Mirror Monday: The Women Who Made My Old School

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

But no one creates these things in a vacuum.

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

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

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

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

That seems especially appropriate for a Mirror Monday.

The Women of Appendix N

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same is true of the men.

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

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

They were helping create it.

The Women Who Gave Fantasy Its Look

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

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

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

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

I find that rather fascinating.

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

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

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

Pamela Colman Smith represents another side of that artistic heritage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn't necessarily make them evil.

But it does make them interesting.

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

None of them gave me a finished Witch class.

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

The Women of Early D&D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eldritch Wizardry and the Possibilities of Magic

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

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

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

For me, these were fascinating possibilities.

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

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

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

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

There is also the cover.

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

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

But I find its place in gaming history fascinating.

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

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

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

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

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

I needed the doors it opened.

Lee Gold and the Craft of the Wise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Hickman, Laurana, and Larina

Laura Hickman deserves special mention here.

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

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

But Rahasia is especially relevant to my witches.

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

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

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

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

But Laura Hickman's influence goes even deeper.

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

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

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

And Laurana became one of the inspirations for Larina Nichols.

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

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

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

I rather like that.

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

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

Jean Wells, Duchess, Candella, and Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the connection remains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were creating worlds and characters of their own.

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

The Women Who Became My Witches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is how creative work develops.

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

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

Over time, those influences became something of their own.

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

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

And the development continues in both directions.

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

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

The Other Side of the Mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I am still discovering new branches.

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

But rather what was there all along.

Mirror Monday: Why Witches?

 I have been writing about witches for a very long time. Anyone who has followed this blog for more than a few weeks probably knows that. Between Advanced Witches & Warlocks, NIGHT SHIFT, and my Jackson, Illinois, setting, witches occupy a considerable amount of my creative time. They have been part of my gaming life for nearly forty years, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

But why witches?

It is a fair question, and one I have asked myself (and have been asked) more than once over the years. Why have I devoted so much time to creating a Witch class for *D&D? Why do witches feature so prominently in my horror games? And why, when I decided to return to the Illinois of my teenage years and create a fictional town filled with supernatural mysteries, did I place a teenage witch named Larina Nichols at its center?

I think the answer goes back further than my games.

The Witch in the Library

My local public library was a second home of sorts when I was younger. I would make my way from one shelf to the next, book in hand, driven by a fascination with the supernatural: mythology, folklore, monsters, vampires, and ghosts. I read anything that put itself in front of me if it held out the promise of some kind of mystery.

Witches in particular held my attention. They had a way of occupying several worlds at once. You had the ones from folklore who were objects of fear and persecution; you had the literary variety, ranging from fairy tale villains to the great sorceresses of myth. And then there were those who actually made witchcraft part of their spiritual practice. Not to mention the ones I wanted to portray in a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

I found myself trying to reconcile these disparate notions. Some were at odds with one another or with my own beliefs, while others appeared to be different takes on the same fundamental ideas of power, nature, and knowledge. Reading and making sense of all this was how I came to think about witches. The notion arose in me that would later give birth to an in-game quote:

Morgan: There are things man was not meant to know, Nichols.
Larina: That's ok. I'm a girl. 

Larina, in my Jackson setting, is fond of the same reading material, poring over works on religion and magic to better understand her Wiccan faith and her own gifts. We put that knowledge to different uses. I was putting together an AD&D character and a magic system; she was forming an idea of where she stood in the world. Yet for all that, our methods were much the same. You will see why I have dubbed these Mirror Mondays.

The Witch Is Not the Wizard

I have long been of the opinion that a D&D witch should not be a distaff Magic-User or a cleric with better eyeliner. The Magic-User is concerned with the arcane; the Cleric has his divine power. But the Witch, as I have come to see her, is engaged in something else entirely. Her's is an occult art, one that is tied to spirits and hidden things and the relationships between them.

A Magic-User may know the right formula for an effect, and a Cleric can make his petitions to a higher authority. A Witch has to know what she is up against and what might be required of her in return. It is a more complicated business, and it has to be if she is to stand apart from the rest of the established classes in AD&D. Those distinctions are what allow for good storytelling. After all, magic ought to have its consequences. It is not merely a set of convenient skills on a character sheet. The risk is not always in a failed spell. Sometimes the problem is that something answers you.

The Witches of Jackson

With the development of Jackson, Illinois, and a return to Larina Nichols, I put the Witch in a new light.

In *Advanced Witches & Warlocks*, the questions were of an AD&D nature: what are her abilities, how does she advance? In Jackson, I was after the meaning of being a witch. What is it like to be sixteen in 1986 in a small Midwestern town and find out the supernatural is real? To see what others cannot? To have the monsters at your school or down the street rather than in some dungeon or a haunted castle in the Carpathians? Or to be the object of fear for being different?

Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are all witches, but they are not cut from the same cloth. Larina wants to understand. Stephanie is ambitious and confident in her power. Faye has older, stranger ties to the occult. I find their differences far more compelling than any common ground.

