Mail Call Tuesday: Endless Quest and Joseph Campbell

 Last week, my brother shared a Facebook Marketplace find with me: some Joseph Campbell books, the Historical Atlas of World Mythology. I wnted to grab them but have been burned on Facebook Marketplace in the past. So I did what one does: I went to eBay. I saw several good candidates, but I didn't pull the trigger on any of them. 

Then I was at Half-Price Books this weekend, and they had copies. A combined Vol. 1 (Parts 1 and 2) and the softcover Vol. 2 (Parts 1, 2, and 3). The price was good and I figured, what the hell.

It is rather amazing, to be honest. Heavily researched, illustrated, and tons of pictures. 

Here are just two examples.

If I ever wrote a book about shamans, then this is the source I would start with. But I am not going to do that. Still, it is a fascinating read, and I can't wait to get into it.

The issue is these are huge books, like 14" tall. Larger even than my Time-LIFE Enchanted World books. They are not going to fit well in my shelves.

A little smaller is a classic Endless Quest book. 

The book is in worse shape than I expected, but I am such a sucker for anything "Dark Druid" that it is still worth it for me. 

I'll read it and see how it goes. I have wanted to do a prequel to my own Dark Druid called All Souls Night for a long time. Maybe this will give me some inspiration. 

Updates From Jackson, IL

A couple of cool things from my all-too-brief Jackson game over the weekend. The characters met more Blackthorn Hags and their rivals, the Cricklow Hags. We also learned about a supposed occultist, Arthur Voss, and his wife Mai. Mai and her daughter are assumed to be dead. Some deal gone south with the Blackthorns. The PCs learn of a mansion in downstate Cheny, IL

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986, The School as Haunted Castle

Despite its smallish size, my old hometown had three high schools. There was the public school, Jacksonville High School (JHS), the Catholic school, Routt, and Westfair Christian Academy. But there was also a fourth one. Or more accurately, a first one. The Newton Bateman High School was the home to JHS for many years. It had students who had seen WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It had history, stories, and legends. 

It was also scary as hell by the mid 1980s.

Jackson Public High School by day and after dark. Mouse over the image, if you dare.

In my personal, real-world history, the Newton Bateman building (named after a local educator) opened its doors in 1921 and then closed them in 1982. Meaning I never walked those halls, and it sat like a grim reminder of a different age. My High School, also then called the "New" High School, was brand new. Slick. The halls were all carpeted, and the HVAC system was brand new. We had, for the time, a state-of-the-art Science Center named for astronaut Neil Armstrong, which included great chemistry labs and a planetarium. We had a great computer lab stocked with all sorts of new TRS-80 computers. And one of the best theatres in all of downstate Illinois. The place was massive and impressive.

It made the "Old" High School, then abandoned, look even older and more grim.

In my Jackson, IL setting, I rather shamelessly copy all of this.

There is the Public School, Jackson Public High School (JPHS), and the Catholic School, St. Michaels Catholic School (formerly called St. Michaels Academy and still called that by some). No stand-in for Westfair, really. I really didn't know much about that school and didn't even know it existed until they posted their graduating class in my then local newspaper.

There is the old High School building, the Thompson-Morgan building, paid for and built by the Thompson and Morgan families back in the 1910s and long before the two families had their falling out. 

The official word in Jackson is that the school closed because it was unsafe. Asbestos, lead, radon, or something. The students would spread rumors that the Morgans used it to dump chemical waste (at least that explains the food in the lunchroom) or that the Thompsons used it for their evil magic to stay in power. The Class of 1983 was the last class to graduate from there. The deaths of Selene "Lena" Marquette and Keely "Q" Ellison were the final judgments on the school. Everyone began the 83-84 school year in the new school.

But the Thompson-Morgan school was not torn down. And the reasons for its closure were never really revealed. 

When my "Tales from Jackson, IL" began, it was this school that called to all the supernatural creatures in the area. The witches, Stephanie, Larina, and Faye, all heard the old bell ring, even though it could not ring. Candy and Denise heard it as well, even though they are not supernatural.

The bell is the important part. A school bell tells students where to go, when to move, when to stop, when to gather, when to leave. In a haunted school, the bell does the same thing. It still gives orders. The problem is that no one knows who is ringing it anymore. 

In the new high school, both in Jackson and in my real-world school, the "bell" was an electronic beep. I mean yeah, it was bell-like, but it was also very, very 1980s. It had more in common with an 8-bit video game than a bell cast in iron or even brass. 

The old school had a proper bell. 

The old school has become something akin to a haunted castle in my game. Old, abandoned, and scary.

In teen horror from the 1980s, one of the unspoken but important characters is the High School itself. Look at the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, or even newer takes like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (80s in all but name) and even "School Spirits." The High School *IS* an important place.

But I get to play around with that idea some. Yes, there are scary things happening at the new High School. But those are not old hauntings. They are new monsters coming to school because, well, supernatural things are attracted to the angst and melodrama of teens. You say "Sturm und Drang" and a supernatural creature hears "Bon appétit."

The new high school is always busy, day and night, so there are plenty of opportunities for me to use it.

The old high school, though, is the Mines of Moria, Dracula's Castle, The Caves of Chaos. Vampires can be nesting in the basement, or the sub-basement with tunnels connecting to the hospital tunnels underground where things still live. There are ghosts in the hallways from 70+ years of student deaths. 

The new high school is where the town is still pretending everything is normal. The old high school is where that lie went to die.

The place isn't just haunted. It is haunted haunted.

And there is no good reason to go there unless you have to.

The cops keep an eye on it all the time. If anything is seen there, well, the newer cops will investigate. The older ones on the force will call it in and then stay the hell away.

Many years ago my younger sister called our hometown a "sinkhole of evil." This was long, long before anyone ever said the phrase "hell mouth." And I want to keep that idea; it isn't just the high school; it is the whole damn town. The high school just has a high concentration of weirdness.

In truth, I have avoided the urge to fill it with monsters. Yes, I know there are plenty of ghosts in the place; that is a given, but I am waiting to see what else *needs* to be there. I think the Hollow King is there, feeding off of the residual emotions of the place, but so far he is the only one I know for sure. 

