Fantasy Fridays: The Gate is Open! Yog vs Dark Sun

 "THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!"

- Dying Edict of the Ash Witch

These were the final words of the Ash Witch and the first words of the Wasted Lands of Yog campaign.

Last week, I was discussing the makeup of Yog: Dying Earth, Zothique, Hyperborea, Gor, and an assortment of other sword-and-sorcery, weird fantasy, and cheap paperback fare that I have put together over the years. I brought up this idea. The Dying Earth is clear on the fact that we are all going to die; Yog asks what we plan to do about it beforehand.

I mean to start putting some answers to that this week. An oddly fitting catalyst has presented itself in the form of another world in its death throes.

Dark Sun is making a comeback.

Wizards of the Coast announced at Gen Con that Athas will be back in 2027 as D&D’s first mature-rated setting. I am looking forward to it. I have always been fond of Dark Sun for the sorcerer-kings, the city-states, the perilous magic, and the feeling that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and those remaining must make do.

But the news has stirred up an old conversation. What does one do with the hard parts? Slavery, tyranny, genocide, brutality, and ecological ruin. These are what make Athas, yet they are at odds with much of today’s heroic fantasy.

I don’t know how Wizards will handle it. I haven’t read the new material, so I am not going to judge it now. I wouldn’t want to try and make Yog into some version of "Dark Sun done right." That would be silly and a bit juvenile. 

Athas is one thing, Yog is another.

The real question is how to put genuinely disturbing matters in a roleplaying context without either sanitizing them or making a spectacle of the whole affair.

How does one handle the hard topics?

This Is a Warning

Let me be extremely plain about this.

Yog is a brutal place. Here, one will find slavery, torture, exploitation, religious oppression, sadism, and sexual violence implied.

For centuries, the Priest-Kings have held sway over their city-states through fear, tradition, and violence. Their economies run on slaves born into bondage. There are professional torturers and priests whose duty is to sanctify the social order. Some make a living from it; others simply like it.

It is an important distinction. Sometimes cruelty is the work of an evil system, sometimes the system allows an evil person to be what he wants to be.

But there is another side to it.

I have made Yog brutal, not so the players can bask in it, but to give them something to fight for.

I have no use for pages of description detailing the degradations of the enslaved or graphic accounts of every atrocity under the Priest-Kings. At some point, "mature" content is just spectacle and says nothing of value. I am after consequences.

Take Constance, for instance. She is from Yog, and she has had terrible things done to her.

I won’t go into exactly what they were. There is no need. One can tell from the world she inhabited and the sort of men who held the reins of her life. The implication is enough.

I am not in denial that the worst happened, but I see no reason to make of her suffering some kind of entertainment for the reader's edification.

What matters is Constance. And the people who later step up for her. Deirdre helps her. The Ash Witch sees to her escape. Once free, Constance starts to help others. In a sense, that is the true beginning of her story. I want to know that the players meet Constance and see that she creates a new life. And then I want their characters to do the same for all the other Constances still left on Yog.

I have a particular affinity for Constance because she is, in an odd way, a mirror to one of my other characters, Candy Mercer from the Jackson, IL game. 

Candy is a sweet girl in a world where awful things happen. Yet Candy has her protections. She has a family and friends who care for her; there is a trio of witches and a host of teenagers who have made it their business to stand between any trouble and one of their own. With all that, Candy is able to put down roots. She gets to grow up. Later, she makes a life for herself as a nurse, becomes a mother, and I she becomes someone who helps others.

Constance is what you get when you take away those safeguards from Candy. Not out of weakness or any notion that she is due for a different fate. It is simply that nobody was there in time. That is, until they were. Deirdre says no. The Ash Witch will not have it. And Constance is free to be the one who can say no on behalf of the next person in line. That is the kind of game I want Yog to be. Constance is only one, after all. There are thousands more who are still waiting for someone to make an appearance.

Look at it this way. I see a distinction between acknowledging something and putting it on display. A game can let someone know that sexual violence is part of the setting without making the players part of it. It can have slavery in its world without dwelling on the lot of the enslaved. One can have sadists in the mix without the game itself turning sadistic. Implication is not always a form of cowardice; it can be restraint.

But I am not going to solve matters by feigning these things do not exist. 

You cannot solve a problem until you are willing to look it in the face.

Slavery is evil, as is religious tyranny, and the treatment of another human as property or as disposible. I don’t believe fantasy is made better by shying away from such truths, nor does a setting become mature just for the sake of having them. Maturity isn’t a matter of how much blood is spilled on the page but the understanding of what that blood signifies.

Which is why we come to the player characters.

The slavery in Yog is not for the players to have a go at living in a slave-holding world. It is there to be broken. The Priest-Kings are not meant to be admired for their decadence, but to be overthrown.

That is not to say every outing in Yog will be an insurrection against a city-state. Characters will still be robbing tombs and sifting through ancient ruins in the sand. They will encounter necromancers who have no qualms about using the most plentiful resource in the world, the dead. There are assassins, witches, strange monsters, and dying gods, and things so old one can’t tell if they were ever alive. It is a swords and sorcery game, plain and simple.

But the Priest-Kings are part of the scenery. Perhaps the merchant outfitting an expedition the PCs are guarding is quietly passing fugitives from one city to the next. Or the caravan they are hired to protect is carrying something other than wares. Maybe that old magical weapon just uncovered is enough to put a Priest-King in the ground. 

The characters will have to decide.

And to be clear on one point: the witches did not put resistance on the map. The people of Yog have been at it for centuries. They have hidden children and fugitives in villages, poisoned their masters. Priests have turned a blind eye to orders; soldiers have done the same. People have escaped.

People fled into deserts, where they might die, rather than remain somewhere they would certainly suffer.

Rebellions broke out. Most of them were put down. There were heroes, though their names have been lost to time for the most part.

I have no desire to present the Thorn Witch, the Red Sorceress, or the Ash Witch as some kind of powerful outsiders who had to show helpless folk what freedom was worth wanting. The people already had that in them. What the witches did was of a different order.

For centuries, the oppressed have been putting up a fight. The witches’ contribution was to show that the Priest-Kings can bleed.

That is a matter of some consequence. 

A slave market goes up in flames. A slaver is gone, and then another. The Red Sorceress has a mind for some trouble, and the soldiers the Priest-King sends after her never return. Word gets around that the Thorn Witch made short work of the soldiers after an escaped girl; someone else will tell you the tale another way. Then the Ash Witch makes her mark.

The stories take on a life of their own. They are sung, prayed over, and scratched into walls. Some are threats. Whether only half of them are true is beside the point.

The Priest-Kings can bleed. And if they can bleed, they can be beaten. In a society that holds its rulers to be beyond reproach, that notion is more perilous than any act of the witches.

But the Ash Witch does something worse still. She provides a destination.

The Witch Gate

I have mentioned the Gate before. For the witches who created it, it was simply The Gate, but the oppressed people of Yog have named it something else. The Witch Gate.

I will leave the details of the Gate, and where it might lead, to the imagination of the players and the characters. Those in Yog who are downtrodden call what lies beyond it *Haven*. The Priest-Kings have a word for it too: *Hell*.

