#RPGaDAY2026: Day 8 Resolve

 Resolve is doing the thing anyway.

Not because it is easy. Not because it is fun. Not because anyone is going to thank you for it. Sometimes resolve means standing there when every sane instinct says to walk away, go home, lock the door, and let someone else deal with the nightmare.

Cases in point: Larina Nichols and Vera Rook of Jackson, IL.

Larina does what she believes is right, even when it costs her. Especially then. She will argue, complain, lose her temper, and probably make some deeply sarcastic comment along the way, but when the moment comes, she stands.

Vera is different.

Vera does what she wants. That can look like resolve from the outside, because she is stubborn, sharp, and hard to move. But there is a difference between holding your ground because something matters and refusing to move because you do not feel like it.

That is the real test of resolve for a witch.

Not whether she has the power to act, but whether she can make herself do what must be done when walking away would be so much easier.

In Jackson, walking or running away always feels easier.

Jackson, IL NPC

This is Week 2, and the topic is Intellect. Back to Saturday and "Works Hard." 

Kevin Pike: A JPHS AV-club kid who records every ghostly sound in the old school and catalogs them like science. One of the first kids in the school to own a camcorder; a JVC GX-N7 Lolux. 

Kevin is a good but odd kid. He doesn't trust anyone with his video collection so it sits in his room with his own organization and label codes. When asked, he says he is filming local wildlife. His mom thinks he is harmless. His dad is worried he is sneaking off to film the girls' dorms at Beecher College. But his tapes are filled with video footage of monsters, ghosts, and in one case a red-headed girl with glasses shooting fire from her hands.

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 7 Mercy

Mercy is the hardest magic for a witch to learn.

Any witch can curse. Any witch can hex. Any witch can call down fire, rot, silence, madness, or whatever else the old books and older powers are willing to teach her.

Mercy is different.

Teenaged Larina is powerful, loyal, brilliant, and brave. But she is not famous for her impulse control or her anger control. Sometimes she sees the cruelty, the monster, the threat to someone she loves, and her first instinct is simple enough.

Burn it all down. Burn fucking everything.

And sometimes, that is the right call.

But mercy asks something harder of her. It asks her to stop. To breathe. To decide whether justice really needs fire this time.

For a witch, mercy is not weakness.

Often, it is choosing not to become the next thing people need saving from. 

Jackson, IL NPC

This is Week 2, and the topic is Intellect.  It's Friday, and Friday's Child is "Loving & Giving." 

Mara Ashcroft.  Mara is a librarian at St. Michael's Catholic School who quietly places the right forbidden book in the right frightened student’s hands. She likes most students, and more to the point, she knows which books NOT to give to which students.

Miss Ashcroft is not a "witch," at least that is what she tells herself. She says she is like her gran; a woman who knew how to "see around corners" and who always knew who was sneaking cookies from her drawer in the kitchen. Miss Ashcroft likes to think that she knows which books to give to which students because she is a good judge of character. And she is. It's just she often has the book in hand before the student even enters the library.

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 5 Burden

It is Witchcraft Wednesday, so let's make today witch-focused. 

Every witch carries a burden.

For some it is knowledge, either learned through books or experience. For many it is power. And for others still it is the terrible understanding that the world is larger, older, stranger, and crueler than most people will ever know.

Larina carries the burden of knowing what is really out there. Faye carries the burden of what was done to her. Rowan carries the pain of others. The witches of the Threefold Goddess carry faith, mystery, and contradiction. The High Order carries secrets. The Scaled Sisterhood carries ancient blood and older obligations.

That is part of what makes witches different from other magic-users.

A wizard learns spells. A cleric serves a god. But a witch inherits something. Often it is a terrible inheritance. A promise. A scar. A duty. A curse. A family. A coven. A town. Often all of them at once.

Jackson, IL NPC

This is Week 2, and the topic is Intellect. Today is Wednesday, Full of Woe, which is why Wednesday Addams has the name she does. 

Lots of students at Jackson Public High School and St. Michaels know what is going on. David Cross is one such student. A Jackson Public student who keeps dreaming true things and writing them down before they happen. Sadly, it is likely he will come to the attention of the PCs when his diary shows up, and he predicts his own death. And others. 

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 4 Charm

Today we move over to Rowan's boyfriend, Andy. Anderson Thompson has Charm. 

Not in the slick, silver-tongued way one usually associates with the elites. Andy's charm is quieter. Maybe because of who his family is, he has developed his own way of dealing with people. He does this by raising others up. He is the kind of person who makes others want to be better because they are sure that is what Andy already thinks of them. 

That is powerful.

He doesn't bully, guilt, or cajole people into doing the right thing. He doesn't shame them. He just looks at them with his strong, steady confidence and enthusiasm, and suddenly they want to be whatever it is Andy sees in them. And when they do it, Andy is there saying, "Yeah! I knew you could do it!"

That is a different use of Charisma/Persona that what Stephanie has. No seduction, no manipulation. But rather trust. Andy already knows you can do it; you just need a little encouragement.

Jackson, IL and Carbon Vale, IL NPC

This is Week 2, and the topic is Intellect, and Tuesday is Full of Grace. Today I reach into TWO campaigns. This character is part of my Carbon Vale, alt-universe setting, but she also makes appearances in Jackson due to her connection to Lars Nichols.   

Professor Étaín Ní Mhaoláin: A Carbon Vale folklore professor whose lectures feel almost like rituals. An Irish national in Illinois on a scholar's visa. Larina is obsessed with her research. 

Étaín Ní Mhaoláin is, of course, the modern horror version/echo/shard of Étaín Moonshadow. She is also based on a Classics professor I really liked.

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 3 Poise

Rowan Abigail McGowan has Poise.

Not the finishing school kind. Far from it. Not the "walk with a book balanced on your head" kind. Rowan has more skill balancing a saddle and a sack full of feed while avoiding the usual hazards of a horse barn. No, Rowan's poise is the kind you get when the dead are restless, the living are scared, and someone has to ride into the middle of all of it. 

As a Spirit Rider, Rowan feels the connections more than most people. Pain, fear, grief, rage- all of it presses down on her. But she doesn't not break, despite only being a teen. She breathes, steadies herself, and keeps on going.

For a horror setting like Jackson, that is poise.

Not looking calm because nothing is wrong, but staying steady because everything is wrong and someone still has to do something about it. 

Jackson, IL NPC

This is the start of Week 2, and the topic is Intellect. Monday is "Fair of Face." That goes for a few of my characters, really. 

Alicia Wrenfield: A West Haven witch-scholar whose beauty makes people underestimate how ruthless her research can be. She is in her early 30s and is a former MacAlister student who still lives in town. She is an accountant at Gilbert & Todd Bank downtown by day, and an astute researcher at night. Her online fights with "The Wizard" on the local "Weird Jackson" Dial up BBSes are legendary.  

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 2 Stature

 Stephanie Wren Vale is 5'5" tall.

Not short, but not exactly physically imposing either. 

Yet when Stephanie walks into a room, everyone notices. More importantly, they relax. She has the sort of presence that fills the room beyond her 5 feet 5 inches, and she makes people feel, "Ok, good, Stephanie is here." 

That is her stature. 

It's not just height, it is how she holds herself. It's not power in an obvious sense, but Stephanie knows how to wield it like power.

She takes control of a situation because she understands people and their relationships. She can calm a room, redirect panic, shut down doubt and make people feel like there is a plan. Even if she is just making it up as she goes along.

In my Jackson, IL setting, Larina knows how the occult works. Faye knows survival. Roawn knows connection and community. Stephanie knows how to make people follow her because they want to.

And that is her special brand of magic.

Jackson, IL NPC

This is Week 1 according to the schedule, and the topic is Drive. Today is Sunday, and the word is Blessed. Sister Margaret Doyle is a retired St. Michael’s teacher in Jackson who seems to know exactly which student needs help before they ask. She can often be found at Jackson's Public Library reading newspapers from all over the area. She always leaves them more organized than when she found them.

