Mirror Mondays: When the Mirror Becomes a Door

 Back in May, when I put out the first of my Mirror Monday pieces, I was preoccupied with two projects: Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL. I called that first post "Two Books, One Spell," and it was highly appropriate. I still think it is a pretty good description of what I was doing. One book was about what the Witch should look like in AD&D. The other was about what it would actually be like to be a witch, particularly a teenage witch, in 1986.

I made the case then that the two were informing each other. If anything, the case is stronger today.

The fundamental question for each remains unchanged: what does a witch look like through a 1986 lens? With Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I am after the kind of Witch class and occult mechanics that would have been at home with the AD&D books I was running back then. With Jackson, I take Larina, Stephanie, Faye, and company, and consider their type of witchcraft: the old school building is your dungeon, the road out of town is the wilderness, and a curious volume from the library is all the occult knowledge you have.

Those sound like very different questions and lines of inquiry. They are not.

Two Books, One Spell, Again

My job on Advanced Witches & Warlocks is to put on my old-school game designer hat. What sets the Witch apart from a Druid or an Illusionist? What are her spells and her limitations? How do you handle covens, pacts, rituals, and familiars? AD&D demands answers, if not always perfectly drawn ones. But *I* need to be able to say how something works or why the witch can’t do it. The distinction between her magic and the Arcane or Divine must be more than just something in my notes.

Jackson allows for some ambiguity, which is often preferable in horror. Larina has no use for the percentage odds of a ritual’s success. There is no spell list on Stephanie’s character sheet when she steps in front of a friend to shield them from danger. And Faye doesn’t care to know which page of the rulebook details what the Blackthorne Hags have done to her soul.

But I do need to know. Or have some idea of it, at any rate.

In that respect, Advanced Witches & Warlocks has been of great service to me in writing Jackson. It compels me to get under the hood of the supernatural. Where is the power coming from? Why can one witch do what another can't? Is it inherited or given? What are the terms of a bargain with something beyond her? Jackson can let the characters wonder about such things while the other project makes me think about what is going on behind the curtain.

Then again, the dynamic is not one way.

What Jackson Has Taught My Witches

This has been a big one. I am not sure I can adequately capture what I have learned over the last few months. 

I have been at this long enough to have written witches for most of my life, longer than some of my readers have been around. Over the years, I have put pen to paper (or, more to the point, fingers to keyboards) for Basic-era games, AD&D, d20, Unisystem, NIGHT SHIFT, and many others in between. In the course of that work, I have produced Witch classes, traditions, spells, and monsters; I have written Witch Queens and more than my share of demons, enough to last a few lifetimes.

Jackson keeps reminding me that witches are people.

It is a painfully obvious statement, but one game design has a habit of making you overlook. It is all too simple to view a Witch as a collection of class abilities: at this level she has this spell, at that one she has those restrictions on her magic items, and so on. When I am crafting an AD&D-compatible class, these details are vital, yet they say little about who she is.

Jackson makes me deal with the questions in a different order.

Who was her teacher? Who can she trust? And when things go horribly wrong, who does she call? What does she make of her own magic? What is her friends' reaction when they are afraid of what she is capable of, or, worse, how does she handle being afraid of it herself?

I have let some of those considerations seep back into Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A coven is no longer just an organization bestowing abilities; I think about what it means for a witch to have a place to belong. Pacts have real consequences rather than simply being a way to "gain power X." And a familiar is a relationship, not a list of bonuses with fur.

Jackson has been adept at getting me to consider why a Witch would act a certain way, not merely if the rules permit it. The reverse is true as well. Putting together the AD&D Witch has made me examine Jackson with a critical eye. Larina, Stephanie and the rest cannot do as they please because "witchcraft" demands it. If anything can happen at any moment, magic ceases to be magical and is little more than an excuse. There is value in limits and costs; they give weight to a choice.

The two projects end up correcting one another.

And so to Land of Confusion.

Welcome to the Land of Confusion

I have mentioned the Land of Confusion adventure before; if somewhat obliquely. The basic idea is exactly the sort of thing that happens when I am left unsupervised with my own characters for too long. With my villain Darren's help, the folks from Jackson have been transplanted into a proper Dungeons & Dragons world.

Yes. As in "Hey, look, A Dungeons & Dragons ride!"