That is a compelling image, really. All these ghosts, all these monsters, and they are afraid of something hiding in the lowest level (or maybe the Bell Tower). What scares the monsters?

Should it scare you as well?

Mirror Shard: The Bell That Should Not Ring

There has not been a student in the Thompson-Morgan school building since Spring 1983. The place is dark, the windows are boarded up, and the doors have chains on them. Even the bell tower had been out of commission for years before the school closed.

Yet at times the bell will ring.

Not everyone, though, can hear it. Witches and sensitives will hear it, as will ghosts. But some ordinary folk do too, and that is always worse. Denise and Candy heard it, and they had no right to be hearing a dead school calling their names.

When characters hear that bell, something has shifted in the old building. A door stands open where it was shut. A ghost has had a recollection. Perhaps a monster has made its way in or a room has come back into being. Maybe a student who died there is once more in the halls, or the Hollow King needs feeding.

Treat the bell as an adventure call, but do not make it so straightforward that it amounts to "go to the school and have your fight with the monster." It should convey that something is underway, and that ignoring it is to invite something worse later on. 

The Bell is not a call. It is a warning. But a warning the characters have to answer sooner or later.

After the bell rings, the characters might notice something like these:

• The clocks at the new high school are all stuck on 3:33. 
• An old hall pass from the Thompson-Morgan 3rd floor is found in a student’s locker (the new school only has a single floor). 
• A yearbook lies open to the Class of 1983 of its own accord. 
• The school nurse puts down her work to hear students laughing in an empty corridor. 
• By morning, a window at the old school has been unboarded, and unbroken. 
• There is a name on the detention list from 1974. 
• Or the ringing follows one home.

In AD&D terms, this is your haunted castle or ruined abbey bell, the kind from a village chapel whose tower fell thirty years ago, or the warning from the old keep for those with a curse on them.

But in Jackson it is a school bell. And it still expects obedience. It expects the high school students to obey it as they did in the old days.

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

Larina Stephanie Nichols at 16

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

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

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

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

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

That changes everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is what I need to know.

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

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

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

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

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

The Larina on my Desk

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

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

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

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

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

Two Spells and a Library Card

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

So why go back to Larina?

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

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

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

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

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

And she is teaching me more this way.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. What I Learned from 40 Years of Larina

The Witch Queen and the Girl in Homeroom: What I Learned from Forty Years of One Character

I created Larina in July, 1986. 

That sentence feels simple enough, but it carries a lot of weight. It means she has been with me through six editions of D&D, most of high school, college games, new systems, abandoned campaigns, resurrected notebooks, lost files, new editions, new worlds, and more than a few versions of myself. She has been a magic-user, a witch, a sage, a horror heroine "last girl", a multiversal constant, and occasionally the person in the room who knows far more than she should.

I have known her longer than my kids have been alive, and I met her 15 months before I met the girl I would one day marry.

I wish I could remember the exact date, but failing that, and for reasons that make sense to me, I'll say it was 40 years ago today. July 6, 1986.

At some point, a character stops being just a character sheet. At some point, she becomes a mirror to what I am doing at the time. 

And Larina has always been a mirror.

Larina was not my first character. She was not even my first "witch" character. But over the years of playing her and using her in many games, she quickly became a favorite of mine.

If you like, you can read some more about her here on her own page and all the versions of her I have posted here over the years.

The Character You Start With Is Not the Character You Keep

That first version of Larina was nothing special at the time. Not really. She was a "witch" but only in the respect that she was a collection of ideas I had about witches. Some notes, some ideas, a rough draft. Her class at the time? Magic-user, 1st level. This was July 1986. I would use her a few times, but my main "wizard" was Phygora-Cronus. He was, and let's be honest here, my Doctor Who-ripoff character. A traveler who messed with the lives of others. Phygora did eventually become his own thing. But that very, very first version of Larina barely saw any adventures. Phygora even stopped traveling to be Larina's "advisor" at the magic school. 

Larina 1st Ed AD&D Character Sheets

Still, there was something that drew me back to her. She saw some play, but not a lot really. I am hard-pressed to remember any of her adventures between that summer and the Fall. 

Then came October 1986 and the release of Dragon Magazine #114 with its new take on the witch class. I really can't overstate how much that issue affected my ideas of how to play a witch. That put an end to her as a "fake-wizard". I made her into a 1st-level Magic-user/1st-level Witch right away with a brand-new sheet. I figured out that she had been to magic school, but the tuition was too much to keep up. Sound familiar? I was in the same boat with one school, so I took my second choice. Another mirror.

So I gave her a backstory to fit. She was working in the school library to make ends meet, and she picked up her witchcraft on the side. Libraries have always been where I study things on the edge of belief, so it was only natural. It was another mirror of my own situation.

That little bit of backstory did a lot more work than I realized at the time. It explained why she knew things she was not supposed to know. It explained why she had access to odd books, old languages, half-forgotten rituals, and dangerous scraps of lore. It made her something other than a spell list. She was not just a student of magic. She was a student of forbidden shelves, closing-time whispers, and books that should probably have been locked up better.

Looking back, that is where Larina really started to become Larina. Not by virtue of better hit points or power, but because she was the one who knew where to find the book. She was the one with the answers. 

This early Larina was hardly the best version of herself. Beginnings seldom are. But she had a spark. Her core was there.

Every Edition Reveals Something Different

I have done this with all of them. I currently have Vera Rook sitting on my desk, and I have six character sheets for her, maybe seven soon. I showed you all this as an experiment with Elowen Hale.  Vera began with a concept and then character options were used to support that concept. Elowen was built by looking at character options across the games and choosing the concept that fit them all. Every game and edition offers a chance to redefine a concept. With Elowen and Vera, it was a matter of deliberate design; with Larina, it has been a decades-long process.