Sister Doyle has a couple of levels of Psychic; she is an empath and will talk to any character, especially teens, to help comfort them. She is a pleasant old woman whoes only secrets are the ones given to her by others. Can be helpful to connect characters to important NPCs.

Jackson Soundtrack

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#RPGaDAY2026: Day 1 Discipline

 Today's prompt is Discipline.

The daily discipline of writing mirrors the witch’s discipline of spellcraft, where one missed word can turn a charm into a curse.

I try to write every day. I often take the weekend off, but I still do a lot of writing. I honestly just can't stop. I see the same quality in the witches in my games, namely they have to keep practicing their magic.

Take one of my favorite characters: Zatanna. This is her day after all; Zatannurday.

Zatanna rather famously does her magic by speaking backward. It isn't that she speaks the words backward and the magic happens; she has to focus on saying the words backward because that is the intent of the spell. It gives her the focus she needs to make what she wants happen.

That is one of the reasons I am still a fan of Vancian magic for AD&D even though there have been scores of other systems that can work for it. It is the discipline, both for the character and the player, to make the magic count.

Jackson, IL NPC

According to the prompts, this is Week 1, and since today is Saturday, the prompt is Works Hard and Drive.

Greg Armstrong. Greg is a senior at Jackson Public High School. You won't see his name on the honor roll, nor on one of the athletic teams, but where you will find Greg most afternoons and every weekend is Armstrong's Body Shop. No one at JPHS knows car repair like Greg. His pride and joy (and justifiably so) is his 1982 Chevy Camaro painted cherry red. He bought it as a junker and has spent the last couple of years rebuilding it on his own, on his own dime. Since he has completed it, his popularity among the girls has gone way up. He is not a bad kid, but he understands cars a lot better than he understands people.

Graduating in the class of 1986. No. He does not like the song Bitchin' Camaro.

Jackson Soundtrack

Every day, I am also going to pick a song that matches the daily theme. In my Jackson setting, much like any Midwest town in the 1980s, music was important. Who and what you listened to was nearly as important as what you wore and who you hung out with. Music was a personality shorthand. but since this is a "Jackson, IL" soundtrack (though it would work for Carbon Vale, IL too) I am limiting the music to the years 1980 to 1986.

Up first, Elvis Costello and "Everyday I Write the Book."  Fairly appropriate, I think. 

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Tales of Jackson, IL: Winnie the Witch

I love public domain and open source characters.

More specifically, I love characters that creators can pick up, reinterpret, remix, and send off in completely new directions.

I have a particular fondness for the kind of character a creator can take in hand, put my own spin on, and send off down an entirely different path. I put that to use with Jenny Everywhere, or "The Shifter" as she is sometimes called. An open-source creation from 2002, Jenny was made to be shared and remade on the premise that she is present in all realities and at liberty to move among them. The concept is ideal for one who wants to cross genres and continuities. And I love her.

When I was working my way through the Doctor Who role-playing games, I made good use of her. In a universe predicated on time travel and the odd encounter, she is hard to beat. She allowed me to step from one iteration of the Doctor’s world to the next without having to fret over whether continuity would hold up. There is a certain freedom in it; one is not so much replacing what was there as having a dialogue with it.

And that is what leads me to another public domain character.

In Search Of...Winnie the Witch

Winnie the Witch was one of Charlton Comics’ horror hosts.

Her claim to fame was Ghost Manor and Ghostly Haunts; under that banner, she hosted from its debut in issue #20 in 1971 all the way to 1978. In much the same vein as the Crypt Keeper or The Old Witch, or the sort of thing you would see on television later on, Winnie was the framing device for the anthology. She put a face and a personality to the proceedings by introducing the stories and putting in her two cents.

But there was an early-1970s edge to Winnie that set her apart. Forget the old crone at the cauldron; she was young, hip and blue-skinned, with a fashionable "mod" look about her. One could imagine this cool witch straying into the wrong comic from some psychedelic club in Soho or New York. She was the unmistakable presence of Ghostly Haunts and made appearances in other Charlton horror fare as well.

It put me to thinking: what ever became of her? Being who I am, I had to ask what Winnie the Witch was up to in 1986.

The answer is obvious. You will find her on television.

Winnie’s House of Horrors

In my Jackson, Illinois continuity, Winnie is now the host of a late-night horror movie show broadcast from UHF Channel 47 in Alton, Illinois. You can't always get it in very clear, the station is at the far range of what UHF can do, but it is there and some nights it comes in clear as...well UHF in the mid 80s.

Every Saturday night:

WINNIE’S HOUSE OF HORRORS

Then there are the films the network affiliates consider beneath them, or that are simply too old for anyone else to have an interest in. Some were picked up in a peculiar package deal; one has to wonder if Channel 47 was forced to put on The Giant Claw just to be allowed three titles with any name recognition. You will find Mexican vampire fare and Italian horror that has been edited until the story is even more of a mystery. Old AIP stock, creature features, public domain prints that appear to have been put through a Buick’s undercarriage. And now and again, something of genuine quality that the station folk doesn’t seem to appreciate having on their hands.

Winnie is the one who puts them on.

"UHF Channel 47 from Alton, Illinois! Home of the Piasa Bird!" she will say.

And as sure as can be, someone in the control room will cue up that old Filmation pterodactyl screech. Every time. Without fail. It is a sound Winnie loathes, so naturally the crew makes it a habit.

WINNIE: "We are broadcasting live from beautiful Alton, IL, home of the Piasa Bird..."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

She gives the sound booth a slow look. "Charlie, I swear to God."

There is no Charlie in the sound booth. There has never been a Charlie. But when things go awry, her thoughts head there first. Because Charlie is her husband. And according to Winnie, Charlie is responsible for most of the suffering in the known universe. Well. In her universe at least.

Samantha Stephens Meets Elvira

The original Winnie was young and mod in her day. But as of 1986, my Winnie is well into her 40s. She remains attractive and has no qualms about letting you know it. Yet the old gimmick is gone; she is not "the sexy young witch" any longer. She is a mom witch now. A hot mom witch, but you get the idea.

Put it this way: imagine Samantha Stephens after two decades of matrimony, three children, PTA obligations and grocery bills have left her with zero tolerance for mortal foolishness. Then mix in some Elvira. You get Winnie. The big hair, the mod dresses that only look a little dated, cat-eye glasses and a pentagram on her throat, all with her makeup in order. There is an air to her of a woman who could call on Satan if she had the time, but there is a parent-teacher conference to attend at 8:15 am tomorrow and she knows Charlie will be late.

Her whole schtick on television is that suburban family life is more terrifying than any supernatural horror. A film will show a demon emerging from a pentagram, and Winnie will address the camera. "Demons? I have three kids. Demons would be a vacation." And we are off to commercial.

Or take a picture of some parasitic monstrosity tearing its way out of a host.

"I have felt something like that," she will say. "This thing inside me, clawing and kicking to make its exit."

She lets the silence hang for a moment.

"Was pregnant again, as it turned out."

Turns to Camera 2. "Gee, thanks, Charlie."

The viewers are fond of Charlie. They have never laid eyes on him, and everyone wonders if he is real. From what Winnie tells us, Charlie is the one who can’t fix the garage door, who considers Hamburger Helper to be cooking, or who invited his mother over "for a few days" and once put the station van through a cemetery gate. He is responsible for buying the wrong dishwasher and for forgetting their anniversary every year. 

"Our next offering has an ancient curse set loose by a fool who pays no heed to warnings," she might say.

She will look right at you.

"In other words, Charlie."

Other Horror Hostesses

Winnie also has an ongoing rivalry with Countess von Bludd, the glamorous vampire hostess from a competing station in St. Louis. Introduced in Scary Tales #12, the Countess dresses entirely in red and presents herself as a far more elegant and sophisticated creature of the night. Winnie remains unimpressed. 

"Over in St. Louis, Countess von Bludd is showing yet another vampire picture tonight. All red dress, red curtains, red lipstick. Apparently, subtlety died before she did."

