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.

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.

The Witches of Appendix N: H.P. Lovecraft

One of the old masters of the Dungeons & Dragons experience, and indeed of many role-playing games, is H. P. Lovecraft. Since tomorrow would have been his 136th birthday, it seems fitting to examine his contribution to the Witches of Appendix N.

I could spend an entire series discussing his influence on D&D, AD&D, and Call of Cthulhu. I could spend another series on his influence on modern horror. Others have done that work, and done it well.

Instead, I want to narrow the focus. Not how Lovecraft influenced Gary Gygax when co-writing Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, nor how he influenced later AD&D design. I want to look specifically at the witches in his fiction. Witches that are recognizable to readers of this blog.

The Big Three

When it comes to witches, there are three stories that stand out more than the others: Dreams of the Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Thing on the Doorstep. 

Keziah Mason

The Dreams in the Witch House features Keziah Mason, the ur-witch of the Mythos.

She is said to have lived in Salem in 1692 and to have been arrested during the witch trials. That alone gives her a witch pedigree that no other Lovecraft character quite matches. Her former home is literally known as “The Witch House.”

But Keziah is not merely a colonial sorceress. She is a mathematician of the forbidden and the occult.

Her witchcraft blends:

• Ritual magic
• Non-Euclidean geometry
• Pacts with beings beyond human comprehension
• Dimensional travel

She has a familiar, the rat-thing Brown Jenkin, which acts as a proper familiar should: as an intermediary, a spy, and a bringer of harm.

The aspect of Keziah that makes her truly Lovecraftian is her intellectual approach to magic. She gets her power not from the earth, the herbs, the spirits, but from her understanding of the world in terms of angles, of solving equations, of navigating hyperspace through mathematics.

You could argue quite readily that the character of Keziah Mason is much closer to the D&D warlock than the witch. She is not the village's wise woman. She is the academic heretic, the one who has turned her back on the academic world. And it is here that the concept of the warlock in D&D starts to come together: the pact-maker, the wielder of forbidden knowledge, the one who trades safety for power.

I have also used her as the source of the equations used to power starships in my BlackStar setting. 

Lavinia Whateley and the Whateley Clan

The next one is The Dunwich Horror.  Lavinia Whateley and the Whateleys are basically archetypical witch family. The Mayfair family from Anne Rice is basically from the same mold.

Lavinia is described as ugly, albino, and strange-looking. She is isolated in the rural area of Dunwich, Massachusetts, and is raised by her grandfather, Old Whateley, who teaches her arcane formulae from forbidden books.

She is a participant in a ritual summoning and has a child with Yog-Sothoth.

This is hereditary or family witchcraft.

Unlike Keziah, Lavinia does not seem to be driven by a thirst for knowledge, merely part of a family tradition. The Whateleys seem to be part of an occult dynasty, a decadent New England family that still practices pre-Christian and cosmic rituals.

Lavinia is a bit of a mysterious figure; is she a willing participant or a victim? She is only described in external terms, observed, and spoken about.

This is the archetype for the rural cult witch in D&D: the isolated valley, the hidden grimoires, the crossbreeding with the outer forces, and the idea that witchcraft is not a class choice, merely a blood inheritance. It might even be related to the D&D Sorcerer, rather than the standard Draconic bloodline that is standard in the 3rd edition era; it is the root of the Aberation bloodlines in later editions.

Asenath Waite 

She is presented as attractive, though marked by unnerving eyes. She is the daughter of Ephraim Waite, an Innsmouth occultist. Her mother was a Deep One.

Asenath’s witchcraft is intimate. She practices:

• Body-swapping
• Identity erasure
• Psychological domination

Where Keziah works through geometry and Lavinia through lineage, Asenath works through possession.

She is a domestic witch in the most terrifying sense. She marries. She enters a home. She infiltrates identity itself. 

And unlike Lavinia, Asenath is not passive. She is willful. She drives the action. She pursues control.

Lovecraft and Witches

We know from his letters that Lovecraft had a dim view of feminism. I am not prepared to say he was misogynistic at all, but rather, he seemed not to think about women very much. The women in his tales were either mothers or had occult ties.  

Keziah Mason and Lavinia Whateley are examples of women who engage in forbidden knowledge, defy social norms, and exist outside ordinary domestic life. While this makes them good witch characters, it does not put either into particularly good light. There are no witch protagonists in Lovecraft tales because there are no women protagonists. Some of this is due to the time, and some to Lovecraft's very conservative social outlook. None of this is really in dispute, but it does color how I want to approach his witches. 

True, none of the characters above are "misunderstood," but they could be more nuanced. Is Lavinia a victim of her weird-ass family? Is Keziah a victim of her own genius? Is Asenath a...no Asenath is pretty much as she is written. 

The Witch as Seeker of Power

There is a recurring pattern here.

Lovecraft’s witches access knowledge denied to them by conventional institutions. They do not sit in classes at Miskatonic University. They might haunt the library, but they are never part of the faculty or student body.

• They make pacts.
• They inherit grimoires.
• They calculate angles that warp reality.

It supports a powerful interpretation: witches are those who seek access to forbidden systems of knowledge when barred from official ones.

And in Lovecraft’s universe, knowledge itself corrupts.

Given how many of his male scholars meet equally terrible ends, perhaps the lesson is not that women should not seek knowledge, but that no one should.

The Witches of Appendix N: A. Merritt

Abraham Grace Merritt, also known by his byline A. Merritt, was a new name to me when I was reading through Appendix N for the first time many, many years ago. Not a surprise, really. He was a contemporary of Howard and Lovecraft, publishing in the same magazines, but he was older (20 and 10 years or so respectively) than both. He was also more successful in terms of publishing and earnings. However, he lacked what made Howard and Lovecraft household names: strong, recognizable characters. He had them, but they were largely cut from the same cloth.

