Vancian Magic, Iouns Stones, Vecna, the Most Excellent Prismatic Spray. All of these and more came to Gary while reading Jack Vance's Dying Earth books.
For me, it has been Javanne the Red Witch, the Black Sabbath, the Witches of the Cobalt Mountains, and Llorio the Murthe.
So much of what is in AD&D now originally came from Vance. Or at least ideas influenced by Vance. So it does seem a little odd to me that the witches from the Dying Earth tales don't make it in. Stranger still when you consider it was Javanne at the Black Sabbath on the first edition of The Dying Earth. Though there is a moon in the image, we have been told there is no moon anymore. Like "Red Lori" from Gardner Fox's Kothar series, she is another evil redheaded witch at the end of time. Maybe there is something to that.
Much like his Lyonesse books, there are a lot of witches here. Not all of them get detailed. Indeed, that is one of the charms of Vance's storytelling. He builds the Dying Earth not explicitly, but through the lens of his tales. The Witches of the Cobalt Mountains, including one with blue hair, are mentioned but not fully explained. We learn there is no moon in the sky anymore, but we never learn when it was gone or why.
Javanne the Red-Haired Witch
Our first named witch, and indeed our cover girl, is Javanne. She starts out appearing to be good, but it is quickly revealed that she is fairly evil. She steals the face of Etarr, her lover, and gives him the face of a demon. Etarr and the artificial girl T'sais track Javanne down at the Black Sabbath, where she is consorting with demons and other witches, including the aforementioned Witches of the Cobalt Mountains. She is able to summon up demons, cast charm spells, and even dominate others. So pretty typical witch magic.
In truth, she is very much an archetypal witch. The idea that she (and by extension any witch) survives to these later days pretty much with their witchcraft intact is an interesting notion. Is Vance saying here that witchcraft is universal? And not just magic, but witches. This gets a deeper treatment in the later, post-Appendix-N books.
T’sain
T'sain is another artificial human and a twin to T'sais. She is not really a witch, but she does have some magic and spells. T'sais was created by the wizard Pandelume. T'sain was created by Turjan of Miir, though she dies freeing him from a rival wizard.
Lith the Golden Witch
A different sort of witch. She pops up in the tale of Liane the Wayfarer. Lith is from the golden land of Ariventa. We don't learn a lot more about her, really. She can command 20 sword-like blades to do her bidding, and she is very attractive. Lith also appears good at first, but soon is revealed to be less so. In the mini scenario from White Dwarf #58, she is also called "Lith the Weaver."
Ok. So this one is also outside of scope, but I wanted to include it anyway since it covers my main theme. It is from the fourth book in the series, "Rhialto the Marvellous." Llorio, the Murthe, is depicted on the cover along with Rhialto the Marvellous. So at least two of the four main books in the Dying Earth series featured witches who were important to the stories.
Witches seem to conform to some sort of color palette. Llorio is a "white witch" but not because of her goodwill, but because of her white hair, white skin, and white clothes. Llorio comes from an earlier age where witches and wizards battled in some sort of magical battle of the sexes in the 17th-18th æon (the current age is the 21st æon). She has come to the future to turn all the world's current male wizards into female witches.
It is an interesting tale. The witches were poised to win this war until their leader, Llorio the Murthe, was sent to a distant star, to the planet Naos. She has now come back and has discovered that the remaining wizards are nothing more than a group of powerless (by her standards) misogynists. So she decides to turn them all into women. Not a terrible plan, really, and an appropriate one for a witch scorned.
I won't spoil the ending for you all. But I will add this quote from Llorio that appears near the end of the tale. I think it sums up the whole feeling of the Dying Earth rather well.
"Hope?" cried Llorio. "When the world is done and I have been thwarted? What remains? Nothing. Neither hope nor honour nor anguish nor pain! All is gone! Ashes blow across the desert. All has been lost, or forgotten; the best and the dearest are gone. Who are these creatures who stand here so foolishly? Ildefonse? Rhialto? Vapid ghosts, mowing with round mouths! Hope! Nothing remains. All is gone, all is done; even death is in the past."
Not only is Llorio powerful, she easily defeats most of the wizards of this time. She also has Ioun (IOUN) stones (something it appears only wizards, not witches, are supposed to use), again a Vance creation added to AD&D. Surely this would rank her as one of the great spellcasters.
"The Murthe" appears to be a granted title. Akin to "The Simbul" or even "Witch Queen." She certainly has all the requisites to be a witch queen.
All three of Vance's witches seem morally ambiguous. Javanne and Lith start out appearing good, but certainly are not. Llorio starts out as a threat, but maybe she has a point. Also, our protagonists have a hard time justifying fighting against her. I think this gray area, or as I have described it so many times, a liminal space, is where witches do their best work. Wizards, at least in terms of how AD&D and the stories that influenced it and were influenced by it, are always either very good, or very evil. In the cases of Gary's own wizards, they are very neutral, i.e., preserving the balance. Witches are allowed a little more freedom. They can be good, neutral, or evil as they choose. They have their own moral directives.
The Lyonesse Trilogy
Jack Vance revisited the theme of magic decades later with his magnificent Lyonesse Trilogy, consisting of Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc (1983-1989). While the books fall outside the chronological scope of this Appendix N series, they are not so far removed from the theme of witches and magic in fantasy as to pass over without comment. The books are set in the mythical land of the Elder Isles, which lies between Britain and France in a time before King Authr. While they are certainly a product of Vance’s later work, they revisit a great deal of the same ideas concerning ancient magic, mystic powers, and the uneasy relationship between human beings and older supernatural entities that pervade Vance’s earlier works.
While not strictly within the chronological scope of this series, the Lyonesse books warrant a separate discussion of witches in the context of fantasy magic, so this theme will be revisited at a later date. Maybe for my planned "Beyond Appendix N" series.
Closing Thoughts
Without the works of Jack Vance the Dungeons & Dragons we play today would look very different. While his Dying Earth is filled with wizards, we only get a few named witches. Largely I think this is due in-universe of the Wizard-Witch war of the 17th and 18th æons. It would have been interesting if Gygax had worked some of that into his design. Granted, the books that mention that war post-date the genesis of D&D and AD&D. But maybe there is something I can do similarly in my own games. Something to explain the obvious dominance of wizardry over witchcraft in the world.
In any case, it has been a lot of fun to revisit these tales. I probably should check out the Dying Earth RPGs at some point, as well.
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