The same holds for the older set in Jackson. Sylvia, Kiera, and Natasha may have the power and knowledge to spare, but it has not made them happy or wise, nor has it made them particularly adept at getting along. You will find a past between them that is littered with unchangeable decisions.

Then there is Nida, and she has no desire to have anything to do with magic. And Vera who has been forbidden by her family to practice it.

In these characters, I can get at things a class description on its own never could. To say one has power is not to say what they will make of it. It does not indicate whether they will be kind or cruel, brave or frightened, generous or selfish. That is a question of character, not of the class they belong to.

Witches, Women, and Power

Witches have an aspect to them that has long held my interest. In fiction and in folklore, they are an odd mix of power, independence, knowledge, and femininity. They can be villains or heroes. Or they can be frightening for the simple reason that they will not behave as others expect of them.

I have never been one to think a woman of power has to shed her femininity to be taken seriously, nor do I see femininity as a synonym for weakness or passivity. Larina might be romantic and compassionate, or stubborn and terrifying. Stephanie is quite happy to be the center of attention in fine clothes and still be a formidable witch. Faye can be dangerous and vulnerable at once. None of them are, by any definition, "weak."

They can be wrong too, which is something I consider vital. I am not interested in characters who are put there to show how admirable or just how powerful they are. I want ones with flaws, who disagree and occasionally make a mess of things. The men in my stories are no different; a strong female doesn’t need a weak male counterpart any more than he needs the women around him to be helpless. There is room for all of them in fantasy and horror. Rowan, for example, is quite powerful in her own right, and she adores Andy. He is her rock, her bit of reality.  Valentino is also very capable. In one of his first adventures, he body-slams a zombie, and he also loves and protects Ami, even though she is every bit as capable as he is. These two complement each other.  Masculinity and femininity aren't competing resources.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing witches is that I don't have to limit them to any single definition of femininity. My witches can be beautiful, glamorous, romantic, sexual, maternal, ambitious, independent, or frightening. Often they are several of those things at once. They can wear elegant dresses and high heels, carry swords, summon demons, fall in love, raise families, and occasionally make decisions that shake the foundations of reality.

I have never understood why any of those qualities should be mutually exclusive. A woman doesn't become less feminine because she is powerful, nor does she become less powerful because she enjoys traditionally feminine things. Larina, Stephanie, and Faye are very different women, and I wouldn't want them any other way. They have their own personalities, interests, ambitions, and faults. Most importantly, they have their own choices to make.

Of course, not all my witches are good people, and even the good ones can do terrible things. Natasha Wilcox is one of the most intelligent and accomplished witches in Jackson, but that doesn't make her compassionate. Sylvia has paid dearly for some of her choices. Larina herself is perfectly capable of allowing her convictions to get in the way of understanding someone else's suffering. I don't need these women to be perfect, and I certainly don't need them all to agree with one another. Their disagreements, failures, and contradictions are part of what makes them interesting. Being a witch grants them access to power, not a monopoly on wisdom.

To me, that is what makes a character interesting. Not whether she conforms to someone else's expectations of what a woman should be, but whether she feels like a person who exists beyond the pages of the character sheet.

The Witch and the Monster

Horror has always had an interesting relationship with witches, often casting them as monsters. The charge of witchcraft was historically ruinous. In our stories, they have been cast as evil’s servants or wise healers, embodying generations of fear of the forbidden and of those who don’t fit in.

But being a witch doesn’t make my characters into monsters of their own accord. They might become so by what they do, by making a bad bargain or seeking power at too high a price. Or they may come across something in themselves they don’t like. But that is about action, not nature.

For Jackson, the distinction is key. The town has its share of the supernatural, but also plenty of human prejudice and anxiety. Those ordinary failings can be just as harmful as the monsters, and the witches have to deal with both.

There is also something wonderfully transgressive about the witch as a character. Witches are frequently associated with forbidden knowledge, dangerous bargains, ancient powers, and things that polite society would prefer not to acknowledge. Their stories can be bloody, violent, grotesque, sexually charged, and deeply disturbing. I don't shy away from any of that in my games. These elements are part of the long traditions of fantasy and horror that I love.

And I don't believe the presence of blood, gore, sex, or monsters automatically makes a story better. Those things are tools, and like any tools, their effectiveness depends on how they are used. A witch bargaining with a demon can be frightening because of the demon's appearance, but the real horror might lie in what she has promised in return. A monster can tear someone apart, but sometimes the more interesting question is why it chose that particular victim.

I don't see these darker elements as belonging to men or women. They belong to horror. And horror, like fantasy, has always benefited from writers and characters who bring different experiences and perspectives to it.

Tabletop Witches Don't Have to Be One Thing

Another thing I love about tabletop roleplaying games is the extraordinary freedom they give us to create. There is room for dark fantasy, heroic adventure, Gothic horror, cosmic terror, sword-and-sorcery, and just about anything else we can imagine. Not every game needs to appeal to everyone, and I certainly don't expect everyone to share my particular fascination with witches. But if you do, I'd love to hear from you!