In Appendix N, Gygax mentions three of A. Merritt's tales: "Creep, Shadow!" "The Moon Pool," and "Dwellers in the Mirage". He even said in the DMG, "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt." That's a strong endorsement. 

In Merritt’s tales, you will find intrepid, but often normal, folk making their way out of the world they know and into territories subject to much older rules. Often "occult" in nature, with the "hidden" meaning of occult being the main focus. There are lost civilizations down in the earth, monsters that are holdovers from another time rather than simple beasts, ancient and forgotten religious practices, and a blurring of the line between sorcery and the super-science of antiquity. That same sort of imagination is at work in D&D’s underworlds and its odd ruins or cities that should not be there, right down to the dark domain of the drow and their queen. In a way, Merritt puts it into perspective: the dungeon is a threshold, not just a collection of rooms. 

Merritt was a collector of the odd, with an air about him that could have been plucked from one of his own tales. He would go traveling and come back with masks, carvings, weapons, and the like, or whatever unusual instrument he could find. At home, he put in order a private library of occult works that ran to several thousand volumes, and he even had a hand in growing plants with a history of poison, witchcraft, and visions.

I mention this because it goes some way to explaining the quality of his fiction. When Merritt put down a priestess or a lost god, he wasn’t working from the kind of thin pulp vocabulary you might expect. His head was full of folklore, botany, ritual, and the occasional nightmare, as well as his share of anthropology and occult theory. Read his best, and you get the sense of a room walled with forbidden books, each shelf suggesting a world far older and less human than we care to think. He was doing the same sort of research into writing his tales as I am doing into reading them.

For me, he feels like a go-to author for the ideas about "Occult D&D," a hidden world just behind the real world we all know. Even sometimes this hidden world is both metaphorically hidden, as in "Burn, Witch, Burn," and geographically hidden, as in "The Moon Pool." 

To explore this, I am going to go beyond the three tales Gygax mentions and into his other works; again, the focus here is not just on the contributions to AD&D/D&D but on how witches or witch-like characters appear in his stories.

Burn, Witch, Burn! (1932)

This is obviously an important one. 

In addtion to the titular witch(es) we get an idea that is very central to my notion of what occult magic needs to be in an AD&D game, namely an older form of magic. In "BWB" the witchcraft of the animated dolls is an older "Science" in Occult D&D witchcraft is an older magic. Both are occult in their nature. 

Based on his essays published at the time this story was heavily influenced by his own interest in witches, witchcraft and the plants used by witches. Madame Mandelip, the antagonist of the tale, gets her name from the Mandrake root used by witches and is also consequently seen as a miniature man. 

I was also impressed by his use of the nine-knot "witch's ladder" in the tale, a nice attention to detail. "Attention to detail" is key, Merritt's style includes a lot of detailed descriptions of what is happening and what things look like. 

The origin of the doll maker, Madame Mandelip, from Prague, reminds me of the tale of The Golem.

This story was also loosely adapted into the screenplay for the 1936 Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks) movie, The Devil Doll. 

A. Merritt on Modern Witchcraft (1942)

Appearing later on in his career, this brief reflection deals with a case he witnessed of Pennsylvania Dutch Powwowing, or Witchcraft. Here, an anemic child was tied to a bloody sacrificed ewe and was "miraculously" healed. Honestly, it would have been as likely to kill the poor girl, too, but as Merritt points out, there might be some hitherto unknown science going on here. 

While the "hex doctor" here could have negative connotations ("hex" = "evil") this is obviously the case of healing sympathetic magic. The blood, or even the life force, of the ewe is being transferred to the little girl. 

I should note that Merritt's description of his participation here parallels that of many of his protagonists: a man of reason thrust into a world dominated by the supernatural. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that such practices occurred in Pennsylvania Dutch, Appalachian, and European folk magic. Did Merritt actually see this happen? I have no idea, but I am willing to take him on his word.

The Doctor in both tales is named Dr. Lowell.

Special thanks to Chrisladams Bizarretales and the A. Merritt Fan Group on Facebook for helping track this article down. 

The Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)

Here we have a lost Alaskan valley, a cult that worships an octopoid godlike being, human sacrifice, and the whole notion of reincarnation. Then there is the modern hero who finds himself confused with, or drawn into, some mythic identity of yore. Here again is another lost world and one many have seen as the prelude to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness."

Khalk'ru certainly feels like another name for Cthulhu. You can almost squint and see that the names are related. 

There is a lot here that is foundational to D&D from an Appendix N perspective. 

Lur the witch woman is practically flirting with me. Strong, powerful, red hair, blue eyes. She is like Larina's distant ancestor. She is called the witch woman, but she doesn't do much that is really witchy, save for talking to wolves and stirring up memories in Leif/Dwayanu, though that could also have been just him or the past-life memories.  Or a "subconscious intracutaneous retro-fold memory loop" as Donna Noble would have called it. 

Lur has a witchy quality by virtue of being part of the threshold; she is of the hidden world and remains so until the hero gets his head around it. She is privy to the names and old identities, the cultic duties, the wolf-roads, and the emotional underpinnings of a place that ought not to be here any longer. You could call her a fine Appendix N witch for that, spell-casting or not. Put it in D&D parlance: she is the one who has an idea of what the dungeon is all about long before the party has found the stairs.

Certainly, the cover of this edition could have influenced the cover of the most witch-coded of the original D&D covers, Eldritch Wizardry.

