Mirror Monday: The Women Who Made My Old School

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

But no one creates these things in a vacuum.

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

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

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

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

That seems especially appropriate for a Mirror Monday.

The Women of Appendix N

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same is true of the men.

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

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

They were helping create it.

The Women Who Gave Fantasy Its Look

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

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

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

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

I find that rather fascinating.

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

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

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

Pamela Colman Smith represents another side of that artistic heritage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn't necessarily make them evil.

But it does make them interesting.

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

None of them gave me a finished Witch class.

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

The Women of Early D&D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eldritch Wizardry and the Possibilities of Magic

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

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

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

For me, these were fascinating possibilities.

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

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

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

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

There is also the cover.

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

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

But I find its place in gaming history fascinating.

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

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

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

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

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

I needed the doors it opened.

Lee Gold and the Craft of the Wise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Hickman, Laurana, and Larina

Laura Hickman deserves special mention here.

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

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

But Rahasia is especially relevant to my witches.

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

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

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

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

But Laura Hickman's influence goes even deeper.

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

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

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

And Laurana became one of the inspirations for Larina Nichols.

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

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

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

I rather like that.

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

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

Jean Wells, Duchess, Candella, and Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the connection remains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were creating worlds and characters of their own.

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

The Women Who Became My Witches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is how creative work develops.

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

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

Over time, those influences became something of their own.

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

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

And the development continues in both directions.

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

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

The Other Side of the Mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I am still discovering new branches.

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

But rather what was there all along.