Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

We are back in Ravenloft. Again.

And honestly, I am happy to be here.

I have talked about Ravenloft a lot over the years. A lot. I have covered the original I6 adventure, the 2nd Edition boxed sets, Realms of Terror, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft books, and into the 5th edition era with Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and more. Ravenloft is one of those settings I keep coming back to, not because I have to, but because it keeps speaking my language.

That language is Gothic horror.

More specifically, it is Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror, Dracula, Dark Shadows, foggy roads, terrified villagers, cursed castles, and vampires who are more than just another entry in the Monster Manual. That has always been part of my Appendix N. So when I first encountered I6 Ravenloft, it was not just another AD&D adventure to me. It was D&D finally doing something I had always wanted it to do. It wasn't Tolkien. It wasn't Conan, or any of the other books and tales people assume we read before encountering D&D. It wasn't the usual dungeon crawl. 

It was a Hammer Horror film with dice. It is what I always wanted from D&D.

Count Strahd von Zarovich mattered because he was not just a vampire. D&D had vampires before Strahd (hello Belgos), but Strahd was different. He had a history. He had a motive. He had a personality. He had a castle, a village, a tragedy, and the sheer theatrical arrogance to make the whole thing work. He was intelligent, ruthless, and absolutely convinced that his own damnation was someone else’s fault.

That is Ravenloft. Or at least, that is the beginning of Ravenloft. 

The setting has changed many times since then. And really, if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know all of this. But...It became a full AD&D 2nd Edition campaign world. It got its own boxed sets, its own domains, its own dark mythology, and eventually its two 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition versions. It came back in 5e with Curse of Strahd, and then in 2021 with Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Every edition has changed it, sometimes in ways I liked and sometimes in ways I had to think about for a while. But I have always believed that Ravenloft can survive reinterpretation. Horror does that. Dracula gets remade (and remade and remade). Frankenstein gets remade. Werewolves, ghosts, witches, haunted houses, and cursed families all get remade. Every generation gets a new set of horror classics to call their own. 

Ravenloft follows suit.

That brings me to Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, the new Ravenloft book for the revised 2024 Dungeons & Dragons rules. Or 5.5e. Or D&D 2024. Or whatever we are all calling it now.

This one is interesting because it is not really a replacement for Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. It is more like the book Van Richten’s Guide needed beside it.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a book of ideas. The Horrors Within is a book of things to use at the table.

That difference is everything.

I liked Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. I still do. I know some people wanted it to be more like the old 2nd Edition setting, with the Core, political borders, domain histories, and more of the classic campaign setting structure. I understand that. I love those books too. But I also said at the time that Van Richten’s Guide was doing something useful. It was not trying to rebuild old Ravenloft exactly. It was treating the Domains of Dread as a horror toolkit for modern 5e.

That worked for me.

It gave us Gothic horror, folk horror, body horror, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost stories, psychological horror, and all the other nightmare flavors Ravenloft can support. It gave us advice for building Domains of Dread and Darklords. It let Ravenloft become more than Barovia and a few neighboring spooky countries. It also gave me the tools to build my own Darklord and my own domain, which I did with Darlessa, my Vampire Queen.

But Van Richten’s Guide also had gaps.

The biggest one was obvious: almost no Darklord stat blocks.

I understood the design philosophy. A Darklord is not just a monster. A Darklord is the dark heart of a domain. They are not always meant to be fought. Sometimes defeating them means surviving them, understanding them, resisting them, or escaping the story they have built around themselves. That is all true.

But this is still Dungeons & Dragons. 

Eventually, someone will say, "I attack Strahd." 

And then you need rules. I mean...sure, why not, they are going to lose, but let's roll some dice.

That is where The Horrors Within makes its strongest case. The new book gives us 17 Darklord stat blocks. Strahd. Azalin Rex. Lord Soth. Hazlik. Viktra Mordenheim. Chakuna. Ebonbane. And yes, Cthulhu.

I will get to Cthulhu in a bit.

The inclusion of Darklord stat blocks immediately changes the usefulness of the book. It means the Darklords are no longer just concepts, villains, or tragic centers of gravity. They are table-ready. They have mechanics. They can face the party, haunt the party, hurt the party, and hopefully do all of that in a way that reflects their curse.