Not some D&D-ified version of Jackson with orcs out by Sal’s Pizza. An actual fantasy world.

In that sense, Land of Confusion is the most straightforward crossover I have done between Jackson and Advanced Witches & Warlocks. I have taken people built to confront supernatural horror in 1986 small-town Illinois and put them where the assumptions of AD&D are fact.

This creates a problem I find absolutely irresistible.

Strip away Jackson Public High School, Paula’s Book Store, Strawberry Fields, the telephones, and the cassette tapes, and what is left of Larina Nichols? Or Stephanie, for that matter? Rowan? Vera? Candy?

The easy answer is to convert their character sheets. I mean, many of these characters began as D&D characters. Give them classes, assign some ability scores, figure out their equipment, and move on. I am doing all of that, naturally. I am a game designer. Stat blocks are one of the ways I amuse myself. But the easy answer is not the interesting one.

What I want to know is what makes the journey through the mirror.

When the Reality of Magic Is Common Knowledge

I find there is a certain distinction that is worth noting. In Jackson, magic is kept under wraps. You could say it is not the best-kept secret in some quarters, but for the most part people live their lives with the firm belief that witches and demons and the like are figments of the imagination. Should something odd occur, social mores will see to it that an alternative explanation is found. It is, in every sense of the word, Occult.

This is what gives Jackson its character; the inhabitants are privy to truths the rest of the world is not.

Put those same characters in an AD&D setting and the dynamic changes. Everyone is aware of magic. The fellow at the tavern table next to you could be a bona fide Magic-User. The priest in his temple has the power to heal with a touch. An old woman on the edge of the village might curse you if she is so inclined. There are monsters in the woods, and the local lord would have no qualms about publically putting a price on their heads for any adventurer willing to do the job.

Which raises the question: what is it that makes Larina stand out?

It is a good question, and one that brings to mind Advanced Witches & Warlocks. If my Witch is just another spellcaster she will be indistinguishable in a fantasy world teeming with them. She needs to be different, not more potent, not more knowledgeable, but certainly different. One finds that in the pacts, the rituals, the traditions, and the kind of old magic that does not belong in a Cleric’s church or a Magic-User’s tome.

In Jackson, these things set her apart from the common world. In D&D, they set her apart from her peers.

The witch is the same, only the mirror is different.

Consequently, Land of Confusion is evolving into something of a stress test for both endeavors, rather than simply an opportunity to put fantasy versions of my Jackson NPCs. I have to be able to explain what makes her a Witch in an AD&D context, as well as in Jackson. Or if an ability in Advanced Witches & Warlocks works on paper but is not something Larina would ever put to use, then I need to re-examine it. The rules put the characters to the test and vice versa.

1986 Through the Looking Glass

Somehow this always leads me back to 1986.

There was a reason for choosing that year for both projects. It is an interesting juncture in D&D history and in my own. AD&D was well established yet in flux. Rules were being added. Some of the original designers were out. Locally, we call the post-Unearthed Arcana era AD&D 1.5 (note: Not then, but now). I was busy playing the game and making up characters, devouring any horror or fantasy I could find, taking in the movies and the music and all manner of ideas without any inkling which ones would be with me forty years down the line.

Larina herself is a product of that time. A character made for AD&D in the eighties (July 1986) became the teenage witch of Jackson, Illinois in 1986. Now I am sending that girl back into a D&D world. I could not have planned that in 1986 if I had tried.

Then again, Land of Confusion is not an exercise in determining which Larina is real. I have long since let go of such concerns. The one in AD&D and the one in Jackson are both Larina, shards of the same concept fashioned by different games and even different versions of myself. My characters were always a bit of a psychological experiment.

Placing the Jackson version in a D&D world does not make her the AD&D character.  It doesn't even make her the younger version of that character. That would be too simple. I want to see what happens when the girl from Jackson is forced to be an adventurer. That is where the fun is.

With all these "looking glass" metaphors, I can't help but think I need a character named Alice. Or Brandy. ETA: I figured out who Alice and Brandy are.

The Mirror Opens

Mirror Mondays began with the mirror as a metaphor. On one side was Advanced Witches & Warlocks, on the other Jackson. I could look at the Witch in one and see something of value reflected from the other.

Over the last few months, that has become less metaphorical than I expected.