Larina, 2nd Edition AD&D, the Witch Priestess

I have some 75 versions of her in posts for various systems now, each one a test to see if I could make a proper witch. For example, in AD&D 2nd Edition, she took on more of a priestess role. I called it her Wiccan side (to put it in modern terms) as she found her faith. The mechanics were simply there to put it on paper. 

And in a way, it was another mirror: while she was getting deeper into the supernatural, I was embracing my atheism and skepticism. There is a contradiction in all this that I have always found amusing. The further I put distance between myself and belief, the more exacting I became with hers. She became the High Priestess of faith and belief, while I rejected such ideas for myself. 

Perhaps that was her utility. She let me get at faith, ritual, gods, spirits, and the like without having to put my own stock in them. Where I was skeptical she could be sincere, she could stand in the circle and invoke the Goddess in earnest while I was on the periphery with a notebook to put in a word: "Yes, but what are the game terms for that?"

If you want an honest appraisal of my witch writing, there it is. I don’t need to believe in a thing to see its power.

I will ask her different questions depending on the game. D&D wants to know what she can cast. A horror game will ask what she has endured to survive. Superhero games make you wonder how much power she truly has. Sci-fi asks what she knows of the universe. Modern horror asks what she does when the monsters are not locked in some dungeon but are down the street. And so on. Every answer tells me how to play her and how to bring her into whatever comes next.

Converting a character is never a mere numbers game for me. You can have your fun making sure a 7th-level spell translates to the equivalent power in another system, but that is not the work. The task is to determine what the game deems important. Some games are about combat or social standing, others about trauma or whether you can afford rent and still be at the ritual on time. When I convert Larina, I am not just changing her stats; I am letting the game have its say with her.

Forty years on, she still has something to say.

Long-Lived Characters Become Mythology

Larina has been with me long enough to take on a mythic quality in these worlds. My players and my kids’ players are familiar with her. I have minis and 3D prints of her in the game room, art on the wall, even a Monster High doll someone went to the trouble of modifying for me (people love this post). Here, you will hear her name in the same breath as "The Simbul," "Circe," or "Tasha/Iggwilv."

I won’t pretend she is on their level in the annals of game history or literature, but at my table, she occupies that space. She is one of the names the young witches talk about in hushed tones. She is the woman who has already had her bout with the thing you have just come across, the one whose notes you find in the margin. She may be of assistance, or she may decide you are not ready for the truth.

Tea with the Witch Queens by Brian Brinlee

That is what mythology is. Not official canon or a publication record. It is what a name means when enough people at the table understand it.

It also means the little details start to matter more. Her red hair, the purple clothes, the dragon tooth necklace, the Triple Moon Goddess tattoo, and the scar below her left collarbone. Or the way she will tell you her birthday is Halloween when in fact it is the 25th of October. Things that were once just bits of color are now like relics. 

After a while, the details are no longer decoration; they are signs.

And because Larina has so many versions, those signs are what tell me she is still Larina. The stats can change. The edition can change. The cosmology can change. She can be in Mystoerth, Jackson, West Haven, WitchCraft, NIGHT SHIFT, Wasted Lands, or some far future starship-adjacent nonsense that probably started with me watching too much Doctor Who and WAY too much Star Trek. But if she is still the woman with the books, the questions, the occult knowledge, the stubborn compassion, the terrible habit of putting herself between people and the dark, and biting her nails, then she is still Larina.

Larina by Jeff Dee

She Taught Me What a Witch Is

Every Witch class I have ever written has Larina’s shadow somewhere in it. Sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, but always there. Elowen is an "adopted daughter"; Vera is a dark shadow; Marrissia is the mother of hers that devours.  Even Sinéad, to a degree, is "what if Larina had been raised in the Forgotten Realms?" All these witches are part of what I call her extended coven. Which is more growth for her because from the start she was a solitary witch learning via books she borrowed from her library. 

My witch books don’t just appear out of a vacuum; they are born of a lived-in experience I have with her. One feeds the other. Another mirror.

Larina made it clear to me that a witch is more than a woman with magic, a druid who has taken to the indoors, a wizard with better jewelry, or a cleric with the wrong holy symbols.

A witch is a relationship.

That was a revelation when I first saw it. Which is odd since what I was looking at were my own notes and writings. But there it was. Was it my writing or hers? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

The witch is a relationship. With power and place and memory. With old gods, false ones, and things that were never gods. With a coven, be it made of ghosts, familiars, past lives, a very patient cat, and the odd book.

That informed my design. A witch needs magic, but she also requires the rituals, the pacts and taboos, the marks and the consequences. She needs to be able to heal, curse, bind, and banish. And most of all, to know. Intelligence is important. Wisdom informs. But it is Charisma that sets it all into motion. 

Larina was never at her finest when she was flinging the largest spell in the room. She was best when she could tell you what the monster was and where it came from, what book made a passing mention of it, and why you should have heeded the old woman at the start of the adventure. 

That is the witch I keep writing.

The witch girl and the Witch Queen

A Good Character Can Outlive the Campaign

This is something of a big deal. Groups disband, people move on, editions are replaced, files go missing, and books get sold. Most campaigns have an end. Yet some characters endure.

Larina is my means of keeping old games from being set in amber. She is continuity, if sometimes of a confusing sort. I have four timelines for my main computer to make sense of what she has been up to since 1986, which is no small chore. In fact, trying to account for her "lost years" and sort out one of those timelines is what first put the notion of an updated Advanced Witches & Warlocks in my head. If you look at one of my playtest notebooks, you will find nothing but character sheets of her from various stages and reams of notes. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Why did she begin to embrace witchcraft as a practice and a religion more?

Will any of this make it to print? No, not all of it. Does it inform what does? You bet.

Those campaigns are history now. I am the only one left alive from some of them. But she has been here with me all along, my witness to the fact that it all happened. She was the chronicler of those long-lost campaigns. The people who were there are gone, but I have the notes I kept in her voice still tucked away in one of my 3-ring binders or stapled to a character sheet. It is strange when I read something like "Must talk to Killian" or "Find out what Morgan Highstar knows." Notes on Larina's sheet by her (by me for her) directed at characters who can no longer answer. Another mirror: Larina, when she is a GMPC or DMPC, often acts as the party's translator or chronicler. There is a certain sadness to it, and a comfort as well. Knowing that she is still bearing witness to deeds of glory.