Spoiler: The Gate leads to West Haven, where the Witch Queen waits on the other side.

Their priests are quick to denounce the witches as demons, preaching that the Ash Witch has opened a road to damnation and is stealing souls from the natural order. But those making a desperate bid for the Gate are not much moved by such theology. More to the point, in their minds, nothing on the other side can be worse than life here.

Prior to the Witch Gate, any escape was fleeting. One could put distance between themself and a master or a city, or hide with strangers in the desert. Yet they were still on Yog, subject to the next slaver or law that would see them in chains. The Witch Gate offers an actual way out, not just a chance to run a little farther and hope the slavers give up.

Opinions differ on what the Gate is. Some say the Ash Witch found a road that was always there; others say that she has made a new world. Some think Haven is a kingdom, some a city, some nothing but freedom. The Priest-Kings insist on Hell. Perhaps they are all wrong. 

With this Gate, the Ash Witch alters Yog more deeply than she ever could with a blade to a Priest-King’s throat. She leaves behind something that will outlast her. The witches are a legend, but the Witch Gate is a permanent fact of the world. And a dangerous one at that.

First, they learn the Priest-Kings can bleed.

Then they can lose.

Now they understand the Priest-Kings do not have the final say on whether you remain.

That last bit is likely to unnerve them.

And it is the most important part of the campaign.

The Ash Witch Falls

And then she is dead.

This is the point at which I want the game to start. Not in the middle of the great witches’ exploits, but in their wake. The Ash Witch, The Thorn Witch, and The Red Sorceress. They have had their day and left their mark on Yog in ways the Priest-Kings cannot undo. Now they are gone.

There is no standing behind the Ash Witch and letting her sort things out. She dies.

As she falls, her voice is heard across the land.  Maybe they hear it with their ears. Maybe they hear it in dreams. Maybe a Priest-King wakes, breathing heavily, because the words are suddenly inside his head, louder than any scream he has caused.

Maybe an enslaved woman working in a field stops what she is doing and somehow knows that, somewhere beyond the horizon, a dying witch has just spoken.

It doesn't really matter how the message travels.

Everyone hears the final Edict of the Ash Witch:

THE GATE IS OPEN! THE GATE IS DEFENDED!

These are the campaign’s opening lines as much as they are the last of the Ash Witch. And the second carries as much weight as the first.

The Gate is open; you can escape.

The Gate is defended; they won’t be able to just take you back.

As for who is doing the defending? I will not say in the game. The Priest-Kings would have you believe it is demons. Some maintain that the dead Ash Witch herself is on the other side. A few witches will only smile if you put the question to them, while others claim the Gate is its own protection. What is beyond dispute is that the Ash Witch is gone and the Gate is still there.

A slave owner may wake to an empty room and find no sign of where his property has gone. A Priest-King will have his sermon ready on the soul-stealing ways of witches, though someone in the pews will be hearing something quite at odds with his intentions. There is an exit. And once that is known, the cage loses its permanence.

This Is Where the Heroes Come In

One can get used to almost anything, but that does not make it right. For as long as anyone in Yog can remember, the Priest-Kings have been saying this is the way of things. Their forebears lived so. The temples call it sacred, the merchants necessary, the soldiers call it law. Given time, the monstrous becomes normal when one has no memory of an alternative.

The world has made a habit of suffering. The heroes have not.

I could make no more telling statement about Yog. 

Perfection is not required of the heroes any more than of the witches. Some are vengeful or prone to killing where another witch would show mercy. After a lifetime of battling monsters, one has to wonder if the line has been crossed. Resistance is not a blanket justification for every deed.

But heroism can be as straightforward as looking at what has been accepted and saying:

No. This is wrong.

And then acting on it.

That is the distinction between Yog and a fantasy world done up in dark colors for the sake of it. I have no desire to see how much misery I can cram onto a map; I want to see the response to it. Which brings me to the talk around Dark Sun. Not because Yog is superior, or that Athas ought to be handled my way. Athas is what it is. But it is worth asking why we put such material in a game.

With Yog, I know why. To be opposed.

Let the sun go dark in time. Let the kingdoms and towers and Priest-Kings become yet another stratum under the sand. Everything dies. But there are chains to be broken in the present. There are people like Constance who require someone to come to them now.

The Ash Witch, the Thorn Witch, and the Red Sorceress had their say. They are dead and cannot see it through. That is as it should be in a role-playing game.

The Ash Witch’s last words are the campaign’s first.

From here on in, it is up to the player characters.

Zothique, the Dying Earth, and Yog

 Last week I talked about the Dying Earth. Since this is last Monday before I get back to my Mirror Mondays, I do want to hold up another mirror, even if it is at an oblique angle.

So I find myself thinking of Yog again. More to the point, the Wasted Lands of Yog. Using the Wasted Lands RPG.

In a way, Yog is my own take on the Dying Earth setting, but I am not drawing from a single well. I have no desire for Yog to be just another Dying Earth or some other swords-and-sorcery affair with a red sun hanging over it all. Those are fun, of course, but we have a lot of games for that.

I want to convey to Yog an age that is almost impossible to put into words. The people who make their home now are walking atop entire civilizations that have come and gone. You will find kingdoms built on the ruins of older ones, by builders who could not have told you who put those ruins in place. The magic is as old as it is perilous, and one gets the impression it was better known to those who perished millennia ago than to the ones making use of it today.

History here does not run in a straight line; it is a matter of layers. Some of those layers get turned over, others have a way of waking up. I would say that is Vance’s influence.

But The Dying Earth is not what Yog is. Not exactly, anyway. 

Look at the gaming DNA, and you will also see plenty of Hyperborea. Jeffrey Talanian has put together an RPG that is part old-school D&D, part weird science-fantasy, and part swords & sorcery. He takes his cues from Howard, Lovecraft, and above all Clark Ashton Smith, yet he never loses sight of the fact that it has to function as a game. That is something I value.

Yog can have its share of dying-world philosophy, but at the end of the day I need my characters to be out there breaking down doors, sifting through ruins for ancient magic and the like, or putting an end to monsters. They will uncover things best left in the ground. Hyperborea allows for that sort of thing, with its mix of horror and the odd bit of impossible science.

Then you have Zothique.

For the mood of Yog, Clark Ashton Smith’s work is perhaps the most significant. I have talked a lot about Zothique in the past. It is the final continent of an Earth in the far future. The lands we know have been under the sea for eons while others have made their appearance and sunk again in the vastness of time. The sun is old, the world is in its last age, and much of history and science is a memory. Magic is back.

Smith was at it in the 1930s, well before Vance put pen to paper for The Dying Earth in 1950. And if Vance can be dangerous, Zothique is consumed by death.

You will find necromancers everywhere. It is not confined to the fellow in black robes in the tower on the edge of town. Sorcerers are raising kingdoms from corpses, lovers won’t stay in their graves, and tombs hold things with ambitions of their own. One could be in a city and feel as though it were a monument to a civilization that has already had its funeral.

