Building Jackson: Religion in Jackson

This is going to be part of a semi-recurring series set in Jackson, IL. While my other series, Mirror Mondays, focused on Jackson and Advanced Witches & Warlocks as mirrors of each other, viewed through the lens of 1986, this one will be more game-design-specific.

There will be mostly world-building items, things the setting has that other NIGHT SHIFT settings don't, plus some game mechanics. There is always a chance that another project will leak into this as well. There are things I have developed for Jackson that, on reflection, didn't work there, but worked great in, say, my Sunny Valley, OH setting or my Valhala, AL setting.

So let's start big. With God and Religion.

Dear God: Religion in Jackson

One of the things I have been exploring lately while developing my fictional Jackson, Illinois, is religion. Not just witchcraft and Wicca, though those are certainly important, but religion in general and the role it plays in the lives of the people who live there. Jackson is based on the real-life Jacksonville, Illinois, a town with a long religious history. Religion has also played an important role in education, community life, and local history almost since its founding. 

Now you might wonder why a self-professed and fairly vocal atheist like myself would concern himself with religion, let alone make it the inaugural post of this new series. Well, I hope that will become obvious. 

Jacksonville was established in 1825, and religious communities were among its earliest institutions. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and other denominations all established congregations during the town's early years. The founding of Illinois College (the real-world "Illinois Beecher College" in Jackson) in 1829 was closely connected to Presbyterian and Congregationalist religious movements, and the town's abolitionist history was influenced by religious convictions as well. Jacksonville even became known for an intersection where churches from four different denominations stood on the four corners.

The Four Corners

One of Jacksonville's more interesting religious landmarks is the famous Four Corners, the intersection of West State Street and Church Street where four different churches once stood. By 1986, only two of those original churches remained. First Baptist had burned in 1966, and State Street Presbyterian had been demolished in 1968. But that didn't erase the intersection's history or the influence those congregations had on the town. The buildings might be gone, but their legacy remained. So much so that I heard about it my entire life growing up. I certainly lived in the "after" era of those churches, but the mark they left on the town's psyche was deep and profound. 

It is not difficult to imagine how this history would carry over into my fictional Jackson. Churches would be among the oldest and most recognizable buildings in town. Generations of families would have attended the same congregations, and the churches would be connected to schools, charities, social clubs, and the everyday lives of the people who lived there.  I like that idea for Jackson, where so much of the past still influences the present, often in ways younger residents don't fully understand.  

But religion in Jackson is about more than buildings and institutions. It is about people and what they believe, or sometimes what they don't believe.

These churches also have more going on, as you'd expect in a horror game. While the real-world history of Jacksonville, with four major religious denominations all at the same intersection, is fascinating enough, Jackson has more to it. 

That research was enough to merit its own post later on. 

Religion in Jackson, 1986

As I have been developing the NPCs of Jackson, I have been thinking more about their religious backgrounds. I assume every character has some sort of religious background, even if they no longer practice, have rejected their childhood beliefs, or simply don't think much about religion at all. In a small Midwestern town in 1986, religion could be an important part of your family's identity whether you wanted it to be or not. This was absolutely true for mid-80s Jacksonville, and true for my Jackson.

Take the Vale family, for example. Stephanie, her older brother Grant, and family are all Lutherans, with connections to one of Jackson's older and more established congregations. The Vales are wealthy, and their family has been prominent in town for generations. They attend church because that is what is expected of them. Church attendance is as much a matter of social standing and appearances as it is personal faith. Stephanie knows the services, the hymns, and all the appropriate traditions, but that doesn't necessarily mean she believes everything she hears. Stephanie is also a witch, so she has a different relationship with the supernatural than her co-congregants. 

The Thompson family is different. Anderson Thompson's family has an Episcopal background, but they don't go to church except for Christmas and Easter. They aren't necessarily opposed to religion. It simply isn't part of their regular lives. Rowan McGowan, Andy's girlfriend, comes from a strong Presbyterian family, and I see her taking her faith more seriously. That sense of duty, responsibility, and doing what is right will become especially interesting as Rowan develops into a Spirit Rider. Rowan certainly has a cross necklace she will wear when the mood strikes her, but avoids wearing while working in the stables. 