Still quite an engaging tale.

The Moon Pool (1919)

I remember picking up "The Moon Pool" many years ago, reading it, thinking it was very good, and then never reading anything else of his after that.  Which is too bad, because he is quite good, and he sits at a nice intersection of fantasy and horror. 

There are many elements here similar to those of The Dwellers in the Mirage. Lost lands, lost races, powerful entities, the battle of good vs evil. 

Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, plays the role of the tempter witch here...sort of. She uses her beauty as a weapon, but it is not her only one. She participates in rituals (called a Witches' Sabbath) and channels the power of the Shining Ones. She has glamours and even something like an evil eye. So even though her powers seem more like lost science than magic, she has more witch-coded powers than Lur the Witch Woman. She is even called an evil witch at one point.

For D&D, what appeals to me is that Yolara is more than just a "female magic-user." You have a priestess and a politician in her as much as a seductress or an occult technician. She has a firm grasp on the rules of her world and how to put them to work. That is exactly where Merritt is useful for Witches of Appendix N. His women of power are not always witches in the fairy-tale sense, but they often occupy the same role a witch occupies in myth and gaming. They are the ones who can stand in the presence of old power and know how to talk to it.

Ship of Ishtar by Virgil Finlay

The Ship of Ishtar (1924)

Sharane, priestess of Ishtar, is another near-witch figure. She is the priestess of a lost and secretive religion. Sharane is a good example of the divine witch. She has witch-like magic and serves Ishtar in a supernatural environment. 

She is what I would call a Witch Priestess. 

Sharane is especially useful because she shows how close the witch and the priestess can be in Appendix N fantasy. To be sure, she is in service to a goddess, but you would not mistake her for some tidy D&D cleric in his mail armor with a cure spell on his lips and a holy symbol at hand. Her world is one of beauty and desire, of temple mystery and curse, of mythic time. She hails from a more ancient religious sensibility where the divine is as intimate as it is perilous, and love, magic and death are all facets of the same issue. Where you have Yolara the tempter or Lur the wild witch of the hidden valley, Sharane is the sacred witch; her authority is drawn from the goddess, from rite and old obligations.

We certainly get the Charm Person spell from here. Or at least one source of it.  

The Near Witches

These tales have women who are near witches. They are not witches per se, but live in a world where witches could live. 

The Women of the Wood (1926)

While not a witch per se, this tale offers another glimpse into the idea of a hidden world next to our own. In the French countryside, a man encounters a woman who is not what she appears to be and then is exactly what she appears to be. Also, if you are not playing your dryads like this, you are missing out. 

Seven Footprints to Satan (1927)

While not really Satan (or his he?), this tale treats the world of crime and its underground, akin to an occult underground. While there are no witches here, it is a great tale on how to possibly use a criminal organization. Again, here is Eve, who is not a witch, but she does have some occult, as in hidden, knowledge.

--

You could say Merritt’s greatest gift to the concept of the Occult in D&D is his treatment of magic as an old science rather than a simple list of spells. He has put his stamp on it with the idea of an older order of powers just beneath the surface of what we know. You will find cults and priesthoods, forbidden things that have survived the ages, secret rites, odd plants, and ancient deities; modern folk may write them off as superstition because they can't think of anything better. A rational sort might come by this world, but he won’t find it easy to master. Case in point, nearly every Merritt hero. 

Then there are the Witches of Appendix N. Merritt presents the witch as one who stands at the threshold. Whether she is a villain or a queen, a living idol or a guide, she is the one who understands the world’s older rules ahead of the hero. Certainly, before the hero does. 

She might be Madame Mandilip in her shop with her murderous dolls, or Yolara, the priestess of the Shining One. Perhaps she is Lur, all red hair and danger in some forgotten Alaskan valley, or Sharane, Ishtar’s darling and victim to a divine curse you couldn’t put a date on. 

He didn’t hand D&D the witch class on a plate, but he has provided a shelf full of witch-shaped ideas for us. In my book, that is enough to work with.

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

We are back in Ravenloft. Again.

And honestly, I am happy to be here.

I have talked about Ravenloft a lot over the years. A lot. I have covered the original I6 adventure, the 2nd Edition boxed sets, Realms of Terror, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft books, and into the 5th edition era with Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and more. Ravenloft is one of those settings I keep coming back to, not because I have to, but because it keeps speaking my language.

That language is Gothic horror.

More specifically, it is Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror, Dracula, Dark Shadows, foggy roads, terrified villagers, cursed castles, and vampires who are more than just another entry in the Monster Manual. That has always been part of my Appendix N. So when I first encountered I6 Ravenloft, it was not just another AD&D adventure to me. It was D&D finally doing something I had always wanted it to do. It wasn't Tolkien. It wasn't Conan, or any of the other books and tales people assume we read before encountering D&D. It wasn't the usual dungeon crawl. 

It was a Hammer Horror film with dice. It is what I always wanted from D&D.

Count Strahd von Zarovich mattered because he was not just a vampire. D&D had vampires before Strahd (hello Belgos), but Strahd was different. He had a history. He had a motive. He had a personality. He had a castle, a village, a tragedy, and the sheer theatrical arrogance to make the whole thing work. He was intelligent, ruthless, and absolutely convinced that his own damnation was someone else’s fault.

That is Ravenloft. Or at least, that is the beginning of Ravenloft. 