In tales like "The Empire of the Necromancers" or "The Charnel God" (two of my favorites), death is not an interruption. It is the landscape. In some places, you might not be able to tell where life leaves off and death takes over.

That is very much how I see Yog. In a sense, Zothique is as decadent as I would have it be for Yog. You will find your share of kings and princes, merchants and priests, sorcerers and torturers, not to mention thieves and wanderers. Yet one gets the impression that very few are concerned with making tomorrow any better.

Then again, why put in the effort? There is little tomorrow to be had.

Kingdoms may come and go, but no one has much faith that they will endure. Religions make their way, though their deities are likely just old ghosts from a bygone era. And while cities hold on to life, the deserts are there to swallow them up, kingdom by kingdom. It all has a temporary quality about it, even civilization itself. That is what I am after on Yog.

Vance provides the ancient world, the oddity of magic and knowledge long since put aside, and the absurdity of folk carrying on with their small-time schemes under a waning sun. Hyperborea offers the gameable swords & sorcery structure; on its map a barbarian or a witch can rub shoulders with a weird monster or some relic of ancient tech, and no one needs to make an issue of it.

But from Zothique, I take the death.

Not in the sense of a high body count, but as entropy. The end of empires and languages and gods. A city left to rot. A tradition of magic is vanishing because the last adept who knew it is gone and taught no one. Whole ways of seeing the world are being buried in the sand.

I want to put that into Yog. I want ruins whose names are no one’s recollection. Gods known only by what was chiseled into a tomb. Spells so old that the question of whether their maker was human is a matter of debate. Dead civilizations layered on top of other dead ones. The people of Yog don’t live amid the detritus of a single past, but of many. That makes a difference.

It goes some way to explaining the necromancy on Yog. The living are a minority compared to the dead, and the weight of those ages is upon us. To a necromancer, it is less a transgression than tapping into the world’s greatest resource: its history.

There are some ways in which I part company with both Vance and Smith.

As mentioned previously, I am also taking influence from other sources. Raven, Swordsmistress of Chaos is not great, but fun. I did my playtesting of Wasted Lands using Raven, and it was a lot of fun. The world fits. I am also mining Gor. Gor is not great, nor is it fun. BUT it does give me some great antagonists to fight against. Something that Vance and Smith do not really do. 

There are things about Gor that are useful to me.

The city-states. The strange cultures. The decadent courts. The merchants, warriors, priests, assassins, and thieves. A world that can feel ancient and brutal even when remnants of advanced technology are hiding behind the curtains. And, of course, the Priest-Kings.

I am even using that name on Yog, though my Priest-Kings are not Norman's alien rulers. Mine are human. Painfully, disappointingly human.  They rule the city-states of Yog through religion, tradition, violence, and fear.

And then there is slavery. You can't really talk about Gor without talking about slavery, particularly the sexual slavery of women. It is not some incidental bit of background decoration in those books. It becomes fundamental to Norman's vision of the world and, eventually, to the philosophy he is trying to sell.

That is where Yog takes a very different road. I don't want to recreate Gor, vis-à-vis a Dying Earth lens. 

I want to burn Gor to the fucking ground. 

Or, more to the point, I want the player characters to be able to do it. 

I want that fantasy woman on the cover of the sleazy 70s and 80s paperback to be the one saying to the oppressors, "Everything dies. But you are dying first."

Yog is a world at the end of things, to be sure. But I don’t see everyone there as ready to make peace with it. Let the sun die if it must. Let the empire become another stratum for someone to walk on. Those still drawing breath now are going to put up a fight for it. They will face down monsters and slavers and Priest-Kings and any king or sorcerer who thinks a dying world is a license to ruin the rest of your days. 

And quite a few of the people doing the fighting are going to be witches.

Perhaps that is the line between the two. The Dying Earth says "we are all going to die." Yog wants to know what you intend to do about it first.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic and the Secret Appeal of Forbidden Books

I am currently reading Manly Wade Wellman for my Witches of Appendix N. He has a lot of occult investigators and talks a lot about dangerous occult texts. There is a strange magic to being told a book is dangerous.

Not real magic. Not the kind the pamphlets warned us about. Not the sort of thing that appears when you mispronounce something in Latin while standing in a chalk circle at midnight. I mean the older, more human kind of magic. The kind that happens when an adult lowers their voice, points at a book, and says, "You should not be reading that."

For a certain sort of kid, that is not a warning.

It is an invitation.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately while working on my Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL projects. I have also been going back through some old Satanic Panic videos, both vintage and retrospective. Some are from the era itself. Some are modern looks back. One or two are modern warnings that feel like they could have been broadcast in 1986 with very little editing.

I am not here to dunk on them. Well. Not entirely.

Some of this material is ridiculous. Some of it is unintentionally hilarious. Some of it is sad. Some of it is built out of real grief aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it comes from people who were clearly frightened by a world changing faster than they knew how to handle.

But all of it circles the same idea 

The fear was not really just about Dungeons & Dragons. It was not just about heavy metal. It was not just about horror movies, Smurfs, He-Man, E.T., or some plastic wizard in the toybox. The fear was about children having access to an imaginative life that adults could not completely supervise.

And that, I think, is where the forbidden book gets its power.

I have written about the Satanic Panic before. Back in 2024, I said I was fascinated by it because I had lived through it and, as someone who was not religious, the whole panic was confusing to me. I also admitted something else that still feels true: my own teenage reaction to all of it absolutely influenced my early D&D games. Lots of undead. Lots of demons. And, yes, lots of witches. Immature? Sure. I was a teenager. That was practically my job. But it was also fruitful. Some of that old material has never really left me. It just waited for better books to live in.

The Panic in the Toybox

One of the great artifacts of the era is Turmoil in the Toybox. If you have never seen it, it is one of those videos that feels like it was assembled in a church basement, a public access studio, and a fever dream all at the same time. Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips seem convinced that the devil is hiding in every toybox, or at least making a pretty serious attempt to franchise there.

• The Smurfs? Suspicious.
• Masters of the Universe? Dangerous.
• E.T.? Worth a second look.
• Dungeons & Dragons? Obviously trouble.

The whole thing is amazing because it does not merely worry about D&D. It worries about the entire imaginative ecosystem of childhood. Toys, cartoons, commercials, fantasy symbols, magic words, Saturday morning television, action figures, and role-playing games all become part of one invisible machinery. The toybox is no longer a toybox. It is a grimoire with plastic hinges.

That sounds like a joke, but that really is how the panic worked.

The D&D section is especially perfect. The game pieces, they tell us, include witches, wizards, necromancers, clerics, evil magic-users, and all the usual suspects. Good versus evil becomes white witchcraft versus black witchcraft. Someone even claims that when game pieces are burned, screams come out of the fire because spiritual forces have inhabited them.

Now, look. That is nonsense. But it is also myth-making.

The panic did not merely misunderstand Dungeons & Dragons. It mythologized it.

That is the funny thing. The adults who wanted to make the game smaller made it larger. They turned rulebooks into occult manuals, dice into ritual objects, miniatures into idols, character sheets into dangerous documents, and the Dungeon Master into some sort of suburban necromancer with graph paper.