Valentino Moreno is Catholic, as are Roderick Morgan and Moria Zachary. Catholicism also provides the background for the Moretti family and, of course, Sister Lucille, a mysterious nun who plays an important role in my Broken Wings adventure. In Lucille's case, her faith is particularly interesting because she is a succubus who has chosen a path very different from what her demonic nature might suggest. Her religious convictions are sincere, and she genuinely tries to live by them. The Moreno's and the Moretti's are what I like to think of as "Old World" Catholics. They have a very serious devotion that has shapped how their families live.

Candy Mercer and Denise Carver come from Christian backgrounds, though neither is especially active in religion. Both might wear a cross necklace when they feel like it, more out of habit than anything else. 

Kyra Bellamy is another matter entirely. Kyra is Baptist and attends the Old Landmark Baptist Church, my fictional counterpart to Jacksonville's historic Mount Emory Baptist Church. Her faith is important to her, and she always wears a cross. For Kyra, religion isn't just something she inherited from her family. It is a genuine part of how she understands the world and her place in it. Kyra is one of those kids who loves her church and everyone in it, and she is one of those rare people for whom religion makes her a better person. 

Vera Rook is Jewish, which gives her a different religious and cultural background from many of her classmates. Vera also wears a pentagram, but that does not mean she is Wiccan. Her fascination with the occult and her Jewish heritage are separate parts of her identity. Likewise, Faye Thorne wears a pentagram, but her relationship with witchcraft, religion, and her own identity is very different from either Vera's or Larina's. Faye's religion is what I like to call the "Keyser Söze" point of view. She doesn't know if there is a God or not, but she knows the Devil is real. 

Kyra and Vera are prime examples of what I am working on here. Both girls identify with their religion on a deep, personal level. They both have disagreements (of a different sort) with their fathers, but both also deeply love their respective congregations. Kyra loves her Church, and she feels alive there. Vera could spend all night Friday drinking and partying, and she would still get to her synagogue on Saturday. She might sit in the way back and wear sunglasses the entire time, but she will be there. 

And then there is Larina Nichols.

The Ghost of Morris

Larina (reading): "Hic locus mortuorum est."
Vera: "Is that some Christian thing I don't get because I am Jewish?"
Larina: "No, it's Latin. And I am not Christian either; I'm Wiccan."
Vera: "There is hope for you yet, Nichols."
Laria: "It says, 'This place belongs to the dead.'"
Vera: "Ok. Less hopeful now."

Larina is Wiccan. More specifically, she follows a form of eclectic Wicca that she developed herself over several years. Her religion predates her arrival in Jackson and, importantly, predates her association with Stephanie and Faye.

Beginning when she was thirteen, Larina spent a great deal of time at Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbon Vale (the mirror of real-life Carbondale), where her father was a professor. She was this little redheaded goth girl who would quietly slip into the library and disappear among the books on witchcraft, mythology, and religion. She tried not to attract attention, though the librarians knew perfectly well she was there. They thought she was cute and eventually nicknamed her "the Ghost of Morris Library."

The Ghost of Morris Library

Larina read everything she could get her hands on. Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler, Margaret Murray, Raymond Buckland, and academic works on religion and folklore all contributed to her developing understanding of Wicca. She compared traditions, questioned what she read, and gradually put together a religious practice that made sense to her. Her Wicca was influenced by Gardnerian practices, feminist Goddess spirituality, and her growing interest in Celtic mythology, but she didn't belong to any formally established tradition.

At some point before moving to Jackson, Larina performed her own solitary Wiccan initiation. This wasn't an initiation into an established Gardnerian or Alexandrian lineage. It was a personal religious commitment, something she had researched, planned, and undertaken herself.

So when Larina tells Vera Rook in 1986, "I'm Wiccan," she isn't experimenting with an identity or trying to shock anyone. She knows exactly what she means. She has already spent years exploring her beliefs and practicing her religion.

