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.

The Witches of Appendix N: Manly Wade Wellman

 I will admit, I did not know the name Manly Wade Wellman when I began this "Witches of Appendix N." Yes, I had read the name in the list, but that was all that I knew.

I have put in the hours for this issue of The Witches of Appendix N, though. I have made it a point to spend some time with Wellman: reading his John Thunstone tales and Strangers on the Heights, working through what is in Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances, and, as is fitting for the subject at hand, getting to know Silver John and The Old Gods Waken.

Wellman has an unquestionable claim to be here. Gary Gygax put him in the original 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide by name, right there in Appendix N. But Gygax did not single out any one book the way he might with another author; he just said, "Wellman." That leaves us with a good deal of ground to cover.

In this "Witches of Appendix N," I am going less by books and more by themes and ideas. Manly Wade Wellman produced a ton of material in his life. I read books I could get my hands on, and audiobooks I grabbed from Audible. I began following the themes, and oftentimes the stories would flow from one to the other, right outside my Appendix N cut-off dates. I found, though, that I really, really enjoyed his tales and, just as importantly, his characters.

He has traveling Bards, urbane occult investigators, retired judges, students of the Black School.

And there are plenty of witches here, and they are not all the same. 

A World Where the Folklore Is True

After so much Wellman, one thing is plain: his world does not have a neat taxonomy for the supernatural.

You have your witches and sorcerers, devils and old gods, ghosts and haunts and whatever makes its home in the mountains. There are things that could be demons or pagan deities or something older still. Christian prayers are effective, as is silver or an old song or a magical sign. An educated occultist may have the answers, or an old woman in the hills, or someone who just heeded what their grandmother said. No one is carrying around a *Monster Manual* and no one seems to mind if these elements do not conform to a tidy cosmology. In my view, this is great. It is better than having a nice tidy universe. 

Modern fantasy tends to demand an explanation for magic, complete with schools and metaphysical laws and well-defined species. You won’t find that in Wellman. 

The folklore is simply true.

Take Silver John, or John the Balladeer as he is also known. For the witch I am looking for in these posts, he is perhaps Wellman’s finest offering as a protagonist.  He is not a D&D Magic-User, nor really a wizard in the conventional sense. He is not even the Bard as some have claimed. He is a wandering man with a silver-stringed guitar, carrying his songs, stories, and signs. He can tell when something is amiss, but he is not portrayed as having all the answers. The difference is important.

John gets by because he is a listener. He respects warnings and will not overlook an elderly woman whom others would put aside. He knows that some piece of mountain lore which an outsider might find preposterous could be the very thing that sees him through the night. It is a fine model for fantasy witchcraft.

Magic is not an alternate form of technology. Here, magic is a matter of tradition.

In that respect, The Old Gods Waken comes in handy. Published in 1979, it is on the edge of my time period for Appendix N, but it is useful as the first Silver John novel. The Southern Appalachian backdrop allows Wellman to put his stock ideas on display: ancient powers and pagan holdovers, local lore and Christianity, and the kind of folk who have a far better grasp of their country than an outsider would credit them with.

The supernatural elements in his work have no use for the labels people put on them, a fact I keep in mind when I am at work designing witches or tending to the Sunny Valley accounts. A witch need not be able to explain the why of her magic; knowing that it works is enough.

The Witches in the Hills

You will find Wellman’s mountain witches are something of an actuality compared to the fantasy-game variety we have since grown used to. Theirs is a local, personal brand of magic. They are aware of cures and curses, of signs and the plants that count. They know what is best left untraveled after dark and what makes its home on the mountain. They can tell you what your grandmother was up to thirty years back and why you are still suffering for it.

Some are good, some evil, though such terms often don’t do them justice.

With "Vandy, Vandy" or "Nine Yards of Other Cloth," one gets the impression that supernatural knowledge is part and parcel of the Appalachian terrain. It is not a separate world that now and then makes an incursion into the everyday; it has been there from the start, and the locals have made their peace with it. In how I view witches, Wellman is perhaps one of my greatest "new" influences. 