That last part matters. A Ravenloft stat block should not just tell me how hard the villain hits. It should tell me something about why they are damned.

• Strahd should not be just a vampire with a better cape. (Though it is a cool cape.)
• Azalin should not be just a Greyhawk lich with a Ravenloft address.
• Viktra Mordenheim should not be just a mad scientist NPC standing next to a flesh golem. 

A good Darklord stat block should say, mechanically, "this is what obsession looks like when the Mists have finished with it."

That is what I want from this book.

The structure also feels different from Van Richten’s Guide. The 2021 book gave us a broad survey of many domains. The Horrors Within focuses on 16 featured Domains of Dread. That means some domains from Van Richten’s Guide move to the margins, including Bluetspur, I’Cath, Richemulot, and The Carnival. That will disappoint some people. It disappoints me a little, especially with Bluetspur, since I liked seeing Ravenloft stretch into alien horror.

But I also understand the trade-off.

Ravenloft domains need space. They are not just countries. They are moral nightmares. A good domain needs a central sin, a Darklord, a curse, a population trapped in the consequences, and enough adventure material for the players to discover all of this the hard way. If focusing on fewer domains means those domains are more playable, then I can live with that.

And there are some interesting returns here. Sithicus and The Shadowlands bring back older Ravenloft material, including the sentient blade Ebonbane and that dark Arthurian fantasy mood that always sat well in Ravenloft’s broader horror geography. Darkon also gets more attention through Azalin Rex and Castle Avernus. That feels right. Azalin has always been one of Ravenloft’s most important figures, second only to Strahd in many ways, in my opinion. If Strahd is Gothic obsession, Azalin is intellectual arrogance, undeath, failed escape, and the refusal to admit that the cage may exist because of him.

That is Ravenloft, too.

The new player options are also very much part of the 2024 rules structure. We get seven subclasses: Reanimator Artificer, College of Spirits Bard, Grave Domain Cleric, Hollow Warden Ranger, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcery Sorcerer, and Undead Patron Warlock. We get Dhampir, Hexblood, Lupin, and Reborn as species. We get backgrounds like Haunted One, Mist Wanderer, Investigator, and Spirit Medium. We get Dark Gifts rebuilt as feats.

The Reanimator Artificer also feels perfect for Lamordia. The Hollow Warden Ranger sounds like something that has spent too much time walking where the Mists are thickest. The Grave Cleric, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcerer, College of Spirits Bard, and Undead Warlock all feel like they belong in this setting. Ravenloft player characters should feel like they have already been touched by something before the adventure begins.

That is where the Dark Gifts come in, and here is where I have my first real concern.

In Van Richten’s Guide, the Dark Gifts were strange, flavorful, and often story-heavy. They felt like bargains, curses, supernatural inheritances, or evidence that something had reached into the character’s life and left a mark. They were not always balanced perfectly, but that was part of their charm. Ravenloft should not always feel perfectly balanced. Sometimes the Mists give you exactly what you asked for and then make you regret the wording.

In The Horrors Within, Dark Gifts are rebuilt for the 2024 feat system. That makes them easier to understand, easier to balance, and easier to run. It also risks making them feel a little more like game widgets and a little less like curses. You know players will look to these as "rewards" and ignore the horror elements.

That is the trade-off of this book in miniature. It is more usable. It may also be a little less haunted.

The example that really sticks with me is the shift in how something like Symbiotic Being works. In older forms, that kind of gift depended on the relationship between the character and the entity inside them. The horror came from the story. What does it want? What does it whisper? What happens when you resist it? Now, by all accounts, the trigger is much cleaner and much more mechanical. Roll a 1 on a d20, and the thing stirs.

That is easier to run.

It is also less personal.

Now, I am not saying this is bad. New DMs need usable mechanics. Players need clarity. The 2024 rules have a design philosophy, and this book is clearly built to fit it. But Ravenloft is a setting where the messy parts matter. Horror is often found in the exception, the strange edge case, the thing that does not behave like the rules say it should.