When Raymond Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, the famous "Big Blue Book," appears in 1986, Larina reads through it with considerable interest and, I am certain, plenty of opinions. She appreciates the organized approach to learning witchcraft and its accessibility to solitary practitioners, but she has already developed her own practices. Buckland isn't introducing her to Wicca. He is providing her with another perspective to consider, agree with, or argue against.

And knowing Larina, I suspect her copy would soon be filled with notes in the margins.

Something else is important here. Being a witch and being Wiccan are not the same thing. This is a distinction I have maintained in my AD&D witch material, and it carries over into NIGHT SHIFT. Being a witch concerns what Larina is, what she can do, and her understanding and practice of occult magic. Being Wiccan concerns what she believes, her relationship with the divine, and how she chooses to live her life. They are separate things, but for Larina they are deeply related and connected.

Not every witch in Jackson is Wiccan, and not every Wiccan in Jackson has supernatural powers. Larina is the case where she is both. 

As Larina gets older, she becomes even more deeply connected to her faith. In 1986, she is still establishing and expressing her religious identity. She wears a triple moon Goddess necklace with a pentagram in the center of the full moon, celebrates the Sabbats, and is quite willing to explain or defend her beliefs. Decades later, her Wicca is less about outward declarations and more about lived experience. Her faith informs how she treats others, understands the natural world, and deals with life, death, and the supernatural.

She doesn't become less Wiccan as she gets older. She becomes more deeply Wiccan. Just less vocal about it.

Her experience is not made up whole cloth. It mirrors my own experiences in creating a witch class.

An Outsider Looking In

My own experience with religion has largely been that of an outsider looking in. I grew up as an atheist in an extremely religious town, one well known for its churches. Religion was everywhere, from the buildings and institutions to the people I knew and the everyday rhythms of community life. It was something I understood as part of the world around me, even though I didn't personally believe in it. I have often joked I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts for being an atheist, but the truth was that my points of view and beliefs were not compatible with the Boy Scouts of America past the age of 10.

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, I frequently played religious characters in Dungeons & Dragons. Clerics, paladins, and, of course, witches. I enjoyed exploring characters whose faith was important to them, even when that faith was very different from what I believed. Religion could inform their worldview, their relationships, their sense of morality, and the choices they made. It was part of what made them interesting characters.

That same curiosity followed me into my research on witches. When I started working on a witch character class for AD&D, I spent a lot of time sitting in libraries reading everything I could find about witchcraft, mythology, folklore, and religion. I wasn't searching for a religion of my own. I was trying to understand these traditions well enough to create a witch class that was something more than a magic-user with a different spell list.

I read about historical witchcraft, the witch trials, pre-Christian religious practices, and modern Wicca. I compared what different authors had to say, looked for common elements, and tried to decide what would translate into the rules and assumptions of AD&D. I wanted my witches to feel like witches, drawing from folklore and religious traditions rather than simply being another variety of spellcaster.

Years later, when I began developing Larina's history, I gave her this similar experience.

There we were, both sitting in libraries, reading many of the same books about witchcraft and religion, trying to construct something from what we had learned. But we were pursuing very different goals. I was trying to create a witch class for AD&D. Larina was trying to construct her own Wiccan faith.

Where I was looking at religion from the outside, Larina was finding her way into it. I was trying to understand witchcraft well enough to write about it, while Larina was trying to understand Wicca well enough to live it.

My original witch class has changed considerably over the decades, eventually becoming part of Advanced Witches & Warlocks. Larina's understanding of her faith has also grown and changed. Neither of us abandoned what we began in those libraries. We continued to learn, reconsider our assumptions, and deepen our understanding.

Faith in a World Where Monsters Are Real

Religion takes on another dimension in Jackson because the supernatural is real.

Demons exist. Ghosts exist. Witches possess actual magical powers. Ancient beings people have worshipped as gods still exist. But knowing these things doesn't automatically answer religion's larger questions. The existence of a demon doesn't prove every religious teaching about demons, and meeting something that claims to be a god doesn't necessarily mean that being deserves worship.

Or as Faye Thorne might remind us, just because there is something out there claiming to be the devil doesn't mean there is a God.