My work on Jackson has altered how I view the witches in Advanced Witches & Warlocks, while the latter has provided a way to understand the behind-the-scenes workings of Jackson. Answer a question for one project, and I seem to spawn two for the other.

Land of Confusion is where they meet.

What started as a reflection between the fantasy witch and the teenager is now seeing one of them cross over.

The mirror was never just a mirror.

It's more of a door.

Witchcraft Wednesday: Advanced Mystics & Mentalists

 I have been sitting on this one for a little bit. But when you see why, you will understand.

So it is my pleasure to announce another upcoming book: Advanced Mystics & Mentalists.

The art is by Eugene Jaworski. The same artist as my upcoming Witch book.

As you can see this new book will be a companion to my Advanced Witches & Warlocks. 

I have been sitting on this image for a bit. The subject is "Morgan Highstar," but he is really my old DM, R. Michael Grenda.  I want him on the cover because while I was obsessed with witches, he was obsessed with psychics and psionics. I didn't want to post it until I had had a chance to give this painting to his widow. I was able to get to her this past weekend, and now I can show it off to all of you. Grenda's widow and I both think Eugene captured his look extremely well.

Advanced Mystics & Mentalists covers mystics, psychics, and mentalists. Grenda loved psychics, and I have so much of his material. I have a lot of my own material, and material from Advanced Witches & Warlocks, that fits this book much better. As I mentioned, you can't write about witches for decades and not have some opinions about psychics. 

There is a ton of material of here. Some is mine, some we worked on together, and a lot of it is his. So, in a sense, I'll be working as the editor on this.

This project still has a very, very long way to go. I am thinking the book won't see the light of day until at least 2028. I have WAY too much on my plate now.

Plus, I want to do this one justice. It behooves me to do a proper book on psychic powers for Old School Games. I am just disappointed it has taken me 40 years to get it done.

I hope this new book can live up to the hype I am putting into it. But more importantly, I hope it lives up to my expectations for what this book should be. 

Witchcraft Wednesday: The Three Laws of Witchcraft

 "Let it be remembered that witches shall keep the hearth for cats, and cats shall keep watch where witches sleep. Neither shall betray the other to hunter, priest, or king. What was agreed before shall endure one hundred years more."

- A portion of The First Accord, as renewed between witches and the Lords of Cats

Power has a price.

Magic has laws.

Not in the sense of laws in the way a king puts his seal on a decree, or even in the manner of wizards who have devoted their existence to the study of how spells are wont to behave. These are far older than that. They exist because powerful beings agreed that certain things would be done in certain ways.

The Three Great Laws of Witchcraft

For witches and warlocks, there are three such arrangements that hold sway over all others.

There is the Pact of Baba Yaga, or what some refer to as the First Pact, which dictates the duties one witch owes to another. The First Accord governs the ties between witches and the Lords of the Animals, and concerns the use of familiars. And finally, the Concordat of Mephistopheles, setting out the terms by which supernatural Powers can endow a mortal with their strength and make a warlock of him.

In truth, none of these are fully known. You will not find an original, authenticated copy in the hands of any mortal scholar. Witches are quick to dispute the finer points of the First Pact. An Animal Lord may recall some part of the First Accord that has been lost to the witches’ memory. A warlock might come to the unpleasant realization that his patron left out a clause or two in the Concordat in their verbal agreements.

But for all that, they are real enough.

The Pact of Baba Yaga

Witches will tell you the Pact of Baba Yaga is the oldest of their accords, so old, in fact, that they call it the First Pact.

Tradition says Baba Yaga had no hand in making witches. They were here before the Pact was drawn up, as was magic, long before anyone put words to what it was. What she put in place was of far greater importance: she set the rules for how witches would have to deal with each other.

The Pact is an acknowledgment of the witch as an independent creature. She might be in service to a Goddess or a demon, to the elements or some ancestral spirit, or to no divine power one can name. She can be part of a coven or a solitary figure; kind or cruel, lawful or capricious, and either respected or feared. Yet she is a witch all the same.

And the First Pact lays down obligations that transcend covenants, nations, religions, and alignments. It is the source of ancient expectations regarding hospitality, sanctuary, debts, secrets, and the resolution of magical disputes.