The witch is not defined by having the most power but by what she knows. She is the "wise." 

Occult Investigators and Monster Hunters

Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant. John Thunstone. Silver John the Balladeer. Lee Cobbett. Longspear. All these names are for a type of character at home in the occult universe of Manly Wade Wellman and D&D. 

What unites all these characters is not hard to put your finger on. For one, they do not content themselves with being onlookers to the supernatural. They are men of action.

Sure, it might start with a bit of research or an old book, a song, some folklore, or a scrap of history from memory. But in the end there comes a point where someone has to make their way into the haunted house or up the mountain, face down a sorcerer, or put himself in harm’s way to protect an innocent from what has emerged from the dark.

In that respect, Wellman’s heroes are not unlike the kind of adventurer D&D would come to define. Yet he does not write them as the professional monster hunters of D&D or even Chill or Call of Cthulhu. You will find no organization handing out assignments, no headquarters with its case files, no locker for standard-issue gear.

They are semi-professionals of a sort. They have the experience to know which questions to put to you and when a detail is of consequence. If the situation deteriorates, they are prepared to act. It is an important mix. In Wellman’s world, knowledge by itself will not see you through; the old lore may tell you what you are up against, but it takes courage to get in the door.

Perhaps that is the clearest distinction between him and D&D: the occult scholar must at some stage become an adventurer.

Judge Pursuivant

Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant preceded John Thunstone, but I read him afterwards.

As another of Wellman’s occult investigators, Pursuivant is an older and more erudite sort. He has the assurance that comes from a lifetime of amassing odd bits of knowledge when he sets about a supernatural matter. Though he is a judge in retirement, in Wellman’s telling one finds that there is still ample time to put in with witches, demons, or any number of haunted locales that have gone unobserved in the modern age.

One can appreciate how well Pursuivant puts in place the kind of world Thunstone will eventually be found in. There are those for whom the occult is no fiction, and they have made a study of it over the years; they are the type to compare cases, recall an old tale or a name, and not let some seemingly preposterous detail pass without consideration.

That is part of the "lived-in" feel I find in Wellman’s work. You do not get the sense of isolated stories with characters like him, Thunstone, Longspear, and the rest. They seem to be going about their business in the same broad supernatural landscape, and now and then their paths will cross simply because there are not many who are privy to what is truly out there.

Then you have Thunstone, who is younger and more given to physicality, tending to confront danger head on. Pursuivant is the scholar who has likely already read up on how things went the last time someone made such an attempt.

John Thunstone

John Thunstone is another matter.

 Silver John is a wandering tramp; John Thunstone orders room service and eats in fine New York restaurants. Where Silver John is traditional, Thunstone is the antithesis. Academic, urbane, educated and sophisticated, he has seen the world and is deliberately engaged in occult matters. He is the type who researches and puts a name to an artifact.  

I have to admit I took a liking to him almost immediately. Yes he can be rude, abrasive and even an erudite and pompous jerk. BUT he gets things done and he knows that he is often the thing between the innocents and the dark.

He has a working knowledge of magical history and appreciates that there are very dangerous men who take their craft in earnest. 

Rowley Thorne is chief among them. 

Rowley Thorne

Wellman has created a fine occult villain in Thorne. He is no old mountain woman the neighbors might call a witch. He is a sorcerer, and the distinction is key.

Thorne is deliberate in his use of occult forces. There is a kinship here with the ceremonial magician or warlock of the old stories. In this way, Wellman provides two distinct models for the practice of magic. On one hand, the folk ways of the hills and Silver John; on the other, the learned approach of a man like Thorne. D&D would come along and put those in separate spell lists and classes. Wellman has them coexist.

Which brings me to a problem of my own making. Wellman and I both have a character named Thorne.

Rowley Thorne is introduced to us in the same tale that introduces us to John Thunstone; The Third Cry to Legba. So if there is a Sherlock-Professor Moriarty feel to their relationship, I am very certain it is intentional. 

Thorne also caused a rather interesting problem for one of my own witches, but I am going to save that for another post.