For the average kid, D&D was a game. A weird, wonderful, sometimes confusing game with too many charts and not enough hit points at 1st level.

But after the panic got hold of it? 

Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.

The Book They Told You Not to Read

The Satanic Panic did not create the fire of D&D’s mystique, but it poured gasoline on it.

The books already looked strange. The Monster Manual was full of demons, devils, dragons, undead, and things with names that sounded like they had crawled out of some medieval marginalia. The Dungeon Masters Guide felt like an occult textbook even when it was mostly explaining initiative, treasure tables, magic item creation, and why you should never let the players get away with too much.

Then the grown-ups started saying these books were dangerous.

Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.

In the 1980s, D&D books became contraband grimoires in the popular imagination. They were passed from hand to hand, argued over in churches, hidden from certain relatives, discussed on television, condemned in pamphlets, and defended at kitchen tables by kids who were absolutely certain that none of the adults understood what was actually happening.

Most of the time, the kids were right.

The game was not teaching us how to summon demons. It was teaching us how to imagine consequences. It was teaching us how to map darkness. It was teaching us that monsters had names, rules, weaknesses, treasure types, and armor classes.

That is powerful. Not Satanic. Not corrupting. Powerful. And power is always frightening to someone.

Or as my mom once so eloquently said about D&D, "This is nothing but Mythology and math!"

The Wrong Demons

One of the more painful parts of looking back at the Satanic Panic is realizing how often adults named the wrong demons.

There were real kids in pain. There were real families struggling. There were real cases of depression, isolation, abuse, grief, mental illness, and fear. But instead of asking harder questions, too many people blamed the game, the records, the horror movies, the toys, the novels, the black t-shirts, the dice.

That is the actual horror.

Not that adults believed in demons. I write about demons all the time. My newest book, Codex Qliphothica, is full of things no sensible person would want crawling out of the wrong side of creation.

The horror is that they named the wrong demons.

That is something I touched on in my 2022 A-to-Z post. In the real world, there is no worldwide Satanic conspiracy. There are no secret armies of Satanists trafficking children through every daycare, pizza parlor, and game store. But in a horror game, there can be demons, devils, evil spirits, and worse. The trick is not to make the panic true. The trick is to understand that people are often looking in the wrong direction. Sometimes the evil is not a cult at all. Sometimes it is perfectly ordinary people who use fear to hurt the "undesirables" in their own community.

That idea matters a lot to me, especially for Jackson, IL. In a town like Jackson in 1986, it is easy to imagine a parent seeing a TV preacher or a warning video and suddenly looking at everything in their kid’s room differently. The D&D hardback. The heavy metal cassette. The horror VHS tape. The plastic skeleton warrior. The fantasy paperback. The notebook is full of strange names. The girl at school who wears a triple-goddess necklace and knows too much.

Most of the time, the adults are wrong.

But this is Jackson. Sometimes they are wrong in the direction of something true.

That is the sweet spot for horror.

In the real world, the panic was destructive because it mistook imagination for corruption. In fiction, though, we can ask the more interesting question: what if the panic was wrong about the cause, but not wrong that something was there?

• What if the book was just a game book, but the thing watching from the closet was real?
• What if the record was harmless, but the voice on the blank tape was not?
• What if the toy was just plastic, but the child was right when she said it moved after midnight?

That is not the Satanic Panic being correct. That is horror using the emotional vocabulary of the panic and aiming it at better targets.

Click to get your own!

 My Life With the Satanic Cult

This is where it stops being only media history for me.

I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois. In 2024 I wrote about a moment from around 1985 or 1986 when someone supposedly found a "satanic altar" in a cornfield south of my high school. I remember the panic ripping through the school. I remember being fascinated and horrified by it. Fascinated by how fast everyone reacted. Horrified by how quickly it changed people. The next day, people wore homemade "Satan Busters" armbands featuring an inverted cross within a red buster circle.

That is the kind of detail no amount of research can invent better than memory.

I was already a D&D kid. I was already interested in witches, monsters, demons, horror, occult books, and the kinds of things polite adults thought you should probably not be reading. I was also an atheist in a place where the average person on the street did not know, or care to know, the difference between atheist, Satanist, witch, gamer, metalhead, or just "weird kid."

The assistant principal, who was a decent guy, told me and some of my gamer friends that we should keep our D&D books at home until all this stupid shit blew over. He was probably right. I still hated it.

I hated the idea that something I wanted to read had to be hidden because a mob of scared idiots had decided books were dangerous.

That feeling has never really left me.

And yes, as I wrote before, my love of psychology was probably strengthened then. So was my love of witches. No one was trying to burn me, not literally, but they were trying to burn the things they feared. And there were book burnings in town. Real ones. People on the conservative religious side burning D&D books and other things they did not understand.

That matters.

Because once you have seen people burn books, you never look at forbidden books the same way again.

Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf

By 1986, the forbidden book was not alone. It had a lot of company.

There was the forbidden record album, especially if someone claimed the lyrics meant something different when played backward. There was the forbidden horror movie from the video store, the one with a cover more dangerous than the movie itself. There were forbidden toys, forbidden cartoons, forbidden symbols, forbidden bands, forbidden fantasy novels, forbidden magazines, forbidden games.

The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.

That is why a movie like Trick or Treat is such a perfect artifact of 1986. It takes the heavy metal panic seriously enough to turn it into a horror plot. A dead rock star comes back through a record. The music really is dangerous. The adults' warning about Satanic rock is, inside the logic of the movie, kind of right.

That is hilarious. It is also revealing, and wonderful for my games.

Horror loves taking the thing adults are panicking about and saying, "Fine. But what if it really was haunted?"

• What if the record really does speak something backward?
• What if the toy really does know your name?
• What if the book really does open a door?
• What if the game really does teach you something you were not supposed to know?

That is not how the real world works. But it is absolutely how good horror works. It is very much how Jackson works.

The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away

The funny thing is, the Satanic Panic did not completely vanish. It changed clothes.

In 2022 I wrote that if you think this "corn-filled nugget" was left behind in the 1980s, I had some news. The panic’s old shape involved Satanists, daycare centers, trafficking, cannibalism, and ritual abuse. Later versions involved Pizzagate, QAnon, and other conspiracy nonsense that kept recycling the same fears in new packaging. 

That is why a modern Christian response to D&D can still feel so oddly familiar. The video is new. The anxieties are old. Role-playing as spiritual danger. Spellcasting as a gateway. Tiamat as proof of pagan contamination. D&D books as corrupting objects. Christian parents being warned to keep the game out of the house. It is all there, just with better lighting, HD resolution, and modern YouTube pacing.

I do not say that to mock people’s faith. I know plenty of Christians who play D&D, write horror, love fantasy, and understand perfectly well where the game ends and the real world begins.

But the panic itself? That old habit of flattening every strange symbol into “Satanic”? That is still with us.

And honestly, from a horror writer’s point of view, it is hard not to be fascinated by it.

The Witch Was Always There

Here is the part that matters most for Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

The panic kept pointing at the Witch.

