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. 

The Witches of Appendix N: Manly Wade Wellman

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World Where the Folklore Is True

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

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

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

The folklore is simply true.

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

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

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

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

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

The Witches in the Hills

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

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

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

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

Occult Investigators and Monster Hunters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Pursuivant

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

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

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

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

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

John Thunstone

John Thunstone is another matter.

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

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

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

Rowley Thorne is chief among them. 

Rowley Thorne

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Cry to Legba Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Black School

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

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

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

Strangers on the Heights

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

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

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

What Can We Use for D&D?

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

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

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

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

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

That is the Wellman type of witch. 

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

The Shonikins

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

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

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

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

Closing Thoughts

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

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

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

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

Mail Call Tuesday: Larina Nix KibiFig

A little bit ago, I was approached by KibiFig after they saw my review here about the figures I had ordered. I had also spoken out online about how pleased I was with the figures in general.

They offered me an upgraded figure, 6" or 15 cm. There was no expectation of a review afterward so I dug through some images and found one I liked.

Last Friday, the figure came in the mail. 

I already knew what it looked like because Kibifig had been using my little Larina in their most recent ads. I have to admit, it is always kind of fun to see her out and about.

The ordering process was simple, and I opted to spend the extra five or so dollars to get the custom box. In retrospect, the box is better for giving these figures as a gift than, say, a collector's box.  Besides, she is going to sit on my desk.

I had considered this an older version of my Jackson Larina, say circa 1995. But this Larna isn't wearing glasses, and she has a red cell phone that was not in the original image. That's fine. They got her necklace and her T-shirt right, so this very easily could be my WitchCraft RPG or Chill RPG version. In the end, though, it doesn't matter; she looks fantastic.

I went ahead and stuck her to her base. She stands well enough without it, but I tend to knock over figures on my desk all the time, and the base will keep her from falling over.

The online ads. These showed up online around September 7. I got my figure notification the day before and delivery on September 18. Considering it was shipped from China and it went through the Chicago mail system, I call that pretty good.

Yeah. I am pretty happy with her.

Mirror Mondays: The Witch as a Liminal Figure

 With the Autumn Equinox upon us (tomorrow), we have a period in which day and night are on equal footing for a time. Neither has the upper hand. It is only fitting to discuss witches.

But not the kind you might think of as spellcasters or monsters, nor even those who dabble in the occult. I am talking about them as liminal figures. Those who make their home at the threshold. 

In Jackson, Faye Thorne is the prime example of that. Or should I say, Fiona Voss. So instead of ending with a Mirror Shard, I am going to talk about her throughout this post.

Neither One Thing Nor the Other

You will hear the term liminal bandied about these days to put a name to an empty mall or a hotel corridor, some place that feels oddly in between. The older definition is more expansive. A liminal space is a boundary, a doorway. It is where a thing has ceased to be what it was but has not yet transitioned to what it will be. Dawn and dusk are liminal. So is the shoreline, a crossroads, adolescence, and the Equinox. Witches have always been found there.

They occupy the space at the edge of the village or the forest. Between the living and the dead. Between healer and hexer. And in the case of the Thornes of Jackson, they are exactly what you would expect.

The Witches Outside of Town

Faye Thorne

Faye Thorne lives with her Aunties. Her mother and father died in an accident when she was a baby. To the world, they are the Thorne women, living well away from the schools and the respectable parts of town. Out past the neighborhoods where the road narrows, and the trees crowd in. You could hardly do better if you were looking up "stereotypical witch’s house" in the dictionary. 

Of course, "Thorne" is a ruse. The authies are, in reality, the Blackthorne Hags.

And the Blackthorne Hags have been at work on Faye. Not in the way one might imagine; they did not haul her into a circle to make a monster of her overnight. They have done something far worse by selling off her soul in small increments. A little of her soul here and there, through small compromises and bargains. The kind of losses that do not seem to matter until you look back and see what has been taken. Faye herself barely noticed until she did, but then so much of her was already gone.