The Third Cry to Legba Collection

This collection of earlier John Thunstone tales is also the one that caught my attention the most. I started with Strangers on the Heights, but these are the tales I enjoyed the most. This collection largely covers his "Weird Tales" era of the John Thunstone tales. These are squarely within the time frame of Appendix N, as opposed to the now-more-current "The Complete John Thunstone" book. The collection "The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations" is named after the first John Thunstone story. 

Here, in addition to Rowley Thorne and a coven's worth of other witches and warlocks, we are introduced to Longspear, an indigenous American native who is as intelligent as he is wise. 

I can forgive some cultural faux pas with Wellman's portrayal of Longspear. It is obvious that this is a character he likes, respects, and tries to portray as authentically as possible. Wellman is trying to do the right things here.

Longspear is described as a chief and a medicine man. Today, we might just call him a shaman or something. Who is to say which is more correct? Longspear, like many of Wellman's characters, comes in and out of his tales. Sometimes he is the star; other times he is just a background character. It gives his tales a solid "lived-in" feel. There is a universe here. 

Other witches include Lil Warren, who was a witch, died, and came back as a vampire. 

Again, Wellman's categories refuse to stay where we might expect them.

The Black School

I should give the Black School some consideration, having brought it up before. Wellman is fond of returning to the notion of formal training in the occult, of institutions where magic is presented to a student rather than left to be acquired through folklore or bloodline. It serves as an apt counterpoint to what one finds with Silver John and his mountain ways. There is an inherent sinisterness to a school that has such matters on its syllabus, the very sort of thing prudent people have been cautioning against for generations.

To the D&D player this will be old hat; the wizard must be schooled somewhere. But Wellman is at pains to point out that not all magical education takes place in a proper academy with its robes, towers, and tests. Some schools are there simply because someone is set on passing on the forbidden arts. In that light the Black School is hardly Hogwarts. It is more of an occult apprenticeship, and one with an alumni association you would do well to question.

This also highlights Wellman's scholarship without turning it into an occult lecture. The Black School is a redressed Scholomance. 

Strangers on the Heights

Strangers on the Heights has been on my list as well. One might not find this as immediately applicable to a conversation about witches, but for getting a handle on the supernatural world Wellman has put together, it is hard to beat.

There is more than your fair share of psychic phenomena and occultism here, along with some odd cultic practices and forces that defy simple categorization. The ambiguity of it all is what is important. Wellman is under no compulsion to pause the narrative and inform us if we are in the presence of something demonic, alien, or purely psychic; he leaves that open. The characters form their own opinions on the matter, as does the reader, but the universe need not oblige by confirming them. I have come to value such an approach to worldbuilding. 

It also is a sign of Wellman's strength as a storyteller.

What Can We Use for D&D?

What can be made of Manly Wade Wellman for a game of Dungeons & Dragons? A lot. Gygax saw that, now you can too.

To start with, there is no requirement for a cohesive theory of magic. A witch will know that rowan is protection against one thing and silver another, that a particular song will undo a spell, and that one does not answer when called from the woods. Why any of it is so is not for her to say. Then there is the matter of locality. An eighty-year-old grandmother who has lived next to a mountain will likely understand what is at its base better than the finest scholar of the occult.

Magical traditions need not be identical in practice or in cosmology. The mountain witch is well advised not to do things the way Rowley Thorne does. And sometimes the old ways hold sway simply because they are old. Not on account of some universal energy field or equations long since forgotten, but because someone put two and two together a long time back and found it was enough to keep the darkness out. They work because people believe they work. 

Wellman also makes the point that a witch is at her best when she is confronted with questions she cannot answer. She ought to be in the know more than anyone, but never in possession of all the answers. That is perhaps the most useful takeaway. That is true for Silver John, Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, John Thunstone, Longspear, Prof. Enderbe, Lee Cobbett, and even Rowley Thorne alike.

Appendix N has its share of writers who will supply you with spells and demons and whole systems of sorcery, or even great magical societies. Wellman offers something else: a sense of accumulation. Christianity may have come to town but the old gods did not pack up and go. There are books of ceremony, to be sure, but also the kind of songs a grandmother puts in your head. A sorcerer like Thorne can devote his life to the mysteries and still miss what an old woman in the hills already has figured out.