For some characters, encounters with the supernatural challenge their religious convictions. For others, those encounters deepen them. Roderick Morgan's Catholicism, for example, provides one framework for understanding demons and possession, but he also approaches supernatural events through investigation and scholarship. Ghosts are not the spirits of the dead to him, they are psychic manifestations that are no more the original person than a reflection or photograph is.

Coach Kiera Moreau, with her ancient supernatural heritage, has a religious outlook rooted in a world far older than modern Christianity. The Blackthorne Hags practice a form of old Paganism that is very different from Larina's modern eclectic Wicca. Sylvia Velasco and Natasha Wilcox have complicated relationships with religion, magic, and the supernatural, shaped by experiences most ordinary people could scarcely imagine.

Then there is the relationship between Larina Nichols and Kyra Bellamy.

In 1985-6, Kyra is genuinely afraid of Larina. She has been raised in a Baptist church, and much of what she has been taught about witchcraft gives her reason to fear, or at least distrust, someone like Larina. Larina, meanwhile, knows that her own religion is widely misunderstood, and she doesn't particularly enjoy being treated as something evil simply because she is a witch. This was important to me since ANY NPC in the game can be an ally or enemy, or something in between. 

If your characters befriend Kyra first (and why not! She is a super nice kid), Larina is going to be that "new kid who brought evil witchcraft to town." If your characters befriend Valentino first, then Larina is "that scary girl," and Kyra is that "goody two-shoes preacher's kid." This is why I have so many NPCs and spend so much detailing them.

But years later (in the "Class Reunion" adventure I am planning), the two women develop a much better understanding of one another. Kyra sees Larina repeatedly demonstrate compassion, courage, and a willingness to help people regardless of who they are. Larina sees those same qualities in Kyra, whose Christian faith inspires her to live a life of service and kindness.

Neither woman converts to the other's religion. Neither has to abandon her beliefs or pretend that their theological differences don't exist. Instead, they come to recognize one another as positive representatives of their respective faiths.

Kyra still wears her cross. Larina still wears her triple moon and pentagram. Neither has changed what she believes, but both have changed how they understand the woman wearing the other symbol.

And I think that is important.

Religion and Character

I don't want religion in Jackson to be a simple matter of deciding which characters go to church and which ones don't. Nor do I want religious affiliation to serve as shorthand for whether someone is good or evil. I also certainly don't want it to be a line on the character sheet that needs filling out. Well. Not just a line. I want it to mean somthing to that charcter even if it just says "None."

Some of my characters are deeply religious, some are only nominally so, and others have beliefs that would be considered strange or even frightening by their neighbors. The Vales attend church because society expects it. The Thompsons don't attend because they don't feel they need to. Kyra's Baptist faith is deeply important to her, and she would never be anywhere else on Sunday. Vera's Jewish heritage is part of her identity, even as she explores occult ideas. Larina is a witch whose Wiccan faith grows more important as she gets older.

They are all different, and those differences matter.

Religion in Jackson influences how people see themselves, how they understand the world, and how they respond when confronted with things that challenge their beliefs. It can be a source of comfort, conflict, courage, community, or fear. Sometimes it brings people together, and sometimes it drives them apart.

And that is true whether the monsters are real or not.

When I think back to my younger self sitting in the Jacksonville Public Library trying to figure out how to write witches for AD&D, and then imagine thirteen-year-old Larina Nichols sitting in Morris Library trying to figure out what it meant to be Wiccan, I see the same curiosity reflected in both of us. We wanted to understand something that fascinated us, even though we were approaching it from very different perspectives.

I didn't have to become Wiccan to write Larina as someone whose Wiccan faith is genuine and important. I don't have to be Baptist to understand why Kyra's Christianity matters to her, or Catholic to appreciate the significance of Sister Lucille's devotion or Val's lived-in faith. I just have to take their beliefs seriously and allow those beliefs to shape who they are.

Because ultimately, that is what makes these characters real to me, and hopefully real to you.

You don't have to believe what your characters believe. You have to believe that they believe it.

October Horror Movie Challenge: Witch Story (1989)

I am getting to the end of this, and I am running out of movies for my theme.