The setting has changed many times since then. And really, if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know all of this. But...It became a full AD&D 2nd Edition campaign world. It got its own boxed sets, its own domains, its own dark mythology, and eventually its two 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition versions. It came back in 5e with Curse of Strahd, and then in 2021 with Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Every edition has changed it, sometimes in ways I liked and sometimes in ways I had to think about for a while. But I have always believed that Ravenloft can survive reinterpretation. Horror does that. Dracula gets remade (and remade and remade). Frankenstein gets remade. Werewolves, ghosts, witches, haunted houses, and cursed families all get remade. Every generation gets a new set of horror classics to call their own. 

Ravenloft follows suit.

That brings me to Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, the new Ravenloft book for the revised 2024 Dungeons & Dragons rules. Or 5.5e. Or D&D 2024. Or whatever we are all calling it now.

This one is interesting because it is not really a replacement for Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. It is more like the book Van Richten’s Guide needed beside it.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a book of ideas. The Horrors Within is a book of things to use at the table.

That difference is everything.

I liked Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. I still do. I know some people wanted it to be more like the old 2nd Edition setting, with the Core, political borders, domain histories, and more of the classic campaign setting structure. I understand that. I love those books too. But I also said at the time that Van Richten’s Guide was doing something useful. It was not trying to rebuild old Ravenloft exactly. It was treating the Domains of Dread as a horror toolkit for modern 5e.

That worked for me.

It gave us Gothic horror, folk horror, body horror, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost stories, psychological horror, and all the other nightmare flavors Ravenloft can support. It gave us advice for building Domains of Dread and Darklords. It let Ravenloft become more than Barovia and a few neighboring spooky countries. It also gave me the tools to build my own Darklord and my own domain, which I did with Darlessa, my Vampire Queen.

But Van Richten’s Guide also had gaps.

The biggest one was obvious: almost no Darklord stat blocks.

I understood the design philosophy. A Darklord is not just a monster. A Darklord is the dark heart of a domain. They are not always meant to be fought. Sometimes defeating them means surviving them, understanding them, resisting them, or escaping the story they have built around themselves. That is all true.

But this is still Dungeons & Dragons. 

Eventually, someone will say, "I attack Strahd." 

And then you need rules. I mean...sure, why not, they are going to lose, but let's roll some dice.

That is where The Horrors Within makes its strongest case. The new book gives us 17 Darklord stat blocks. Strahd. Azalin Rex. Lord Soth. Hazlik. Viktra Mordenheim. Chakuna. Ebonbane. And yes, Cthulhu.

I will get to Cthulhu in a bit.

The inclusion of Darklord stat blocks immediately changes the usefulness of the book. It means the Darklords are no longer just concepts, villains, or tragic centers of gravity. They are table-ready. They have mechanics. They can face the party, haunt the party, hurt the party, and hopefully do all of that in a way that reflects their curse.

That last part matters. A Ravenloft stat block should not just tell me how hard the villain hits. It should tell me something about why they are damned.

• Strahd should not be just a vampire with a better cape. (Though it is a cool cape.)
• Azalin should not be just a Greyhawk lich with a Ravenloft address.
• Viktra Mordenheim should not be just a mad scientist NPC standing next to a flesh golem. 

A good Darklord stat block should say, mechanically, "this is what obsession looks like when the Mists have finished with it."

That is what I want from this book.

The structure also feels different from Van Richten’s Guide. The 2021 book gave us a broad survey of many domains. The Horrors Within focuses on 16 featured Domains of Dread. That means some domains from Van Richten’s Guide move to the margins, including Bluetspur, I’Cath, Richemulot, and The Carnival. That will disappoint some people. It disappoints me a little, especially with Bluetspur, since I liked seeing Ravenloft stretch into alien horror.

But I also understand the trade-off.

Ravenloft domains need space. They are not just countries. They are moral nightmares. A good domain needs a central sin, a Darklord, a curse, a population trapped in the consequences, and enough adventure material for the players to discover all of this the hard way. If focusing on fewer domains means those domains are more playable, then I can live with that.

And there are some interesting returns here. Sithicus and The Shadowlands bring back older Ravenloft material, including the sentient blade Ebonbane and that dark Arthurian fantasy mood that always sat well in Ravenloft’s broader horror geography. Darkon also gets more attention through Azalin Rex and Castle Avernus. That feels right. Azalin has always been one of Ravenloft’s most important figures, second only to Strahd in many ways, in my opinion. If Strahd is Gothic obsession, Azalin is intellectual arrogance, undeath, failed escape, and the refusal to admit that the cage may exist because of him.

That is Ravenloft, too.

The new player options are also very much part of the 2024 rules structure. We get seven subclasses: Reanimator Artificer, College of Spirits Bard, Grave Domain Cleric, Hollow Warden Ranger, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcery Sorcerer, and Undead Patron Warlock. We get Dhampir, Hexblood, Lupin, and Reborn as species. We get backgrounds like Haunted One, Mist Wanderer, Investigator, and Spirit Medium. We get Dark Gifts rebuilt as feats.

The Reanimator Artificer also feels perfect for Lamordia. The Hollow Warden Ranger sounds like something that has spent too much time walking where the Mists are thickest. The Grave Cleric, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcerer, College of Spirits Bard, and Undead Warlock all feel like they belong in this setting. Ravenloft player characters should feel like they have already been touched by something before the adventure begins.

That is where the Dark Gifts come in, and here is where I have my first real concern.

In Van Richten’s Guide, the Dark Gifts were strange, flavorful, and often story-heavy. They felt like bargains, curses, supernatural inheritances, or evidence that something had reached into the character’s life and left a mark. They were not always balanced perfectly, but that was part of their charm. Ravenloft should not always feel perfectly balanced. Sometimes the Mists give you exactly what you asked for and then make you regret the wording.