That is the Wellman type of witch. 

Where her knowledge comes from, a book, her mother, or some whisper from the woods, is anybody’s guess. But once the sun is down and there is scratching at the door, everyone is going to want to hear what she has to say. To my mind, that is the essence of D&D.

The Shonikins

The Shonokins are another of Wellman’s creations that I feel I should mention, but I will put off any in-depth talk of them until my next post.

In some ways they are the better example of his ability to put together a piece of work that has all the hallmarks of both folklore and weird fiction. You do not find just another monster to be filed away with the rest; rather, they put forward an older history that runs under our own. They are close to humanity in appearance yet distinct enough to be profoundly disquieting. 

I have use for them as well when I come to examine the part Wellman has played in shaping my own settings, Sunny Valley in particular. It is one thing to say there is a monster in the mountains, quite another to make the case that something was there before we were.

Truthfully, I love the idea and need to do a lot more with it. 

Closing Thoughts

Wellman surprised me. I mean, yes, all the Appendix N authors I was not aware of gave me something I had not expected, but Wellman was an honest delight. His tales were great, with some great bits of fantasy and horror, and there was just so much of it. But most of all, it was his characters that appealed to me. His occult investigators, his wandering monster hunters, and all his witches, warlocks, and evil wizards were great. 

I wanted to read more about them. I smiled when someone would make a guest appearance in someoneelse's tale. When Longspear appeared in John Thunstone's tales, he was great; when shown on his own, he was great as well. 

I think what Wellman offered D&D, vis-à-vis Gygax, is the idea of the semi-professional monster hunter. Not to mention all the magic, wizards, and even a holy sword. 

What did I get out of it for my settings? I'll discuss that more in another post.

The Witches of Appendix N: August Derleth

 August Derleth is not really one of my favorite authors. But he has two redeeming qualities.

First are his Solar Pons stories. They are a pastische of the Sherlock Holmes stories  and could be easily dismissed, but I found them rather fun. I like to think, in a rather comical and completely unfair fashion, that all the negative stereotypes attributed to Holmes come from Pons. That is not true of course, but it amuses me. In truth I sometimes found Pons more approachable than Holmes. 

But that is not really the topic of today.

Second, it is largely due to Derleth that we know H.P. Lovecraft. He republished his works and contributed a lot (of good and bad) material to what has been dubbed The Cthulhu mythos.  

While Derleth did a good job with pastiches of Holmes, despite his personal connection to Lovecraft, his "pastiches" of the Cthulhu mythos never quite lived up. 

Now, Derleth was a very prolific writer, and I can't even pretend I have gone through all his works. 

He has written with Lovecraft and with Robert E. Howard, I suppose that garners him enough literary "street cred" to be on the Appendix N list.  But despite all the horror he had written, I can't find much about witches.  He did write one story though that does concern witches...sort of.

Witches’ Hollow

Published in Dark Mind, Dark Heart and presented as a “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft, the story is set in rural Massachusetts, in the familiar shadow of Arkham country. The premise is simple and folkloric: there is a hollow, a depression in the woods, where witches once gathered. Something of their rites still clings to the place.

In “Witches’ Hollow,” Derleth does not give us a witch so much as the memory of witches. The hollow itself becomes the character. It is a place where covens once gathered, where rites were enacted, and where something of those rites has never quite dissipated. Unlike Lovecraft’s Keziah Mason, who manipulates forbidden geometry and traffics with alien beings, Derleth’s witches are anonymous and historical. They exist as residue rather than agency.

Yet this is not without value. In folkloric witchcraft, place matters. A grove, a crossroads, a hollow in the woods. Derleth accidentally stumbles into something very old here. Witchcraft is not merely about spells. It is about land. And land remembers. 

This story feels a little like "The Dunwhich Horror" meets "The Colour out of Space." Indeed the Whatleys of the Dunwhich Horror are mentioned here and might even be related to the Potters of this tale. Yeah, hearing "Wizard Potter" a lot is funny. 