It has left its mark. Her hair was originally black; now it is stark white. To the Blackthornes, she is the Thorn Child, the dangerous element among the pretty things. Prepared to become one of them. That is the intention anyway.

The Thorn Child

I really like the image of it. The sharp thing concealed under the beauty of a flower. But there is more to it. A thorn is part of the plant. It belongs.

Faye is being made to understand that the Blackthornes are her family, that their nature and magic are her own. That to join them is not so much a choice as the next logical step. It is how she will grow up. She is in a liminal space of her own, or more to the point, theirs. She is still a girl, still human. But something is being eroded, and something else is being put in its stead. She is not a hag yet, but she is no longer beyond their reach. There is a particular danger in a threshold when another is the one forcing you into it or over it.

Stephanie and Larina

Here is where you have to consider Stephanie and Larina.

They are not going to "fix" Faye by telling her who she ought to be. One could argue that would be no different from the Blackthornes' methods. No, they help her out of it. They show her there is an option she had not considered and, in doing so, allow her to take back what the Aunties have been chipping away at.

Choice. 

I find that of more value than any spell in their repertoire. The true measure of victory has nothing to do with vanquishing the Blackthorne hags; it is Faye making the decision that she is not theirs. In time she will do something else entirely: she will take back her original name.

But there is a reason that in High School Faye is always in the middle of Larina and Stephanie. They protect her until she can choose.

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina

Fiona Voss

When Faye Thorne later becomes (or reclaims) Fiona Voss, do not mistake it for a disguise or an alias provided by someone else. It is reclamation. "Thorne" was put on her by the women set on turning her into something else, as was the Blackthorne destiny they had in mind for her. Fiona Voss is hers.

Of course, it does not undo what has been done. Her hair will not go from white to black, and the things the Blackthornes have taken are not going to regrow simply because she has made her escape. There are marks left by the threshold, and that is as it should be. We are fond of our transformation tales where one crosses over and is made new, but actual change is a messier business. You may escape, but you will not be exactly the same as before. Those bits of her soul are still gone. Fiona has Faye with her and the Thorn Child too, but she will not let the Blackthornes put a meaning on either.

But Faye, and then later Fiona, discovers that "gone" doesn't always mean "gone forever."

When she joins the coven with her childhood friend Stephanie and new girl Larina, she sees something. Three long black hairs where there had been only one before.

Maybe that is the real gift from Stephanie and Larina to Faye/Fiona. Not just choice, but the room to recognize that she has a choice. 

I don't need to speculate what would have happened to Faye if she had never met Larina or reconnected with Stephanie. I have my Carbon Vale setting to explore that if I wish. But I also have Yog where Faye is the Thorne Witch. She is what happens to Faye if her aunties got what they wanted. She dies the same night as the Ash Witch. In fact, she dies first. I know from these two examples that life for a soulless Faye is not a kind one to her. And the worst part? She is too far gone to even know that it could have been better. 

Witches and Boundaries

Folklore puts witches at the boundaries for good reason. The rules are less certain there. The forest is not the village, the night is not the day. The crossroads are both the roads, and neither. Yet they touch. That is the witch’s domain.

There is a difference, however, between standing at the boundary and being consumed by it. The Blackthornes know how to exploit a line, to turn one thing into another. Faye has a steeper lesson to learn: how to remain at the threshold and not let anyone else determine what she is to become. 

High School Is a Liminal Place

Faye is well suited to this for another reason: high school is a liminal environment. At that age, one is neither child nor adult, just in the process of becoming. And everyone is being told what they are by the whole apparatus of parents, coaches, cliques, boyfriends/girlfriends, churches, and social systems.

You are the jock, the nerd, the horse girl, the good girl, or the bad one. The freak. The witch. The monster. High school abounds with people eager to put a label on you. What Faye faces is the supernatural extreme of that. Her Aunties are not content to tell her what she is; they make it so, unless she puts a stop to them.

I have discussed this before: how the high school years are a perfect metaphor for dealing with the supernatural. OR is that the supernatural is the perfect metaphor for high school years and adolescence? 