Even when people were talking about D&D generally, the real charge was around magic. Spellcasting. Divination. Necromancy. Enchantment. Demons. Spirits. Symbols. Curses. The old gods. Forbidden knowledge. Books that teach you things.

Again and again, the panic caught sight of the Witch's shadow and recoiled.

I want to do the opposite. I want to look directly at her and say, "Yes. You belong here."

The Witch was always part of fantasy gaming, even when the game did not quite know what to do with her. She was there as the evil enchantress, the village wise woman, the hag in the woods, the priestess of the old gods, the herbalist, the oracle, the charm-worker, the necromancer, the woman everyone feared and visited anyway.

• She was there in the margins.
• She was there at the edge of the village.
• She was there in the spell list.
• She was there in the panic.

The mistake was reducing her to "evil spellcaster" or treating her as merely a monster. The Witch is older than that. Stranger than that. More useful than that. She is better than that.

The Witch belongs to the place where folklore, religion, fear, healing, social suspicion, forbidden knowledge, and personal power all overlap. Which is to say, she belongs in D&D perfectly.

That is what Advanced Witches & Warlocks is about. Not making the panic true, but reclaiming the imaginative territory the panic could not stop pointing at.

High School Is the Real Haunted House

The Satanic Panic also helped sharpen something else for me: the horror of being a teenager and having adults decide what your symbols mean before you get to explain them.

I came back to that in my Monsterhearts post, where I talked about Larina in 1986. High school is already horrifying. Add the Satanic Panic, a sleepy Midwestern college town, and a girl everyone already suspects is out in the woods sacrificing animals and calling up demons, and you have something that feels very close to the emotional center of Jackson, IL. The truth, of course, is smaller and stranger. Larina is more likely to be in her attic room listening to her dad’s Yes albums than leading a coven in the cornfields. But rumor has never needed truth to grow teeth.

That is the Jackson mood. I talked about this in detail last week.

The town does not need every parent to believe there is a demon in the toybox. It only needs enough of them to wonder. Enough to whisper. Enough to throw away a book, forbid a game, search a bedroom, call a pastor, or look twice at the quiet girl with the strange necklace and the too-old eyes.

And the kids? The kids know the adults are wrong. Mostly.

These Are the Books You Were Warned About

So here is my cheeky little sales pitch, and I am only half joking.

These are the books you were warned about in 1986.

Codex Qliphothica is on the way out, and it is very much a demon book. But it is not a "everything dark is Satanic" book. That was always one of the dullest parts of the panic. It flattened everything. Devils, demons, pagan gods, witches, ghosts, occult symbols, fantasy monsters, and rock music all became one big smear of "darkness."

Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.

The Qliphoth are not generic devils. They are not just demons with a different coat of paint. They are shells, refuse, wounds, corruptions, anti-creation, things that should not have survived the making of the world and yet did. They are what happens when the cosmos has a scar and something learns to live inside it.

That is much more interesting than "the devil is in the toybox."

Advanced Witches & Warlocks comes from the other side of the same forbidden bookshelf. It asks what old-school fantasy gaming looks like when the Witch is not a joke, not a monster, not an afterthought, and not simply a reskinned magic-user. What if she had been there properly all along? What if the game had made room for occult magic as something distinct from arcane study and divine authority?

And Jackson, IL is where all of this comes home.

Jackson is 1986 as a haunted town. It is school lockers and church warnings, mall bookstores and strange kids, rumors and records, public access panic and real shadows behind the gym. It is the place where adults blame D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and witchcraft because those are the monsters they know how to name.

But Jackson has older monsters. Jackson has quieter monsters. Jackson has the things that were listening while everyone argued about the wrong books.

The Secret Appeal

The secret appeal of forbidden books is not that they are evil. It is that they promise the world is larger than you were told. That is the real danger.

A forbidden book says there are secret doors. It says names matter. It says monsters can be known. It says the dead might speak, the old gods might stir, the map might continue past the edge, and the strange kid might not be strange for nothing.

That is why the warnings failed. They told us the books were dangerous. We believed them; we just understood danger differently.

For some of us, danger meant possibility. It meant mystery. It meant there was something behind the ordinary world, something the adults were either too frightened or too tired to see.

That is the heart of fantasy gaming. That is the heart of occult horror. That is the heart of every witch story worth telling.

In 1986, that promise might have been sitting on a bookshelf with a dragon on the cover.

• Or in a toybox.
• Or in a record sleeve.
• Or on a VHS tape from the back room of the video store.
• Or in the hands of the quiet girl at school who knew more than she should.

And if someone told you not to open it?

Well...You were probably going to open it.

Mirror Shard: The Jackson Satanic Panic

I feel like I have talked about this one a lot already. Partially in posts here and all weekend at EGG Con. In "Am I Evil," the Satanic Panic comes to Jackson, but not in the way the town's folk expect. It is in the form of Moria Elizabeth Zachary. She looks like a nice girl. She wears fuzzy sweaters. She is polite. She has an ugly dog she holds. And she is utterly evil.

Darren Vale acts evil, but he is really sort of a joke. Sylvia Velasco is evil, but not the way everyone thinks she is. People even think Faye Thorne is evil, she isn't, but her family is. 

As my co-creator of NIGHT SHIFT, Jason Vey, commented this past weekend, the Satanic Panic in Jackson takes on new dimensions. 

And of course I have my own real-world history from the real-world Jacksonville. Sure, it is not as dramatic as some other tales of the Satanic Panic, but it has the advantage of being mine. 

There is just too much material here to use. Really...there is too much material NOT to do this. 

Links

Videos

• D&D is Satanic, from the classic "Turmoil in the Toybox." A must-watch!
• Trick or Treat (1986) The Satanic Panic of the 1980s (Retrospective)
• The Satanic Panic: A Brief History. A great retrospective and overview of the Satanic Panic and D&D's place in it.
• KSTP Twin Cities Live August 1986: Satan is in your Child’s Bedroom. From the day, the Satanic Panic sealed in amber for us to enjoy.
• Christian Concerns about Dungeons & Dragons, newer, but it shows that 40 years later, people still keep making the same nonsensical mistakes.

My Posts

• Satanic Panic!
• A to Z of Witches. O is for Occult Panic and Obeah. Links to Turmoil in the Toybox
• AtoZChallenge2022: S is for Satanic Panic
• AtoZChallenge2024: S is for Satanic Panic

The Witches of Appendix N: Gardner Fox

Gardner Francis Fox is an interesting member of the Appendix N canon. Fox is one of a small few I can find that has also published in the pages of Dragon Magazine (Issue #44 and Issue #55) (L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's "The Green Magician" was published after Pratt's death). He also had a celebrated career at DC comics, where he created some of my favorite characters, including Zatanna. 

Since today is his birthday, let's dive into his mentions in Appendix N. 

Kothar Series

Kothar is a giant blonde-haired, blue-eyed barbarian from the far north, weilding a mighty sword. His world of Yarth seems to exist at the very end of time. There are five Kothar books, and they are largely collections of shorter novellas. There is a continuity between them, so they do follow one from the other. Here, demons and gods are used somewhat interchangeably. 

