seventeen became a very different adventure.

There is no evil ghost to defeat. No demonic mastermind is manipulating events. No sinister ritual is required to send Aaron back to the grave.

Instead, the adventure is about two teenagers who find each other under impossible circumstances and decide to make the most of the time they have.

That doesn't mean there isn't a mystery. The characters can investigate Aaron's death, explore the circumstances of his return, and try to understand what happens when Halloween ends. There are opportunities for the other characters to become involved, particularly when Larina learns the truth.

But solving the mystery isn't the point.

The point is just two teens getting to be regular teens for a little bit. It doesn't matter that one is a ghost and the other is a witch. It is the type of adventure you can have in Jackson and nowhere else.  

Everyone Needs a Hand to Hold On To

On November 1, the Veil begins returning to normal, and Aaron can no longer remain in the world of the living.

Larina cannot prevent this. Despite her considerable magical abilities, she cannot simply make Aaron alive again. Nor should she have to. There is no mystery to solve here, but I don't need the players to know that right away.

One of the lessons I want Edge of Seventeen to explore is that magic cannot, and perhaps should not, solve every problem.

Aaron isn't asking Larina to resurrect him (she couldn't anyway). He isn't demanding that she find some way to keep him in Jackson forever. He just wants to spend what time he has with her.

And when that time ends, he wants someone to hold his hand. Neither wants to say goodbye, but they both know they have to.

And then Aaron is gone.

No explosion of supernatural energy. No terrible curse. No triumphant spellcasting.

Just a girl standing alone on an autumn evening, missing a boy she loved for a little while.

I don't plan to bring Aaron back in a future adventure. His story has an ending, and I think it should remain that way. Not every character needs to return, and not every loss needs to be reversed.

Sometimes that is simply how life works.

Aaron says goodbye

What I Want from Edge of Seventeen

I want this adventure to demonstrate something important about Jackson and about the kinds of stories I want to tell with NIGHT SHIFT. 

This likely reads more like a Monsterhearts game than an OSR-adjacent NIGHT SHIFT game, but that is the point. 

Not every supernatural encounter needs to be a combat encounter. Not every ghost is evil. Not every mystery must be solved, and not every adventure needs a villain.

There are plenty of monsters in Jackson. The teenagers will have more than enough opportunities to fight vampires, confront demons, break curses, and save the town from terrible things.

But sometimes the supernatural gives us an opportunity to tell a different kind of story.

A story about kindness, first love, friendship, loss, and growing up.

For Aaron Michaels, the extraordinary event isn't coming back from the dead. It's getting to experience things he thought were gone forever. A first date. A birthday party. A girl who really likes him. The simple pleasure of being seventeen.

For Larina, the adventure is about learning that something doesn't have to last forever to matter, and that loving someone sometimes means accepting that you cannot keep them.

And for the players, I hope it becomes a reminder that the characters in Jackson are teenagers first and supernatural investigators second. Their friendships, romances, heartbreaks, and ordinary lives deserve just as much attention as the monsters lurking beyond the Veil.

Because sometimes the ghost doesn't need to be busted.

Sometimes it just needs someone to share a bag of chips with, and a hand to hold before moving on.

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!

Larina "Nix" Nichols for Villains & Vigilantes

"Larina" by Jeff Dee

 Been meaning to do this one for a while.

Just got back from visiting my family. Anytime I meet up with them, especially my brothers and sisters, we get to talking about all the scary stories we know.  This time it was about a road where people, in particular single women, will often just vanish. Yes. We know the truth is a different sort of horror, but this is still where our thoughts took us. 

The "haunted road" tale is very old. This got me to think about who, or what, is haunting them and who, or what, should be guarding them.

While it is great for modern supernatural games, I was reading over Tim Knight's new blog, Cowboys, Capes, and Claws, and was reminded of how much fun I always had with Villains & Vigilantes.

And given that we both have Jeff Dee art of our characters, I can't help but think that they exist in the same universe. 

The Witch and The Road Warden

Larina Nichols did not become a hero because she wanted to save the world. She became one because the world kept losing people in the spaces no one watched. 