None of this means a witch has to like her sister. The Pact does not even preclude enmity. Two witches can be at each other’s throats and still be bound by it. That is the point. The Pact of Baba Yaga is no declaration of universal peace or sisterhood; it is a recognition that there are things a witch does not do to another without consequence.

What precisely those things are is open to debate. One tradition will have its own take on the Pact, another its own. Some tenets are made plain to an apprentice, others are not spoken of until after coven initiation, and some are said to be the province of the very old. Baba Yaga, it is thought, remembers them all.

One should not expect a bolt from the blue every time a witch is dishonest with another. Breaking the First Pact rarely brings about such immediate retribution. The aftermath is often worse. A transgressor may find herself shunned: no one will trade spells with her, put her under their roof, honor her claims, or come to her aid. Then there are the tales of those who overstepped and found Baba Yaga taking a personal interest in the affair. Most witches find that prospect enough to ensure they behave.

Which is why a witch being styled a Granddaughter of Baba Yaga is more than a matter of prestige. It is a sign that she has personally taken note of the witch. And it is a reminder to all that the witch is bound by the First Pact. There are benefits, but there are also obligations.

The First Accord

The First Accord is older than most surviving witch traditions, although whether it predates the Pact of Baba Yaga is a question witches and occult scholars have argued about for centuries. The Animal Lords are not inclined to settle the argument.

The Accord concerns familiars.

Witches have always had their associations with animals. They have been friends to them, compelled them with magic, or used them as tools and vessels. But the Lords of the Animals eventually took notice.

The Lords of the Animals go by many names: Beast Lords, Totem Kings, First Beasts. They are not gods as one would understand them, nor simply animals of great power. They are something older, the embodiment of the creatures in their keeping. The Cat Lord is not just a cat; in a deep magical way, she is Cat. The same holds for the Bear King, the Wolf Lord, the Crow Queen, and the rest of the courts at the fringes of the mortal world.

Under the terms of the First Accord, a witch may have a familiar, but the Accord makes clear that the animal is not property. The bond is a relationship in the eyes of the Lords, not one of ownership. The familiar may guard, advise, or teach, but it gives something, and the witch must give in return.

Some are companions for life, others are inherited, and some come and go with little explanation. But any proper arrangement between a witch and her familiar falls under the protection of the Accord. When a witch is unkind to her familiar, she is in danger of more than just being without a handy magical companion. She risks the displeasure of powers that have an entire kingdom of animals to answer for.

The First Accord has its own history, though the details are not entirely clear. The earliest records we have put it down to negotiations between witches and some of the more formidable Animal Lords; later on, tradition speaks of further meetings to clarify or renew those terms. In the time since, certain witches have made their living as intermediaries between the two worlds.

One might be called a Bearer of the First Accord, a mark of recognition from the Lords of the Animals and an acknowledgment of the obligations she has been given. Then there is the rarer title of She Who May Approach. To a mortal ear, it is unassuming, even unimpressive, but the Animal Lords would disagree. A mortal who may approach has been recognized. She may enter places where other mortals would be intruders. She may speak before powers that would otherwise ignore her, or worse, see her as prey.

It does not make her safe; the Bear King is still the Bear King, but at least she will be heard.

There is also the Peace Talker, for those who have habitually stood between the witches and the Animal Lords. These are privileges of a sort, yet like most occult designations, they come with strings attached. A Bearer of the First Accord cannot flout the rules and then claim the title. A Peace Talker is expected to make conversation before making threats.

Every title grants something.

Every title also takes something away.

The Concordat of Mephistopheles

Warlocks are a different matter altogether. While a witch’s power comes from study, initiation, and the good graces of her Patron, a warlock bargains. For the origins of that, you have to look to the Concordat of Mephistopheles.

Do not believe the clerics' claims that all warlocks are in service to Mephistopheles. Most have never uttered his name, and some of the Powers that make warlocks would count him an enemy. Mephistopheles did not lay claim to them all; he simply set the terms of the bargain.

Before the Concordat, there was no dependable way for a supernatural Power to put some of its strength into a mortal on a permanent basis. You had your miracles from the gods, your possessed mediums, your demons teaching sorcery, but it was an unstable business. Mephistopheles put an end to that. He created a metaphysical framework that allowed a Power to bestow ongoing abilities in return for whatever consideration was deemed fit: allegiance, sacrifice, or obedience. And so the warlock was born.