The Sword of the Sorcerer

The first Kothar tale gives three different sorts of witches. First is Red Lori, the beautiful redheaded half-succubus witch; she is a proper witch whose skills seem to be both "necromantic" and "priestessly." She haunts Kothar throughout his series. She spends half her time wanting to kill Kothar, the other half taunting him, making me think she actually likes the barbarian. 

Queen Elfa is a Queen, but she is also described as a witch and the main antagonist of Red Lori. She has some sort of relationship with the witch Fristhia, who is our old, hag-like witch.

This tale also gives us hydras, dragons, and a lich. His other books follow a similar pattern of Kothar being broke, hungry, and/or thirsty (for ale, but yeah that other one too) and stumbling into trouble.

The Woman in the Witch-Wood. Here we get a witch, the Lady Alaine, and a warlock. 

The Demon Queen. Queen Candara of Kor is a Queen and part demon. She has some magic and serves a demon-god for youth and beauty. She serves demons, but not so much that she seems to be a warlock.

The Conjuer's Curse. We open the story with Stefanya, who is about to be burned as a witch. She served a wizard named Zoqquanor. Her life is linked to that of Zoqquanor so that if he dies, she dies, and vice versa. Stefanya reminds me a bit of Myrnis later on.  She isn't a witch, but that doesn't stop the angry mob.

There is a flashback to younger Kothar meeting a "wild woman" named Ursula. Later on, he meets another wild woman named Lupilina. They could be described as a "Bear Witch" and "Wolf Witch" respectively.  

In Kothar and the Wizard Slayer, we see Kothar team up with his "arch enemy," the witch Red Lori. I say in quotes because they have been having a love-hate relationship throughout the books. They travel and work together to see who is killing all of the mages and necromancers in the world of Yarth. 

I can't help but think about what I would have done differently with my own witches if I had read about Red Lori beforehand. Would Larina have ended up different? Maybe. Red Lori would have been something like a spiritual godmother to Larina had I read these first. Who knows, maybe some of Red Lori's DNA filtered down via the pages of AD&D to Larina anyway. 

Kyrik Series

Kyirk is, wait for it, a giant blonde-haired, blue-eyed barbarian from the far north, weilding a mighty sword.

There are three Kyrik books. Kyrik starts his tale dead. But we are not going to let that stop him. We actually get a witch, or a sorceress, Aryalla, before any other character. She finds a statue of Kyrik and, with the help of three demons, brings Kyrik back from the dead after a thousand years. 

His girlfriend, Myrnis, sometimes shows witch-like powers, but that usually happens when she is possessed by the demon-goddess Illis. 

Kyrik is described as a warrior-warlock. He does not cast spells, but he does get help from the demon-goddess Illis.  

--

So I have some issues with both series. In Kyrik's series, he was "dead" for 1,000 years, but he finds a gem in a room he had been in 1,000 years earlier, and his hunting lodge is still standing. Maybe if he had been trapped in the statue for 100 years, it would have been more believable. It is a complaint I have for many of Fox's tales. You can reduce any time he gives by 10x and get a better number. Same with Kothar, but here it is 100s of thousands of years. True Kothar is at the very end of time and would be more at home in the Hyperborea RPG than, say, Wasted Lands.

Kyrik seems a little more lustful for life than Kothar. Kyrik also finds the "Romany" girl, Myrnis, and stays with her for the whole series. The only time he is "unfaithful" to her is with a deposed Queen who looks exactly like her. Kothar, for all his lusting, seems relatively tame. Unless the girls he meets, he spends his nights with "off page", his only true obsession (and may I add equal) is the witch Red Lori. Sure, there are, that are more than implied, a serving girl and Queen Candara, for Kothar in particular.

Pretty tame, really, given he was also the author of "Cherry Delight" and "The Lady for L.U.S.T." vintage sleaze spy novels.

The biggest issue between these two tales is that Kothar and Kyrik might as well be the same person. Both are "giant" barbarians with blue eyes and blonde hair. Kothar has the sword "Frostfire," and Kyrik has the sword "Bluefang," both of which are described in remarkably similar ways. OH, take a drink anytime either is described like some sort of cat. You won't make it.

The stories are not great, but they are fun. Not every tale needs to be a full-course meal. These tales are sliders. Again, sometimes you want a steak, other times you want a slider. As far as sliders go, these are pretty good. I mean, it is hard not to like Kothar and Kyrik despite their clichés, or maybe even because of them. 

There is a lot here that is foundational to the AD&D experiences. Fighting demons, ghouls, and undead. Epic quests for gold, glory, and more. And lots, and lots of witches, wizards, and necromancers. "Lich" gets mentioned more than once and almost always in respect to a long-dead/undead wizard. Given everything from these books that did make it into AD&D, it feels odd that witches did not, given how much they feature in all these tales. 

There is one thing to consider. A lot of what made it into AD&D (and D&D) here also came from elsewhere. Kothar and Kyric feel like AD&D adventures because they are dipping into the great well of ideas that AD&D also dipped from: Conan. 

Oerth and its near clones are obviously influenced by Fox's Yarth. It would have been fun to see more of Kothar and Red Lori traveling together; him with Frostfire and her with her magic, going back and forth between wanting to kill each other and still ending up in each other's arms. Especially with the scene where Red Lori shows she is more than a match for Kothar.  I think, honestly, that would have been a much more interesting tale. Something that would have elevated this from just being a Conan clone. 

I wonder if there are any tales like that out there? I mean, there is Thundarr and Ariel from the Thundarr series, but there was never a love/hate relationship between the two of them. I suppose Silverglass also counts. Corson as our fighter/barbarian and Nyctasia as our witch, their relationship is fairly love/hate at the start until they gain mutual respect for each other. 

Final Thoughts

I was prepared to like these at first, but didn't, but once I got into them, I began to enjoy them a lot more. I have been a Gardner Fox fan for a while and these were a lot of fun. Just don't take them very seriously.

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Witch Was Already Waiting in AD&D

The main design idea behind Advanced Witches & Warlocks is simple.

The Witch was already a part of AD&D.

However, she had yet to receive an official class.

After all, she didn't really fall under the same category as other classes, such as the Magic-User, Cleric, Druid, Illusionist, Assassin, Monk, Ranger, or Paladin. But the Witch had a presence.

If you know how to find her, you will encounter her in the spells, in the monsters, in the implied setting, and even in Appendix N. She hides within the text itself. Like an occult figure.

AD&D already contained curses, charms, familiars, potions, polymorphs, magic circles, haunted mirrors, hags, night creatures, demons, devils, spirits, evil temples, forbidden books, and strange old women living on the fringes of the map.  Welcome to witch country.

All that was really left was to make the formal class.

That is why I don't think of my Advanced Witches & Warlocks as trying to force a modern witch concept into a retro-style game. AD&D has its own style, its own rules, and its own unique feel. If you drop a modern witch into AD&D's framework, it wouldn't work. The two things simply don't gel. 

Instead, the real question is: What sort of witch does AD&D want to nurture?

And that is why Appendix N plays such an essential role here.