I have always been fascinated by the assumption that fantasy gaming belongs to a particular kind of person or that there is only one proper way to approach it. I came to D&D through a lot of the same books, rules, and traditions that inspired so many other gamers of my generation. I loved the combat, the monsters, the dangerous dungeons, and the strange worlds waiting to be explored. But I was just as fascinated by the magic, mythology, folklore, and characters who didn't fit neatly into the traditional heroic mold. The old wizard, the wise cleric, the heroic paladin, and the mysterious witch were all on equal footing to me.

For me, none of these things were contradictory. They were all part of the same wonderful hobby. I didn't have to choose between Conan and Circe, between fighting monsters and studying magic, or between writing about powerful warriors and powerful sorceresses. Those interests complemented one another, and they still do. 

My love of witches didn't take me away from old-school gaming. It took me deeper into it.

But I have never believed that someone else's enjoyment of the hobby diminishes my own. There is nothing preventing me from playing AD&D the way I played it in the 1980s, or from creating something new that draws upon those same traditions. The fact that other people might prefer different characters, stories, or playstyles doesn't make my games any less meaningful.

I want more people to discover these old games and the literature that inspired them. I want them to read Appendix N, explore the old rules, and find something that excites their imaginations. They might discover the same things I did, or they might see possibilities I never considered. Either way, the hobby is richer for their participation.

I've spent far too many years exploring fantastic worlds to believe there is only one correct way to enjoy them.

The Two Sides of the Mirror

Working on Advanced Witches & Warlocks and on Jackson, I have come to see how much the two feed off each other. A rule I put down for AW&W clarifies what Larina and the rest are up to. An adventure from Jackson makes me re-examine what an ability means to the one who has it. A character will point out a flaw in the rules, or a new rule will introduce a role-playing element I hadn’t considered.

I will be the first to admit that, even after forty years, I can look at one of my own creations and learn something new from her that I didn’t know before. And I don’t see that ending soon.

I don't write about witches because I want to change what fantasy gaming is supposed to be. I write about witches because they have always been part of the fantasy, horror, and folklore I love. I don't see them as alternatives to the warriors, wizards, clerics, and rogues who have populated my games for decades. I see them as part of the same rich tradition. There is room in my games for Conan and Circe, for Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, for ancient sorceresses and teenage witches trying to survive high school. 

There always has been.

There are mysteries out there beyond the familiar world, and more to be said about what people do when they find them. I suppose that is why I am drawn back to witches' time and again. They let me get at the unknown, the very things that pulled me into gaming and mythology in the first place.

In some ways, I am still that boy in the library hunting for a book on witches. Only now am I the one writing the books, and I am still finding new ones.

Games Plus Fall 2026 Auction Haul

 Went to the Games Plus Auction this past week. I was not expecting to pick up much, which naturally means I bought a lot.

Some of that belongs to my oldest kid. He grabbed the Dune games, the magnetic tiles, the cookbook (natch), and the monster books. I am going to give Savage Worlds another try. 

I picked up Dark Age Vampire for us both, he has been wanting to try it out more.

But the real surprise in the lot was the game Fledge Witch. 

Described as a non-combative, cozy Japanese RPG, it is about creating apprentice witches who try to impress their teacher, an older witch. Already, I am thinking of Elown, Ainsling, and the rest of my West Haven coven with Larina as the teacher. 

I ended up with what can only be described as the "deluxe set," possibly a Kickstarter exclusive. ETA: It looks like this is the $80 version. 

It came in s very sturdy box, with dice, a nice-looking rulebook, a notebook to put spells in, a collapsible dice tray, and some signed art.

It is on DriveThruRPG for the PDFs, but that is about how much I got if for at the auction. So yeah, it was a steal. I did grab some character sheets. I printed two pages per page in landscape, and they fit into the box. I can have multiple apprentices and multiple teacher witches.

Though, knowing the group I have here on Sundays, they will decide the best way to impress their teacher is by sabotaging the other students. 

Still, it looks like it could be fun!

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.

Tales of Jackson: We Are Not Alone

 I recently talked a bit about going home and not finding Jacksonville, or even Jackson, I remember. I was standing out in front of what we called "the old High School," the Newton-Bateman building where people in my town went to school up until about 1983. I never went there. We had the "new" High School out north of town. That structure survives in Jackson with the old, haunted High School and the new school. 

I also wrote a bit about Charmed. The one thing the new Charmed series established was that the "Power of Three" was repeated over and over in the Warren Witch Family line. That included the witches Macy, Mel, and Maggie, as well as Prue, Piper, Phoebe, and later Paige. History repeats itself. Another structure I grabbed for Jackson.

So excuse me if this post feels a little schizophrenic. It was really two posts that never really gelled on their own, and I figured out they needed each other. So, let me start with the original post, and for that, we need to talk about Iggwilv.