Old campaigns are like ghosts. You hold on to the recollection of the character deaths and the lucky rolls, the big set pieces and the arguments over rules, not to mention the maps we were sure we would have for all time, only to mislay them. And the dumb jokes. But memory is no good at archiving; it will let go of what you once deemed important and hang on to the odd bits.

She reminds me that those games happened. Those people sat at those tables. That we cared very much about things written in pencil on loose-leaf paper. That we spent entire afternoons arguing over what a spell could do. For a little while, the world was bigger than the room we were sitting in, and the room we were sitting in was bigger than the world outside.

Larina is not the campaign itself, but you can smell it on her clothes.

The trick with an old character is not keeping her exactly the same. It is letting her change without letting her become someone else. Larina from 1986 is not the same character as Larina from 2026, because I am not the same either.

She has become something of a creative engine for me. What she needs is what my books need. It may sound mad, but then again, I once put in some time as a QMHP at an institution for schizophrenics, so perhaps it rubbed off. Or I just know this character well enough to tell the difference between what works and what I might want.

The WitchCraft RPG made clear to me the distinction between her magic and her psychic side, and I carried that over to Ghosts of Albion with its separate Magic and Faith abilities. From her I got the Wicca and the Witch Priestess for Advanced Witches & Warlocks, and the Witch Queen for Liber Mysterium and my 3rd Edition book. She was the six-year-old in my AD&D Complete Netbook of Witches & Warlocks. 

Which is the strangest thing of all: the adult Witch Queen and the girl in homeroom with glasses, wearing her watch on her right wrist, are one and the same. Not in any tidy, linear way, but in the manner of a dream or a myth, or an RPG you have been at for a while.

The child answers the call. The teenager comes across the book. The young witch puts up with the vampire. The adult who becomes the teacher. And the Witch Queen who becomes the warning. 

And somewhere in there is a guy (also with glasses) with a notebook, trying to figure out what all of that means in terms of saving throws, spell levels, and whether or not this really belongs in the next book.

Forty years on, and Larina is still around. 

I don’t hold on to her out of stubbornness (though there is a lot of that too); she has a way of showing me something new. Just when I think I have had my fill of her lessons, another one of her turns up. A stat block in a folder I have not opened in ages. A picture. Some class feature that is there only because, at some point, Larina did that at the table. A spell that is logical in a way only she could make it so.

Maybe that is the real lesson.

The best characters are not the ones who stay frozen on the page. They are the ones who follow us out of the dungeon, through the years, and into whatever strange country comes next.

For me, Larina has been a witch, a mirror, a witness, a test case, a mythology, and a creative engine.

Not bad for a little 1st-level magic-user girl from July of 1986.

Larina by Claudio Pozas

The Mirror Shard: The Dark Anima

This one is a little bit different than other mirror shards. Those typically cover concepts I can use in both my Occult D&D campaign and my Jackson, IL campaign, even if they appear different in each. 

I have talked about this before, but it is worth bringing up again here because it is part of Larina’s genesis.

My first foray into psychology was in the mid-80s. I went the way of most people and began with Freud and then Jung. Freud had his Id, Ego, and Superego, all very serviceable concepts. Jung I found a bit more philosophical, or at any rate more to my liking as a writer and a gamer. From him I took the archetypes, the Shadow, synchronicity, the Animus, and the Anima. That was what resonated. 

The Anima, in Jungian terms, is the inner feminine image in a man’s psyche. The Animus is the inner masculine image in a woman’s psyche. Now, I am not going to pretend this is modern psychology, or even particularly good psychology by today’s standards. This is armchair Jung, filtered through a teenage gamer in the 1980s who was reading books he only partly understood and immediately turning the interesting bits into D&D characters.

In a way, that was all I really needed then.

But the notion of the Anima held me. Jung would have you believe it is the inner feminine in a man’s mind (the Animus being the woman’s inner masculine). I wanted to know what mine looked like, and not in the pedestrian sense of an ideal type of woman. I was after something darker and more symbolic. If the feminine side of my imagination were to step into a dungeon with a spellbook and some secret she wasn’t in a hurry to share, who would she be?

Larina was the answer. Or perhaps she was there first, and I put the question to her later. In college, I worked on my undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees in Psychology. All the while, I had Larina by my side. Informing me, informed by me. I read Jung in highschool, I read it again in college and discussed him in History of Psychology classes I was in. Her first "publication" may have been a paper I wrote about the Anima with the Witch as archetype. That would have been at least 1989 or 1990. 

She is not simply “the girl character.” Sure, I like witches, and I have played a lot of women over the years, but that is not why she is here. She was curious and intuitive. She was compassion made into a weapon. She was the part of me still open to magic while the rest of me was being weaned off it. A useful tension.

As my Anima, Larina, is not merely soft and healing. She is dark. Not evil; there is a distinction. She is the witch standing at the periphery of the firelight; the one standing in the liminal space. The one who tells you there is more to it than you see. The librarian who will hand you a cursed tome because you need the lesson. The red-haired woman in purple who smiles when the monster misnames her.

Forget the seductress or the evil queen; they are too convenient and too cliché. The Dark Anima is your guide to the underworld. Think of Beatrice with a black cat, or Persephone once she has memorized the map of Hell. She won’t rescue you from the dark; she will show you how to navigate it. She is Innana and Ereshkigal. 

That is why she has a habit of appearing in my work as a sage, a mirror, or a teacher. She is the voice in my head that says the monster is a symbol, a wound, an old story in new clothes.

It also makes for good company with Nigel. He is my Id, all impulse and violence, the one who will put a blade to the problem and leave the philosophy for another day. Larina is his interpreter. She understands his danger and his necessity. Between them, I have Phygora as Animus, Johan as Super-ego, Retsam as Ego… a full psychological adventuring party in my head. It may not be entirely healthy, but it has given me my share of characters.

But Larina is the one who has stuck.