While writing my Witches of Appendix N posts, I am doing far more than merely collecting witches in an inventory list. In reality, I am attempting to identify the essential concepts that were formed by early fantasy, weird fiction, horror stories, and sword-and-sorcery before D&D codified magic into game rules.

And once you start looking, the witches are everywhere.

Notably, not all witches will go by that name. They might be referred to as sorceresses, enchantresses, priestesses, hags, mothers, queens, oracles, temptresses, psychics, necromancers, or any other female with unusual powers. They are more than just distaff wizards; they have their own unique presence. 

Not all witches will be villains either. In fact, sometimes, they are the only ones capable of interpreting the strange events taking place. Whether that places them on the side of "good" or "evil" is often too simple of a question. 

That is important for gaming design purposes. 

The witch of AD&D doesn't have to be confined to folklore alone. She doesn't have to be a village healer, a wicked stepmother, a pagan priestess, an enchantress, or the mysterious old woman of the woods.

She is all these things combined.

Take, for example, the Satanic Witch featured in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. The story takes place within a setting full of Christian, pagan, faerie, and infernal elements. The witch's magic is powerful because it has spiritual, moral, and social implications. Both the satanic witch and Morgan Le Fey of this tale stand apart AND stand between all these other groups. 

A witch doesn't simply cast a spell.  A witch makes contact with beings that want something from her. She makes social contacts.

Here is another vital lesson for our witch design in AD&D.

• Magic-Users learn the arcane.
• Clerics petition divine power.
• Druids follow the ancient rites.
• Witches make contact.

She makes contact with spirits, patrons, ancestors, elder gods, demons, the dead, the moon, the earth, and whatever else lies beyond naming.

Of course, this doesn't mean every witch is inherently evil. That would be sloppy game design and even worse, boring.

Here we see the magic of Fritz Leiber, where the main antagonist of one of the first Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories isn't some evil mage, but Fafhrd's mother. Mor isn't just a boss in the dungeon, but family, power, culture, and control. She created that whole world for him, and escaping her is an accomplishment not unlike slaying monsters. Mor is not really evil. She is controlling; she is a matriarch after all, but she isn't harming Fafhrd; she is just not letting the youth run free. 

In Leiber's The Conjure Wife we see another witch, Tansy. She navigates her own "dungeon," only this time it is the challenges of a suburban housewife/witch facing other witches for dominance over their husbands' mundane careers at a University. Like Mor, Tansy is not about flashy magic; her magic is about something else.

That brings us to the third thing we learn:

The Witch is social.

She has family members, a coven, social and economic obligations, rivals, apprentices, enemies, taboos, and reputation. People know she exists before meeting her. People talk about her in hushed tones. People avoid her home, yet people end up visiting her.

• They visit when the child is ill.
• They visit when the cow stops giving milk.
• They visit when their husband takes a lover.
• They visit when their crops fail.
• They visit when the ghosts keep coming out.

These things aren't mere background flavor; they're solid adventure hooks.

The Witch should cause rumors. She should be a reason why villages need adventurers. She should affect villages in tangible ways.

Robert E. Howard brings up a fourth point. His worlds are full of the vestiges of lost ages, dark cults, serpent-haunted ruins, vanished civilizations, sinister rituals, and sorcerers whose power seems to predate even mankind itself. His witches and similar beings appear almost to carry within themselves the weight of lost history. Their magic is not theoretical; it is something that has been practiced long before modern civilization.

This matters. Well, at least to me and my view of how witches work.

An AD&D Witch is not simply an academic wizard with a new label slapped on. This character must embody knowledge of forgotten lore that remains effective. The old magic still works.

Sometimes that involves healing. Sometimes it involves cursing. Sometimes it involves making deals with powers better left unawakened.

And here we begin to see how the Witch becomes distinct from the usual AD&D Magic-User. Whereas the latter is kept aloof from the world through scholarship, the former is involved in the world and its dark undercurrents.

• She knows the trees that were once used to hang criminals.
• She knows why the church bell has a crack in it.
• She knows who among the midwives was secretly buried beyond the cemetery walls.
• She knows what the nameless thing in the well is.

Once again, this isn't just flavor. It is essential to what the class is.

A Witch PC knows more than just whether there is magic around. She knows the history of that magic. She knows who left it behind. She knows why.

• What spirit cursed the bridge?
• What drives the wolves away from the north road?
• Why does the old woman who lives near the outskirts to put out milk on dark nights?
• Why does the baron’s daughter cast no reflection?

That's why Advanced Witches & Warlocks doesn't reduce the Witch to simply having a spell list. She is not a wizard with a broom. She is not a cleric with a pointy hat.

The spell list is important, however. AD&D is a game of rules, levels, spells, limitations, saving throws, and consequences. A class has to have some sort of unique footprint.

But a class needs something else too.

It needs a role in the implied setting and world.

The Cleric implies temples, deities, undead, holy symbols, and orders.

The Magic-User implies spellbooks, towers, apprenticeships, lost libraries, and rival magic-users.

The Druid implies sacred groves, circles, mistletoe, ancient faiths, and harmony.

The Witch implies cottage homes, covens, familiars, curses, enchantments, rites of the full moon, hidden grimoires, local superstition, wizened crones, prodigious children, the fool of wisdom, and the dangerous generosity of one who understands your predicament and the price of its resolution.

This is not merely an addition for AD&D. This is part of what makes it AD&D.

Consider the monsters.

The hags; Night hags. Sea hags. Greenhags. Lamias. Medusae. Harpies. Vampires. Succubi. Lycanthropes. Demons and devils who tempt mortals with power. The undead whose restless souls seek redemption. The fey whose customs of hospitality and revenge dictate their actions.

These are not random monsters.

These are elements of a world in which magic is dangerous, intimate, and transactional.

This is the world of the Witch.

Consider the spells.

Charm Person. Detect Evil. ESP. Clairvoyance. Polymorph. Geas. Bestow/Remove Curse. Speak with Dead. Animate Dead. Reincarnation. Contact Other Plane. Magic Jar.

These spells all have their roots in esoteric practices that involve dealing with spirits, transformations, fates, and taboo acts.

These spells all contain elements of witchcraft.

One cannot simply mix and match bits of the Magic-User and the Cleric classes, add a cat, a broom, and a pointy hat. One cannot create the Witch in such a lazy manner. The Witch should not be merely a Magic-User with a familiar or a Cleric without armor nor a Druid with a different robe. 

A proper Witch demands her own mechanics and her own logic.

That logic for Advanced Witches & Warlocks is Occult Magic.

• Arcane magic is learned magic.
• Divine magic is authoritative magic.
• Occult magic is secretive magic.

The Witch recognizes magic as a complex tapestry, and one that might take notice if its strands are pulled apart.

And that's the other reason why Charisma remains my pick for the Witch's primary attribute. Not beauty, not popularity, but presence. Presence, as in the power of the self vis-à-vis others. Because the Witch must bargain, bind, curse, bless, threaten, pacify, command, and beckon across thresholds. 