So I will use these new Dark Gifts, but I already know I will be adding some of the old narrative teeth back in. Even if it means grabbing some older AD&D 2nd Ed material.

The Tarokka material, on the other hand, sounds like exactly the sort of thing I want. The Tarokka deck has been part of Ravenloft since the beginning. In I6, the Fortunes of Ravenloft gave the adventure replayability and mystery. In Curse of Strahd, the Tarokka reading became one of the defining ritual moments of the campaign. It is one of Ravenloft’s best props because it tells the players that fate is not abstract here. Fate has cards. Fate has a voice. Fate may be cheating.

The Horrors Within appears to give the Tarokka deck more mechanical weight in navigating the Mists and interacting with the domains. I like that a lot. That is exactly the kind of old Ravenloft idea that should be made more central, not less. If the Mists are the roads of Ravenloft, then the Tarokka should be one of the few maps that matters. 

Of course, in Ravenloft, even the map can betray you.

I also picked up the new Tarokka deck as well. I'll discuss that later on. 

The Haunted Bastions are another very 2024 idea that actually fits Ravenloft better than I expected. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduced Bastions as a form of player stronghold or home base. In a normal campaign, that can mean a tower, keep, workshop, temple, or guildhall. In Ravenloft, that same idea becomes much more interesting.

A home in Ravenloft should never feel completely safe.

A gothic manor, a lonely chapel, a cursed observatory, a half-reclaimed castle, a witch’s house at the edge of the woods, a laboratory in Lamordia, or a sanctuary surrounded by Mists: all of these work as Haunted Bastions. But they should also come with a question.

What does the house want?

That is the Ravenloft version of a Bastion. Not just a base. Not just a reward. A relationship with a place that remembers things you wish it did not. I have been thinking a lot of places lately and what sorts of "things" they remember; geography as occult memory. This is the Ravenloft version.

The adventures are also a major point in this book’s favor. The Horrors Within gives us one-shot adventures tied to the featured domains. This is exactly the sort of thing Van Richten’s Guide did not do enough of. That book made me want to run Ravenloft. This one seems designed to let me run Ravenloft with less prep. Well...not that I need much prep for Ravenloft these days.

But it still matters.

I know I am an old-school guy. I like weird maps, strange presentation choices, moody boxed sets, and books that feel like forbidden travel guides. But I am also a working DM. A working DM appreciates ready-to-use material. Give me the Darklord. Give me the domain. Give me the map. Give me the adventure seed. Give me the monster stats. Then I can do the rest.

The maps are part of that. Van Richten’s Guide had evocative, conceptual maps. They helped define mood. The Horrors Within leans harder into tactical, full-color, VTT-ready maps. That is not always my preferred style for Ravenloft, but it is useful. And usefulness counts.

This is also where I think the book resembles Domains of Dread in a modern way. Domains of Dread was a late 2nd Edition Ravenloft hardcover that gathered the setting into a more complete reference. It was not the beginning of Ravenloft. It was a summation. The Horrors Within feels a little like that for 5e and 5.5e. Curse of Strahd gave modern players Barovia. Van Richten’s Guide gave them the new conceptual framework. The Horrors Within gives them the operational version.

That is a good place for it to sit.

Now, about Cthulhu.

I am not opposed to cosmic horror in Ravenloft. Ravenloft has always been able to absorb different forms of horror. Gothic horror is the foundation, but the setting has room for mad science, ghost stories, mummy curses, slasher stories, folk horror, dark fantasy, witchcraft, haunted mansions, and yes, cosmic dread. Bluetspur already pushed Ravenloft toward alien horror. Lamordia has always had Frankenstein. Har’Akir has mummy horror. Sithicus has tragic dark fantasy. Ravenloft is not one horror story. It is a machine for making horror stories.

So, Innsmouth as a Domain of Dread? I can work with that. I think.

Elder Things, Mi-Go, Nightgaunts, and Shoggoths? Fine. Those are usable monsters, and I can absolutely see them crawling, flying, or oozing out of the Mists.

Cthulhu as a Darklord? That is where I pause.