The rivalry is mostly theatrical, the sort of manufactured feud local stations would encourage for publicity. Winnie calls her "that overdressed mosquito from St. Louis," while the Countess refers to Winnie as "the housewife of horrors." Privately, they may even like each other, but neither woman would ever spoil the act by admitting it.

She also talks about the time she won the "Miss Fortune" beauty contest against another Horror Hostess, Arachne Coffin. But she fails to mention that she lost the title to Arachne the next year. Her rivalry with Arachne seems to be one more of mutual respect. 

The Joke Is Winnie Is Really a Witch

Here is the important bit: Winnie is, in fact, a witch. The viewers take it as part of the performance, and why wouldn’t they? It is a horror-host show after all. She has her cauldron, her candles, the skulls on display. Now and then she puts on a "spell" for laughs. What none of them are aware of is that some of these have a way of working.

Take the protection charm she put on before Black Sunday; that was no act. Or when she made the point about not heeding a dead relative’s voice from outside the house; one can be sure of that. As for the salt she put down at the studio door in the course of a commercial break, there was method to it.

The station crew are not entirely certain what to make of it, but they have been witness to odd occurrences in Winnie’s vicinity. They do not inquire. This is local TV, and people have their own troubles to contend with.

It's also not entirely clear when Winnie became a witch. Was it when she was in her 20s or before? Did she become a witch later after pretending to be one? But she isn’t telling anyone anything, and she uses her magic on a UHF Public Access show. 

It is probably Charlie’s fault.

The Soccer Mom of Darkness

I have a soft spot for another aspect of Winnie’s act. She acts like a mother, and in truth she is one, with three children to her name. 

There is another part of Winnie’s gimmick that I really like. She looks like somebody’s mom. You can tell by the way she drives; it is an aggressively normal vehicle, most likely a Chevy station wagon. One might even find a "MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM" sticker on the back of it, though Winnie would be loath to admit Charlie put it there.

She is the type to go to the grocery store or a school function and have something to say about the school board. She has no doubt made brownies for the bake sale. And yet she does all of this while giving the impression she could be putting on a Black Sabbath show when the day is done.

Put it to the people who were watching Channel 47 as kids, and they will be talking about her in some documentary down the line. The conversation goes like this:

"Winnie the Witch? Yeah. She was the original MILF."

"Oh, you can say that again."

Only it doesn’t do her justice. They will recall the hair and the cleavage, the barbs at Charlie’s expense and that ridiculous Piasa Bird noise. 

What gets left out is that Winnie knew things. She is clearly well-versed in the occult.

The Jackson Connection

Naturally, Stephanie, Faye, and Larina watch her.

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina watching Winnie the Witch

It is late Saturday night, and they are together at a sleepover with some popcorn and Diet Pepsi while a fourteen-inch set in Larina’s bedroom puts on a particularly bad horror film.

Stephanie is taken with Winnie from the start. She has an appreciation for performance and can tell when Winnie is in command of a room by dictating how one is to view her before you have made up your own mind. And she is loath to admit it, but she loves the movies too.

Faye is there for the movies; the more awful the better. And she finds Winnie to be hilarious, and kinda hot.

Larina is not so sure. She has been listening to the occult talk, and most of it is just television drivel. Until Winnie says something. Very specific. Obscure. The sort of thing Larina has come across in only one book.

She sits up a little.

LARINA: "Wait."
FAYE: (without looking up from her popcorn) "What?"
LARINA: "What she said."
STEPHANIE: "And?"
LARINA: "It was right."
FAYE: "Good for her," turning back to the screen.
LARINA: "No, you don’t understand. She pronounced it right."
STEPHANIE: "Maybe she got it out of Buckland’s book."
LARINA: (quieter) "That’s not in Buckland’s book." 

Larina is studying Winnie now, and things keep catching her attention. Perhaps it is a sighting, or something Winnie put on air that had a ring to it in Jackson. Or other cases, say from Carbon Vale, Larina’s home before 1985.

In that moment, Larina stops to consider if Winnie the Witch is any kind of charade. She begins to wonder what it is Winnie knows. She has been to Jackson once and, unlike most who go there, she knew when to make her exit.

That is the way I see it. Not some superhero or sage of the occult, nor a comic relief. Winnie is a witch of twenty years' standing who has seen enough supernatural oddities to know the first rule of the trade: get in the station wagon and head home. Before Charlie sees you have taken the good car.

Over in Alton...

"This is Winnie the Witch on Channel 47 in Alton, Illinois..."

She lets out a sigh. "Home of the Piasa Bird."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Winnie shuts her eyes.

"I hate this job."

She absolutely does not.

Using Winnie in Your Game

Winnie can be used as background or as comic relief, and that is perfectly fine. She can be on in the background just doing her show, complaining about Charlie.

"Charlie said he fixed the antenna. Charlie also said he could install a ceiling fan. We spent Thanksgiving in the emergency room."

But I intend to use her for more than that. She can be the source of some very subtle clues. Being a witch, she has her way of knowing things. For one, she is aware there are other witches with eyes on her.

I am not talking about her halting the film to look down the lens and lay out the adventure for the player characters. The clues need to come across as part of the act. A warning couched in a joke, perhaps, or a piece of folklore in the intro, or an odd shift in tone when she brings up a certain town or local legend. There might be a warding gesture while the camera is still rolling.

It is the difference between what the casual viewer and a witch will take from it. 

"Tonight’s creature has a talent for mimicking the ones you hold dear. So boys and girls, if your late grandmother should ring you from the cornfield, do let her leave a message."

The room will laugh. Larina will make a note of it.

Then there is the matter of Jackson. In my games, Winnie knows it. Not in the sense of "oh, that town 70 miles up 67?" but rather, "You are living on Mauvaisterre land? Why in the hell would you put yourself in that town?"

One thing I would like to avoid, though, is having her show up in Jackson. Not because I don’t want her there; I think she would be a lot of fun, but I want to avoid a couple of things. First, I want to avoid the whole "Special Guest Star" syndrome. Sure, it can be fun under the right circumstances, but not too much. Secondly, and this is more specific to this situation is I want to avoid making her into a "Peter Vincent" from Fright Night. 

I mean. Obviously, Elvira is a huge influence on…well…a lot of things, but it is Peter Vincent who is on my mind a lot for this one. Sorry, Winnie, don’t mean to compare you to Roddy McDowall.

Winnie will provide the clues, sometimes looking straight at the camera and saying things like "No. The other road." No one knows what she is talking about, but the PCs might.

Used this way, Winnie becomes a kind of supernatural numbers station. The messages are there. The players simply have to realize these are messages AND, more importantly, the messages are meant for them.

Winnie also has a feature on her show, "Winnie's Witch Mail," where a letter is "delivered" to her by a rubber bat on strings she calls "Vlad." She reads viewer mail. No one is sure if the letters are real or not, but if the Characters write her a letter, she will answer it on air in a couple of weeks.

Stephanie, Larina, and Faye watch it in complete shock.

FAYE: What the fuck?
LARINA (sipping her Diet Pepsi): See. Told ya.

Links

• The Levitation of Winnie the Witch
• SLAY Monsterbot of the Deep! Bold Fashion Choices--Winnie The Witch!!
• Ghostly Haunts
• Rip Jagger's Dojo: The 13 Faces Of Winnie!
• Marvel Mysteries and Comics Minutiae: Ditko at Charlton Part 2: 1972-1974
• Facebook
• Public Domain HEROES
• Charlton Neo Comics
• International Catalog of Superheroes
• Comicvine: Winnie the Witch
• Winnie the Witch at the Grand Comics Database
• Ghost Manor (1968 series)
• Ghostly Haunts (1971 series)
• MyComicShop: Ghostly Haunts Issue Index
• Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Witch, the Cleric, and the Magic-User

 One of the central design ideas behind Advanced Witches & Warlocks is something that, in retrospect, seems obvious to me.