Witch Story (1989)

Witch Story, aka Streghe, is a 1989 Italian horror movie directed by Alessandro Capone, but most of it was shot in Florida. That combination actually fits the movie pretty well because the basic story feels much more European than American.  

A brother and sister have come into possession of an old farmhouse and with some friends in tow they find that the place is haunted by Helena, a woman put to the torch as a witch half a century ago. One will also find demons, possession, a priest with a past and no end of bloody supernatural retribution.

I like the premise. An inherited piece of family land with a buried history, a curse that has made its way to the present and some witchcraft is my kind of thing. The setup is nearly Gothic despite the location. But the film does not hold up in the middle; it drags, and the characters are not great, nor are the actors. Ian Bannen carries some of the weight as Father Matthew, the most familiar face in the cast.

The lead is listed as Amy Adams in the role of Susan. She is not the one you would see in Enchanted or Arrival, but a credit like that makes you double-check. None of the actors here went on to much more. This is not atypical of horror movies.

NIGHT SHIFT and Jackson Connections

As for my 1980s "Horror Comes Home" theme, this is right up my alley. There is no quest for a far-off castle here. The terror is in the house you have been left with, in an old family tale, and in what the locals did decades back. The past has been biding its time for someone to return.

It fits well with Sunny Valley and its older history, though there is nothing here I couldn't do in any of my three settings. I can always use the "50 years ago" idea from this movie, but 1939 is already a crowded year in Jackson!

It has a good premise and some entertaining supernatural mayhem. Only too much dead space in the center. I would have liked it better.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
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This Old Dragon: 40 Years of the Dragon #114 Witch

 This October marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Dragon #114. All year long, I have been waxing nostalgic about my gaming experiences from 1986 and how they set the tone for the next 40 years of my gaming life. I have also spoken at great length about the witches who have shared those gaming experiences with me over the last four decades. 

So I would be remiss if I didn't mark this particular anniversary as something important.

But the question is, after spending so much time with the witch and this particular issue of Dragon magazine, what do I have left to say?

Turns out, more than I thought.

The Witch on the Page

I have already talked at length about how my understanding of witches and witchcraft grew out of my love of stories about witches, as well as historical documents, and modern occult and New Age interpretations of the witch. So seeing her in the pages of Dragon was exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for at the exact time I was looking for her.

Now, I had been working on my own witches for some time before this issue came out. Some of my earliest surviving notes date back to 1982 at the latest (could be 1981 even, but 82 is a safer bet). But Dragon #114 showed me something bigger than what I had been putting together in my haphazard collection of notebook pages.

This was a complete class.

Based on Ronald Pehr's Witch in The Dragon #20, Bill Muhlhausen created the original witch class, with Kim Mohan and Tom Moldvay revising the version in #43. Roger E. Moore expanded and revised it for #114, with Karen Martin, Robin Jenkins, and Kim Mohan editing.

Beyond the name, beyond the mechanics, and beyond the particular choices made in its design, the Dragon #114 witch taught me something very important.

The witch, as a class, could work.

Maybe not exactly the way I would have done it, but that was part of the lesson, too.

There was one thing about the Dragon #114 witch I never quite agreed with. She was presented primarily as an NPC, and the editors warned she might be too powerful for regular player characters. There was an implication that this character, while maybe not 100% evil, was certainly up to no good (or even good, for that matter; yes, there is a distinction).

But I wanted to play a witch, not just fight one.

I had already been thinking about witches as characters who could be heroes, villains, or anything in between. Their relationship with magic made them witches, not their alignment. And I certainly wasn't interested in limiting my witches to being somebody else's adversary.

That was another lesson I took from Dragon #114. Just because the designers had one particular use in mind didn't mean their rules could accomplish only that. 

I knew the class was capable of more.

"Me and Thee"

The witch I was building and the Dragon #114 witch had many similarities. While I marveled at that back then, the reasons turned out to be largely mundane and practical. We were all reading the same books.

Back in Dragon #43, Tom Moldvay pretty much spelled this out in his revision of the witch class, which would eventually form the basis for the version in #114.

I detailed that here: Tom Moldvay on Witches.