Iggwilv, Tasha, and Jackson

It is no surprise that I adore Iggwilv, Tasha, Hura, Zyblina, or whatever she is calling herself this week. I have known for a while now that she was going to make an appearance in Jackson in some role. Not Iggwilv from Greyhawk, but my "Shard" of her, reflected in Jackson's mirror. BUT I wanted her to be important, but not so important that she would overshadow my playtest characters (and thus your characters). So I have been sitting on a few ideas for a bit, and none of them felt right to me.  In fact, my first idea came up around my birthday, but it also didn't gel the way I liked. It DID, however, give me the tragic coven of witches that protected Jackson before Larina and her friends. 

So instead, Lena, Alyssa, and Keely were born. And...Lena and Keely died trying to protect Jackson, and Alyssa lost her mind.

But they were not the first coven of witches, nor were they the last. I mean I knew this, but I did not have names for them yet. 

Though maybe I did.

I am working on something else right now: my next Witches of Appendix N post and reading some L. Sprague de Camp, and thinking about what sorts of witches actually came from these books. I am not ready to present my thesis on that just yet, but it got me thinking about Iggwilv again and how she was never supposed to be a main or face character. Maybe my Iggwilv shard in Jackson is the same way. She is there, but working in the shadows. Not evil, per se, but certainly amoral. 

Then it hit me. Lena and Keely are dead because it was Iggwilv who sent them to their deaths.

Natasha Wilcox

My "Iggwilv shard" is Natasha Wilcox. Professor of Classics at MacAlister College and one of the few people who intellectually challenges Larina. She is one of those nightmare professors who knows everything about her subject and dares you to bullshit your way through it. She is intelligent, shrewd, driven, and knows exactly what she wants. She is also a witch. 

Back in 1983, she was the "adult in the room" when Lena, Alyssa, and Keely were in school. She was a professor at Mac, but came to the High School to teach Latin. Alyssa was her star pupil. Equally as brilliant in both academics and magic. Natasha saw a little of herself in Alyssa and sought to train her to become even better. But that training wasn't enough. Alyssa learned she was brilliant but never learned to fear the things Jackson bred. 

Natasha Wilcox caused Lena and Keely's deaths because she had not taught Alyssa the limits of her powers. Her hubris and three lives were destroyed.

I figured out then that Kiera "Keri" Moreau told Natasha that if she ever set foot in Jackson Public High again, she would kill her. A bit of a strong reaction? Maybe, but it tracks with two things. Who these characters are/were in my AD&D games AND what they were before in Jackson.

Natasha Wilcox, Kiera Moreau, and Sylvia Velasco were members of the coven that protected Jackson in the 1950s.

Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)

In the mid-1950s, Jackson Public High School had three girls who were the best of friends. Mundane circumstances threw them together, but it was their magic that united them. Natasha Wilcox's family had survived World War II and had come to America fleeing Nazi oppression when Natasha was only a baby. Likewise, Sylvia's family had fled Spain and had come to Jackson via Mexico. Kiera Moreau was the half-nymph daughter of a sea god, but her human guise was that of the daughter of a wealthy family who had made millions in import and export deals (easy to do when you can control the seas); sadly, even in enlightened Jackson, with its abolitionist history and place on the Underground Railroad, her skin color was an issue with many other residents. All three girls were social outcasts within the very tight, insular cliques of Jackson Public High School. So they formed their own group. 

They had no idea they were part of a legacy that stretched backward and forward in time. 

No one knew they were magical. Natasha and Sylvia, with their magic, and Kiera, with her psychic abilities and half-sea nymph powers, protected their school and home. But more than that, they were friends. Kiera bought Sylvia that pink cardigan sweater, and Natasha said it looked great on her. 

They fought monsters. Had boyfriends. Though Natasha was always too serious about her work for any romance, Sylvia still managed to have boyfriends and girlfriends in 1955. They all went to MacAlister together. They thought they would be doing this when they were old and gray.

And then things began to fall apart. Natasha was studying magic for magic's sake and no longer stopping the monsters. Kiera fought the monsters, but could not do it on her own. Sylvia began selling off little bits of her soul for more and more power until her hair had gone completely white from Soul Burn. They only grew further and further apart.

Then in 1979, teachers Kiera and Natasha saw Alyssa, Lena, and Keely coming up through the school and recognized them right away. "They are us." And they began to disagree right away on how to deal with these new students. Natasha sees witches. Kiera sees young women. Sylvia sees an omen. Their disagreements were at first minor, but gained in intensity as the years went on. Kiera thought Natasha was being too cavalier with their lives. Natasha thought Kiera was being too soft. Sylvia wanted to know what magics these new girls knew.

Then, in 1983, Lena and Keely were killed. Alyssa had been committed to the state hospital.

Natasha didn't see herself as responsible. She taught Alyssa everything she believed Alyssa needed to know. Alyssa was exceptionally gifted, perhaps the most talented student Natasha had ever encountered. But Alyssa overestimated her abilities, failed to account for some variable, and the spell or ritual went catastrophically wrong.

For Natasha, this was a problem of magical theory and practice. Something went wrong. She needs to understand what happened so she can prevent it from happening again.

For Kiera, two girls are dead, and a third has lost her mind. 

To Kiera, this is a tragedy. To Natasha, it is a puzzle. Neither recognizes the girl they used to call "sister."