The Witch is not a Magic-User in a black dress. She is also not a Cleric with better eyeliner.

I have joked about that distinction before, but there is a real design issue behind it, one that gets to the heart of what I want the Witch to be in Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

From its very inception, Dungeons & Dragons has had two principal modes of spellcasting at its core. Later editions were more explicit in codifying the divide between these forms of magic, but the separation was always there. A Magic-User wields Arcane power; a Cleric has Divine. The former will study a spell, commit it to book and memory, experiment with it, and come to see magic as something to be grasped by way of knowledge. The latter relies on faith and service, on a connection to powers beyond the mortal realm and the authority they confer.

Even if the outcome is sometimes the same (often the same), these are fundamentally different ways of looking at magic. No one at an AD&D table would confuse the two classes when they cast spells. That is an important distinction, and in my view, the Witch is owed the same respect.

I have been saying it here often enough, but it is worth restating: Witches practice Occult magic.

By nature it is secret and initiatory, often dealing with matters that polite society would rather not acknowledge. In some respects it is like Arcane or Divine magic since witches both believe and study. They make use of books and rituals, of gods and spirits, of herbs and stars and the like, drawing on all the same sort of things a Magic-User or Cleric might. But then again, similarity does not make them the same. 

The Witch has her own way of going about it.

Knowledge, Authority, and Relationship

• A Magic-User looks at magic and wants to understand how it works.
• A Cleric looks toward the Divine and asks what is required.
• A Witch looks at the hidden world and asks how everything is connected.

That last part is increasingly important to how I am designing the class.

I have written before about why Charisma is the Witch's prime attribute. I do not use Charisma here as a measure of physical attractiveness or popularity. For the Witch, Charisma is presence, the ability of the self to affect and interact with others. Often, and more to the point, how do this and not lose oneself.

And "others" is a very broad category.

Other people, certainly, but also spirits, ghosts, ancestors, familiars, demons, gods, the dead, the land, magical places, supernatural powers, and things for which there might not be a convenient entry in the Monster Manual.

A Witch does not simply know that a spirit exists. She has a relationship with it. She might summon or put an end to it, make a bargain, issue a threat, or offer some form of appeasement. Perhaps she is in its debt, or she is privy to the one name it would have left unspoken. For this kind of work, Charisma is essential.

Power for the Witch is a matter of relationships, and even those that are hostile qualify. A curse, a pact, a haunting, or the tie to a familiar are all forms of relationship. The same holds true for her connection to her coven, her Patron, or the ground on which she puts her craft to use.

In this way, Occult magic makes a clear distinction from the Arcane and the Divine. A Magic-User will see an effect replicated so long as he has the right formula; a Cleric can expect a miracle by virtue of his divine authority. The Witch acts because she knows how to deal with what lies behind the effect. At times she may know its wants or its name. 

More to the point, it may know her. That is no small thing. With Occult magic, you are always noticed in return. 

That last bit is important. Occult magic always notices you back.

There is an importance to this at the game table as well. When one considers that Occult magic is founded on relationships, a Witch ought not to come across as any other Magic-User with a distinct set of spells. The nature of her art should impose certain obligations and leave its mark. It is a matter of names and places. Of covens, Patrons, spirits, and familiars. And of encounters that are made more than once. Over the span of a campaign, she can form ties with the supernatural; and while they may prove useful, they can be just as often dangerous, or even both in the same breath.

A list of names is often more useful to the witch than a list of what treasures she has found.

That, more than anything else, is why Charisma is the Witch’s prime attribute. It is not enough to perceive the hidden world or understand it. The Witch must be able to enter into a relationship with it and remain herself when it answers.

More Than a Third Spell List

This is something I want to be very careful and very deliberate about in Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

It would be the easy thing to do from a mechanical standpoint to compile a Witch spell list by culling some spells from the Magic-User and Cleric, throwing in a few curses and calling it a day. But that is philosophically lazy. Occult magic must be more than that.

The reason for drawing a line between Arcane, Divine, and Occult is not to put spells in three separate filing cabinets. Each should be predicated on a different view of reality. With Arcane, you are working with the notion that the universe has patterns to be found and put to use. Divine magic is built on the existence of a supernatural authority and the mortal’s ability to partake of it via faith or service.

Occult magic posits that there are things in reality one can enter into: hidden correspondences and identities, debts and thresholds. The Witch might learn, or she might pray; at times she will bargain. At other times she is doing what her coven has been doing for nine centuries without fully understanding the why of it. Or perhaps it works because a promise is being kept somewhere. All of which puts the Witch in an altogether different position vis-à-vis magic.

A spellbook is for knowledge, a holy text for revelation. A Book of Shadows has both, but you will also find recipes and family secrets in its pages, or warnings and the names of the dead. There may be diagrams lifted from stones long since misplaced, or a fragment of a conversation, or the record of a bargain made. You might come across an instruction to the effect of “do not perform this rite twice in the same place.” To my mind, that is what Witch magic is.

To a wizard this looks slap-dash and like “low magic.” Clerics will call it blasphemy or heresy. A witch will see the true power.

Traditions Are Means to Answers, Not Restrictions

New Witch Traditions is an area I have been putting a good deal of work into of late. One has to consider that if Occult magic is predicated on relationships and a certain way of seeing the world, it follows that there can be no single correct Witch theology. To put it another way, the question “Where does Witch magic come from?” should not have one universal answer; different witches will give you different ones. A Tradition is a means to one such answer. It is also what the answers are grounded in and, even more than that, how the questions are asked.

A Tradition does not merely give a Witch an answer. It teaches her which questions are worth asking. 

Think of it as a worldview and a means of making sense of the hidden world, complete with its own body of teachings and magical vocabulary. It is not to be confused with a coven. A coven is a matter of who one practices alongside; a Tradition speaks to how one comprehends the practice itself. The possibilities that distinction affords are considerable.

Take, for instance, the three I have been developing: the High Order, the Scaled Sisterhood, and the Threefold Goddess Tradition. They are all capable of producing witches, and they all make use of Occult magic, but you will find they can be in radical disagreement as to what magic really is. Or even what a witch is.

The High Order

To an outside observer, the High Order is what one would expect of an Arcane tradition. The witches of the order are students of their craft; they put in the work to investigate everything from magical laws and ancient tongues to the hidden architecture of the cosmos, the planes, ritual structures, and metaphysics. There are some who will find common ground with a Magic-User or Wizard, at least for a time.

Yet the High Order does not see magic as nothing more than a mechanism to be put under a microscope. Magic is too large for that, too sacred. One can approach it with knowledge but never fully account for it. A Magic-User is content to learn the formula for opening a gate between worlds. A Witch of the High Order wants to know what the gate is in the first place. She asks why thresholds have such import, or why some doors are two-way, and others are not. Why a spot becomes a threshold unaided by any hand. Who was the first to cross and what came back after him?

Such questions are no longer about mechanics. Study is indeed part of her life, but it is an initiation into deeper things. Her Book of Shadows is not simply a technical manual; it is a record of encounters. In fact, her education affects how she views reality. I have come to appreciate the notion at the heart of the Tradition: the Witch is sovereign, not a servant.

She might have Patrons or pay her respects to gods. She may take instruction from an Archmage or an Archwitch, or from some supernatural teacher whose name is otherwise unknown. But obedience is not the point. The relationship could be one of rivalry or obligation, mentorship or initiation. But there is a relationship. That is what makes the difference. 

That is where the High Order stops being merely "the scholarly Witch" and becomes something distinctly Occult.

The Scaled Sisterhood

The Scaled Sisterhood approaches the mystery from an entirely different direction. For these witches, dragons are more than monsters, gods, enemies, or powerful creatures. Dragons are magic, and mysteries made flesh.

They are creatures that hoard and sleep and dream; they change the very landscape around them with their presence. Their existence spans mortal generations, so it is not uncommon for a dragon to have a firsthand recollection of what the rest of the world would dismiss as mere myth. It puts a different kind of vocabulary to the Sisterhood’s magic.