But there are three things in my mind that set this apart as a Derleth story and not a Lovecraft one.  First is that everything is connected to everything else. This isn't just a lone standing story about a weird family in the country, everything is connected to something else in the mythos. Which takes me to my second point, the "star signs" or "elder signs" are used in abundance here. Too much. They get used like holy waffers do in Dracula and that is certainly not what Lovecraft would have intended. Our school teach goes from being a potential witness to cosmic horror to RPG monster hunter. Lastly, and this is a nitpick more than anything, the ending is a happy one. Look, almost no one ever survives a tangle with the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about, but here the Potters manage to survive and even leave the area no worse for the wear. That doesn't really feel very Lovecraftian to me. 

Still. Lovecraft, like Moorcock, helped define the D&D Warlock and goes back to very roots of the hobby. And if it wasn't for Derleth we might not ever know who Howard Philips Lovecraft was.

The Witches of Appendix N: H.P. Lovecraft

One of the old masters of the Dungeons & Dragons experience, and indeed of many role-playing games, is H. P. Lovecraft. Since tomorrow would have been his 136th birthday, it seems fitting to examine his contribution to the Witches of Appendix N.

I could spend an entire series discussing his influence on D&D, AD&D, and Call of Cthulhu. I could spend another series on his influence on modern horror. Others have done that work, and done it well.

Instead, I want to narrow the focus. Not how Lovecraft influenced Gary Gygax when co-writing Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, nor how he influenced later AD&D design. I want to look specifically at the witches in his fiction. Witches that are recognizable to readers of this blog.

The Big Three

When it comes to witches, there are three stories that stand out more than the others: Dreams of the Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Thing on the Doorstep. 

Keziah Mason

The Dreams in the Witch House features Keziah Mason, the ur-witch of the Mythos.

She is said to have lived in Salem in 1692 and to have been arrested during the witch trials. That alone gives her a witch pedigree that no other Lovecraft character quite matches. Her former home is literally known as “The Witch House.”

But Keziah is not merely a colonial sorceress. She is a mathematician of the forbidden and the occult.

Her witchcraft blends:

• Ritual magic
• Non-Euclidean geometry
• Pacts with beings beyond human comprehension
• Dimensional travel

She has a familiar, the rat-thing Brown Jenkin, which acts as a proper familiar should: as an intermediary, a spy, and a bringer of harm.

The aspect of Keziah that makes her truly Lovecraftian is her intellectual approach to magic. She gets her power not from the earth, the herbs, the spirits, but from her understanding of the world in terms of angles, of solving equations, of navigating hyperspace through mathematics.

You could argue quite readily that the character of Keziah Mason is much closer to the D&D warlock than the witch. She is not the village's wise woman. She is the academic heretic, the one who has turned her back on the academic world. And it is here that the concept of the warlock in D&D starts to come together: the pact-maker, the wielder of forbidden knowledge, the one who trades safety for power.

I have also used her as the source of the equations used to power starships in my BlackStar setting. 

Lavinia Whateley and the Whateley Clan

The next one is The Dunwich Horror.  Lavinia Whateley and the Whateleys are basically archetypical witch family. The Mayfair family from Anne Rice is basically from the same mold.

Lavinia is described as ugly, albino, and strange-looking. She is isolated in the rural area of Dunwich, Massachusetts, and is raised by her grandfather, Old Whateley, who teaches her arcane formulae from forbidden books.

She is a participant in a ritual summoning and has a child with Yog-Sothoth.

This is hereditary or family witchcraft.

Unlike Keziah, Lavinia does not seem to be driven by a thirst for knowledge, merely part of a family tradition. The Whateleys seem to be part of an occult dynasty, a decadent New England family that still practices pre-Christian and cosmic rituals.

Lavinia is a bit of a mysterious figure; is she a willing participant or a victim? She is only described in external terms, observed, and spoken about.

This is the archetype for the rural cult witch in D&D: the isolated valley, the hidden grimoires, the crossbreeding with the outer forces, and the idea that witchcraft is not a class choice, merely a blood inheritance. It might even be related to the D&D Sorcerer, rather than the standard Draconic bloodline that is standard in the 3rd edition era; it is the root of the Aberation bloodlines in later editions.