"If you set foot in this school again, I will kill you," Kiera told Natasha. Her heart was broken, but the threat was real, and Natasha knew Kiera could carry it out.

There is another important distinction here. Natasha, Kiera, and Sylvia went to the Old School. So did Lena, Alyssa, and Keely nearly thirty years later. Larina, Stephanie, and Faye attend the New School, north of town. They never walked those same halls or sat in those same classrooms. Their connection to those earlier witches isn't the building itself, but the photographs they left behind. Three girls smiling at the camera, unaware of what awaited them. Larina looks at those pictures and recognizes something that has nothing to do with the school they attended. There is no magical presence of either coven in 1986. That building sits near the heart of the town, with its haunted halls and broken bell. 

It is less about the buildings they attended and more about the roles these young women found themselves playing.

And the yearbook photographs are the only evidence of something the monsters haven't managed to destroy: the memory of ordinary happiness.

"They were all happy. Like us. And then they weren't."

What does this mean to the current generation?

We Are Not Alone

This gets me back to Jacksonville.

I was driving around taking some pictures of buildings. I wanted to drive out to the "new" High School (now 40+ years old) and take some pictures. I saw a group of kids walking downtown, laughing and generally just being kids. I mused, "Maybe they are the new witches?" I was not far from where the bookstore I based Paula's on used to be. I thought about Larina riding her bike every Saturday in 1985-86 to head to the Square for Paula's. For an odd moment, the past, present, and future of Jacksonville and Jackson all overlapped. I thought about Larina, Stephanie, and Faye. I thought about Lena, Alyssa, and Keely before them, and all the witches who had come before them and those who would come after.

This all hit in a few minutes. I was amused by these kids. Then, in typical 50+-year-old fashion, I thought, "They better get out of the road; that's not safe."

In Jackson, one of the themes is "this has all happened before." The monsters keep coming to the Bad Land. There are protectors, there are fighters, and there are those who have the power and still do nothing about it. 

Larina (in my games) sees the yearbook photos of Lena, Alyssa, and Keely and thinks, "That was us." She looks at the picture of Natasha, Kiera, and Sylvia and wonders what happened to cause these girls to grow into women who can barely stand to be around each other now.

That's what I want to happen in your games. That connection your characters have to the setting's past. Your witches can look at these girls and think, "They were like us." Fighters like Val, Andy, and Ami, or protectors like Rowan, Candy, and Denise. They all have a role to play. Not just as my NPCs but as your NPCs. 

There is no occult registry. No one knows who the past witches and protectors were unless they told someone. There may have been years without one. Lena and Keely died in May of 1983. Larina didn't arrive in Jackson until July of 1985. That is two years when no one was watching the gate. No wonder the place is a mess. Even Kiera and Valerie, who were still in Jackson, did little.  

I have no real intention of filling up the in-between years with witches, fighters, and protectors. Not here, and certainly not in any published version of Jackson. Those years belong to you. The game masters and players of Jackson. I mean, I might have an idea or two, but nothing solid beyond maybe thinking that the 1990s could use someone.  

I saw (them) in black and white; there ain't no color in memories.

Somewhere in Jackson right now, there might be another group of kids walking downtown, laughing with their friends, completely unaware of the dangers around them. Maybe they are the next witches. Maybe they are the next fighters or protectors. Maybe they are just kids enjoying an afternoon together. I like to think that Natasha, Kiera, and Sylvia were once just like them. So were Lena, Alyssa, and Keely. So were Larina, Stephanie, and Faye.

Jackson has a long history, and not all of it has been written yet. Some of those adventures are mine. The rest of them are yours.

Or they will be.

October Movie Challenge: Necropolis (1986)

 White-haired, evil Immortal witch? Hell yes! But is the rest of the movie any good? Well...

Necropolis (1986)

It is 1686, and we are in "New Amsterdam" (minor quibble: it was renamed to "New York" in 1866), and we are following a witch (LeeAnne Baker) with long white hair. She sacrifices a young woman who was about to get married. Her husband-to-be and the locals find her, and they kill all the Satanists .

300 years later, Eva is back, only now she rides a motorcycle and wears a leather jacket over her lingerie. She kills all over town, draining the victims of their life-force so she can, and I shit you not, feeds it back to her growing army of undead via one of her six breasts. Gee, to think I was worried about the New Amsterdam goof.

BTW. If you took a drink any time someone calls a woman "baby," you would be dead by the end of the movie. 

Look, the acting is really sub-par, but LeeAnne Baker gives it her all, and honestly I kinda enjoyed her portrayal of evil Eva. The other characters, such as they are, barely rise above caricature. 

Like Eva, William and Dawn are reincarnated from the would-be husband and wife from 1686. Neither actor is very good, and the character of William, the Police Lt. Cervetti, is particularly distasteful. Though the coroner is likely the worst character here in terms of redeemable qualities. Yes, it is even worse than the zombie that screams after its head is ripped off.

There is only one reason to watch this film, and it is to see LeeAnne Baker strut around in high heels and overact her heart out.