The questions they put forward are of a particular sort: Why does a dragon put together a hoard? What is the significance of its blood or of fire that transforms instead of obliterating? When one lives long enough, does memory become a kind of magic? What is it to shed one’s skin in terms of identity or rebirth? And what is left in the dragon’s mind that history has let go of?

Their teachings run deep into the nature of draconic beings and powers. Tiamat and Bahamut are part of the Tradition, but by no means do they define it. One will find other interpretations of what it is to be a dragon, such as Vritraxion, Lóngzihua, Anantanatha, and older mysteries. There is no requirement for such teachings to be in accord with each other. 

I would be disappointed if they were.

You will hear the Sisterhood put forth notions like "The Breath Transforms," "The Scale Remembers," or "The Hoard Reveals." Do not mistake them for simple rules. They are propositions, true mysteries that have been the subject of argument among witches for centuries. A Cleric may see fit to worship a dragon god, or a Magic-User might put a blade to a dragon to understand the mechanics of its breath weapon. The Witch of the Scaled Sisterhood wants to know why the dragon is there in the first place. That is the point of Occult magic.

The Threefold Goddess Tradition

The Threefold Goddess Tradition initially appears to lean much closer toward Divine magic.

It is a theological Tradition after all, and that is made clear in its tenets: the Goddess is at once the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. And yet one cannot say the Maiden is the Mother, or the Mother the Crone, or the Crone the Maiden, even as they are all entirely the Goddess. I would not put in the effort to sort out such a contradiction; it is the theology. In fact, it is best not to try.  The Tradition has a way of regarding mystery as something that need not be simplified to be true.

The Maiden, who is beginning, discovery, courage and movement. The Mother stands for fullness, creation and guardianship. Then there is the Crone with her death-wisdom, prophecy, curses and the preparation for rebirth. These are not so much job descriptions as they are expressions. A goddess will manifest in more than one Face if she chooses, and may well seem to run counter to the system or defy classification altogether. So be it. Once you can put a complete diagram to a mystery, it ceases to be one.

The Threefold Sign makes this plain to see in the interlinked forms of the three Faces, leaving the center to stand for something else: the Mystery of the Goddess.

• What does the Maiden reveal? 
• What does the Mother protect?
• What does the Crone hide?

Consider the difference in approach. A Cleric will worship a goddess and be granted Divine magic on account of it. A Witch of this Tradition might pay homage to the very same deity but in another way. She asks what is being concealed, or what is revealed in this particular manifestation, and why. If the Goddess puts in an appearance that we do not expect, the Witch is there to make sense of it. She is not just taking in doctrine; she is interpreting. 

It is a far different kind of spiritual relationship, and relationship is the operative word.

Three Traditions, One Class

This is where these Traditions help me understand what I want Advanced Witches & Warlocks to accomplish.

• The High Order approaches mystery through knowledge.
• The Scaled Sisterhood approaches mystery through ancient beings, transformation, memory, and living symbols.
• The Threefold Goddess Tradition approaches mystery through sacred contradiction, revelation, and theology.

There is no agreement between them, nor should there be. Occult magic has no need for it; it demands participation instead. What unites these three is that they all put the Witch in a relationship with something concealed. For one of the High Order, this might be Magic itself, while a member of the Scaled Sisterhood could be bound to dragons and the old mysteries they stand for. A follower of the Threefold Goddess relates to the Goddess, whose various Faces are but a fraction of the whole.

These are the things that define a Witch, not some spell list. It is the difference between a Cleric who draws on Divine authority or a Magic-User who relies on understanding. The Witch derives her power from the hidden world. She makes promises and crosses thresholds. She has her obligations and her beliefs. In time, she may even have something on the other side acknowledge her. That is the nature of Occult magic.

And there are still two more Traditions I have that I have not discussed in detail yet. One is the Daughters of Baba Yaga. The other can wait a little longer.

Back in Jackson

This distinction also explains why the Witch works so naturally in Jackson, IL, even though Jackson is a very different project from Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are all witches, but they do not understand witchcraft in the same way. In fact, looking at the three of them through the lens of Advanced Witches & Warlocks helps clarify what I mean by Tradition.

Larina is a witch of the High Order in every sense. 

She is always with a book, studying witchcraft, folklore, the occult, religious theory, and ritual. It is not enough for her to know how something is done; she wants to get to the bottom of why it works, what the symbols are saying, and what lies under the surface of the accepted explanation.

You would be hard-pressed to call her a Magic-User. Larina does not view magic as some mechanism to be put under a microscope and decoded. For her, knowledge is a way of getting closer to the mystery. A text might explain a ritual, but she is more interested in what was really being contacted, or what the author overlooked. Her faith in the Goddess is no more passive than her study habits; she is trying to make sense of a larger, stranger reality, which precludes her from being a Cleric.

When the ghost sees her, and she sees the ghost, the whole question is altered. She will find an authentic word in a poorly written description of a ritual, or spot the real Enochian coming from someone putting on a show on late-night TV. She has a way of pulling at the threads where theology and lived experience meet. That is the mark of the High Order.

Stephanie is another matter altogether. In many ways I would put her in the Scaled Sisterhood, though not out of any interest in dragons. What comes instinctively to her is an understanding of power.

She knows the social hierarchies, the reputations and the influence. She can tell who is in control of a room and who is only pretending to be, who is vulnerable and where one must apply pressure. This is what makes her such an effective leader, even if she doesn’t think of herself in those terms.

A hoard is not always gold. For Stephanie, it can be status, or secrets, or social capital. She has an instinct for the invisible territories and pecking orders of a high school. But there is also the Scaled Sisterhood’s notion that power entails responsibility. When she puts a stop to another cheerleader making fun of Faye, she doesn’t just chide her for cruelty. She redefines the argument entirely.

"We don’t do that. We have to be the best Jackson Public High has. Not the worst."

In invoking duty and belonging, she is using the very structure of things. That is Stephanie. She has no quarrel with the hierarchy; she makes it serve as her protection. Stephanie understands something else dragons know instinctively: possessing power changes the space around you whether you intend it to or not. 

The Scaled Sisterhood studies dragons because dragons embody power in its oldest and most concentrated forms. Stephanie does not need a dragon in front of her to understand the lesson. She already understands what it means to have power and decide what kind of person you are going to be with it.

Then there is Faye. She is a Daughter of Baba Yaga. I have yet to put a lot of detail into that Tradition here, but Faye can help us understand it a little better now.

If Larina is occupied with the hidden world and Stephanie with the way power is structured within it, Faye is immersed in something much older. The Old Magic. The sort that predated anyone’s efforts to file it away in a church or an occult order or some respectable tome.

The Daughters of Baba Yaga may preserve practice. They remember what must be done even after the reason has been forgotten.

Faye was raised by witches of the Blackthorn and Thorne lines who had no inclination to justify themselves to outsiders. They have their ways, their grudges, their recipes and curses and protections, knowledge handed down through the generations without the need for a formal theology. Some things are done out of habit. Others are left alone because one recalls what went wrong the last time around. Faye is well aware of the difference. She might not care for it, and often doesn’t, but the Old Magic runs in her.

It is why Faye can grasp a thing in an instant that would send Larina off to do some research. Larina wants to know the origin of a custom, the mythology behind it. Faye will just say: "Don’t do that." And when asked why? "Because you don’t." It is an answer that would madden Larina, though Faye is usually right. And Larina knows that.

The Daughters of Baba Yaga are meant to stand for a rougher, more elemental side of witchcraft. Folk magic, inherited wisdom from old women who know too much, dangerous bargains and spirits, rules whose source is lost but not the consequences. 

Yet Faye is not a prisoner to it. Her role is in part about what she chooses to hold on to and what she will remake for herself. That is a relationship with tradition in its own right. She is the witch in Jackson that "looks evil, but isn’t," like Moria is "looks innocent, but is evil" and Sylvia is "looks evil, and is evil, and looks better than everyone else while doing it."