In The Horrors Within, Dark Gifts are rebuilt for the 2024 feat system. That makes them easier to understand, easier to balance, and easier to run. It also risks making them feel a little more like game widgets and a little less like curses. You know players will look to these as "rewards" and ignore the horror elements.

That is the trade-off of this book in miniature. It is more usable. It may also be a little less haunted.

The example that really sticks with me is the shift in how something like Symbiotic Being works. In older forms, that kind of gift depended on the relationship between the character and the entity inside them. The horror came from the story. What does it want? What does it whisper? What happens when you resist it? Now, by all accounts, the trigger is much cleaner and much more mechanical. Roll a 1 on a d20, and the thing stirs.

That is easier to run.

It is also less personal.

Now, I am not saying this is bad. New DMs need usable mechanics. Players need clarity. The 2024 rules have a design philosophy, and this book is clearly built to fit it. But Ravenloft is a setting where the messy parts matter. Horror is often found in the exception, the strange edge case, the thing that does not behave like the rules say it should.

So I will use these new Dark Gifts, but I already know I will be adding some of the old narrative teeth back in. Even if it means grabbing some older AD&D 2nd Ed material.

The Tarokka material, on the other hand, sounds like exactly the sort of thing I want. The Tarokka deck has been part of Ravenloft since the beginning. In I6, the Fortunes of Ravenloft gave the adventure replayability and mystery. In Curse of Strahd, the Tarokka reading became one of the defining ritual moments of the campaign. It is one of Ravenloft’s best props because it tells the players that fate is not abstract here. Fate has cards. Fate has a voice. Fate may be cheating.

The Horrors Within appears to give the Tarokka deck more mechanical weight in navigating the Mists and interacting with the domains. I like that a lot. That is exactly the kind of old Ravenloft idea that should be made more central, not less. If the Mists are the roads of Ravenloft, then the Tarokka should be one of the few maps that matters. 

Of course, in Ravenloft, even the map can betray you.

I also picked up the new Tarokka deck as well. I'll discuss that later on. 

The Haunted Bastions are another very 2024 idea that actually fits Ravenloft better than I expected. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduced Bastions as a form of player stronghold or home base. In a normal campaign, that can mean a tower, keep, workshop, temple, or guildhall. In Ravenloft, that same idea becomes much more interesting.

A home in Ravenloft should never feel completely safe.

A gothic manor, a lonely chapel, a cursed observatory, a half-reclaimed castle, a witch’s house at the edge of the woods, a laboratory in Lamordia, or a sanctuary surrounded by Mists: all of these work as Haunted Bastions. But they should also come with a question.

What does the house want?

That is the Ravenloft version of a Bastion. Not just a base. Not just a reward. A relationship with a place that remembers things you wish it did not. I have been thinking a lot of places lately and what sorts of "things" they remember; geography as occult memory. This is the Ravenloft version.

The adventures are also a major point in this book’s favor. The Horrors Within gives us one-shot adventures tied to the featured domains. This is exactly the sort of thing Van Richten’s Guide did not do enough of. That book made me want to run Ravenloft. This one seems designed to let me run Ravenloft with less prep. Well...not that I need much prep for Ravenloft these days.

But it still matters.

I know I am an old-school guy. I like weird maps, strange presentation choices, moody boxed sets, and books that feel like forbidden travel guides. But I am also a working DM. A working DM appreciates ready-to-use material. Give me the Darklord. Give me the domain. Give me the map. Give me the adventure seed. Give me the monster stats. Then I can do the rest.

The maps are part of that. Van Richten’s Guide had evocative, conceptual maps. They helped define mood. The Horrors Within leans harder into tactical, full-color, VTT-ready maps. That is not always my preferred style for Ravenloft, but it is useful. And usefulness counts.

This is also where I think the book resembles Domains of Dread in a modern way. Domains of Dread was a late 2nd Edition Ravenloft hardcover that gathered the setting into a more complete reference. It was not the beginning of Ravenloft. It was a summation. The Horrors Within feels a little like that for 5e and 5.5e. Curse of Strahd gave modern players Barovia. Van Richten’s Guide gave them the new conceptual framework. The Horrors Within gives them the operational version.

That is a good place for it to sit.

Now, about Cthulhu.

I am not opposed to cosmic horror in Ravenloft. Ravenloft has always been able to absorb different forms of horror. Gothic horror is the foundation, but the setting has room for mad science, ghost stories, mummy curses, slasher stories, folk horror, dark fantasy, witchcraft, haunted mansions, and yes, cosmic dread. Bluetspur already pushed Ravenloft toward alien horror. Lamordia has always had Frankenstein. Har’Akir has mummy horror. Sithicus has tragic dark fantasy. Ravenloft is not one horror story. It is a machine for making horror stories.

So, Innsmouth as a Domain of Dread? I can work with that. I think.

Elder Things, Mi-Go, Nightgaunts, and Shoggoths? Fine. Those are usable monsters, and I can absolutely see them crawling, flying, or oozing out of the Mists.

Cthulhu as a Darklord? That is where I pause.

Not because Cthulhu is too powerful. Power levels in D&D are always negotiable. The issue is conceptual. A Darklord is trapped by their own sin. The domain is a prison built around their desire, failure, crime, obsession, or refusal to change. That is intensely personal. Cosmic horror, at its best, is impersonal. The universe does not hate you. It simply does not care.

So if Cthulhu is a Darklord, then the book has to answer the Ravenloft question: what is the curse? What does Cthulhu want that the Mists deny? How does the domain torment him? What personal horror makes him fit the same metaphysical structure as Strahd, Azalin, Mordenheim, or Soth? We asked the same questions in the later 2nd Ed era, when Vecna ended up in Ravenloft. How can the Mists contain a God?