The Anima is no ordinary character. She is a mirror. She shows you desire and fear, and the things you put aside for being inconvenient. And as the person looking in the mirror changes, so does she. In a very literal sense, she has been my mirror, reflecting my turn away from religion, my skepticism, my fondness for libraries, my urge to codify the occult for a game, and my fascination with women who know more than they ought not to.

She is not me. But she is mine in a way my other characters are not. 

I suspect that is the reason for her forty-year run.

Urban Fantasy Friday: Slasher Flick Director's Cut

At the start of the week, I posted about Horror Movie rules and the Final Girl. The topic of the Steven Jackson Games Magazine's Slasher Flick came up. I had never played that, but I did know about the RPG Slasher Flick: Director's Cut from Spectrum Games. 

I went back to Slasher Flick to see what it has that I can use to help flesh out my ideas for Jackson, IL. Obviously, Slasher Flick leans hard into the whole slasher sub-genre of horror, whereas Jackson is more supernatural horror. The list of movies is, of course, fantastic and a must-have. Reading the video recommendations is really one of the book's treats.

The obvious overlap is in structure. Jackson, IL is not a slasher setting in the strictest sense. There are slashers in it, certainly. There are masked killers, urban legends, haunted campuses, missing girls, old crimes that repeat, and all the usual things that make people in horror movies say, "I'll be right back," right before they absolutely do not come back.

But Jackson is not really about a killer with a knife. Jackson is about the thing under the town.

Slasher Flick is not just a game about killing off teenagers. It is a game about horror movie pacing. It understands that the first third of a horror movie is not really about death. It is about relationships. Who likes whom. Who is lying. Who is jealous. Who is scared. Who is trying to act brave. Who is going to make the wrong choice for exactly the right emotional reason. The book even notes that slasher films often focus on teenagers or college-aged characters, isolation, and the relationships and conflicts among them, especially in the first part of the movie. That is very useful for Jackson.

A Slasher Flick game asks, "Who is killing these kids?"

A Jackson game asks, "Why is this happening again?"

I'll talk more about this next week, but July 2026 marks 40 years since I first rolled up Larina as an AD&D character. So it seems fitting that I try her and her friends out. Compare and contrast their Jackson and Slasher Flick counterparts.

Larina "Nix" Nichols
Primary Character
Stereotype: Weird Bookish Witch Girl
Role: Smart Girl

Brawn: Poor
Physically Small / Not Built for This (-)

Finesse: Normal

Brains: Good
Occult Research (+), Perceptive (+), Knows the Library (+) 

Spirit: Good
Cool When Things Get Weird (+)

Special Ability: Psychic Power

Tidbits: Has a short temper. Has nightmares.

Items: Backpack, compact mirror, library card, Greek II notebook, flashlight, occult book, wristwatch

Stephanie Vale
Primary Character
Stereotype: Sweet Cheerleader
Role: Ms Popular

Brawn: Normal
Healthy (+)

Finesse: Good
Flexible (+)

Brains: Normal

Spirit: Good
Attractive (+), Annoyingly Perky (-)

Special Ability: Wholesome

Tidbits: Feels like she is the only one holding everything together.

Items: Car keys, cosmetics, mace/pepper spray, sunglasses, brush

Faye "Thornie" Thorne
Primary Character
Stereotype: Snarky Goth Girl
Role: Oddball

Brawn: Poor

Finesse: Good

Brains: Normal
Unconvential Thuinker (+) 

Spirit: Good
Bluff (+), Courageous (+), Witty Remarks (+), Overly Sarcastic (-)

Special Ability: Steel Yourself

Tidbits: Doesn't like to be touched, Loves hot peppers, encyclopedic knowledge of music

Items: Pentagram necklace, knife (in boot), knife (in pocket), knife (in jacket sleeve), leather jacket, cigarettes.

Candace "Candy" Mercer
Primary Character
Stereotype: Fun-loving Party Girl
Role: Smartass

Brawn: Normal

Finesse: Good
Breaking & Entering (+), Stealthy (+)

Brains: Normal
Resourceful (+) 

Spirit: Good
Seduction (+), Inappropriate Humor (-)

Special Ability: Dumb Luck

Tidbits: Shockingly good at First Aid. Uses inappropriate humor as a shield. Uses sex as a means of connection.

Items: First Aid kit, knife, baseball bat, lighter, cheap sweet strawberry wine/

Denise "Duchess" Carver
Primary Character
Stereotype: Party Girl with a heart of gold
Role: Rebel

Brawn: Normal
Street fighter (+)

Finesse: Good
Stealthy (+)

Brains: Normal

Spirit: Good
Bluff (+), Courageous (+), Untrusting (-)

Special Ability: Overcome

Tidbits: Knows where all the exits are. Doesn't trust anyone but Candy

Items: Crowbar, cigarettes, perfume, cosmetics, knife

--

Wow. I rather love these. I was thinking that these could be have been the girls in their next adventure, but this feels like early school year 1985. Maybe their second adventure and the first one with all five of them together.

Originally Candy and Denise were going to be Secondary Characters. But like how they evolved in NIGHT SHIFT, I couldn't help but make them Primary characters. These versions are likely the ones we see in Shadows of the Night.

Slasher Flick Adventure: "Hey Mickey, You’re So Dead"

So I want a good "Slasher Flick"- style adventure that keeps all the characters involved. It's easy to keep Larina and Faye involved; they love spooky shit. Denise and Faye are always in trouble, but Stephanie. She was an issue in the beginning. She didn't have a lot of reason to stay with the others despite their magic connection. This helps me solve that. Granted. Your game will have different issues with different characters, but Steph is the stand-in for the Popular Guy/Girl who would normally not be hanging out with the High School weirdos. 

This adventure involves her.

Michele "Mickey" Wren was the head cheerleader in Jackson for the 1965/66 school year. A senior, popular, pretty, and hated by her rivals. So, while decorating for homecoming in the gym at the Old High School, the other cheerleaders and football players decide to prank her by taking away the ladder she was using. Mickey didn't see this and fell to her death.