Larina looks for the structure. Stephanie sees how power flows through it. Faye is aware that some magic is older than the structures we build to account for it. They are all witches; they all work the Occult, but the hidden world speaks to each of them differently.

That is the point of Traditions in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. Not to lay down which spells a Witch may cast, but to show what she notices, what she deems important, the questions she puts forward when the impossible occurs. What answers is she willing to accept?

And the Witch has to live with those answers.

Note: For RPGaDay2026 next month, Mirror Mondays will be on pause, but I am still working on all my new projects and campaigns. 

Weirdly World News: SATANIC LESBIAN WITCHES INVADE SALEM, ORE!

 What's on the tabloid news racks at your local grocery store in August of 1985? Jackson, IL is not ready for this! This is gold for my Jackson, IL NIGHT SHIFT Night World and Weirdly World News introduced in the Night Companion. 

Article text.

SATANIC LESBIAN WITCHES INVADE SALEM, ORE! 

Is Middle-America Next?
By Sean Ridire, Weirdly World News
Chief Staff Writer

SALEM, ORE.: It was a strange affair at an Oregon state park, according to the police in Salem, Ore. Some 150 nude women were there for what witnesses described as a ceremony of a bizarre nature, complete with symbols they put down to Satanism. While authorities looked into claims that the women were fondling each other, officers have determined no law was transgressed.

But occult specialists are cautioning that this is not just a West Coast phenomenon. They point to small towns in Middle America as potential hotbeds for secret covens to go about their business unobserved by the common man. With old cemeteries and woods on the edge of town, plus a rising vogue for witchcraft and local lore to add to the mystery, these places make for convenient cover.

One has to wonder if the quiet hometown is next. Do not be fooled by appearances; the witch in your neighborhood may bear little resemblance to the stereotype. She could be the teacher or the housewife, or perhaps a college student, even the one who sits with your daughter in homeroom.

As it turns out, this is a true story!

Article text.

Friday, August 9, 1985

Naked Witches

Salem, Ore.

Police say about 150 nude women fondled each other and joined in a ceremony involving the display of symbols associated with satanism at a state park, but no laws were broken.

Associated Press

It was an article from 10 Aug 1985,  Red Deer Advocate(Red Deer, Alberta, Canada).

And confirmed by Wikipedia.

I mean. This is too good NOT to use in my Jackson, IL game. 

I can see each of my witch NPCs reading the article separately (by Aug 9, 1985; they have not met just yet).

Stephanie: "This is so stupid."
Larina: "There are so many inaccuracies with this article."
Faye: "Why don't they tell us where this is exactly?"

Some more background lore for Jackson, IL. Hat tip to former White Wolf game designer Kraig Blackwelder for digging this gem up.

EGG Con, NIGHT SHIFT and the Wasted Lands of Yog

 I am back from EGG Con this past weekend, and it was fantastic. I sold a lot of books and played a few games. Heidi Gygax Garland and Erik Garland did a hell of a good job with the Con. Reminds me of Gary Con in its early days. It is kind of small, but I hope it grows; it is really a great con.

Jackson, IL

I got to play some NIGHT SHIFT in Jackson. I ran a session of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." It was a fantastic experience to see Valentino, Renee, Andy, Rowan, Denise, and Candy brought to life by others. It was just so great. 

It really got me excited to do more with Jackson and Jason, and I talked about it quite a bit. I am pleased that people seem to really love it.

It also got me thinking a lot about my Dark Places & Demogorgons crossover as well and how the two games are getting further apart. 

Yog: The Dying Lands 

I also sold a lot of Wasted Lands. I mentioned to a lot of folks that I use Wasted Lands as my D&D replacement and that is true. I do often do that, but usually run something I have. Like some B/X or AD&D modules. What I was lacking was a solid idea. I was going to buy a copy of DCC's Dying Earth (I have the PDFs and I love them), but I was complaining that I have too many systems and not enough time. I told Jason then that Wasted Lands did everything that DCC did, and vice versa. 

It dawned on me that I had already put together an idea for a Dying Earth-like game, my Wasted Lands: The Dying Age. I also had another world I have been playing around with; a pastiche of cheap 1970s-80s Sword & Sorcery novels. And by cheap I mean dirt freaking cheap. Cheap and sleazy. Some of it has also come out of my exploration of Appendix N fantasy. I have been calling the world Yog. On my drive home, I combined them all into one idea: Yog The Dying Lands.

I'll detail some more Yog later on; it is turning into a fun little experiment. Spent quite a bit of time with it Sunday and Monday night. It went pretty fast since I combined three other ideas I had. "Yog" is the world and the last continent. 

This gives me my world, my desire to do Dying Earth, and my desire for some cheap pulpy novel action. AND I get to do it all in Wasted Lands. I want it to feel like a cheap used paperback you found in 1982 with a half-naked barbarian on the cover with a giant snake and an even more naked sorceress in the background summoning lightning. The cover was enticing, scandalous even; the words might be good or not. Doesn't matter really. 

It is a really fun idea, but not grabbing me as hard as Jackson is right now. 

As my habit, I tend to pool all the things I buy at a Con into a single idea, so I'll likely try to fit the various Gaxland adventures I picked up. 

I plan to play it very much as a dying world, and everyone knows it. The heroes are not really expected to save Yog, just merely survive. I know, not much of a reason for adventuring; I am working on it.

I DID have one idea.

Back on Facebook a month or so ago, this guy was lamenting that there had never been a good Gor movie. I replied back that this was because "Gor sucks."  Since starting this blog, I have read some of the Gor books in my efforts to complete my "Classical" education. Yeah. They suck. But I have been stewing this idea of a Gor-like world, BUT (and this is where it becomes mine) there is this group of witch "freedom fighters" who fly in on booms (flying is important, brooms are just fun) and rescue women and children and take them to a sanctuary. So part Gor and part "Logan's Run." Also, while drawing inspiration from the Soviet Night Witches and the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). 

Honestly, I rather love the idea of this world, with its slavers and abusers, being terrorized by a group of flying witches. It would give the setting some conflict. I can imagine guards standing watch at night and then suddenly hearing the cackle of witches and seeing their silhouettes against the starry skies. Sounds like a Falero painting to me. 

Of course I am on the side of the witches. Turn them into what our world's ultra conservatives think feminists are. Sounds like a freaking blast. Sounds a bit like the whole Hexengeddon line from Relentless Fiction. Witches vs. The Patriarchy, or in this case, Witches vs. The Priest-Kings. I kinda like that. 

I might have some version of Vera Rook/Veyra Shadoraven in charge of the witches. That sounds like fun.

Signings and AD&D 2nd Ed

I got a few books signed. I am not an autograph hound, but I do like talking with the original creators.

So I spoke with Jeff Easley and Ed Greenwood again; both are always a pleasure. And I got one I have been wanting for years, Tom Wham.

Getting these reminded me I really wanted to convert my AD&D 1st Ed Forgotten Realms game over to 2nd Edition, but it has also become my Advanced Witches & Warlocks playtest game. 

I'll have to think about it more. I do want to dust off my AD&D 2nd Edition.

Now to check eBay for some AD&D 2nd Ed books for my kids.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic and the Secret Appeal of Forbidden Books

I am currently reading Manly Wade Wellman for my Witches of Appendix N. He has a lot of occult investigators and talks a lot about dangerous occult texts. There is a strange magic to being told a book is dangerous.

Not real magic. Not the kind the pamphlets warned us about. Not the sort of thing that appears when you mispronounce something in Latin while standing in a chalk circle at midnight. I mean the older, more human kind of magic. The kind that happens when an adult lowers their voice, points at a book, and says, "You should not be reading that."

For a certain sort of kid, that is not a warning.

It is an invitation.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately while working on my Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL projects. I have also been going back through some old Satanic Panic videos, both vintage and retrospective. Some are from the era itself. Some are modern looks back. One or two are modern warnings that feel like they could have been broadcast in 1986 with very little editing.