If the book answers these questions, well, I am interested.

If not, then I will use the monsters and leave Cthulhu where he belongs, dreaming in R’lyeh.

My oldest and I talked about this a lot since we picked up our copies. He is going to say this is just a Star Spawn of Cthulhu with delusions of godhood. I like that idea. I am still on the fence. 

Plus. Shouldn't it be Dagon? Dagon was the central mythos figure around Innsmouth.

This is the larger issue with importing cosmic horror into Ravenloft. It has to be translated. Ravenloft is not just a spooky multiverse junk drawer. At least it shouldn't be. It has its own moral and metaphysical logic. Evil leaves stains. Sin becomes geography. Desire becomes prison. The Dark Powers do not merely punish you. They arrange the world so that you can keep proving you deserve the punishment.

That is what makes Ravenloft different from other D&D horror. That is why the Darklords matter. That is why the domains matter. That is why the Mists matter.

There is also the broader production context. The Horrors Within arrives during D&D’s new "Season of Horror" approach, and it comes after a period of visible change at Wizards of the Coast, including the departures of long-time D&D figures Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. I do not want to overstate that in a product review, but it is hard not to notice. This book feels like part of a new publishing rhythm: more programmatic, more integrated with D&D Beyond, more tied to digital tools, maps, accessories, and seasonal branding. The newer 5.5 books even look different. 

That is not inherently bad, but it is different.

Ravenloft used to feel like something that escaped from the shadows of D&D. Now it is a coordinated product line with digital bundles, map packs, accessories, and mechanical integration into the 2024 rules. That is the nature of the game now. The question is whether the horror survives the repackaging.

So far, I think it can. BUT, (and this is an all capital but) it has to be negotiated very carefully.  

There is one more rules issue worth mentioning, though perhaps more as a side note than as a central part of the review: the Hexblade problem. The 2017 Hexblade Warlock was famously front-loaded. It gave Warlocks, and multiclass Paladins and Sorcerers, a very strong reason to take a one-level dip. The 2024 rules absorbed much of that melee Warlock identity into the base Pact of the Blade. That left the Hexblade with an identity problem. If every Blade Pact Warlock can do the signature Hexblade thing, then what is the Hexblade now?

The answer seems to be to move the Hexblade closer to the idea of a sentient magic weapon and a curse-bound warrior. That is more Ravenloft-friendly in flavor, honestly. A cursed blade with its own will is exactly the sort of thing that belongs in the Domains of Dread. But it also shows the larger issue of adapting legacy 5e material to the 2024 framework. Some old mechanics no longer have the same niche. Some old subclasses need a new reason to exist.

That is not really a flaw in The Horrors Within, but it is part of the same design moment. The 2024 rules want cleaner baselines. Ravenloft wants strange exceptions. The tension between those two impulses is all over this book.

So, where does this leave Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft?

Still useful.

Very useful, in fact.

I would not tell anyone to throw it out. Van Richten’s Guide is still the better book for understanding the 5e conception of Ravenloft. It gives you the broad view. It gives you the horror genres. It gives you the domain-building advice. It gives you a sense of Ravenloft as a modular horror engine. It is the book I would hand someone who wanted to know what modern Ravenloft can be.

The Horrors Within is the book I would hand to someone who wanted to run it this weekend.

That is the cleanest comparison.

Van Richten’s Guide tells you why Ravenloft works. The Horrors Within tells you what to roll. Both are useful. And they work well together.

For my own games, I suspect I would use both, and then still pull from the Black Box, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft book, Curse of Strahd, and whatever else is sitting on my Ravenloft shelf. Ravenloft has never been one book for me. It has always been a shelf. A haunted, but well-traveled, shelf, naturally.

If you already own Van Richten’s Guide, do you need The Horrors Within?

• If you are running Ravenloft with the 2024 rules, probably yes.
• If you want Darklord stat blocks, yes.
• If you want ready-to-run domain adventures, yes.
• If you want VTT-friendly maps, updated player options, and more monsters, yes.

If you only want the broad setting lore and horror advice, then Van Richten’s Guide may still be enough.

For me, though, the appeal is obvious. I want the Darklords. I want the Haunted Bastions. I want the Tarokka to matter. I want to see what they do with Sithicus, The Shadowlands, Castle Avernus, and Innsmouth. I want to see whether the monsters feel like Ravenloft monsters, not just horror-themed stat blocks.

As I read this in detail, I want to see whether this book remembers the most important thing.

Ravenloft is not scary because the monsters have more hit points. Ravenloft is scary because the monster used to be a person, and somewhere deep down, maybe still is. That is the horror. That is the tragedy. 

And that is why we keep going back into the Mists.

A Note about the "New" Format for 5.5 Books

Hasbro/Wizards has made some slight changes to the format of their "setting" books. I saw it in the Forgotten Realms ones and see it here now in the Ravenloft one. It is actually pretty good. I like what they have been giving us concept-wise. Backgrounds, history, new sub-classes, some spells, monsters. It is like getting the 2nd Ed Boxed set experience without the product bloat that was one of the reasons for TSR's death. 

I am not saying the books are perfect, and sometimes I still disagree with some of the content choices (see Cthulhu above), but I can't fault the way these are put together.

WotC's publishing schedule has slowed, but I'd still love to see some Mystara content in this format. I think 5.5 and Mystara would work well together.