Jackson, IL Connections

This movie doesn't bring anything new to the table, but I do like the idea of a witch coming back. In 1686, Jackson, the town, would not exist, but the Mauvaisterre land did. In 1786, there would be French settlers in the area, and in 1886, the village of Jackson is growing. So, given that these things typically pop up in 100-year cycles, I could do something with that. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 9
First Time Views: 6

Manly Wade Wellman, Jackson, Sunny Valley and Appalachian Gothic

 What started as an exercise for my Witches of Appendix N project has become a rather thorough immersion in the works of Manly Wade Wellman. I have spent more than a couple of months reading his works and listening to his books.  

I went in looking for witches and any number of useful ideas about magic, and to add another piece to the puzzle: the literary landscape behind Dungeons & Dragons.

I did not expect Wellman to start reaching backward into things I had already written.

But here we are.

The more I read Wellman, the more I could see bits of him reflected in two of my own settings, Jackson and Sunny Valley. Some of those similarities are pure coincidence. Others are the result of the same folklore and traditions influencing us from very different directions.

And in at least one case, Wellman handed me an idea that was simply too good not to use.

On the Matter of "Thorne"

Those who have been reading here for a while know Faye Thorne. You might also be aware that this is not, in fact, her real name. She is really "Fiona Voss."

As a child, she was stolen by the Blackthorne Hags and renamed Faye Thorne, to be remade into what I have been calling the "Thorn Child." The Blackthorn Hags took a witch child and tried to turn into a hag.

When I first put together Faye’s character sheet, "Thorne" was just part of the package. But then I came across some Manly Wade Wellman and made the acquaintance of his Rowley Thorne. It was too hard to ignore.

Now, I am inclined to write such things off as happenstance; after all, I had no intention of lifting from Wellman, and there were decades between us when it came to creating these characters. More to the point, when I created Faye Thorne, I had not yet read Wellman. But Faye has a history. The Blackthorne Hags were in the habit of taking children from two families in particular: the Vosses and the Thornes. The Blackthornes were related to the Thornes.

That gave the coincidence some weight. What if the two human families were related?

It led me to do some speculative genealogy. Let us say that Rowley Thorne at some point became involved with a Teutonic witch named Elsa Voss, and they had a son, Arthur Voss. Arthur would have his mother’s name but Rowley’s blood. Fast forward a few years and you have Fiona Voss, who is in every way a Thorne as well as a Voss. 

All of a sudden, the Hags’ fixation on both families is less random. They have been tracking a single bloodline. And the moniker they put on Fiona takes on a different meaning. "Faye Thorne" was never a legal formality. One might say the hags were not giving her a new surname so much as putting an old one back where it belonged. Knowing who she was, they made sure of it. There is something wonderfully unsettling about that.

It gives the whole Thorn Child concept more weight. The hags were not content to simply abduct; they were tending a bloodline like a gardener tends generations of roses, waiting for the right traits to show before they made their claim.

As for whether Rowley Thorne is truly in Fiona’s past, I would rather she (and us) remain in the dark.

There may be a scrawled note from John Thunstone who once looked into the matter of Elsa Voss and Rowley, or an entry in an occult journal, or a family Bible in poor repair. Plausible, certainly. Proof, no. It is very Wellman of it, and suits Fiona.

For Fiona has spent her life spurning the notion that your blood writes your future. The Hags did their worst; gave her a name, taught her the art, ripped out bits of her soul to make her the Thorn Child. She put up with it and lived to tell of it. So even if she were to find Rowley Thorne in her family tree, it would not alter who she is.

Blood will tell you why the monsters want you. It does not account for the person you are. I can see Faye in the mid-90s seeking out an elderly John Thunstone and handling, and not being burned by, his famous silver sword blessed by St. Dunstan. Equally, I can hear Thunstone saying: "The silver knows nothing of surnames."

There is merit in that. Faye is not the sum of her biology. 

There feels something very Wellman about all this. All I needed was a book covered in human flesh and written in blood-red ink telling the Blackthorns what to do and how to do it.

Jackson and Wellman

Jackson is not Appalachia. That needs to be made clear first.

Jackson is a Midwestern town, and the particular flavor of its supernatural landscape developed out of very different sources.

But Jackson and Wellman's fiction share something important: the supernatural has been there all along.

The characters do not discover that magic has suddenly entered their world. They discover that the world they thought they knew was never quite the whole world.

Old stories turn out to have some truth behind them. Things dismissed as superstition prove to have practical value. The person who was considered eccentric because she hung something strange above her door may have had an excellent reason for doing so.

Where Jackson differs is in the reaction.

When the kids in Jackson find out there is something horrible living in the abandoned building, their first instinct is usually to find a flashlight, grab their friends, and go see what it is.

There is an almost heroic recklessness to Jackson. They run toward the darkness.

That is not how Sunny Valley works.