It hardly matters what the Power is. An archdevil or demon prince can make a warlock, as can an ancient dragon, an archfey, an elemental sovereign, or something from beyond the stars for which our scholars have no name. The Concordat is the mechanism; the pact itself sets the terms. That is why you will find no two pacts alike. One may give up her soul, another seven years of her life, another must see to it that a lost relic is found. Some of these deals seem quite generous. They are not safe for all that.

Warlocks come to understand the central tenet of the Concordat in short order: power given is power owed.

What the original text of the Concordat says is anyone’s guess. There are plenty of forgeries in circulation among the occult set. Demonologists will tell you Mephistopheles put out contradictory versions on purpose, while infernal types say the true copy is in Hell. Warlocks have been known to put their hands on fragments in languages older than any mortal tongue. But the principles are plain enough. A Power must deliver on its word, and a mortal must put something on the table. Both are held to the letter of the agreement, not to intent. And there is always a price.

This accounts for the precise way warlock patrons talk. Devils are well known for it, but Faerie Powers can be worse given how differently they view a promise. It is also what makes a witch deeply suspicious of a warlock. Her Patron can do as he pleases, teach, punish, or leave her to her own devices. A warlock’s Power has entered into a deal.

An outsider might not see much in the way of a distinction. For witches, however, it is everything.

Three Agreements, Three Relationships

Taken together, these three ancient agreements describe much of the hidden structure underlying witches and warlocks.

There is the Pact of Baba Yaga, which puts to rest the question of how witches are to conduct themselves with one another. The First Accord is there to determine the terms between a witch and her familiars, as well as the Powers that give voice to them. Then the Concordat of Mephistopheles to settle what price a Power will exact from a mortal for bestowing its supernatural gifts.

In short, the First Pact is about community, the First Accord is about relationship, and the Concordat is a transaction. But running under all of them is an age-old tenet of magic: no power is ever given without some obligation attached.

Power is never free.

#RPGaDAY2026: Day 19 Desire

 Since this is also Witchcraft Wednesday, let’s talk about desire.

Occult magic begins with wanting.

Not wishing. Not hoping. Wanting. The kind of desire that keeps one awake, sends one back to the old book, makes them draw the circle one more time, whisper the name, light the candle, open the door.

That is what separates occult magic from other kinds of magic.

In this lies the distinction between occult and other forms of magic. 

A wizard may approach it as an academic pursuit, a cleric as something of grace. But a witch comes by her magic where will and need intersect. Whether for healing or revenge, for power, justice or love, for answers or simply a way home, she wants it.

It is a dangerous thing, desire.

When magic responds, it is not always a clean transaction. The spell delivers what was requested rather than what was intended; the spirit is attuned to the hunger behind the words, the curse will take the form of the injury. 

Witches are bound by their taboos and covens, by patrons and tradition, for this reason. Not so as to put an end to their wants, but to see they live through it.

Yog NPC

Back to Wednesday, Instinct and Child Full of Woe. 

Megyn the Child is a Yog survivor whose instincts keep her alive, but not always kind. She is called the Child, but also the Ghost and the Herald of Screams. She is a witch and a trained swordswoman. She has been raised by Veyra Shadowraven as an instrument of vengeance against Yog's Priest-Kings. 

Jackson Soundtrack

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

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. 

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

Witchcraft Wednesday: Étaín Moonshadow

 I picked up a new Forgotten Realms game over the past weekend. Sorta. It is actually the same game I have been playing in, just with some new characters. In reality, I am worried less about the setting or background and more about the playtest. I am using this game to try out some more ideas from my Advanced Witches & Warlocks book. While I have the classes pretty much where I want them, I still want to "stress test" them a little more. 

Étaín Moonshadow

 I have half-jokingly referred to Étaín Moonshadow as my Margaret Murray of the Realms. She is a Moon Elf and was born in Evereska. She was an acolyte of Sehanine Moonbow and could have lived the quiet life of a priestess. That was until Sehanine came to her in a dream, telling her there was more to her faith than she knew. The dream, nearly half-forgotten, disturbed her at a fundamental level. She tried to forget it and ignore it, but the more she tried, the more it got to her. 