RPG Retrospective: The Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG

 On this day in 1981, 45 years ago, I went to see the newest George Lucas/Steven Spielberg collab called "Raiders of the Lost Ark."  I went with my best friend Steven and it was a life changer for both of us. Steven watched it and wanted to become a big Hollywood director. I watched it and wanted to become a university professor. We both got to our dreams, more or less. Steven became an art director and is now fed up with Hollywood. I became a professor, but sold my soul to the dot-com world during the late 90s/early 2000s dot-com boom. I, too, had become a little burned out on academic life. 

But Raiders of the Lost Ark still remains a perfect movie in our minds. One we still talk about to this very day.

It is just too bad the RPG was so, well, terrible. At least that was my recollection of it. But is that true? 

Let's pull out my copy and have a deep dive into the game and what it has to offer.

Fortune and Glory, Kid

When TSR picked up the license for Indiana Jones, it looked like a slam dunk. After all, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been a massive success, Temple of Doom was hitting theaters, and TSR was flush with cash and ambition. Iron Crown had Middle-earth. Doctor Who and Star Trek had a home at FASA, and now Indy was coming to Lake Geneva. 

And let us not forget, this was TSR we were talking about, the very company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, and, by 1984, the excellent Marvel Super Heroes game.

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out… pretty much everything. 

TSR put out The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game in 1984. David "Zeb" Cook and John Byrne, the comic book writer, are credited with the design.  On the surface, it’s a boxed set with everything you'd expect: dice, minis (well, cardboard cutouts you had to assemble), a rulebook, character cards, and an introductory adventure. Inside, you get a chance to live out pulp adventures in the style of everyone’s favorite bullwhip-wielding archaeologist. Sounds great, right?

Except here’s the first problem: you had to play Indy. Or at best, one of a handful of established characters like Marion or Sallah. The rules didn’t include any way to make your own characters. That’s like handing a bunch of kids the Star Wars RPG and saying, "No, sorry, you can’t be smugglers or bounty hunters, you can only be Luke, Han, or Leia." Half the fun of role-playing is creating your own hero to drop into wild situations, and this game just locked the door on that entirely. It gives you some movie characters and tells you, "don't mess them up."

One could argue the later Indiana Jones Judge's Survival Pack made amends by introducing rules for original characters along with the kind of chases, ruins, and vehicles that ought to have been in the core box from day one. But that was the patch, if you will. TSR coming around to say "Oh, you wanted to role-play." But by then, the writing was on the wall. The original set had already conditioned people to think of this as the game where you couldn’t make your own character, and that is the way it was remembered.

The system itself is light, almost perfunctory. There’s some resolution mechanics, a few skill checks, and some chase and combat rules, but nothing that feels like it captures the frenetic energy of Indy punching Nazis or dodging rolling boulders. Instead, it feels like TSR wanted a quick "introductory RPG" to tie in with the movies without giving much thought to longevity or depth. The end result is that it plays more like a board game that forgot to include the board. Or, more on point, an RPG that forgot to include anything about role-playing.

There are percentile skill rolls versus Strength, Prowess, or Backbone, and the like. Nothing too difficult really.

There are rules for "danger" and some perfunctory chase rules (it is Indian Jones after all). So don’t think of it as mechanically useless. The bones are all there, you just have to look past some rather peculiar design decisions. 

But let's not pretend here. This is really not a good game. 

It is a shame, really. The ingredients for an outstanding Indiana Jones RPG were right there. You had the ancient ruins, the lost temples, secret cults, and their terrible artifacts. Nazis, gangsters, and the odd occult society. University politics and rival expeditions. Mummies, curses, ghosts, forbidden manuscripts, hidden cities, and desert tombs. Zeppelins and seaplanes, and a map with a red line across the ocean. You could build a campaign from all that without breaking a sweat.

Yet TSR produced an Indiana Jones game that was far too fixated on the man himself and not enough on his world. West End Games would get it right with Star Wars some years down the line. They grasped what was important: the player doesn’t want to be Luke or Han or Leia. He wants to inhabit the universe, with his own ship and his own Imperial entanglements and the kind of awful plan that somehow comes off.

Indiana Jones called for a World of Indiana Jones, as West End would call it later. All we got from TSR was the star when what we wanted was the stage.

The Problem with Being Indiana Jones

The system is just one problem. Take Indiana Jones: he lives because he is who he is. You don’t have to worry about him being put down by some guard in scene two or perishing in a truck chase. Even if he comes up short, it is in service of the plot. In a film, that is how it should be. But in a role-playing game it is another matter. The TSR version makes an effort to keep that sort of movie logic intact, but at the cost of any real peril. 

There is "Danger" but no real danger. 

Sure, Indy can have his moments, but the game will bend to accommodate him. Your heroes are not the run-of-the-mill pulp types putting their lives and limbs on the line; they are movie stars sporting a kind of narrative armor. I get why they went about it that way, but it doesn’t work for me.

What is the point of a pulp adventure if your character can’t come to grief? Maybe you shoot the swordsman, maybe you are the one who drops the gun. You could put your trust in the wrong guide or be unceremoniously thrown from the back of the truck. That is where the fun is. When the game goes to such lengths to shield the movie, it gets in the way of playing.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this RPG. It aspires to be an Indiana Jones movie when a good one ought to let you have an adventure in his style. They are not one and the same.

What It Gets Right

I wouldn’t want to be entirely unfair about it, though. There is much I like in this game.

To start with, it has the sense that Indiana Jones is a pulp character and makes no pretense of being a scholarly archaeological simulation. Good. What you get instead are your villains, your action, the clues and exotic locales, some perilous artifacts, and a kind of cliffhanger pacing. It puts Indy in his proper context, the same vein as Doc Savage or The Shadow, or one of those odd interwar stories from Republic serials and lost world fiction, where there is a blank spot on the map and someone is off on a secret expedition.