Not because Cthulhu is too powerful. Power levels in D&D are always negotiable. The issue is conceptual. A Darklord is trapped by their own sin. The domain is a prison built around their desire, failure, crime, obsession, or refusal to change. That is intensely personal. Cosmic horror, at its best, is impersonal. The universe does not hate you. It simply does not care.

So if Cthulhu is a Darklord, then the book has to answer the Ravenloft question: what is the curse? What does Cthulhu want that the Mists deny? How does the domain torment him? What personal horror makes him fit the same metaphysical structure as Strahd, Azalin, Mordenheim, or Soth? We asked the same questions in the later 2nd Ed era, when Vecna ended up in Ravenloft. How can the Mists contain a God?

If the book answers these questions, well, I am interested.

If not, then I will use the monsters and leave Cthulhu where he belongs, dreaming in R’lyeh.

My oldest and I talked about this a lot since we picked up our copies. He is going to say this is just a Star Spawn of Cthulhu with delusions of godhood. I like that idea. I am still on the fence. 

Plus. Shouldn't it be Dagon? Dagon was the central mythos figure around Innsmouth.

This is the larger issue with importing cosmic horror into Ravenloft. It has to be translated. Ravenloft is not just a spooky multiverse junk drawer. At least it shouldn't be. It has its own moral and metaphysical logic. Evil leaves stains. Sin becomes geography. Desire becomes prison. The Dark Powers do not merely punish you. They arrange the world so that you can keep proving you deserve the punishment.

That is what makes Ravenloft different from other D&D horror. That is why the Darklords matter. That is why the domains matter. That is why the Mists matter.

There is also the broader production context. The Horrors Within arrives during D&D’s new "Season of Horror" approach, and it comes after a period of visible change at Wizards of the Coast, including the departures of long-time D&D figures Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. I do not want to overstate that in a product review, but it is hard not to notice. This book feels like part of a new publishing rhythm: more programmatic, more integrated with D&D Beyond, more tied to digital tools, maps, accessories, and seasonal branding. The newer 5.5 books even look different. 

That is not inherently bad, but it is different.

Ravenloft used to feel like something that escaped from the shadows of D&D. Now it is a coordinated product line with digital bundles, map packs, accessories, and mechanical integration into the 2024 rules. That is the nature of the game now. The question is whether the horror survives the repackaging.

So far, I think it can. BUT, (and this is an all capital but) it has to be negotiated very carefully.  

There is one more rules issue worth mentioning, though perhaps more as a side note than as a central part of the review: the Hexblade problem. The 2017 Hexblade Warlock was famously front-loaded. It gave Warlocks, and multiclass Paladins and Sorcerers, a very strong reason to take a one-level dip. The 2024 rules absorbed much of that melee Warlock identity into the base Pact of the Blade. That left the Hexblade with an identity problem. If every Blade Pact Warlock can do the signature Hexblade thing, then what is the Hexblade now?

The answer seems to be to move the Hexblade closer to the idea of a sentient magic weapon and a curse-bound warrior. That is more Ravenloft-friendly in flavor, honestly. A cursed blade with its own will is exactly the sort of thing that belongs in the Domains of Dread. But it also shows the larger issue of adapting legacy 5e material to the 2024 framework. Some old mechanics no longer have the same niche. Some old subclasses need a new reason to exist.

That is not really a flaw in The Horrors Within, but it is part of the same design moment. The 2024 rules want cleaner baselines. Ravenloft wants strange exceptions. The tension between those two impulses is all over this book.

So, where does this leave Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft?

Still useful.

Very useful, in fact.

I would not tell anyone to throw it out. Van Richten’s Guide is still the better book for understanding the 5e conception of Ravenloft. It gives you the broad view. It gives you the horror genres. It gives you the domain-building advice. It gives you a sense of Ravenloft as a modular horror engine. It is the book I would hand someone who wanted to know what modern Ravenloft can be.

The Horrors Within is the book I would hand to someone who wanted to run it this weekend.

That is the cleanest comparison.

Van Richten’s Guide tells you why Ravenloft works. The Horrors Within tells you what to roll. Both are useful. And they work well together.