Moldvay outlined six things he felt a witch class needed: herbalism, fascination or charm, a combination of clerical and magic-user abilities, sympathetic magic, secret religious practices, and powers tied to nature and the changing seasons. When I revisited his article in 2011, I added two more things I felt were essential: covens and ritual magic.

Looking back now, I find it remarkable how many of these ideas were already in my notes, even if I hadn't yet figured out how to turn them into workable game mechanics.

Among other things, we agreed that the witch should have a combination of clerical and magic-user spells, though I originally had my witches avoiding flashy magic and spells that did a lot of damage. So, no fireballs. I wanted witches to have magic that was more subtle, more personal, and often more frightening. Curses, charms, divinations, transformations, and magic that could affect people without necessarily blowing them up.

I already had the idea that witches could have healing magic, but never to the degree that clerics did. Herbal healing, potions, and magical cures all seemed perfectly appropriate. A witch should be able to tend to the sick, heal wounds, and perhaps cure certain ailments through her knowledge of herbs and magic. But she should not replace the cleric in an adventuring party. Maybe at low levels she could be a stand-in, but never once the real combat started. ETA: I am reminded of a scene in one of my Jackson playtests where Candy, the "thief," is a better healer than my witches.

Also, under no circumstances would a witch have a Raise Dead spell.

This was something Moldvay's discussion helped me articulate more clearly. The witch's relationship with nature and the seasons also meant a relationship with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Bringing someone back from the dead in the same body seemed to violate that cycle. Reincarnation, however, was another matter entirely. That fit the witch's worldview much better. Death was part of nature, not just another condition to fix with enough magical power.

The High Secret Order (HSO) spells were great, and many of them fit right into what I thought witch magic should be. I just had a group of spells I originally called "witchcraft" and later "hex magic." My witch was more focused on occult powers and familiars.

Sympathetic magic mattered most to me. The idea that a witch could use a lock of hair, a personal possession, a poppet, or some other object connected to a person to work her magic felt much more appropriate than simply pointing a finger and casting a spell. A witch's practice of magic should feel different, not just in the spells she can cast.

In my 2011 post, I suggested that clerics rely on faith, magic-users on intellect, and witches on personal connections and magical correspondences. A wizard might regard such things as unnecessary props, but to the witch they are part of the magic itself. This also gives the witch something distinctive to do in the game. She might need to gather ingredients, prepare a charm, or perform a ritual before a spell can take effect. These are not just trappings, this is good roleplaying.

Herbalism and alchemy were also natural fits. I had long associated witches with herbs, potions, and strange concoctions bubbling away in cauldrons. But there was also a practical design question here. How much healing could I give the witch before she started replacing the cleric? How much magical power could I give her before she became just another magic-user?

I asked these questions in 1986, and I still ask them when designing witches today.

The power of fascination was another interesting idea. Witches in folklore and fiction have always been able to beguile, charm, or otherwise influence others. Morgan le Fay and Circe came to mind, along with countless other witches from stories, television, and movies. I liked the idea of this being more than another charm spell. It was part of what made a witch a witch.

The religious aspects of witchcraft were a little more complicated. Moldvay drew on historical and anthropological interpretations of witchcraft, including Margaret Murray's work. Murray's theories about a surviving, organized pre-Christian witch-cult have long since been discredited, but they were enormously influential on twentieth-century ideas about witches, including modern Paganism and fantasy fiction. Not to mention, great for my gaming ideas.

Like Moldvay, I drew on many of those same sources. But I was also interested in the idea that a witch's relationship with the supernatural differed from a cleric's. A witch might honor gods and goddesses, work with spirits, bargain with supernatural powers, or call upon something older and stranger. Her magic could be spiritual without working the same way as clerical magic.

This eventually became an important part of my own ideas about Patrons and how witches gain and use their powers.

The two things I added to Moldvay's list in 2011, covens and ritual magic, were also missing from many early attempts at witch classes.

Witches working together are a fixture of folklore and literature, from the Weird Sisters in Macbeth to the witches of modern television. I wanted covens to mean something mechanically. Maybe three witches working together could accomplish something none of them could do alone. Maybe certain spells required a coven, or their effects grew stronger as more witches participated.