The Witch in the Doorway

I am reminded of a certain picture of the witch (but could not find it for the life of me; I might be misremembering). She is in a doorway, with one world behind her and another ahead, belonging to neither and therefore able to see both. It is a position of power, if not also of some fear.

The Blackthorne hags have put themselves apart from ordinary life, living beyond the last streetlight like the dangerous sort of woman from old stories that children are steered clear of. Near the "far unlit unknown," as the great bards have told us. 

Fiona is of a different order. She will cross the line and return. That is the distinction between the hag and the witch: the hag wants to have you swallowed by the threshold, while the witch knows the way home.

The Equinox

Which is why I think of the Autumn Equinox. For a time light and dark are in balance as summer gives way to autumn and the world is in a state of flux. Then the balance is broken. Not a tragedy in itself. Change is not loss, and getting older does not mean you have to give in to whoever says they know what you should be.

Faye Thorne was at that boundary, and the Blackthornes had a word for what lay on the other side: the Thorn Child. But with Larina and Stephanie to point the way, she found she could pick a different course. And a different name. Fiona Voss.

Witchcraft is a threshold, as is adolescence. The peril is not in standing between worlds but in allowing another to choose your side for you. The choice, though, must be made. Unlike that witch of my memory, or my imagining (I have mentioned how funny memory is), you can't stand in a doorway forever. To quote the great bards again, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." 

The equinox comes. But so does winter right after that. "Changes are not permanent. But change is."

And standing there is the witch.

Mirror Mondays: The Seven Books That Made Me Want Witches in D&D

 I have spent a lot of time during these Mirror Mondays talking about where my ideas about witches came from.

Some came from D&D, obviously. Some came from movies and television. Some came from folklore, mythology, and religion. And more than a few came from simply being a kid in the 1970s and 1980s when the occult seemed to be everywhere. From the Occult revival to the Satanic Panic.

But most of it came from books.

And more specifically, most of it came from the public library.

I talked about the library as a dungeon back in June, and with good reason. My local branch had what struck me as an enormous amount of material on the supernatural: witches, vampires, ghosts, monsters, the whole lot. I made short work of them. I later discovered that we did indeed have more than our fair share. I went on to visit other libraries, and they had only a fraction of what my local one had. 

In those days, before the Internet, if one wanted to know about witches, one had to put in the effort and find a book on the subject. And that also often meant me getting on my bike and riding to the library. 

I was not being completely allegorical when I described the library as a place of quests. Should a book make mention of Jung or some obscure piece of mythology or psychic phenomena, you can bet I was off in search of more. One shelf would lead to another. In terms of shaping my Witch class, that process was likely of greater import than any rulebook from D&D. I did the legwork; I was on the quest.

Below are seven books that put the desire for witches in D&D in me. Don’t mistake them for the seven best on witchcraft; some are scholarly, and some are not, and one doesn’t really concern witches in any way. But they all added to the mix. Or as I often say, the alchemy that allowed the witch to grow in my mind. 

Daniel Cohen, Witchcraft, Superstition & Ghostly Magic (1974)

I went through everything Cohen had to offer at the library in my pre-teen years. He wrote the kind of thing I was after: unexplained happenings, monsters, the like. It was a last stand for a world of magic I wanted to believe in, even though I knew on some level it wasn’t true. Before I turned ten, I could still savor the notion of a secret world beneath the ordinary. That romantic notion has never left me, even if I know that the world is not hiding anything supernatural. 

Take Jackson, IL. The adults are at work, the kids are at school, everyone is shopping or complaining about the weather or worried about grades. But there are witches and ghosts and monsters in that town. Most are none the wiser. 

Cohen didn’t put that idea in my head, but he did a fine job of convincing a younger me that the world is more interesting if you allow for such possibilities.

C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1983 edition)

I have been a huge fan of Carl Jung. His psychoanalytic theories, especially regarding the collective unconscious and archetypes, have always appealed to me more than Freud’s. The witch is just one figure to come out of that, but the fact that certain stories and symbols have a way of reappearing has meant a great deal to my approach to fantasy.