For my own games, I suspect I would use both, and then still pull from the Black Box, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft book, Curse of Strahd, and whatever else is sitting on my Ravenloft shelf. Ravenloft has never been one book for me. It has always been a shelf. A haunted, but well-traveled, shelf, naturally.

If you already own Van Richten’s Guide, do you need The Horrors Within?

• If you are running Ravenloft with the 2024 rules, probably yes.
• If you want Darklord stat blocks, yes.
• If you want ready-to-run domain adventures, yes.
• If you want VTT-friendly maps, updated player options, and more monsters, yes.

If you only want the broad setting lore and horror advice, then Van Richten’s Guide may still be enough.

For me, though, the appeal is obvious. I want the Darklords. I want the Haunted Bastions. I want the Tarokka to matter. I want to see what they do with Sithicus, The Shadowlands, Castle Avernus, and Innsmouth. I want to see whether the monsters feel like Ravenloft monsters, not just horror-themed stat blocks.

As I read this in detail, I want to see whether this book remembers the most important thing.

Ravenloft is not scary because the monsters have more hit points. Ravenloft is scary because the monster used to be a person, and somewhere deep down, maybe still is. That is the horror. That is the tragedy. 

And that is why we keep going back into the Mists.

A Note about the "New" Format for 5.5 Books

Hasbro/Wizards has made some slight changes to the format of their "setting" books. I saw it in the Forgotten Realms ones and see it here now in the Ravenloft one. It is actually pretty good. I like what they have been giving us concept-wise. Backgrounds, history, new sub-classes, some spells, monsters. It is like getting the 2nd Ed Boxed set experience without the product bloat that was one of the reasons for TSR's death. 

I am not saying the books are perfect, and sometimes I still disagree with some of the content choices (see Cthulhu above), but I can't fault the way these are put together.

WotC's publishing schedule has slowed, but I'd still love to see some Mystara content in this format. I think 5.5 and Mystara would work well together.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Public Library as Dungeon

 There is a very good reason my main witch character, Larina, is often cast as a librarian.

My introduction to “real” witches was in the library. Not the kind made of flesh and blood, but the ones you find in the pages of a book, in history, or in mythology. You could say libraries are where witches live, and I am not using that as some kind of metaphor all these years on. That is simply how it was for me.

The public library was among the first places where the world seemed to expand and grow stranger at once. You would come in off a perfectly ordinary Midwestern afternoon, make your way past the desk and the new books and whatever they had on display for the month, and then in the stacks you were liable to run across ghosts, demons, gods, vampires, lost cities, ancient rites, and other things your school teachers never thought to mention and certainly never on the "staff picks" section. 

There is a trick to a library. It is meant to be safe. Quiet, ordered, respectable. It has its rules and its due dates and its card catalogs. The librarians know where everything is. But this is precisely what makes for a fine dungeon.

Because a dungeon is more than a hole in the ground with monsters in it. It is a place of hidden knowledge, danger, and memory, with its maps, keys, locked doors, old names, and false leads. A good one will have treasures that alter the person who brings them out. An old public library has all of that.

Take my fictional Jackson, which is rooted in the real Jacksonville, Illinois. The Public Library there has the right bones for it. As a Carnegie library, built in 1902 and put to use in 1903, it has the sort of grand Classical Revival air about it that suggests books are of consequence, and perhaps a touch perilous if you give them any thought. It feels like it is holding secrets even before you start making any up. A building like this isn’t holding just ordinary books; it has something special. 

I don’t want the library in Jackson to be sinister, though. There is a difference between "evil" and being "important". It is not a haunted mansion in disguise. It is doing what it does: preserving, collecting, cataloging, remembering. There is enough danger in just that.  I mean, didn't the Satanic Panic try to teach us that books were dangerous?

A town or a local family can tell you lies, or what they want you to hear. A church can. A newspaper will be careful with what it puts in print. But the library keeps things. Not without fault; you will find things misfiled or stolen or damaged or just plain forgotten. But in a game, that is useful. A missing book means someone saw fit to put it away. A yearbook with a face marked out says more than the picture alone.