Ritual magic went hand in hand with that. Not every spell should be something a witch could cast in the middle of combat. Some magic should take time, preparation, special ingredients, and perhaps the right phase of the moon or time of year. That sort of magic was often much closer to the witchcraft I had been reading about than anything in the Player's Handbook.

Of course, these ideas weren't all fully formed in 1986. Some were little more than margin notes, or, more often, on paper bookmarks, and others were things I wouldn't find good mechanical solutions for until much later. But the foundations were there.

And that brings me back to Dragon #114.

The witch in those pages wasn't my witch. I would have handled some spells and abilities differently, and I wanted to explore ideas the article never touched on. But that was perfectly fine.

What mattered was that we approached the same problem from similar directions, used many of the same sources, and found that a witch could be something different from either a cleric or a magic-user.

Not necessarily better or more powerful. Just different.

There is a line from one of Larina's binding rituals that goes, "I bind you to me, and me to thee. I bind us with the power of three times times."

I think that fits well here. My witch and the Dragon #114 witch were never quite the same, but they have been connected for forty years. One influenced the other, and my own understanding of both has changed over time.

And I suspect that neither of them is quite finished with me yet.

"If Anyone Falls"

Of course, I can't talk about Dragon #114 without talking about Larina.

I have already gone into great detail about her origins and evolution in my Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986 post back in July. I don't want to repeat all of that here, but something about her relationship with this particular issue of Dragon is worth exploring.

When I created Larina in July 1986, she was a witch in concept but a magic-user on her character sheet. I had my own witch class in various stages of development, but it was hardly complete. So she was a magic-user, with the understanding that she was really something else. I have a rather distinct memory of saying "I am going to play her like a witch." She wasn't the first; hell, she wasn't even my fourth witch character (well, maybe my fourth), but she was the one I explicitly called a "witch."

When Dragon #114 came along, I immediately made her a magic-user/witch. Suddenly, there were rules for something I had been trying to represent for years.

But I didn't quite appreciate then how much those rules would change the way I thought about her.

She wasn't simply a magic-user who happened to call herself a witch anymore. Her witchcraft was something distinct, something she could study and practice alongside her more conventional magical education. That distinction became part of her story.

And more importantly, it made me think about what she could do that other characters couldn't.

Larina was never going to be the most powerful combat spellcaster in the group. That wasn't what interested me about her. I wanted her to know things. I wanted her to understand the strange and mysterious, to recognize a supernatural threat when others couldn't, and to know what to do about it.

The witch class helped me explore that. But then something interesting happened.

Over the years, as I kept working on my own witch classes and playing others (Bard Games, Mayfair, AD&D 2nd ed), Larina became a kind of measuring stick for them. I could look at a new version of the witch and ask myself, "Can I make Larina with these rules?"

It was a useful question, even if it wasn't always fair. After all, not every witch should be Larina, and I'd created plenty who were nothing like her. But she represented a particular understanding of what a witch could be, and if the rules couldn't support that, then I wanted to know why.

In 1986, I was adapting Larina to fit the witch class in Dragon #114. Forty years later, I often evaluate witch classes by how well they represent her. 

So, somewhere along the way, the relationship had reversed.

And that brings me to something else.

The witch in Dragon #114 was a collection of rules. A good collection of rules, one that influenced me enormously, but rules nonetheless. Larina was the character who lived with the consequences of those rules.

She gained experience, learned new spells, met other characters, developed relationships, changed her beliefs, and survived campaigns that sometimes ended long before I wanted them to.

She eventually became a character I could play in games that had no witch class at all. The mechanics changed, sometimes dramatically. But I still knew who she was.

This taught me something about character classes that I don't think I fully understood in 1986. A class needs to be more than a collection of powers and abilities. It should help players create a particular kind of character, one with a recognizable identity and a place in the game world.

And if it does that well, the characters it helps create might eventually become something larger than the class itself.

That certainly happened with Larina.

Forty years ago, Dragon #114 helped me figure out how to play her.

Forty years later, she is still helping me figure out how to write witches.

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.