There is an accident of library history here. In 1984, I set out to read Synchronicity. Yes, because I was a fan of the Police album of the same name. The library didn’t have it, so I made do with Man and His Symbols. In the end, perhaps that was the more fitting book for me to be reading at the time. Jung provided a vocabulary of sorts for what I was already putting my characters through. He made me ask why some of them have a way of coming back in my mind, or why I can spot an element of one witch in another. Why is it that a character can cross from one game to another, from one world or genre to the next, and still be unmistakably who she is? Those ideas had their genesis here. The witch not as a character but as a universal archetype. 

At the time, I was only aware of the patterns. I have reread the book many times and each time I walk away with different ideas and insights. It is not a great work of psychology, but it does provide a great lens in how we view the stories (or my case, games) we create.

Brendan Lehane, The Enchanted World: Wizards and Witches (1984)

One would not be surprised to see this on the list. I have put pen to paper about the Enchanted World series and this volume in particular, but the first had a profound impact on me. Lehane takes you from the wizards of old myth to the forbidden arts of the medieval magician and on to the witches. You will find Circe, Merlin, Roger Bacon, Baba Yaga, and the like all occupying the same broad magical space. Yet they are not all engaged in the same sort of thing. That is a distinction which matters.

It is an idea I am still mulling over in Advanced Witches & Warlocks; a Witch, a Wizard, and a Warlock ought to be more than three labels for a spell-caster. Their approach to magic is different. In looking back at Lehane, I can trace the origins of that notion. There are small things I have taken from the book into my games as well. The bit on witches’ flight, for instance, speaks of distaffs as well as broomsticks, and I have since made room for them in my own work. One reads something at the age of fourteen and finds it has been sitting in your game for forty years.

Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959)

Here is one of the major ones. I picked up my copy in a second-hand shop and it has proved indispensable when it comes to witchcraft and demonology. But with Robbins, the subject matter gets less comfortable. Witchcraft is entertaining when you are discussing familiars and old legends. The record of witch persecution is no fun at all. It is the story of men and children, but mostly women, being put to the sword or tortured on the say-so of someone who called them a witch. The witch stops being the wise old woman, the alluring temptress, or even the oh-so-clever teen in homeroom. She becomes the innocent woman tortured to confess something impossible and only has death to look forward to. 

You have the fantasy witch, the one from folklore, and then the individual who is accused. They are not one and the same. Robbins gave some historical heft to what might have been nothing more than a character class in a game. I have gone back to it more times than I can count; of everything here, it is the one I have used most as a reference for my writing.

I am not so vain as to say I write to avenge those wronged. But I keep them in mind with everything I do write. Maybe I read this stuff at too young an age (the ongoing joke that Gen X is the way we are because we read the wrong book way too young), and it imprinted on me. 

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts (Reader’s Digest, 1978)

My parents were/are voracious readers. Books filled every corner of my home growing up, and every room had at least one bookshelf; some, like the living room, had three. 

They, like many people of their generation, had a lot of Reader's Digest books. One, in particular, was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.

There was a copy of this in my parents’ house, and for years I could not put it down. At first it was my book of choice when I wanted to read about vampires, though over time I began to make use of it for witches too. 

This book should not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered good literature or even good research. It is, however, good fun and a fun read.

In a way, it was an education in the weird, a sort of giant compendium of everything. You have ghosts next to odd bits of history, monsters beside the unexplained, and folklore rubbing up against what is put forward as fact. 

One might open the volume with a particular aim in mind and turn twenty pages to find one’s thoughts on something else entirely. This is where I came up with the idea that *I* could figure out what REALLY happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia. (She died.)

It was much like wandering the library stacks. I suspect that kind of discovery has had more of an effect on my games than I gave it credit for at the time. I am fond of connections: the local ghost story tied to an old family, which in turn is tied to a witch and some strange occurrence out of town. The supernatural does not exist in a vacuum.