For the purposes of Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the library is the old occult archive. A Magic-user will be after his spellbooks and grimoires, a Cleric his demonologies and forbidden heresies. But a Witch? She sees relationships. The volume on local flora sitting beside one on funeral rites. A genealogy that seems to orbit the same three names over and over. Consider the old map with a road that curves for no reason. Well. No apparent reason. The church record is missing a winter. A travel diary, making note of a hill nobody goes to anymore. Or a trial transcript where they all seem to be talking around one particular fact.

This is what we call occult knowledge. It is not just about fireballs and lightning. It is the kind of thing you can see if you know how to read the shape of it, right in plain view.

Which explains the witch’s affinity for libraries. She is after more than spells; she wants to find the pattern that runs under the town, the detail everyone has overlooked because they haven’t asked the right question about it yet. In Jackson, IL, this is all the more pressing.

Take a teenage witch in 1986 like Larina. There is no internet to comb through at midnight, no way to put ten sources side by side in half a minute, or access some digital archive. If she wants to understand why the cemetery has an empty grave, or why a teacher’s name is in a yearbook from two decades back, or what happened to the old road’s name, she has to make the trip. She has to go down into the dungeon.

The public library provides something modern games are too quick to discard: a place for your information. And that is a big deal. If the answer is in the library, your characters have to be there. They have to put in the work to be seen, to ask for help, to charm the librarian or wait for the building to quiet down so the ghosts can move between the shelves. They have to get their hands on the old book.

It makes research physical. Gameable.

You can have encounters in a library. Not necessarily combat, but the real sort. The librarian who holds her tongue when she knows better. The classmate watching which book you check out. Some old man with his newspaper who puts you on the spot about your family. A child tells you there is a lady in the local history room, but you see nothing. You might come across a locked cabinet, a missing index card, a book out of place in the children’s section, or the smell of candle smoke by the microfilm.

Sometimes the library is of more use than a haunted house. One will give you a secret; the other gives you the town’s secrets, all sorted by subject. I put them in my own witch work for that reason. My Appendix O is littered with books on everything from vampires and monsters to Jung and the supernatural. Some were dubious (ok, more than some), some were serious, and some you would be a fool to call scholarship, but all are worth mining for a game.

A library does not just put facts in your head. It teaches you to wander. You start out for one title and end up with three. You put down a tome on mythology and pick up one on ghosts. You are looking into witchcraft, and before you know it, you are in demonology, then horror films, then local history, until you have found something that nags at you and becomes a character or a spell years down the line.

That is how you build a witch. Shelf by shelf. Book by book.

You won’t find much of an accident in Larina’s vocation as a librarian. If anything, it is one of the most honest things about her. She is meant to be with books because that is where you will find the doors; the doors to rooms in your mind. Some are opened with a sword, some with a spell, but a library card will open more than either of those if you have the patience and curiosity for it and are just a little reckless.

It is also where Jackson, IL, and Advanced Witches & Warlocks come together.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the occult library is your hoard. Not of gold, but something better: names, maps, rituals, marginalia, correspondences, the weaknesses of monsters, forgotten gods, and that single bit of information which makes a hopeless fight a dangerous proposition. In Jackson, the public library is all that and then some, only with fluorescent lights, carpet, and summer reading posters. You won’t be in a ruined tower; you’ll be downtown. Your mother could drive by while you are in there, or your English teacher might be at the desk. Someone from school may well notice what you are holding.

There is a danger to a forbidden book in a fantasy dungeon, sure. It might call a demon. The same book in Jackson is dangerous because it can do that and get you grounded into the bargain. Both are problems you don’t want.

Then there is the matter of democracy. A wizard’s tower is his, for the cleric the temple is the god’s, and a witch has her house. The library claims to belong to the town. Anyone can put in an appearance and make a private discovery. The smart girl, the jock with nothing to do, the kid skulking from bullies, the would-be warlock after a shortcut, the old woman with her genealogy, the teacher who has put in too many hours. Even the monster in human skin who comes in on Thursdays to read the obituaries. For a horror game, it is hard to beat a public place like that. Harder still in 1986.