I am not here to dunk on them. Well. Not entirely.

Some of this material is ridiculous. Some of it is unintentionally hilarious. Some of it is sad. Some of it is built out of real grief aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it comes from people who were clearly frightened by a world changing faster than they knew how to handle.

But all of it circles the same idea 

The fear was not really just about Dungeons & Dragons. It was not just about heavy metal. It was not just about horror movies, Smurfs, He-Man, E.T., or some plastic wizard in the toybox. The fear was about children having access to an imaginative life that adults could not completely supervise.

And that, I think, is where the forbidden book gets its power.

I have written about the Satanic Panic before. Back in 2024, I said I was fascinated by it because I had lived through it and, as someone who was not religious, the whole panic was confusing to me. I also admitted something else that still feels true: my own teenage reaction to all of it absolutely influenced my early D&D games. Lots of undead. Lots of demons. And, yes, lots of witches. Immature? Sure. I was a teenager. That was practically my job. But it was also fruitful. Some of that old material has never really left me. It just waited for better books to live in.

The Panic in the Toybox

One of the great artifacts of the era is Turmoil in the Toybox. If you have never seen it, it is one of those videos that feels like it was assembled in a church basement, a public access studio, and a fever dream all at the same time. Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips seem convinced that the devil is hiding in every toybox, or at least making a pretty serious attempt to franchise there.

• The Smurfs? Suspicious.
• Masters of the Universe? Dangerous.
• E.T.? Worth a second look.
• Dungeons & Dragons? Obviously trouble.

The whole thing is amazing because it does not merely worry about D&D. It worries about the entire imaginative ecosystem of childhood. Toys, cartoons, commercials, fantasy symbols, magic words, Saturday morning television, action figures, and role-playing games all become part of one invisible machinery. The toybox is no longer a toybox. It is a grimoire with plastic hinges.

That sounds like a joke, but that really is how the panic worked.

The D&D section is especially perfect. The game pieces, they tell us, include witches, wizards, necromancers, clerics, evil magic-users, and all the usual suspects. Good versus evil becomes white witchcraft versus black witchcraft. Someone even claims that when game pieces are burned, screams come out of the fire because spiritual forces have inhabited them.

Now, look. That is nonsense. But it is also myth-making.

The panic did not merely misunderstand Dungeons & Dragons. It mythologized it.

That is the funny thing. The adults who wanted to make the game smaller made it larger. They turned rulebooks into occult manuals, dice into ritual objects, miniatures into idols, character sheets into dangerous documents, and the Dungeon Master into some sort of suburban necromancer with graph paper.

For the average kid, D&D was a game. A weird, wonderful, sometimes confusing game with too many charts and not enough hit points at 1st level.

But after the panic got hold of it? 

Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.

The Book They Told You Not to Read

The Satanic Panic did not create the fire of D&D’s mystique, but it poured gasoline on it.

The books already looked strange. The Monster Manual was full of demons, devils, dragons, undead, and things with names that sounded like they had crawled out of some medieval marginalia. The Dungeon Masters Guide felt like an occult textbook even when it was mostly explaining initiative, treasure tables, magic item creation, and why you should never let the players get away with too much.

Then the grown-ups started saying these books were dangerous.

Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.

In the 1980s, D&D books became contraband grimoires in the popular imagination. They were passed from hand to hand, argued over in churches, hidden from certain relatives, discussed on television, condemned in pamphlets, and defended at kitchen tables by kids who were absolutely certain that none of the adults understood what was actually happening.

Most of the time, the kids were right.

The game was not teaching us how to summon demons. It was teaching us how to imagine consequences. It was teaching us how to map darkness. It was teaching us that monsters had names, rules, weaknesses, treasure types, and armor classes.

That is powerful. Not Satanic. Not corrupting. Powerful. And power is always frightening to someone.

Or as my mom once so eloquently said about D&D, "This is nothing but Mythology and math!"

The Wrong Demons

One of the more painful parts of looking back at the Satanic Panic is realizing how often adults named the wrong demons.

There were real kids in pain. There were real families struggling. There were real cases of depression, isolation, abuse, grief, mental illness, and fear. But instead of asking harder questions, too many people blamed the game, the records, the horror movies, the toys, the novels, the black t-shirts, the dice.

That is the actual horror.

Not that adults believed in demons. I write about demons all the time. My newest book, Codex Qliphothica, is full of things no sensible person would want crawling out of the wrong side of creation.

The horror is that they named the wrong demons.

That is something I touched on in my 2022 A-to-Z post. In the real world, there is no worldwide Satanic conspiracy. There are no secret armies of Satanists trafficking children through every daycare, pizza parlor, and game store. But in a horror game, there can be demons, devils, evil spirits, and worse. The trick is not to make the panic true. The trick is to understand that people are often looking in the wrong direction. Sometimes the evil is not a cult at all. Sometimes it is perfectly ordinary people who use fear to hurt the "undesirables" in their own community.

That idea matters a lot to me, especially for Jackson, IL. In a town like Jackson in 1986, it is easy to imagine a parent seeing a TV preacher or a warning video and suddenly looking at everything in their kid’s room differently. The D&D hardback. The heavy metal cassette. The horror VHS tape. The plastic skeleton warrior. The fantasy paperback. The notebook is full of strange names. The girl at school who wears a triple-goddess necklace and knows too much.

Most of the time, the adults are wrong.

But this is Jackson. Sometimes they are wrong in the direction of something true.

That is the sweet spot for horror.

In the real world, the panic was destructive because it mistook imagination for corruption. In fiction, though, we can ask the more interesting question: what if the panic was wrong about the cause, but not wrong that something was there?

• What if the book was just a game book, but the thing watching from the closet was real?
• What if the record was harmless, but the voice on the blank tape was not?
• What if the toy was just plastic, but the child was right when she said it moved after midnight?

That is not the Satanic Panic being correct. That is horror using the emotional vocabulary of the panic and aiming it at better targets.

Click to get your own!

 My Life With the Satanic Cult

This is where it stops being only media history for me.

I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois. In 2024 I wrote about a moment from around 1985 or 1986 when someone supposedly found a "satanic altar" in a cornfield south of my high school. I remember the panic ripping through the school. I remember being fascinated and horrified by it. Fascinated by how fast everyone reacted. Horrified by how quickly it changed people. The next day, people wore homemade "Satan Busters" armbands featuring an inverted cross within a red buster circle.

That is the kind of detail no amount of research can invent better than memory.

I was already a D&D kid. I was already interested in witches, monsters, demons, horror, occult books, and the kinds of things polite adults thought you should probably not be reading. I was also an atheist in a place where the average person on the street did not know, or care to know, the difference between atheist, Satanist, witch, gamer, metalhead, or just "weird kid."

The assistant principal, who was a decent guy, told me and some of my gamer friends that we should keep our D&D books at home until all this stupid shit blew over. He was probably right. I still hated it.

I hated the idea that something I wanted to read had to be hidden because a mob of scared idiots had decided books were dangerous.

That feeling has never really left me.

And yes, as I wrote before, my love of psychology was probably strengthened then. So was my love of witches. No one was trying to burn me, not literally, but they were trying to burn the things they feared. And there were book burnings in town. Real ones. People on the conservative religious side burning D&D books and other things they did not understand.

That matters.

Because once you have seen people burn books, you never look at forbidden books the same way again.

Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf

By 1986, the forbidden book was not alone. It had a lot of company.

There was the forbidden record album, especially if someone claimed the lyrics meant something different when played backward. There was the forbidden horror movie from the video store, the one with a cover more dangerous than the movie itself. There were forbidden toys, forbidden cartoons, forbidden symbols, forbidden bands, forbidden fantasy novels, forbidden magazines, forbidden games.

The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.

That is why a movie like Trick or Treat is such a perfect artifact of 1986. It takes the heavy metal panic seriously enough to turn it into a horror plot. A dead rock star comes back through a record. The music really is dangerous. The adults' warning about Satanic rock is, inside the logic of the movie, kind of right.