Asenath Waite 

She is presented as attractive, though marked by unnerving eyes. She is the daughter of Ephraim Waite, an Innsmouth occultist. Her mother was a Deep One.

Asenath’s witchcraft is intimate. She practices:

• Body-swapping
• Identity erasure
• Psychological domination

Where Keziah works through geometry and Lavinia through lineage, Asenath works through possession.

She is a domestic witch in the most terrifying sense. She marries. She enters a home. She infiltrates identity itself. 

And unlike Lavinia, Asenath is not passive. She is willful. She drives the action. She pursues control.

Lovecraft and Witches

We know from his letters that Lovecraft had a dim view of feminism. I am not prepared to say he was misogynistic at all, but rather, he seemed not to think about women very much. The women in his tales were either mothers or had occult ties.  

Keziah Mason and Lavinia Whateley are examples of women who engage in forbidden knowledge, defy social norms, and exist outside ordinary domestic life. While this makes them good witch characters, it does not put either into particularly good light. There are no witch protagonists in Lovecraft tales because there are no women protagonists. Some of this is due to the time, and some to Lovecraft's very conservative social outlook. None of this is really in dispute, but it does color how I want to approach his witches. 

True, none of the characters above are "misunderstood," but they could be more nuanced. Is Lavinia a victim of her weird-ass family? Is Keziah a victim of her own genius? Is Asenath a...no Asenath is pretty much as she is written. 

The Witch as Seeker of Power

There is a recurring pattern here.

Lovecraft’s witches access knowledge denied to them by conventional institutions. They do not sit in classes at Miskatonic University. They might haunt the library, but they are never part of the faculty or student body.

• They make pacts.
• They inherit grimoires.
• They calculate angles that warp reality.

It supports a powerful interpretation: witches are those who seek access to forbidden systems of knowledge when barred from official ones.

And in Lovecraft’s universe, knowledge itself corrupts.

Given how many of his male scholars meet equally terrible ends, perhaps the lesson is not that women should not seek knowledge, but that no one should.

The Witches of Appendix N: A. Merritt

Abraham Grace Merritt, also known by his byline A. Merritt, was a new name to me when I was reading through Appendix N for the first time many, many years ago. Not a surprise, really. He was a contemporary of Howard and Lovecraft, publishing in the same magazines, but he was older (20 and 10 years or so respectively) than both. He was also more successful in terms of publishing and earnings. However, he lacked what made Howard and Lovecraft household names: strong, recognizable characters. He had them, but they were largely cut from the same cloth.

In Appendix N, Gygax mentions three of A. Merritt's tales: "Creep, Shadow!" "The Moon Pool," and "Dwellers in the Mirage". He even said in the DMG, "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt." That's a strong endorsement. 

In Merritt’s tales, you will find intrepid, but often normal, folk making their way out of the world they know and into territories subject to much older rules. Often "occult" in nature, with the "hidden" meaning of occult being the main focus. There are lost civilizations down in the earth, monsters that are holdovers from another time rather than simple beasts, ancient and forgotten religious practices, and a blurring of the line between sorcery and the super-science of antiquity. That same sort of imagination is at work in D&D’s underworlds and its odd ruins or cities that should not be there, right down to the dark domain of the drow and their queen. In a way, Merritt puts it into perspective: the dungeon is a threshold, not just a collection of rooms. 

Merritt was a collector of the odd, with an air about him that could have been plucked from one of his own tales. He would go traveling and come back with masks, carvings, weapons, and the like, or whatever unusual instrument he could find. At home, he put in order a private library of occult works that ran to several thousand volumes, and he even had a hand in growing plants with a history of poison, witchcraft, and visions.

I mention this because it goes some way to explaining the quality of his fiction. When Merritt put down a priestess or a lost god, he wasn’t working from the kind of thin pulp vocabulary you might expect. His head was full of folklore, botany, ritual, and the occasional nightmare, as well as his share of anthropology and occult theory. Read his best, and you get the sense of a room walled with forbidden books, each shelf suggesting a world far older and less human than we care to think. He was doing the same sort of research into writing his tales as I am doing into reading them.