The card catalog has the feel of a summoning machine. You can tell who had a book before you by the checkout card in the front. The microfilm reader puts out a hum like some kind of artifact; the local paper archive is a time tunnel, and the yearbooks are grimoires of social magic with their dedications and signatures and people making an effort to look normal for posterity. The library holds these like a silent guardian of bygone truths. 

It keeps the version of the town that wants to be remembered and the one it couldn’t quite put away. That is where the witches fit in. She will spot the failure. The crack in the catalog, the year with an odd number of obituaries, a family name that vanishes and reappears under a different spelling. She will see the photograph was cut, not torn, and the map folded so often along one road the paper is thinning.

I don’t want a magic shop or a wizard school for the Jackson Public Library. I want a building with a long memory where you can walk in broad daylight and sense the dungeon beneath you. Where the ghosts are to be found under Local History. A place of better questions than answers. There is an occult section, not a big one, but you will somehow come across the very book you were dreading to put your hands on. For the Advanced Witches & Warlocks crowd, it is the same with the fantasy game. Any town that has a witch in it ought to have its library.

It could be a shelf in the priest’s study or a chest of scrolls under the wise woman’s bed. A ruined scriptorium. A set of bones with names carved in them. Or perhaps a ring of old women who commit nothing to paper and remember everything; I would call that the most dangerous library of all. The Witch doesn’t just read the book. She reads the silence about it, the hand that made the note in the margin, the missing page, the town trying to put it out of mind. In that sense the public library is a dungeon. The doors are open, the treasure is there for the taking and so are the monsters, who can read as well as anyone.

The Mirror Shard: The Locked History Room

Take the case of the Locked Local History Room. Every haunted town has one. It needn’t be locked in any literal sense. It may be behind the desk or in the basement. Maybe they only let you in during certain hours, which is its own kind of lock. Or maybe it is wide open, but no one under eighteen is to go in uninvited. That suffices.

Jackson uses this room for the things that don’t make the official tour: the old yearbooks, the church histories, the funeral cards and maps, the donated family papers and clippings. There are photographs in here no one bothered to label because at the time you knew who they were. And horror has a way of living in “at the time.”

In your game, this is the village archive, the temple record room, the witch’s cabinet of names. This is where you get the first true account of the curse, not the tavern version. In Jackson, IL, a young witch discovers that the town has been lying by omission.

The room is quiet in a way that feels wrong. It is not empty, it is listening. You can smell the dust and old print on the carpet. The file cabinets are stiff, and the table bears pencil marks from the long dead. On a shelf are yearbooks with cracked spines and an excess of smiling faces.

A good clue from this place should make the mystery personal, not put an end to it. A young witch comes across her own surname in a clipping from before she was born. A player spots his grandmother next to a man who was dead by 1935. They find a map of Mauvaisterre that someone has tried to rub out, or a yearbook with the words “You heard the bell too” scrawled in it.

There is usually a guardian to the room, though not always a monster. It could be the librarian, a retired teacher, a ghost, or a rule in red ink on an index card. He won’t tell you, “you can’t come in,” that is too simple. He will ask, “What are you looking for?” which is far worse. In a room like this, the wrong answer can still give you exactly what you are looking for. Just maybe not in the way you expect it should.

Happy Birthday to me!

 Yesterday (June 13) was my birthday! We went out to eat, I got some more parts for my various computer projects, including a new GPU for my main game computer. But I also got some other RPG-related gifts.

The new Star Trek Adventures Starter Set.

I am disappointed that Starfleet Academy was canceled and that Doctor Who is on an extended hiatus. So I am planning a Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover. And just to be "that guy" I want to set it during the Later Discovery/Starfleet Academy era after the Burn (32nd Century) and in the Ncuti Gatwa/Fifteenth Doctor era. I adore both Sylvia Tilly and Ruby Sunday.

In fact, I really like this idea. It also gives me a chance to do something that the Fifteenth Doctor never got the chance to do...fight some Daleks. 

And a REAL Trapper Keeper for all my Jackson, IL, notes and character sheets. 

So the birthday was good, and I still have Father's Day coming up.