She had survived a house fire that should have killed her. Officially ruled an accident, it never sat right with her. From that moment on, Larina heard things others did not, felt the pull of grief and danger like a pulse beneath the skin of everyday life. Roads felt watched. Abandoned places whispered. Women went missing, and the silence around their absence was louder than any alarm. She learned early that evil did not always announce itself, and that survival carried an obligation.

The truth found her on a moonlit stretch of forgotten highway, following a pattern no one else believed in. What haunted those roads was not a man or a monster in the simple sense, but a thing older than asphalt, a guardian spirit twisted feral by neglect and blood. A Road Warden. When Hecate, guardian of the crossroads, answered Larina’s call, it was not with command but recognition. Strength came, clarity followed, but the magic was never a gift alone. Larina studied, bled, bargained, and learned the old ways. 

Her first act was not destruction but binding. She restored the Road Warden to its true purpose, and in doing so, saved some who were lost and mourned those who were found. The world called it a miracle. Larina called it insufficient and kept going. For this, she received the Blessing of Artemis and may call on her in her need. 

She wears no mask, only intention. Her power is divine and learned, occult and earned, sharpened by grief rather than dulled by it. In a world of capes and symbols, Larina walks the liminal spaces, guarding thresholds, sealing cracks, and watching the places heroes overlook. She does not promise salvation. She promises attention. Sometimes that is enough. 

Sometimes it has to be.

Larina "Nix" Nichols (formerly Larina Macalister), Villains and Vigilantes

SIDE: Good
SEX: F
AGE: 28
WEIGHT: 128 lbs

EXPERIENCE: 90,000
LEVEL: 13

TRAINING: Occult Studies, Folklore, Ritual Magic

POWERS
Magic Spells (requires speaking & gestures)
- Witch Bolt (Power Blast, 1d20, magical; +3 to hit)
- Witchfire Ward (Force Field +7 vs physical/energy)
- Glamour (Illusions, all senses)
- Mirror Walk (Teleport; medium = mirrors/reflective surfaces)
- Divination (Precognition/Postcognition; Detect Magic)
- Binding Curse (Paralysis/Affliction; Will/mental resistance applies)
- Flight (broom or spell)
Familiar: Cotton (small white flying cat; mental link; while nearby, Larina gains +2 Detect Hidden and +2 Detect Danger)
Weakness: Must be able to speak and gesture to cast.

ABILITIES

STRENGTH: 10
ENDURANCE: 14
AGILITY: 13
INTELLIGENCE: 21
CHARISMA: 22

DERIVED STATS
BASIC HITS: 3
HIT MOD: (STR 1.0)(END 1.4)(AGL 1.3)(INT 1.4) = 2.548
HIT POINTS: 8 (3 × 2.55 → 7.65, rounds to 8)
POWER: 58
CARRYING CAPACITY: 132 lbs
BASE HTH DAMAGE: 1d4 (STR 10)
HEALING RATE: 1.0/day (END 14)
ACCURACY MODIFIER: +1 (AGL 13)
DAMAGE MODIFIER: +3 (AGL/INT)
DETECT HIDDEN: 16% (INT 21)
DETECT DANGER: 20% (INT 21)
REACTION FROM GOOD: +4 REACTION FROM EVIL: –4 (CHA 22)

MOVEMENT
Ground: 37" (AGL 13)
Flight: 90 MPH (broom/spell)

INVENTING
INVENTING POINTS: 29.4 (INT-based)
INVENTING %: 63% (~INT × 3%)

LEGAL STATUS
Citizen of the US with no criminal record.

ORIGIN & BACKGROUND
Multiversal witch and occult scholar; protector of the gifted. Known in mystical circles as Nix the Witch Queen. Her familiar Cotton is psychically linked and often scouts or warns of danger.

VISUAL
Flowing dark purple costume with glowing runes, black boots, triple-moon goddess symbol, bracers engraved with warding symbols, and a faint aura of witchfire. Crescent moon burn scar near her left collar bone. Triple moon goddess tattoo on her back, between her shoulder blades.  

Red hair, blue eyes.

--

Ok, this is a good build and there are enough differences between this version of Larina and say my Mutants & Masterminds versions [2][3][4]. Larina was never one of my V&V characters back then. That honor goes to Johan as "The Paladin." But she certainly works here.