The History of Witchcraft by Montague Summers (1956 edition)

Like Robbins, Summers was indispensable to me as a starting point, but he is a very different source, and I found that to my advantage. Put in the hours reading on witchcraft, and you will see the books do not always agree. There are shifts in scholarship or the authors’ own assumptions at play. Where one man writes of literal truth, another may call it superstition or fraud or psychology. 

A researcher has his work cut out for him. As a game designer, however, I welcome it. There is no need for every source to concur, nor for every witch in my games to be of one mind. A demonologist with an old grimoire, a folklorist, a frightened priest, and a witch who took her lessons from her grandmother could all tell you of the same event in four distinct ways. They could be right, or they could be wrong. That notion is central to what I do now, and I can put it down to having read widely divergent takes on the same subject.

In my academic work I typically dislike contradiction. I like looking for the one true answer. My game design work though has taught me to embrace contradictions.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

An odd entry, perhaps, but then again maybe not. 

This is not a witchcraft tome in the same vein as the rest; it is children’s literature and theology and science fantasy and cosmic adventure all at once. 

But consider Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit. For a child with an obsession for witches there was no way I would not be drawn in. I can still recall the chills I first felt when I read Mrs. Whatsit’s thundering “WWEEE ARRE HHERRE!” 

I know a witch when I see her on the page.

L’Engle’s book put some things into perspective for me regarding distance. The world is stranger and vaster than it seems; two points can be worlds apart yet still touch. Will, memory, and love can get where ordinary travel cannot. Meg is not a witch, but she has power, and she is central to solving the problems of this tale. 

I did not have the vocabulary for it on my first reading. I do these days. And so I am led back to Jackson. That comes later in this essay.

Honorable Mention: The Witch’s Catalog (1976) by Norman Bridwell

This one has to be included. An odd volume, but it planted the seeds for much of my imagination when it comes to witches. Most of all, it did away with the notion of the child-eater; in its pages, the witch is a protector, a protector of children from scary things. There is an image of a witch night light that I can still picture as clearly as day 50 years later. It is witch, well a Bridwell witch, glowing with her hand out. She is keeping a trio of frightened-looking monsters away. The caption reads "scary things don’t go where the witch tells them not to go." That stuck with me. Compare that to the "mission statement" of NIGHT SHIFT. All the classes talk about how they deal with the "weird things," and the witch says, "I am the weird thing."

And it was published in 1976, the year I was six. Six is also the age at which Larina first realizes she is a witch in my games. You see where this is going? A coincidence, I am sure. But where is the fun in that?

Shelf by Shelf, Book by Book

You won’t find "my Witch" in any single tome. I cannot direct you to a chapter and claim that it is the origin of the class or of Larina. It was a more gradual process.

Daniel Cohen provided the secret world. From Jung, I took the archetypes. Lehane taught me that magic should vary in kind and gave me the mythic type. Robbins offered history and its consequences; Strange Stories, Amazing Facts made the connections. Summers was all contradiction. L’Engle supplied the sense of distance and the idea that an impossible chasm between two people is not so impossible after all. And Bridwell was there to make the case that a witch does not have to be a monster.

All of that ended up on the same mental shelf. Then, when D&D arrived, I had somewhere to put them. 

Perhaps that is why I return to the library in my writing. A wizard makes do with a spellbook, a cleric with his holy text.

As for the Witch, give her a library card and let her sort it out on her own.

The Mirror Shard: A Wrinkle Between Worlds

I put this concept out there for #RPGaDAY earlier in the year, though I have a bit more to go before it is finished.

Take Jackson Larina, "Nix," and his counterpart in Carbon Vale, "Creepy." They have found ways to talk to one another. Don’t imagine some grand magical rite or a crystal ball; no spell is required. They are just two teenagers after all, and they know a grand total of maybe five spells combined. 

All they need are two well-worn copies of A Wrinkle in Time. Put a message in one, and it will be in the other when you open it. The books are 220 miles apart and in two completely different universes.

That is the kind of magic that appeals to me.