20 years later, the pep-squad has convinced the school district to hold the Homecoming dance in the old High School Gym (the "new" gym is not ready yet). This wakes up Mickey's vengeful spirit, and she tries to kill the current roster of cheerleaders and football players. This includes Stephanie, Valentino, and Andy. Steph needs Faye, Larina, and strangely enough Candy and Denise to help.

I am including Candy and Denise, well, because I love them, but I also need someone to climb to where Mickey fell to her death, and frankly that screams Candy. She isn't afraid of heights. 

It starts when someone sees a girl in an older cheer uniform, but wearing a Crimson Cougar mask (Steph sees this first). Then killings start. The clues are in the library (old yearbooks, newspapers) the realization that someone has died in the school every year since there was a Jackson Public High School (Larina figures that out). Someone gets cut (allowing Candy to show off her first-aid skills), gets trapped under the old gym (allowing Denise to show them the way out), and, basically, I want everyone to have something to do. Faye is the one who figures out Mickey isn't mad because she died; she is mad because everyone forgot her. In the end, Steph decides that the Homecoming theme is 1965 and Mickey is remembered, so she doesn't come back to kill again. 

Mickey's Slasher Flick components would be:

Hard to Kill

She keeps coming back after being knocked down, drowned, electrocuted, or locked behind doors.

Linked Location: Jackson PHS Old Gym and Auditorium Wing

She is strongest in the old gym, locker rooms, stage, costume storage, catwalk, boiler access, and trophy hallway.

Signature Weapon: Sharpened Spirit Baton

The baton is part cheer prop, part ritual weapon, part murder implement.

Stalking the Prey

She appears in mirrors, trophy case glass, polished locker doors, and the dark windows of the gym before she attacks.

Tidy

Bodies vanish, blood is wiped away, and the school keeps looking normal until the final act. This lets adults doubt the girls. It also makes Steph trust the others because they believe her right away.

Episode Theme Song: Mickey, which Candy will hum when they are supposed to be sneaking around. 

Candy: (softly) "Oh Mickey, what a pity..."
Faye: "Could you not do that?"
Candy: "Sorry, inappropriate behavior is how I deal with stress."
Denise: "I thought random sex was how you dealt with stress."
Candy: "I have a lot of stress."

Yeah. I like this. I don't think I need NIGHT SHIFT stats for Mickey Wren, but if she comes back, I'll certainly do them. 

This should also be the episode where the players learn that someone has died in the school every year since 1936.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986, The Final Girl and the Adventuring Party

Candy and Denise, in trouble again.

Jackson, IL is a place where 1980s horror rules apply.

I just finished watching "In Search of Darkness" on Tubi, and it was wonderful. It is about 4 and a half hours long and covers movies from every year of the 1980s. There are some fantastic movies, wonderful interviews (Barbara Crampton and Cassandra Peterson still look amazing!), and just a wonderful romp through some of my favorite VHS, and now Tubi, memories. 

They talked a lot about the "rules" of horror movies and how more recent movies still abide by them and/or try to send them up. They are useful and a lot of fun. 

I have no desire to go by the book on every one of those rules, though. Some of them are better left broken or put into question. Others ought to be hauled out behind the old school and put in the ground where the football field lights can’t find them.

Then there is the matter of the Final Girl. She still has her place.

She matters in that she is the one who spots the pattern. The locked door, the photograph that isn’t there, a name you keep hearing, a song in the wrong room, some sound the rest of them don’t pick up. She puts two and two together before the adults do and lives to see how the horror is done. When the game is well played, she will act on it.

Mina Murray Harker is still my favorite example of a Final Girl. It might seem an odd choice for a discussion of 80s horror, but she is the root of it for me. More than simply being the one to outlast Dracula, she makes sense of things. She organizes the evidence, types up the journals, and turns fear into something you can act on. I find that more to my liking than the "last girl alive" trope.

For the 1980s, we have Nancy Thompson. She is a prime case. She stops waiting for the grown-ups to come to her rescue and starts making ready for the fight herself, having learned Freddy’s rules. Or take Kirsty Cotton in Hellraiser; she doesn’t survive by overmatching the Cenobites but by knowing their rules well enough to make a better bargain than the one they offer. Or  Laurie Strode in Halloween, or Ellen Ripley in Alien (ok, 1979, but she still counts). 

That is what I want in my games. None of the lazy notion that survival is a form of moral superiority, no purity or punishment for its own sake. The Final Girl endures because she learns and adapts and won’t let the monster have all the upper hand. That is good horror design and good adventure design.

In Jackson, the title of Final Girl does not belong to the witches. My playtests have shown it is usually Denise and Candy who are best at it. And that is as it should be.

They are NPCs, certainly, but they stand in for the kind of characters Jackson should be able to support. They are not here to supplant the ones at the table but to demonstrate the sort of arc you can get from the game. YOUR characters should feel like the Final Girl. At least that is my desire. 

Denise and Candy are not the stars of every Jackson game, but they are the proof of concept: ordinary people can stand in the center of the horror and still matter. In fact they can sometimes have the best clarity.

Denise and Candy are always in some kind of trouble. Not from any weakness or foolishness on their part, but because they are right in the human center of the horror. They are tied to the town and its consequences. The witches may spot the occult angles first, but Denise and Candy will see the human side of it. Who is being lied to? Who is missing? Who is afraid? Plus they just have a knack of being exactly where they shouldn't be. More Horror Movie logic.

What am I getting at? Survival is not always about power. It should be about noticing what is going on. 

It is what makes them targets and what makes them valuable.

The horror in this part of Illinois is not just about who wields the magic. It is about who comes through an encounter and doesn’t leave the vulnerable behind, the one you can run to later. That is where Denise and Candy count for most. They don’t just get through a bad night and disappear. 

I would call that a Final Girl arc, and I want one at my table. In a ways it is like The Hero's Journey, just with more AquaNet.