That is hilarious. It is also revealing, and wonderful for my games.

Horror loves taking the thing adults are panicking about and saying, "Fine. But what if it really was haunted?"

• What if the record really does speak something backward?
• What if the toy really does know your name?
• What if the book really does open a door?
• What if the game really does teach you something you were not supposed to know?

That is not how the real world works. But it is absolutely how good horror works. It is very much how Jackson works.

The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away

The funny thing is, the Satanic Panic did not completely vanish. It changed clothes.

In 2022 I wrote that if you think this "corn-filled nugget" was left behind in the 1980s, I had some news. The panic’s old shape involved Satanists, daycare centers, trafficking, cannibalism, and ritual abuse. Later versions involved Pizzagate, QAnon, and other conspiracy nonsense that kept recycling the same fears in new packaging. 

That is why a modern Christian response to D&D can still feel so oddly familiar. The video is new. The anxieties are old. Role-playing as spiritual danger. Spellcasting as a gateway. Tiamat as proof of pagan contamination. D&D books as corrupting objects. Christian parents being warned to keep the game out of the house. It is all there, just with better lighting, HD resolution, and modern YouTube pacing.

I do not say that to mock people’s faith. I know plenty of Christians who play D&D, write horror, love fantasy, and understand perfectly well where the game ends and the real world begins.

But the panic itself? That old habit of flattening every strange symbol into “Satanic”? That is still with us.

And honestly, from a horror writer’s point of view, it is hard not to be fascinated by it.

The Witch Was Always There

Here is the part that matters most for Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

The panic kept pointing at the Witch.

Even when people were talking about D&D generally, the real charge was around magic. Spellcasting. Divination. Necromancy. Enchantment. Demons. Spirits. Symbols. Curses. The old gods. Forbidden knowledge. Books that teach you things.

Again and again, the panic caught sight of the Witch's shadow and recoiled.

I want to do the opposite. I want to look directly at her and say, "Yes. You belong here."

The Witch was always part of fantasy gaming, even when the game did not quite know what to do with her. She was there as the evil enchantress, the village wise woman, the hag in the woods, the priestess of the old gods, the herbalist, the oracle, the charm-worker, the necromancer, the woman everyone feared and visited anyway.

• She was there in the margins.
• She was there at the edge of the village.
• She was there in the spell list.
• She was there in the panic.

The mistake was reducing her to "evil spellcaster" or treating her as merely a monster. The Witch is older than that. Stranger than that. More useful than that. She is better than that.

The Witch belongs to the place where folklore, religion, fear, healing, social suspicion, forbidden knowledge, and personal power all overlap. Which is to say, she belongs in D&D perfectly.

That is what Advanced Witches & Warlocks is about. Not making the panic true, but reclaiming the imaginative territory the panic could not stop pointing at.

High School Is the Real Haunted House

The Satanic Panic also helped sharpen something else for me: the horror of being a teenager and having adults decide what your symbols mean before you get to explain them.

I came back to that in my Monsterhearts post, where I talked about Larina in 1986. High school is already horrifying. Add the Satanic Panic, a sleepy Midwestern college town, and a girl everyone already suspects is out in the woods sacrificing animals and calling up demons, and you have something that feels very close to the emotional center of Jackson, IL. The truth, of course, is smaller and stranger. Larina is more likely to be in her attic room listening to her dad’s Yes albums than leading a coven in the cornfields. But rumor has never needed truth to grow teeth.

That is the Jackson mood. I talked about this in detail last week.

The town does not need every parent to believe there is a demon in the toybox. It only needs enough of them to wonder. Enough to whisper. Enough to throw away a book, forbid a game, search a bedroom, call a pastor, or look twice at the quiet girl with the strange necklace and the too-old eyes.

And the kids? The kids know the adults are wrong. Mostly.

These Are the Books You Were Warned About

So here is my cheeky little sales pitch, and I am only half joking.

These are the books you were warned about in 1986.

Codex Qliphothica is on the way out, and it is very much a demon book. But it is not a "everything dark is Satanic" book. That was always one of the dullest parts of the panic. It flattened everything. Devils, demons, pagan gods, witches, ghosts, occult symbols, fantasy monsters, and rock music all became one big smear of "darkness."

Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.

The Qliphoth are not generic devils. They are not just demons with a different coat of paint. They are shells, refuse, wounds, corruptions, anti-creation, things that should not have survived the making of the world and yet did. They are what happens when the cosmos has a scar and something learns to live inside it.

That is much more interesting than "the devil is in the toybox."

Advanced Witches & Warlocks comes from the other side of the same forbidden bookshelf. It asks what old-school fantasy gaming looks like when the Witch is not a joke, not a monster, not an afterthought, and not simply a reskinned magic-user. What if she had been there properly all along? What if the game had made room for occult magic as something distinct from arcane study and divine authority?

And Jackson, IL is where all of this comes home.

Jackson is 1986 as a haunted town. It is school lockers and church warnings, mall bookstores and strange kids, rumors and records, public access panic and real shadows behind the gym. It is the place where adults blame D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and witchcraft because those are the monsters they know how to name.

But Jackson has older monsters. Jackson has quieter monsters. Jackson has the things that were listening while everyone argued about the wrong books.

The Secret Appeal

The secret appeal of forbidden books is not that they are evil. It is that they promise the world is larger than you were told. That is the real danger.

A forbidden book says there are secret doors. It says names matter. It says monsters can be known. It says the dead might speak, the old gods might stir, the map might continue past the edge, and the strange kid might not be strange for nothing.

That is why the warnings failed. They told us the books were dangerous. We believed them; we just understood danger differently.

For some of us, danger meant possibility. It meant mystery. It meant there was something behind the ordinary world, something the adults were either too frightened or too tired to see.

That is the heart of fantasy gaming. That is the heart of occult horror. That is the heart of every witch story worth telling.

In 1986, that promise might have been sitting on a bookshelf with a dragon on the cover.

• Or in a toybox.
• Or in a record sleeve.
• Or on a VHS tape from the back room of the video store.
• Or in the hands of the quiet girl at school who knew more than she should.

And if someone told you not to open it?

Well...You were probably going to open it.

Mirror Shard: The Jackson Satanic Panic

I feel like I have talked about this one a lot already. Partially in posts here and all weekend at EGG Con. In "Am I Evil," the Satanic Panic comes to Jackson, but not in the way the town's folk expect. It is in the form of Moria Elizabeth Zachary. She looks like a nice girl. She wears fuzzy sweaters. She is polite. She has an ugly dog she holds. And she is utterly evil.

Darren Vale acts evil, but he is really sort of a joke. Sylvia Velasco is evil, but not the way everyone thinks she is. People even think Faye Thorne is evil, she isn't, but her family is. 

As my co-creator of NIGHT SHIFT, Jason Vey, commented this past weekend, the Satanic Panic in Jackson takes on new dimensions. 

And of course I have my own real-world history from the real-world Jacksonville. Sure, it is not as dramatic as some other tales of the Satanic Panic, but it has the advantage of being mine. 

There is just too much material here to use. Really...there is too much material NOT to do this. 

Links

Videos

• D&D is Satanic, from the classic "Turmoil in the Toybox." A must-watch!
• Trick or Treat (1986) The Satanic Panic of the 1980s (Retrospective)
• The Satanic Panic: A Brief History. A great retrospective and overview of the Satanic Panic and D&D's place in it.
• KSTP Twin Cities Live August 1986: Satan is in your Child’s Bedroom. From the day, the Satanic Panic sealed in amber for us to enjoy.
• Christian Concerns about Dungeons & Dragons, newer, but it shows that 40 years later, people still keep making the same nonsensical mistakes.

My Posts

• Satanic Panic!
• A to Z of Witches. O is for Occult Panic and Obeah. Links to Turmoil in the Toybox
• AtoZChallenge2022: S is for Satanic Panic
• AtoZChallenge2024: S is for Satanic Panic