Given her Triple Goddess tattoo I am saying she is in contact with three goddesses, Artemis, Selene, and Hecate; representing the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. I went with Greek here because that is what I would have done back when I was playing V&V. If I had gone with my usual Celtic, then it would have been Brigid, Cerridwen, and the Morrigan. 

Links

• Taryn, Larina's (future) daughter (V&V)
• Johan, Taryn, and Larina for Mighty Protectors
• Justice and Iron Maiden for V&V
• Willow & Tara

I have enough here to work up my ARTEMIS group for V&V. Sounds like something to do next year!

Building Jackson: Religion in Jackson

This is going to be part of a semi-recurring series set in Jackson, IL. While my other series, Mirror Mondays, focused on Jackson and Advanced Witches & Warlocks as mirrors of each other, viewed through the lens of 1986, this one will be more game-design-specific.

There will be mostly world-building items, things the setting has that other NIGHT SHIFT settings don't, plus some game mechanics. There is always a chance that another project will leak into this as well. There are things I have developed for Jackson that, on reflection, didn't work there, but worked great in, say, my Sunny Valley, OH setting or my Valhala, AL setting.

So let's start big. With God and Religion.

Dear God: Religion in Jackson

One of the things I have been exploring lately while developing my fictional Jackson, Illinois, is religion. Not just witchcraft and Wicca, though those are certainly important, but religion in general and the role it plays in the lives of the people who live there. Jackson is based on the real-life Jacksonville, Illinois, a town with a long religious history. Religion has also played an important role in education, community life, and local history almost since its founding. 

Now you might wonder why a self-professed and fairly vocal atheist like myself would concern himself with religion, let alone make it the inaugural post of this new series. Well, I hope that will become obvious. 

Jacksonville was established in 1825, and religious communities were among its earliest institutions. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and other denominations all established congregations during the town's early years. The founding of Illinois College (the real-world "Illinois Beecher College" in Jackson) in 1829 was closely connected to Presbyterian and Congregationalist religious movements, and the town's abolitionist history was influenced by religious convictions as well. Jacksonville even became known for an intersection where churches from four different denominations stood on the four corners.

The Four Corners

One of Jacksonville's more interesting religious landmarks is the famous Four Corners, the intersection of West State Street and Church Street where four different churches once stood. By 1986, only two of those original churches remained. First Baptist had burned in 1966, and State Street Presbyterian had been demolished in 1968. But that didn't erase the intersection's history or the influence those congregations had on the town. The buildings might be gone, but their legacy remained. So much so that I heard about it my entire life growing up. I certainly lived in the "after" era of those churches, but the mark they left on the town's psyche was deep and profound. 

It is not difficult to imagine how this history would carry over into my fictional Jackson. Churches would be among the oldest and most recognizable buildings in town. Generations of families would have attended the same congregations, and the churches would be connected to schools, charities, social clubs, and the everyday lives of the people who lived there.  I like that idea for Jackson, where so much of the past still influences the present, often in ways younger residents don't fully understand.  

But religion in Jackson is about more than buildings and institutions. It is about people and what they believe, or sometimes what they don't believe.

These churches also have more going on, as you'd expect in a horror game. While the real-world history of Jacksonville, with four major religious denominations all at the same intersection, is fascinating enough, Jackson has more to it. 

That research was enough to merit its own post later on. 

Religion in Jackson, 1986

As I have been developing the NPCs of Jackson, I have been thinking more about their religious backgrounds. I assume every character has some sort of religious background, even if they no longer practice, have rejected their childhood beliefs, or simply don't think much about religion at all. In a small Midwestern town in 1986, religion could be an important part of your family's identity whether you wanted it to be or not. This was absolutely true for mid-80s Jacksonville, and true for my Jackson.

Take the Vale family, for example. Stephanie, her older brother Grant, and family are all Lutherans, with connections to one of Jackson's older and more established congregations. The Vales are wealthy, and their family has been prominent in town for generations. They attend church because that is what is expected of them. Church attendance is as much a matter of social standing and appearances as it is personal faith. Stephanie knows the services, the hymns, and all the appropriate traditions, but that doesn't necessarily mean she believes everything she hears. Stephanie is also a witch, so she has a different relationship with the supernatural than her co-congregants. 