John Thunstone Comes to Jackson

The case can be made that Jackson is precisely the kind of town John Thunstone or Judge Pursuivant would put on their itinerary. I have no trouble imagining an invitation from Illinois Beecher College for John Thunstone to deliver a lecture. On paper it is all very respectable and academic, with a title like “Survivals of European Folk Belief in the American Midwest” or perhaps “Ceremonial Magic and the Persistence of Folklore in Modern America.” To the faculty he is a well-heeled independent scholar with a command of religion and the occult, spending his retirement years on a speaking tour.

But anyone who has read Wellman will know there is more to it than that. Thunstone does not concern himself with these matters as quaint holdovers from a less enlightened time; he studies them because some of them are true. Some of those truths need to be confronted. And that is what makes Jackson such a good fit. 

John Thunstone at Illinois Beecher College

Put him at a lectern in Beecher and he will be talking of witches and old gods and ritual objects and the like. The majority of his audience will think they are in for an entertaining bit of folklore. A few will understand he is being quite literal. Young Larina Nichols will be among them.

I can see her sitting there, this large and urbane man with an air of intimidation describing things she already knows to be fact. She will be listening intently and put in a word here and there. Not your run-of-the-mill questions on symbolism or history. Hers will be a little too precise for comfort.

Thunstone will pick up on it. He may well pause after one of her remarks and fix his gaze on the red-haired girl in the crowd to see that her curiosity is not of the academic sort.

This is Jackson. It is where the supernatural can be put under a microscope. There are the college archives and the libraries, the hospital records and the old newspapers with their forgotten scandals and family histories, and enough people around to spot the impossible when it happens. Judge Pursuivant or Thunstone could come to town and have no end of work.

Of course the local kids would tend to complicate matters. Thunstone might want to spend three days doing his homework on an abandoned house before he so much as steps on the property. By then Candy has already picked the lock, and Larina and her group will have been inside for some time. 

Wellman and Sunny Valley

I can’t help but wonder what bits of synchronicity led me to be listening to Wellman on audiobook while driving through the Appalachian Mountains recently. But even if I hadn’t, the connections abound. Indeed, I found myself driving through some of the very mountains Wellman had talked about and driving to the area of the county Wellman called home.

Sunny Valley has several attributes that are very much in the Wellman Universe.  There is an isolation to this Appalachian community, old mountains all around it, and its own brand of local lore with a tinge of the cosmic at the edges. It leaves you with the sense that those who have put down roots here know things an outsider never will.

The kind of horror one encounters is not some import from a gothic chateau; it is of the land itself.

In that respect, Wellman’s touch is what sets Sunny Valley apart from Jackson. With Jackson, you have a propensity to head straight for trouble. In Sunny Valley, there is an awareness of the things in the hills that are not to be trifled with, and a need to abide by traditions that may seem irrational until they do not, if one is to survive.

Silver John Comes to Sunny Valley

 Silver John would arrive in Sunny Valley very differently.

Nobody invites him. He just comes walking down the road.

Maybe he is looking for a meal and somewhere to sleep. Maybe he plays his guitar at a church social or on somebody's porch. Maybe someone offers him supper because that is what you do when a traveler comes through.

He is there to listen, which is the point of it. Someone will bring up the lights on the ridge, or the cow that has gone dry, or the sound of knocking from under the old bridge once the clock strikes twelve. John does not scoff when an old woman says nobody is foolish enough to take the northern trail after dark. He makes no assumptions that a rule is without meaning just because no one can say why it was made. He asks about it.

Perhaps the old woman can recite the words to a song her grandmother put in her head but has long since lost the melody for. John has the melody. This is how things would work for Sunny Valley.

He is not like Thunstone, who brings his scholarship to bear. John is armed with memory. He does not come with some answer from the outside world; the answer has been here all along, living on in a bit of custom or a rhyme that has eluded everyone else. John is the one to recognize it.

What he does with that knowledge varies. He may fight, or make use of silver, or sing the right song. At times he is wise enough to keep off the mountain.

In time, the folk of Sunny Valley will have only a hazy notion of him. "That fellow with the silver strings," they will say. "Nice enough man. Put up with the Carters for three nights." They might note he was gone the morning the lights on Buckhorn Ridge went out. But then they will be on to other things. The valley has had its share of oddities.

Sunny Valley becomes one more tale in John the Balladeer's story. John is one more strange visitor in Sunny Valley's strange history.

Wellman has given me cause to think again on how music keeps folklore alive. I have come to like this idea from Silver John. Explanations get lost and books burn, but a song endures. A hymn in a hollow will have a verse you won’t find elsewhere; an old fiddle tune can chart a safe way through where one ought not to go at night. The ones singing them don’t know they are holding onto occult knowledge, nor do they need to. The song has preserved it.

People forget. The song remembers.

The Shonokins

Take Wellman's own Shonokins. These "near-human" people are described as descended from another prehistoric hominid lineage, not Homo sapiens. They were in America before the native Americans, likely before homo sapien left Africa. Maybe something that explains the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon. 

I don’t need to transplant the Shonokins into Sunny Valley, but I do want their effect. It is a world of difference between "there is a monster in that cave" and "something has been living in that cave since before we came along." The first is an encounter. The second is history. And for Sunny Valley, that is a vital distinction. 