For me, he feels like a go-to author for the ideas about "Occult D&D," a hidden world just behind the real world we all know. Even sometimes this hidden world is both metaphorically hidden, as in "Burn, Witch, Burn," and geographically hidden, as in "The Moon Pool." 

To explore this, I am going to go beyond the three tales Gygax mentions and into his other works; again, the focus here is not just on the contributions to AD&D/D&D but on how witches or witch-like characters appear in his stories.

Burn, Witch, Burn! (1932)

This is obviously an important one. 

In addtion to the titular witch(es) we get an idea that is very central to my notion of what occult magic needs to be in an AD&D game, namely an older form of magic. In "BWB" the witchcraft of the animated dolls is an older "Science" in Occult D&D witchcraft is an older magic. Both are occult in their nature. 

Based on his essays published at the time this story was heavily influenced by his own interest in witches, witchcraft and the plants used by witches. Madame Mandelip, the antagonist of the tale, gets her name from the Mandrake root used by witches and is also consequently seen as a miniature man. 

I was also impressed by his use of the nine-knot "witch's ladder" in the tale, a nice attention to detail. "Attention to detail" is key, Merritt's style includes a lot of detailed descriptions of what is happening and what things look like. 

The origin of the doll maker, Madame Mandelip, from Prague, reminds me of the tale of The Golem.

This story was also loosely adapted into the screenplay for the 1936 Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks) movie, The Devil Doll. 

A. Merritt on Modern Witchcraft (1942)

Appearing later on in his career, this brief reflection deals with a case he witnessed of Pennsylvania Dutch Powwowing, or Witchcraft. Here, an anemic child was tied to a bloody sacrificed ewe and was "miraculously" healed. Honestly, it would have been as likely to kill the poor girl, too, but as Merritt points out, there might be some hitherto unknown science going on here. 

While the "hex doctor" here could have negative connotations ("hex" = "evil") this is obviously the case of healing sympathetic magic. The blood, or even the life force, of the ewe is being transferred to the little girl. 

I should note that Merritt's description of his participation here parallels that of many of his protagonists: a man of reason thrust into a world dominated by the supernatural. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that such practices occurred in Pennsylvania Dutch, Appalachian, and European folk magic. Did Merritt actually see this happen? I have no idea, but I am willing to take him on his word.

The Doctor in both tales is named Dr. Lowell.

Special thanks to Chrisladams Bizarretales and the A. Merritt Fan Group on Facebook for helping track this article down. 

The Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)

Here we have a lost Alaskan valley, a cult that worships an octopoid godlike being, human sacrifice, and the whole notion of reincarnation. Then there is the modern hero who finds himself confused with, or drawn into, some mythic identity of yore. Here again is another lost world and one many have seen as the prelude to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness."

Khalk'ru certainly feels like another name for Cthulhu. You can almost squint and see that the names are related. 

There is a lot here that is foundational to D&D from an Appendix N perspective. 

Lur the witch woman is practically flirting with me. Strong, powerful, red hair, blue eyes. She is like Larina's distant ancestor. She is called the witch woman, but she doesn't do much that is really witchy, save for talking to wolves and stirring up memories in Leif/Dwayanu, though that could also have been just him or the past-life memories.  Or a "subconscious intracutaneous retro-fold memory loop" as Donna Noble would have called it. 

Lur has a witchy quality by virtue of being part of the threshold; she is of the hidden world and remains so until the hero gets his head around it. She is privy to the names and old identities, the cultic duties, the wolf-roads, and the emotional underpinnings of a place that ought not to be here any longer. You could call her a fine Appendix N witch for that, spell-casting or not. Put it in D&D parlance: she is the one who has an idea of what the dungeon is all about long before the party has found the stairs.

Certainly, the cover of this edition could have influenced the cover of the most witch-coded of the original D&D covers, Eldritch Wizardry.

Still quite an engaging tale.