The Thompson family is different. Anderson Thompson's family has an Episcopal background, but they don't go to church except for Christmas and Easter. They aren't necessarily opposed to religion. It simply isn't part of their regular lives. Rowan McGowan, Andy's girlfriend, comes from a strong Presbyterian family, and I see her taking her faith more seriously. That sense of duty, responsibility, and doing what is right will become especially interesting as Rowan develops into a Spirit Rider. Rowan certainly has a cross necklace she will wear when the mood strikes her, but avoids wearing while working in the stables. 

Valentino Moreno is Catholic, as are Roderick Morgan and Moria Zachary. Catholicism also provides the background for the Moretti family and, of course, Sister Lucille, a mysterious nun who plays an important role in my Broken Wings adventure. In Lucille's case, her faith is particularly interesting because she is a succubus who has chosen a path very different from what her demonic nature might suggest. Her religious convictions are sincere, and she genuinely tries to live by them. The Moreno's and the Moretti's are what I like to think of as "Old World" Catholics. They have a very serious devotion that has shapped how their families live.

Candy Mercer and Denise Carver come from Christian backgrounds, though neither is especially active in religion. Both might wear a cross necklace when they feel like it, more out of habit than anything else. 

Kyra Bellamy is another matter entirely. Kyra is Baptist and attends the Old Landmark Baptist Church, my fictional counterpart to Jacksonville's historic Mount Emory Baptist Church. Her faith is important to her, and she always wears a cross. For Kyra, religion isn't just something she inherited from her family. It is a genuine part of how she understands the world and her place in it. Kyra is one of those kids who loves her church and everyone in it, and she is one of those rare people for whom religion makes her a better person. 

Vera Rook is Jewish, which gives her a different religious and cultural background from many of her classmates. Vera also wears a pentagram, but that does not mean she is Wiccan. Her fascination with the occult and her Jewish heritage are separate parts of her identity. Likewise, Faye Thorne wears a pentagram, but her relationship with witchcraft, religion, and her own identity is very different from either Vera's or Larina's. Faye's religion is what I like to call the "Keyser Söze" point of view. She doesn't know if there is a God or not, but she knows the Devil is real. 

Kyra and Vera are prime examples of what I am working on here. Both girls identify with their religion on a deep, personal level. They both have disagreements (of a different sort) with their fathers, but both also deeply love their respective congregations. Kyra loves her Church, and she feels alive there. Vera could spend all night Friday drinking and partying, and she would still get to her synagogue on Saturday. She might sit in the way back and wear sunglasses the entire time, but she will be there. 

And then there is Larina Nichols.

The Ghost of Morris

Larina (reading): "Hic locus mortuorum est."
Vera: "Is that some Christian thing I don't get because I am Jewish?"
Larina: "No, it's Latin. And I am not Christian either; I'm Wiccan."
Vera: "There is hope for you yet, Nichols."
Laria: "It says, 'This place belongs to the dead.'"
Vera: "Ok. Less hopeful now."

Larina is Wiccan. More specifically, she follows a form of eclectic Wicca that she developed herself over several years. Her religion predates her arrival in Jackson and, importantly, predates her association with Stephanie and Faye.

Beginning when she was thirteen, Larina spent a great deal of time at Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbon Vale (the mirror of real-life Carbondale), where her father was a professor. She was this little redheaded goth girl who would quietly slip into the library and disappear among the books on witchcraft, mythology, and religion. She tried not to attract attention, though the librarians knew perfectly well she was there. They thought she was cute and eventually nicknamed her "the Ghost of Morris Library."

The Ghost of Morris Library

Larina read everything she could get her hands on. Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler, Margaret Murray, Raymond Buckland, and academic works on religion and folklore all contributed to her developing understanding of Wicca. She compared traditions, questioned what she read, and gradually put together a religious practice that made sense to her. Her Wicca was influenced by Gardnerian practices, feminist Goddess spirituality, and her growing interest in Celtic mythology, but she didn't belong to any formally established tradition.

At some point before moving to Jackson, Larina performed her own solitary Wiccan initiation. This wasn't an initiation into an established Gardnerian or Alexandrian lineage. It was a personal religious commitment, something she had researched, planned, and undertaken herself.