Not just a "monster," something that thinks, reasons, and maybe even feels like we do. But they are not a part of the "we." Even a hillbilly with generations of inbreeding is still human. There should be things in the Appalachians that are not even that.

Maybe something like a human-troglodyte, or a grimlock or aglæca. Something really old, living up in those mountains. It looks human, mostly, but isn't.  

Maybe I can dip into that other Appendix N mainstay, the near-human. Not an "ape-man" or even a "sub-human," but an "other-human" or "ur-human." Something that would serve the same ecological niche as the Shonokin or even "the old man of the mountains." But make him less Hillbilly, and more Woodwose or Lovecraftian. Like the fishmen of Innsmouth.

Appalachian Gothic

It brings me back to the notion of Appalachian Gothic. These are geologically old mountains, having seen worlds unrecognizable to us, seas come and go, continents collide. Life has come and gone while they have stood there. A decaying manor or ruined abbey might preserve the sins of the past in traditional Gothic, but here the landscape does the job. The mountain and the woods remember. The creek by your house has likely been on its course since before any human walked the Earth.

That lends the supernatural a quality that is at once folkloric and cosmic. An old woman will tell you not to cross a stream after dark. She may not be able to put a cosmological significance to it, but her grandmother told her and her grandmother’s grandmother knew better. Someone in the line learned the reason. That suffices.

I have taken much from Wellman in this regard. Local horror need not be small. One can be tied to a single valley or family and still be made aware of forces that predate us. Grounding the cosmic in the local only makes it more potent. You cannot leave it behind by heading somewhere far off. This is home.

The Old Rules

There is a particular relationship with tradition in Sunny Valley because of it. You follow rules without question. Don’t whistle in the woods when it is dark. Don’t answer a call from the ridge. Leave the stone. Don’t take the left fork after sunset. An outsider may hear superstition, but a local hears instruction.

Not every one of them is true, and that is more interesting. Some are nonsense, some have been warped by time. But enough of them hold up.

You don’t require an occult order or a secret Vatican library to make sense of it all. No global conspiracy or team of hunters with ledgers on every species is necessary. The fact that the folks in a valley have been doing something odd for two centuries is record enough. Perhaps they had their reasons.

They likely have very good reasons.

Sunday Morning and the Old Ways

There is another Wellman quality I want Sunny Valley to retain: nobody feels obligated to sort every supernatural belief into a neat theological system.

Take the old woman in the front pew come Sunday morning at church. She is as likely to be there as she is to be the one cautioning you against answering if your name is called from the ridge.

She has her faith in Christ and wears a silver cross. You will find iron over the door, and she can rattle off three or four of the charms her grandmother put in her head. At the same time, she harbors no conflict in believing there are things under the mountain that predate man.

An outsider may have a go at putting labels on it: Christian, pagan, superstition, folk magic, Pow-wow. But she would consider such an exercise a waste of time. She knows what is needed for the safety of her family, and that is sufficient.

Jackson Runs Toward It. Sunny Valley Knows Better.

I have said it before.  If I were to put a fine point on the difference between the two settings, it is this: in Jackson the supernatural is a challenge to be met. In Sunny Valley it is simply part of the environment.

The kids in Jackson see an abandoned house and are curious as to what is within. The people in Sunny Valley already know something is in there. They may not be precise about it, but they know enough.

One setting breeds monster hunters, the other survivors. Both have their witches and their old secrets and things that ought not to be. But the approach is fundamentally different. After spending time with Manly Wade Wellman, I am in no doubt as to the nature of that difference. The trip through Appendix N was well worth it for that alone.

The Land Remembers

Wellman has put a finer point on the difference between Jackson and Sunny Valley for me.

In Jackson, it is the events that tend to haunt you. A crime was done, or a bargain struck. Someone died or went missing. The past has a way of intruding on the present when there is unfinished business.

Sunny Valley is haunted in another way, by its very places. No one can tell you what transpired at the old hollow; for all anyone knows, nothing did. Or perhaps it was just always wrong. There are stones left by the creek and an unspoken rule not to climb the western face of the mountain after dark, yet nobody can say who first made that decision or why. The origin is gone, but the custom endures. It is what lends Sunny Valley a particular kind of age. One might say Jackson has history while Sunny Valley has memory, and memory is older than history.

Bringing Wellman Back Around

It would be wrong to think I came up with Jackson or Sunny Valley because I had been reading Manly Wade Wellman. The oddity of it is that both were already in existence before I was even acquainted with his work. What he provided was a vocabulary for my own endeavors.

Plus, I have been talking about both settings for a long time now.

Consider the questions. In Jackson, one wants to know: who did this? What is it, and how do we put a stop to it? Sunny Valley poses entirely different ones: what rules have been left for us here? What will come of it if we are forgetful?

That distinction was there to begin with. Wellman merely helped me to see it. Which is as good an influence as any. Not the kind of writer one sets out to imitate, but the sort who causes you to examine your own work and come to an understanding of why it is the way it is.

And if nothing else? He gave me plenty of good ideas to make these two "80s teen horror" settings more distinct from each other.