Her mother was a member of the clergy of Sehanine, and her father was an archivist. This gave her access to documents, scrolls, histories, and tales of the elven folk.  As she read, she remembered tales from her grandmother on how her own grandmother came from the Moonshae Isles, and her worship was different.  Much was the same, but other aspects seemed odd or incongruous at the time. Until she read more and discovered that some of the rituals were similar to those she had read about in Selûnite prayer texts. Liturgical texts lifted word-for-word from Sharan ones. At the start, she believed what any elf would, that humans had copied older elven texts. But as she read, she became less and less certain of that. She began to come to the conclusion that the worship of Sehanine Moonbow, Selûne, and Shar were all one and the same. Even more than the three goddesses were all but a face of a single Moon Goddess.

Étaín left Evereska to seek adventure, at least that is what she said. It was not uncommon for a young Moon Elf to do so. But what she didn't tell anyone was that is was not treasure she sought, but knowledge. Knowledge to support her idea of the Triple Moon Goddess.

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So now I have this adventuring witch who is not looking for gold and glory, but for knowledge and divine truths.  She feels there is an ancient religion out there, and she just needs to reclaim it. She is also searching for others who share her beliefs. These will be members of the other classes from the book. Some will agree with her, others will challenge her. She will run into the orthodoxy of the Sehanine, Selûne, and Shar religions and she will have to deal with them as well.

Her interest in Selûne started out as an academic curiosity, until the dream of Sehanine. Then it became much more. 

This is also where she is less Margaret Murray and more Raymond Buckland. This ties back to my 1986 connections with his own "Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft" published that year. Étaín is not just searching; she is reconstructing this religion as she goes. "Moonshadow" then becomes the craft name she chooses for herself.

Calling Étaín the "Margaret Murray of the Realms" is only partly accurate. Like Murray, she is assembling scattered traditions into a larger theory. Unlike Murray, though, Étaín is willing to abandon her conclusions if better evidence appears. She is less interested in proving herself right than in following the evidence wherever it leads. In that sense, she also owes something to Raymond Buckland, who took fragments of older traditions and helped shape them into a living modern faith.

So she is a witch character to help me discover more about other witch characters.

Étaín Moonshadow

Moon Elf
Witch level 6

Secondary Skill: Scribe

S: 10
I: 14
W: 16
D: 12
C: 10
Ch: 15

Paralysis/Poison: 11
Petrify/Polymorph: 11
Rod, Staff, or Wand: 12
Breath Weapon: 14
Spells: 13

AC: 10 (None)
HP: 22
THAC0: 18

Weapon
Dagger 1d4/1d3
Staff 1d6

Familiar: Snowy Owl "Nóta"

Spells 
First level: Charm Person, Glamour, Mend Light Wounds, Read Languages, Speak with Animals 
Second level: Augury, Detect Thoughts, ESP, Knock, Suggestion
Third level: Clairvoyance, Tongues

Theme Song: The Mystic's Dream - Loreena McKennitt

Eyes: Blue with flecks of silver
Hair: Black
Born: 1230 DR (age 128)

What excites me most about Étaín isn't whether she'll discover the truth about the Triple Moon Goddess. It is whether she'll change her mind along the way. If the evidence leads somewhere unexpected, then so will she. That's the sort of character I want to spend time playing, and exactly the sort of witch I want Advanced Witches & Warlocks to encourage.

Now I just need to play her some more.

One of the things I want to test with Advanced Witches & Warlocks is whether a witch can drive an entire campaign through curiosity rather than combat. D&D often assumes adventurers are motivated by gold, glory, or survival. Étaín is motivated by questions. If there is an old moon shrine, she wants to read the inscriptions. If there is a forgotten library, she wants to compare its texts. If there is a village with unusual customs, she wants to talk to the oldest grandmother she can find. Success for her isn't measured by magic items recovered, but by another page filled in one of her journals.

When the party enters a ruin, the fighter looks for enemies, the thief looks for traps, and Étaín looks for inscriptions. If someone says, "We found treasure," she'll smile and congratulate them. If someone says, "We found an old prayer carved into the wall," she is already halfway across the room.

Unlike some of my other witches, Étaín does not have a Jackson, IL counterpart. Étaín is too linked to the history and the mythology of the Forgotten Realms in my mind.