So when Larina tells Vera Rook in 1986, "I'm Wiccan," she isn't experimenting with an identity or trying to shock anyone. She knows exactly what she means. She has already spent years exploring her beliefs and practicing her religion.

When Raymond Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, the famous "Big Blue Book," appears in 1986, Larina reads through it with considerable interest and, I am certain, plenty of opinions. She appreciates the organized approach to learning witchcraft and its accessibility to solitary practitioners, but she has already developed her own practices. Buckland isn't introducing her to Wicca. He is providing her with another perspective to consider, agree with, or argue against.

And knowing Larina, I suspect her copy would soon be filled with notes in the margins.

Something else is important here. Being a witch and being Wiccan are not the same thing. This is a distinction I have maintained in my AD&D witch material, and it carries over into NIGHT SHIFT. Being a witch concerns what Larina is, what she can do, and her understanding and practice of occult magic. Being Wiccan concerns what she believes, her relationship with the divine, and how she chooses to live her life. They are separate things, but for Larina they are deeply related and connected.

Not every witch in Jackson is Wiccan, and not every Wiccan in Jackson has supernatural powers. Larina is the case where she is both. 

As Larina gets older, she becomes even more deeply connected to her faith. In 1986, she is still establishing and expressing her religious identity. She wears a triple moon Goddess necklace with a pentagram in the center of the full moon, celebrates the Sabbats, and is quite willing to explain or defend her beliefs. Decades later, her Wicca is less about outward declarations and more about lived experience. Her faith informs how she treats others, understands the natural world, and deals with life, death, and the supernatural.

She doesn't become less Wiccan as she gets older. She becomes more deeply Wiccan. Just less vocal about it.

Her experience is not made up whole cloth. It mirrors my own experiences in creating a witch class.

An Outsider Looking In

My own experience with religion has largely been that of an outsider looking in. I grew up as an atheist in an extremely religious town, one well known for its churches. Religion was everywhere, from the buildings and institutions to the people I knew and the everyday rhythms of community life. It was something I understood as part of the world around me, even though I didn't personally believe in it. I have often joked I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts for being an atheist, but the truth was that my points of view and beliefs were not compatible with the Boy Scouts of America past the age of 10.

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, I frequently played religious characters in Dungeons & Dragons. Clerics, paladins, and, of course, witches. I enjoyed exploring characters whose faith was important to them, even when that faith was very different from what I believed. Religion could inform their worldview, their relationships, their sense of morality, and the choices they made. It was part of what made them interesting characters.

That same curiosity followed me into my research on witches. When I started working on a witch character class for AD&D, I spent a lot of time sitting in libraries reading everything I could find about witchcraft, mythology, folklore, and religion. I wasn't searching for a religion of my own. I was trying to understand these traditions well enough to create a witch class that was something more than a magic-user with a different spell list.

I read about historical witchcraft, the witch trials, pre-Christian religious practices, and modern Wicca. I compared what different authors had to say, looked for common elements, and tried to decide what would translate into the rules and assumptions of AD&D. I wanted my witches to feel like witches, drawing from folklore and religious traditions rather than simply being another variety of spellcaster.

Years later, when I began developing Larina's history, I gave her this similar experience.

There we were, both sitting in libraries, reading many of the same books about witchcraft and religion, trying to construct something from what we had learned. But we were pursuing very different goals. I was trying to create a witch class for AD&D. Larina was trying to construct her own Wiccan faith.

Where I was looking at religion from the outside, Larina was finding her way into it. I was trying to understand witchcraft well enough to write about it, while Larina was trying to understand Wicca well enough to live it.

My original witch class has changed considerably over the decades, eventually becoming part of Advanced Witches & Warlocks. Larina's understanding of her faith has also grown and changed. Neither of us abandoned what we began in those libraries. We continued to learn, reconsider our assumptions, and deepen our understanding.

Faith in a World Where Monsters Are Real

Religion takes on another dimension in Jackson because the supernatural is real.

Demons exist. Ghosts exist. Witches possess actual magical powers. Ancient beings people have worshipped as gods still exist. But knowing these things doesn't automatically answer religion's larger questions. The existence of a demon doesn't prove every religious teaching about demons, and meeting something that claims to be a god doesn't necessarily mean that being deserves worship.