With this logic then there can be more than one "Final Girl." You will not find that in a film. A Slasher is built to whittle things down to a single survivor; a role-playing game has no need for such assumptions. The Game Master ought not to view the rest of the cast as so many bodies laid out to flatter one character’s significance. This is not a screenplay. It is a room full of people making their choices and rolling the dice to see if they can get through the scenario.

In Jackson, the Final Girl might be Final Girls. Or a boy. Or a coven. Or a whole lot of furious, battered teenagers who put up with the haunted school and then have to be in class on Monday. That makes for better play. The archetype is there, but the table is what counts.

And this is where we look at Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

In Gothic Horror, the Final Girl is often the helpless last victim. Mina Harker broke this mold. She is last, but she was never helpless. She was the hero.

In AD&D the Final Girl is the adventuring hero. To make her only the Witch would be too self-serving, too narrow. The Witch has her part to play: she is the one who knows the monster’s true name or reads the omen the others missed. But let the Fighter hold the door. Let the Cleric be the one who won’t abandon the dead. The Thief can spot the way out, the Magic-User the spell that turns the tide, the Ranger can follow the horror to its lair, while the Paladin stands at the threshold. The Gallowglass, the Warlock, the Magus, they all get their due.

The adventuring party in AD&D are all potential Final Girls. Fantasy and horror mix well because the dungeon is a haunted house with rules you have to learn or die by. D&D is different in that it allows your characters to be more than mere survivors. They become the ones who go back in.

You have Nancy setting traps for Freddy, or Kirsty haggling with Hell and coming out the other side. Mina is the one who collects the evidence to put Dracula to the sword. Laurie and Ellen telling the monster, "No." Then the party comes to the crypt with lanterns and spells, and someone says to the monster: "We know what you are now. And we know how to fight you."

That's D&D for "Get away from her, you bitch!"

That is the moment I am after. Not because I want to make horror easy. If the creature is reduced to a bag of hit points, you have lost the tone. But if the characters have put in the work, survived the first pass, and figured out the pattern, then acting on that is no betrayal. It is their reward for paying attention.

The Final Girl isn’t the one the scenario lets off the hook. She is the one who has learned how it works. She knows the rules. And at the table, that can be anyone, or all of them.

Mirror Shard: The Survivor’s Rule

There are times in an adventure, be it in Jackson, IL, or with Advanced Witches & Warlocks, or with your own horror game, when the horror is thick, and the characters have come face to face with the main threat and put up with it. In those cases, put this rule into play.

Let a player who has just survived a run-in with the central horror put in one question to the Game Master about the creature’s weakness, its limits or how it operates. You must give a straight answer. It doesn’t need to be exhaustive, but it has to be true. The character has been there and seen what the rest of the party has not. This is their reward for paying attention. For surviving. 

Some good ones to ask might be:

• What does it invariably do before making an attack?
• Is there a name that will make it pause?
• What has it left in its wake?
• Who is it after, really?
• Where won’t it go?
• What old mistake has it made?
• What compels it to follow a certain rule?

In Jackson, you can think of it as genre knowledge born of fear. The survivor has picked up on the rhythm of things; she knows the hallway is quiet when it should not be, or what tune precedes the ghost. She can tell the adult is lying because she has heard the lie from him before. With the Advanced Witches and Warlocks, it is more of an old-school affair. They have put themselves in harm’s way to see how the monster behaves, to watch it choose or reveal itself.

But don’t let the rule be a way of handing them the answer. Make it the basis for their next dangerous decision.

It is horror movie logic, gamified. 

It is the desire to survive against terrible odds, certain death, or worse. 

The "or worse" is important. In AD&D, death is something that happens a lot, and there are ways to raise the dead. In Jackson, death is a much bigger deal. A death can shut down a community, and there are no Raise Dead spells here. Dead is dead.

But Player Characters are not Horror Movie Characters. So the fear may never be as real to them. I keep thinking about "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors". Those kids are still in terrible danger. Freddy is still Freddy. But once they understand that the dream gives them a kind of power, the game changes. They are not safe. They are not invincible. They are just no longer completely helpless.  That is what the Survivor’s Rule is meant to do. It gives the players a small edge, earned through fear and attention. The Big Bad can still be bigger and badder. In fact, it probably should be. In the end Freddy still gets most of them. 

That is why I keep coming back to the Final Girl. Not as a fixed role, and certainly not as a body count waiting to happen, but as a way to think about play. Horror gaming works best when the characters are frightened, outmatched, and still paying attention. Jackson, IL gives me Denise and Candy as my working examples of that. Advanced Witches & Warlocks gives me the adventuring party as the fantasy version of the same idea. Different clothes, different weapons, different rules, but the same moment at the table: the monster has shown itself, the players have survived long enough to understand it, and now someone gets to say, "We know what you are." That is when horror becomes adventure.

Tales of Jackson, IL: Not-so Mystic Locales

 One of the things I really wanted when I began putting together Jackson was it to feel real. I wanted places these characters could hang out and locations that felt like something from the Midwest in the mid 1980s. 

So while I love my haunted houses, hidden underground tunnels, and everything else the "bad land" has to offer, there are far more "normal" places to visit that will come into play. 

Colleges

In addition to two High Schools (Jackson Public High and Saint Michael's Catholic), Jackson has two small four-year colleges offering full bachelor's degrees in a variety of subjects, along with technical degrees and, at MacAlister, a robust RN program and an RN-to-BSN program.

While the colleges have their ghosts and their own stories, they are to most people mundane institutions of higher learning. 

MacAlister College
The East Side College, "Mac"

Founded in the early 1830s, MacAlister College for Women broke ground before Talcott College did, but did not begin enrolling students until after Talcott was established. It began with a group of Scottish immigrants looking to provide a strong Presbyterian education for young women. Its School of Nursing began strongly in its first years and continues to provide one of the best medical educations outside of the University of Illinois. After struggling somewhat in the 1870s, Mac (as it is known) opened its doors to men and women, competing with the more successful Talcott College, which had begun offering degrees in accounting and chemistry. The chemistry classrooms became the first co-ed classrooms in the entire Midwest. 

Now more than 150 years old, MacAlister is showing its age, but is beloved by students, faculty, and alumni alike. Since the 1970s, enrollment has been declining, rarely reaching its cap of 900 students. 