The Moon Pool (1919)

I remember picking up "The Moon Pool" many years ago, reading it, thinking it was very good, and then never reading anything else of his after that.  Which is too bad, because he is quite good, and he sits at a nice intersection of fantasy and horror. 

There are many elements here similar to those of The Dwellers in the Mirage. Lost lands, lost races, powerful entities, the battle of good vs evil. 

Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, plays the role of the tempter witch here...sort of. She uses her beauty as a weapon, but it is not her only one. She participates in rituals (called a Witches' Sabbath) and channels the power of the Shining Ones. She has glamours and even something like an evil eye. So even though her powers seem more like lost science than magic, she has more witch-coded powers than Lur the Witch Woman. She is even called an evil witch at one point.

For D&D, what appeals to me is that Yolara is more than just a "female magic-user." You have a priestess and a politician in her as much as a seductress or an occult technician. She has a firm grasp on the rules of her world and how to put them to work. That is exactly where Merritt is useful for Witches of Appendix N. His women of power are not always witches in the fairy-tale sense, but they often occupy the same role a witch occupies in myth and gaming. They are the ones who can stand in the presence of old power and know how to talk to it.

Ship of Ishtar by Virgil Finlay

The Ship of Ishtar (1924)

Sharane, priestess of Ishtar, is another near-witch figure. She is the priestess of a lost and secretive religion. Sharane is a good example of the divine witch. She has witch-like magic and serves Ishtar in a supernatural environment. 

She is what I would call a Witch Priestess. 

Sharane is especially useful because she shows how close the witch and the priestess can be in Appendix N fantasy. To be sure, she is in service to a goddess, but you would not mistake her for some tidy D&D cleric in his mail armor with a cure spell on his lips and a holy symbol at hand. Her world is one of beauty and desire, of temple mystery and curse, of mythic time. She hails from a more ancient religious sensibility where the divine is as intimate as it is perilous, and love, magic and death are all facets of the same issue. Where you have Yolara the tempter or Lur the wild witch of the hidden valley, Sharane is the sacred witch; her authority is drawn from the goddess, from rite and old obligations.

We certainly get the Charm Person spell from here. Or at least one source of it.  

The Near Witches

These tales have women who are near witches. They are not witches per se, but live in a world where witches could live. 

The Women of the Wood (1926)

While not a witch per se, this tale offers another glimpse into the idea of a hidden world next to our own. In the French countryside, a man encounters a woman who is not what she appears to be and then is exactly what she appears to be. Also, if you are not playing your dryads like this, you are missing out. 

Seven Footprints to Satan (1927)

While not really Satan (or his he?), this tale treats the world of crime and its underground, akin to an occult underground. While there are no witches here, it is a great tale on how to possibly use a criminal organization. Again, here is Eve, who is not a witch, but she does have some occult, as in hidden, knowledge.

--

You could say Merritt’s greatest gift to the concept of the Occult in D&D is his treatment of magic as an old science rather than a simple list of spells. He has put his stamp on it with the idea of an older order of powers just beneath the surface of what we know. You will find cults and priesthoods, forbidden things that have survived the ages, secret rites, odd plants, and ancient deities; modern folk may write them off as superstition because they can't think of anything better. A rational sort might come by this world, but he won’t find it easy to master. Case in point, nearly every Merritt hero. 

Then there are the Witches of Appendix N. Merritt presents the witch as one who stands at the threshold. Whether she is a villain or a queen, a living idol or a guide, she is the one who understands the world’s older rules ahead of the hero. Certainly, before the hero does. 

She might be Madame Mandilip in her shop with her murderous dolls, or Yolara, the priestess of the Shining One. Perhaps she is Lur, all red hair and danger in some forgotten Alaskan valley, or Sharane, Ishtar’s darling and victim to a divine curse you couldn’t put a date on. 

He didn’t hand D&D the witch class on a plate, but he has provided a shelf full of witch-shaped ideas for us. In my book, that is enough to work with.

The Witches of Appendix N: Jack Vance

 You simply cannot talk about magic and Appendix N without mentioning Jack Vance.

Vancian Magic, Ioun 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."

Llorio, the Murthe, the White Witch

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.