Or as Faye Thorne might remind us, just because there is something out there claiming to be the devil doesn't mean there is a God.

For some characters, encounters with the supernatural challenge their religious convictions. For others, those encounters deepen them. Roderick Morgan's Catholicism, for example, provides one framework for understanding demons and possession, but he also approaches supernatural events through investigation and scholarship. Ghosts are not the spirits of the dead to him, they are psychic manifestations that are no more the original person than a reflection or photograph is.

Coach Kiera Moreau, with her ancient supernatural heritage, has a religious outlook rooted in a world far older than modern Christianity. The Blackthorne Hags practice a form of old Paganism that is very different from Larina's modern eclectic Wicca. Sylvia Velasco and Natasha Wilcox have complicated relationships with religion, magic, and the supernatural, shaped by experiences most ordinary people could scarcely imagine.

Then there is the relationship between Larina Nichols and Kyra Bellamy.

In 1985-6, Kyra is genuinely afraid of Larina. She has been raised in a Baptist church, and much of what she has been taught about witchcraft gives her reason to fear, or at least distrust, someone like Larina. Larina, meanwhile, knows that her own religion is widely misunderstood, and she doesn't particularly enjoy being treated as something evil simply because she is a witch. This was important to me since ANY NPC in the game can be an ally or enemy, or something in between. 

If your characters befriend Kyra first (and why not! She is a super nice kid), Larina is going to be that "new kid who brought evil witchcraft to town." If your characters befriend Valentino first, then Larina is "that scary girl," and Kyra is that "goody two-shoes preacher's kid." This is why I have so many NPCs and spend so much detailing them.

But years later (in the "Class Reunion" adventure I am planning), the two women develop a much better understanding of one another. Kyra sees Larina repeatedly demonstrate compassion, courage, and a willingness to help people regardless of who they are. Larina sees those same qualities in Kyra, whose Christian faith inspires her to live a life of service and kindness.

Neither woman converts to the other's religion. Neither has to abandon her beliefs or pretend that their theological differences don't exist. Instead, they come to recognize one another as positive representatives of their respective faiths.

Kyra still wears her cross. Larina still wears her triple moon and pentagram. Neither has changed what she believes, but both have changed how they understand the woman wearing the other symbol.

And I think that is important.

Religion and Character

I don't want religion in Jackson to be a simple matter of deciding which characters go to church and which ones don't. Nor do I want religious affiliation to serve as shorthand for whether someone is good or evil. I also certainly don't want it to be a line on the character sheet that needs filling out. Well. Not just a line. I want it to mean somthing to that charcter even if it just says "None."

Some of my characters are deeply religious, some are only nominally so, and others have beliefs that would be considered strange or even frightening by their neighbors. The Vales attend church because society expects it. The Thompsons don't attend because they don't feel they need to. Kyra's Baptist faith is deeply important to her, and she would never be anywhere else on Sunday. Vera's Jewish heritage is part of her identity, even as she explores occult ideas. Larina is a witch whose Wiccan faith grows more important as she gets older.

They are all different, and those differences matter.

Religion in Jackson influences how people see themselves, how they understand the world, and how they respond when confronted with things that challenge their beliefs. It can be a source of comfort, conflict, courage, community, or fear. Sometimes it brings people together, and sometimes it drives them apart.

And that is true whether the monsters are real or not.

When I think back to my younger self sitting in the Jacksonville Public Library trying to figure out how to write witches for AD&D, and then imagine thirteen-year-old Larina Nichols sitting in Morris Library trying to figure out what it meant to be Wiccan, I see the same curiosity reflected in both of us. We wanted to understand something that fascinated us, even though we were approaching it from very different perspectives.

I didn't have to become Wiccan to write Larina as someone whose Wiccan faith is genuine and important. I don't have to be Baptist to understand why Kyra's Christianity matters to her, or Catholic to appreciate the significance of Sister Lucille's devotion or Val's lived-in faith. I just have to take their beliefs seriously and allow those beliefs to shape who they are.

Because ultimately, that is what makes these characters real to me, and hopefully real to you.

You don't have to believe what your characters believe. You have to believe that they believe it.