Then there is the speed of the thing. A slow, tactical affair would have been a disaster for an Indiana Jones game, so the fact that this is built for pace is important. Sure, it can be clunky at times, but it isn’t going to have you work out the tensile strength of your whip before you put it to use over a chasm. As it should be.

The Diana Jones Award and Nazi™

You could argue the afterlife of this game is nearly as good as the thing itself.

Game historians and fans know that TSR eventually had to pulp unsold copies of the boxed set after losing the license, which only adds to the mystique. One of the last copies to be burned was salvaged and became the Diana Jones Award. Which itself has been a focus of some gamer legend, with the original award now lost somewhere in the mail. 

There is a certain poetry to it, bordering on the mythic. The temple is destroyed but the artifact endures, you pull the relic from the ashes and it is handed down as a prize from one year to the next. In a way it has more of an Indiana Jones feel to it than the game did.

Then you have the old legend of the "Nazi™" figure that has been going around as long as anyone can remember. It is about as accurate as any gamer tale is, but then again, it is funnier for it. It has a ring of truth to it, the sort of thing a big 80s product with a name on it would get up to by mistake. The facts don’t have to be tidy for it to become part of the folklore.

Final Thoughts

There are some movies you can put on at any time, and they are just right; Raiders of the Lost Ark is still one of my perfect films. Put on that John Williams', score, and I am instantly 12 again, back in the Illinois Theater with my best friend. We were two kids looking at the same movie but seeing our own futures in it. He was watching the camera work, I was thinking of the classroom, yet we both saw the adventure.

You won’t get that from the TSR Indiana Jones RPG. It doesn’t come close to the feeling and perhaps never could. There is a fascination to its failure, though, in how instructive it is. It puts the distinction between adapting a story and a world in sharp relief. You see why player freedom has to be there, and that no license in the world is going to prop up a game if it loses sight of what players want to do when they sit down at the table.

They aren’t there to watch the hero. They want to be him. Or make their own kind of hero out of it, with his own hat and scars and bad decisions, and an impossible way out of a temple coming down around them.

For all that, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game isn’t some lost classic. More of a lost opportunity. I don’t mind owning it for that reason. A failed artifact has its place in a museum, or on my game shelf at the very least.

Indiana Jones and the Cauldron of Hecate

Create a character for a game with no character creation rules? Of course, I can't resist a challenge like this. Yes, there were character creation rules introduced later on, as I mentioned, but it was too little too late, really. Plus, I don't have those rules, so I can check them out. 

I mentioned above that watching this movie made me want to be a University professor, which I did for many years. So it would seem natural for me to want to stat up Prof. Scott Elders, my erstwhile self-insert character. Really, he is perfect since I have a Call of Cthulhu version where he is at a University researching occult artifacts. 

He is almost too perfect, in fact. The name of the game is "Indiana Jones," and bringing along Dr. Elders would be about the same thing as inviting Solar Pons into a Sherlock Holmes RPG to solve a case with Sherlock. No, I need someone who can look up to Indy, ask questions like "What is that, Dr. Jones?" and stand on their own.

I have the perfect choice, and she is a lot on my mind lately. Enter graduate student of ancient religions, Larina Nichols, from the University of Chicago.

How would she work this into this adventure? Simple, Indy has discovered some sort of clue that leads to the mythical "Cauldron of Hecate."  In typical movie tradition, I am also going to blend the myths of Hecate with the Cauldron of Cerriweden, in that it can be used to bring forth an army of undead soldiers, so of course, the Nazis, excuse me, Nazis™, want it.  Indy heads back to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to speak to Prof. Scot Elders, who was a grad student when he was there. Dr. Elders is not there, but his star grad student, Larina Nichols, is. She is able to translate the fragment and tells Indy she will tell him the rest of the translation when they get to Greece and Turkey! 

And off they go to Turkey, Greece, and wherever else, with Nazis hot on their tail and an army of the dead at the end. Plus, Indy, as far as I know, has never had to deal with a redhead before.

The best Indiana Jones adventures always have a few elements:

• A legendary artifact.
• A historical mystery.
• A rival faction.
• An expert who knows more than they admit.
• A supernatural truth hiding behind what everyone thinks is merely legend.

This has them all!

Larina Stephanie Nichols

Graduate student of Ancient Religions at the University of Chicago. 

Attributes (Normal/x2/½/¼)

Strength 46/92/23/11
Movement 52/104/26/13
Prowess 60/120/30/15
Backbone 76/152/38/19
Instinct 80/160/40/20
Appeal 92/184/46/23

Movement Rate (running): 20 squares (5 areas)/turn
Weapons: Knife
Money: $100
Languages: English, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Aramaic, Hittite
Irrational Fears: Fire
Notes:

I completely guessed at these. I figured she was slightly better at fighting than Willie (but only a little), a little under Indiy in intelligence, but she knows more languages. That is her "in" in this adventure; she speaks the languages Indy doesn't. Though I would say she is every bit as smart as Indy, if not smarter (that is her thing), but Indy is still the star of the show...er adventure. 

Since I have been going over her 1986 character sheet in detail recently, I am also bringing back her fear/fascination of fire here. 

She has a knife, likely a ritual blade she picked up somewhere, but this is a grad student with no training in weapons. She is not carrying a gun. 

In truth, I like this version a lot. I might try this version out as a 1930s Call of Cthulhu character one day. She needs her own theme music!