Things get more complicated when Nix uses the book to warn Creepy about something that is going to happen. In Jackson, Larina's mother, Siân, died. Nix warned Creepy in Carbon Vale.

And in Carbon Vale, Siân lived. 

I have already said there will be a price for that. I don't know what it is yet. But there will be one.

For now, it is the book itself that matters. In choosing the object to bridge the divide between the two Larina Nicholses, I went with something I read as a kid. That doesn't feel accidental.

It feels Jungian, and maybe even a little bit of Bridwell too. 

The idea came to me while developing these two similar but distinct worlds. I knew they had commonalities and I knew they had a shared history. But there was divergence somewhere along the way. Game-wise, they allow me to play in similar worlds with different rules. But they kept informing each other on changes. It was like Jackson was talking to Carbon Vale. Or, as it turns out, Nix was talking to Creepy. In game it was innocent enough. Larina "Nix" was at the library. She saw a copy of "A Wrinkle in Time" sitting in the book return area and had the idea to write a note on  bit of paper "I love this book!" and slip it in. She thought that was a little silly, and went back to take it out. She did but now her note read "I do too!" And the handwriting was the same. The responder even used the same purple ink Larina was fond of. 

I am planning an adventure, "The Best of Both Worlds," that will be dual-stated that brings these two together in one world. But so far, that is planned for the first adventure of a "Season 2" after they defeat the Hollow King, so maybe Summer 1986. No idea what Season 2 is even about yet. 

The Best of Both Worlds, when Creepy met Nix

It should be rather ridiculous, and I am really looking forward to it!

#RPGaDAY2026: Day 31 Edge

The witch lives on the edge. 

You will find it to be the case in Jackson, IL. There, teenage witches separate the town’s older, darker undercurrents from the everyday business of school, football, the local diner, and homework with friends. They are still girls, yet they are the ones who know where the monsters can be found. And they are the ones to stop them. 

The same holds for Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A witch is never a simple thing; she occupies the space between the arcane and the divine, as much a scholar or village healer as a priestess or an object of fear. That is the whole point.

In Yog, the edge is all the more pronounced. Here the witch is positioned between survival and rebellion, the old gods and a world on its last legs, between being put to the hunt and turning into something the tyrants would dread in the dark. Yog has no use for comfort; it gives the witch fire and blood and will, and makes her choose.

That is why “Edge” feels like the right place to end RPGaDay.

The witch is invariably at the boundary, be it between mercy and vengeance or the world as it is and what it could be, between girl and monster. It is up to her to decide what gets across.

And what doesn't get back up.

Multiversal NPC

It is Monday, so a new week, but the only one of this week. Ability and Fair of Face. And since this is the last one, lets have someone from all the worlds. 

Selene Marr. A beautiful, unsettling witch-adjacent woman who appears in Jackson as the new Instructor at Beecher College everyone notices, in Carbon Vale as a folklore department assistant who knows too much for her age, and in Yog as a veiled oracle whose "ability" is seeing the version of you that survives. In Iriandor, she is a temple witch in the first year of her temple administration. She can see the best in everyone. 

In every world, she knows something about the PCs and sometimes something about one of their Shards. She is also looking for her younger sister Tessa.

Jackson Soundtrack

Really, for Jackson there is only one song for Edge.

--

And that’s a wrap on another #RPGaDAY! Huge thanks to David F. Chapman (Autocratik) and Anthony Boyd (Casting Shadows Blog) for keeping this tradition going year after year. It’s been a great excuse to reflect, reconnect, and rediscover why I love this hobby so much. Whether you joined in with every prompt or just caught a few along the way, I hope you found something that inspired you.

It has been a great year talking about my various campaigns from West Haven to Jackson and Carbon Vale to Yog and Iriandor. All these worlds are a lot of fun, and I hope to keep bringing you more.

I hope you all enjoyed the soundtrack as well. I have been playing it while I work on all of these posts.

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

The Witches of Appendix N: August Derleth

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

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

But that is not really the topic of today.

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

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

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

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

Witches’ Hollow

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

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

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

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

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

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