RPG Retrospective: The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG

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

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

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

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

Fortune and Glory, Kid

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

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

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out… pretty much everything. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem with Being Indiana Jones

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

There is "Danger" but no real danger. 

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

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

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

What It Gets Right

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

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

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

The Diana Jones Award and Nazi™

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

Indiana Jones and the Cauldron of Hecate

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best Indiana Jones adventures always have a few elements:

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

This has them all!

Larina Stephanie Nichols

Graduate student of Ancient Religions at the University of Chicago. 

Attributes (Normal/x2/½/¼)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson, IL: NPCs, The Ones Who Know

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

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

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

Roderick Morgan, II, aka "Morgan Highstar"

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

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

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

He also can't stand witches. 

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

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

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

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

Vera Rook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kyra Bellamy 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meriko Hayashida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renee Sylvi Jäneläinen

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

Renee: "Hello. Godmother."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project Updates. Codex Qliphothica, Advanced Witches, and Jackson IL

 It's a Projects Update Witchcraft Wednesday! So let's get to it.

Codex Qliphothica

This did a LOT better than I expected, so I have turned around and started buying a bunch more art for it, and I am expanding the page count. I just need to make some tweaks to the layout to accommodate it. I am really happy with how it has turned out so far, and I am looking forward to getting it out to everyone.

Advanced Witches & Warlocks

My first *real* "AD&D" book. I mentioned in the past that I am going back to the drawing board on my witch class and challenging all my assumptions about the witch and warlock classes and what they should actually do in an AD&D game. 

So there has been a lot of play-testing. I have stated up witches and warlocks of every level from 1 to 32. Each has slight variations of the rules, and I have been playing them. That's just one binder. The other two are my notes, and the other is a variation of the witch class that I have been playing to see how it feels under the AD&D rules. My goal is to have a witch class that everyone would want to play, regardless of how you want to play her.

I have tried a lot of different ideas too. 

And some ideas didn't make the cut. So no, there won't be any cenobites in this book. In truth I have enough here for a bunch of books, but I don't want a bunch of books. I want one REALLY good one. 

What's that mean?

It means I am NOT going to have this ready for October 2026 like I wanted. More like 2027. I am disappointed. There are so many other projects I want to get done, and this one has to be done first. I also want it done right. So, maybe Walpurgis Night 2027. I *might* still have something for Halloween 2026. I have written so much text here and I just need to get it transcribed (yes, it is in pencil, I REALLY went back to the drawing board) into my word processor and then into layout. It's going to take a bit. 

I want this to be *THE* witch book for AD&D.

Gods. I need a project manager over here. 

Jackson, IL

Ok, this one is still very near and dear to my heart. I have about 46k words written. I have a soft agreement to get this published. But I need to get more done. I have a whole history written for the town, but I need to make it more "gameable" and less like a history textbook with monsters. 

But I am enjoying it a lot. I can't wait to introduce you all to things like the Witch Chairs in Jackson's cemeteries and ponder questions like "what is stealing love in town?" and "who is the thorn-child?"

No game for me this past weekend, but I did create two new NPCs. They are not antagonists, but they are not here to help your PCs either.

Mail Call Tuesday: Authentic Thaumaturgy

 I picked this up on Facebook Marketplace. I had a copy in the past, but sold it when I was in grad school. I think I paid now what I sold it for back then, so I guess that is fine.

Authentic Thaumaturgy was written by a professional occultist and high druid, Isaac Bonewits (the only person to get a degree in Magic from UC Berkeley). It is...interesting. 

The book is dense and suffers from a strong case of physics-envy. It tries to be a game book, particularly for GURPS, but doesn't really succeed. I get the feeling that the game material, which actually makes the most sense, was written by Steve Jackson.

Back in the early days of the Internet, I talked to Bonewits and asked a little about this book. He was kind of a jerk to be honest. But in his defense, he could have been at the early days of his cancer and that would make anyone cranky. Though I do recall this was the 1990s and he passed in 2010. 

Anyway, I have the book back now and hopefully I can mine it for some ideas on my Jackson, IL game or my Occult AD&D one.