Illinois Beecher College 
The West Side College, The Harvard of the Heartland

Founded in the mid-19th century, what is now Illinois Beecher College began as Talcott Collegiate Institute in 1856, an ambitious attempt to establish a center of higher learning on the Illinois frontier. Its founders were educators, reformers, and idealists, some with quiet but firm ties to abolitionist networks moving through the region. They came to Jackson with one goal in mind: to provide a world-class, Protestant education to the new frontier, and in particular, the "Thebes of the West," as Jackson had been called. They even went as far as to proclaim the new college as the "Harvard of the Heartland!" Indeed, for several decades, Talcott College produced several notable scholars, orators, and political figures who would shape the state through to the 20th century. 

Talcott was renamed Illinois Beecher College in 1918, during a period of reorganization backed by Chicago financiers, railroad money, and several prominent alumni families. Talcott Hall remained the main campus building until 1975, when the new Harriet Tubman Hall was built to house the college’s expanding computer lab and business programs. The name was not an attempt to curry favor with changing times, but a concrete statement acknowledging the college’s strong abolitionist sympathies dating back to its foundation.

Stores

Lots of places to spend money in town, but only a few are of interest to our characters, and some places are better than others to find some NPCs.

El Espejo Oscuro - Illinois Ave, near Illinois Beecher College

Owner and Propriator Sylvia Velasco. 

El Espejo Oscuro sits on Illinois Avenue, not far from Illinois Beecher College, though most students are careful to say they only go there "as a joke." The name means "The Dark Mirror," and the shop lives up to it: black-painted shelves, old mirrors, candles that smell too sweet, imported books, tarot decks, silver jewelry, saints’ medals, dried herbs, and occult titles that no one in Jackson admits to buying. The owner, Sylvia Velasco, claims to be from Spain, dresses like she stepped out of a perfume ad, and somehow affords a brand-new red Ferrari despite the fact that the store never seems to have any customers. El Espejo Oscuro is both a resource and a warning. People who need answers can find them there, but Sylvia never gives anything away for free, even when she is smiling.

This is also a good place to find Vera Rook and Renee Jäneläinen, though not usually at the same time.

Paula's Bookstore - Downtown Square

Paula’s Bookstore sits on the northwest side of the Square, with a faded sign, crowded front windows, and more books than the building has any reasonable right to hold. Paula Belakis sells new books, used paperbacks, magazines, comics, local histories, poetry, study guides, and the occasional odd volume that no one remembers ordering. Unlike Strawberry Fields, Paula’s is not trying to be cool, and unlike El Espejo Oscuro, it is not trying to be dangerous. It is just a bookstore, or at least that is what everyone says. Students from Jackson Public, Saint Michael’s, Beecher, and MacAlister drift in looking for paperbacks, textbooks, horror novels, fantasy trilogies, romance novels, GED guides, and a place to hide for twenty minutes. The store has a harmless ghost, or maybe a helpful one, depending on whom you ask, and Paula has learned not to question why certain books fall off certain shelves when certain customers walk in.

This is also where you will find Larina most Saturday mornings or Roderick Morgan on Friday nights.

Paula does not have a very high opinion of Sylvia Velasco. And the feeling is mutual. But they at least respect each other as women business owners, so they try not to make things difficult for each other and try to cater to different clientele. 

Strawberry Fields - Jackson Town Mall

Located on the near west side of town, on Morgan Street, Strawberry Fields is a cramped record/head shop selling records, tapes, incense, posters, tarot decks, used books, magazines, cheap occult novelties, and dull display weapons. Parents think it is dangerous. Teens think it is magic. PASS thinks it is proof of moral collapse. The rumor that it sells weed is false, but the rumor never dies. For years the rumor has been if you ask at the counter for "Mellow Yellow" they will sell you something made from "bannana peels." The owners, finding the rumor funny, will just tell them, "Sorry, we only have Mt. Dew." 

This is one of the places where the PCs can also find Faye Thorne. She works here to avoid, well, pretty much everyone, but mostly her two strict aunts. Faye knows a lot about music, but still thinks your choices suck.

Places to Eat

Jackson has its own collection of fast food staples, including McDonald's, Hardee's, IHOP, and one of the few remaining Burger Chefs. 

Salvatore's Pizzeria ("Sal's Pizza") - Near Downtown Square

Owner, Operator, head pizza chef, and sometimes waiter, Salvatore Vitale is full of old-school charm and work ethic, and he yells at anyone who doesn't share his desire to work 80 hours a week. This is THE pizza place in town, and with good reason. Sal's puts his heart into everything, and a lot of garlic. The place is usually packed every Friday night and Saturday all day. Forget getting a table during any homecoming weekend for any of the schools in town. Yes, the food is that good. You can't get deep-dish style pizza here, only thin crust, but no one ever complains.

This is also one of the places where the PCs can run into Denise. Largely because she is the only one who can deal with Sal. In truth, they actually like each other because they can deal with each other's yelling.

Sal: "You should fire you!"
Denise: "You can't fire me, no one else will work here!"
Sal: "Sei proprio una ragazza pigra!"
Denise: "Ugh! We are in America! Speak American!"

Later on, when Denise Carver wins recognition for her work as a social worker, Sal puts up a framed copy of the newspaper article about her in his restaurant, where he tells everyone that Denise was "the best waitress he ever had!"  

There are more places. Many I am leaving purposefully vague until I need them. Others are a little too haunted to deal with right now. Case in point, I have plans for the Court House and the old Governor's Mansion. I still have the hospitals to detail as well.

I have already talked about the Library as both a place of adventure and a Mystic Locale. I have already figured out that there is a copy of "A Wrinkle in Time" where Larina can leave a note, and her alternate universe self in the Dark Places & Demogorgons universe will find it in the copy in her library. One of the notes Jackson Larina "Nix" sends to Cabon Vale, IL, Larina "Creepy", is "watch out for Moria."

I might get a map of my old hometown and start putting "X"s on it, marking these locations.