It is equally obvious why this applies directly to Jackson, IL. Our young Witch may well be one of the smartest people in the room, but we don't need to assume it, and our young Witch will certainly never be the wisest. But our young Witch will have presence. Sometimes it may be subtle. Other times it may be awkward. And it will most likely manifest only under the cover of darkness, fog, mirrors, and whispers of her name. In the context of a school, Charisma becomes not simply popularity but social gravity. The ability to pull others into a secret, intimidate a bully, unsettle a teacher, console a frightened child, or even make that mysterious dead girl in the bathroom listen.

The reason why the Witch also works in Jackson, IL, just like in AD&D, is that she is powered by relationships. And there is perhaps no better place than high school for such power to operate.

Multi-faceted Non-Player Character Witches

That leads to yet another reason why this class is not too simplistic. Modern fantasy is often built around clear-cut heroes and villains, and both can do the job. However, AD&D requires something more nuanced.

The old-school Witch must be useful to the party, feared, necessary, and possibly suspicious.

She may be the party's best hope of countering the effects of a curse... while also being the very reason that curse exists.

She may heal a sick child in one town while being accused of causing a blight elsewhere. She may be neutral but remember that neutrality doesn't imply passivity but rather balance, debts, oaths, and repercussions.

She may be good yet be truly horrifying and evil, yet still cherished by someone she saved.

These are the roles that I want for my new class.

The Witch had to appear in Advanced Witches & Warlocks because of what AD&D represents.

• A dungeon door.
• A path through the woods.
• A forsaken altar.
• A burial site.
• A locked chamber.
• A mirror.
• An old and forgotten tome.

In all cases, the Witch understands that these are thresholds and must be named.

• She was there in Appendix N.
• She was there on the spell lists.
• She was there in the monster manuals.
• She was there in the rumors.

Advanced Witches & Warlocks does nothing more than greet her, provide her some rules, and give her a voice.

Shard: The Village Witch

She was in the game even before she became a class.

She was in the rumor table, though nobody called her by name. She was in the little cottage noted in the forest wilderness map. She was the old woman the people feared, and yet the one they visited under the cover of darkness. She was the stranger who knew the barrow’s true name, the seeress who told the party not to open the black door, the sole inhabitant of the town not showing any sign of surprise when the dead started walking.

There were always traces of her in the game. Her familiar lurking on top of a fencepost. The curse that no Cleric could lift, but she knew who placed it. Potion brewed from grave-moss, moonwater, and blood. Charm tied in red thread. Child born under an unlucky star. Ruined shrine where old rituals still work.

Introduce the village witch whenever the party arrives in a small town dealing with some problem they don’t want to face. She can be anywhere near the settlement – at the edge of the map, at the edge of the woods, marsh, ancient trail, ruin of the old temple, the last house in town before the fields become dark.

She is not automatically an enemy of the party. Nor is she always friendly towards everyone around her. She is not a monster, though the monster may fear her. She is not a Cleric, though the villagers seek her help whenever they get sick. She is not a Magic-User, though she casts spells that are unknown in academies. She is not a Druid, but uses all the old names for plants and trees.

She knows about what the villagers have done. She knows what the monster wants. She knows the secret the priest won’t talk about in public. She knows what the Magic-User failed to discover, because he was looking for written magic while ignoring oral magic. The magic that predates writing. 

Maybe she cured the reeve’s son once, though the reeve still considers her a wicked witch. Maybe her familiar has encountered the monster, and refuses to venture into the forest at night. Maybe she knows the old name of the hill ruins, but calling it brings her blood loss. Maybe she has written down her secret spells in some old tome that gets written by itself whenever it rains thunderously.

Perhaps the village priest consults her in secret for the reading of dreams. She may have buried something beneath her hearth long ago and never talked about it for two decades. She may recognize one of the party members' birthmarks as a witch-mark. She may ask to have the curse removed only after somebody confesses.

She may inform the party that the haunting isn’t actually caused by the undead, but rather it is the grief made manifest. She may recall times when the ruined temple had worshippers. She may remember which tomb is empty, and why people keep flowers on it. She may not venture over moving waters ever since the last witch-hunt came to the town.

It shouldn’t give away rumors and heal the party for free like an automaton. She has her needs, debts, limits, and enemies. She may request to have a piece of hair, offer to protect someone, make a pact under the moonlight, retrieve a missing charm, or identify the liar among the villagers.

Most of all, she must have a price.  Not gold, for sure. Rarely gold. 

Usually, something only the PCs can provide.

But in any case, the witch is out there. Waiting. 

#RPGaDay2025 Day 26 Nemesis

 One of my favorite characters in Superman has always been Lex Luthor.

Why? Because Lex never thinks he’s evil. In his mind, he’s the only one doing the right thing. Humanity can’t trust an alien god with their future, no matter how many kittens he rescues from trees. Lex isn’t mustache-twirling evil, he’s rational. Cold. Calculating. Absolutely convinced that he is the smartest man in the room and that everyone else is either too blind, too stupid, or too naïve to see the danger.

That, to me, is the perfect nemesis.

In my games, I’ve had plenty of recurring villains, necromancers, devils, cultists with too many teeth, but only a few that have earned that capital-N “Nemesis” title.

Magnus is one. He’s my classic evil necromancer, complete with black robes, pale skin, and an ego that can barely fit into the dungeon. But I’ll be honest, sometimes he feels like a cartoon villain. Fun to bring out for a good dramatic monologue, but not quite the existential threat I want.

Yoln was a better one. He was the nemesis in my AD&D 1st ed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer games. His evil had a face, a voice, a reason. Players hated him, but they also understood him. That’s good villainy.

Dracula? Always a favorite. But he’s more of a force of nature than a true nemesis. The devil you invite in by accident.  The Refrigerator? Fun, but he is a misanthropic one-trick pony.

But lately… I’ve been circling something deeper. A presence that’s shown up in many of my games, even when I didn’t know it yet.

At first, it was just a phrase, The Whispering God. A vague mythos thread to tie things together. But somewhere between running a Buffy session and catching a train in downtown Chicago, I realized something. Magnus has heard those whispers. So has Yoln. And maybe, just maybe, they were never the real threat.

They were echoes. Shadows.

The true nemesis is something I’ve started calling The One Who Remains.

He’s not a person, not really. “He” is just a convenient pronoun. “It” would be more accurate. “They,” maybe. Or “We,” if I’m being honest.

Here’s what I know:

• He was once a human, or something like it.
• He helped end the Age of Old Ones, maybe in the Wasted Lands’ Dreaming Age, maybe earlier.
• He did something, some ritual or betrayal, that shattered his being across time and space.

Now he is trying to pull himself back together.

Like gravity pulling dust into stars, his scattered thoughts, identities, and echoes are coalescing. Slowly at first. Then faster. Always faster. And when he is whole again?

It will be too late to stop him.

Some worlds feel his influence only faintly, a name in a forgotten grimoire, a face glimpsed in a nightmare. Others bear him like a scar. In some, he is barely more than a drive or a hunger. In others, he takes on form: a warlock, a high priest, a masked prophet. In some campaigns, he’s just a whisper. In others, he’s a storm.

And in my multiverse?

He’s everywhere.

He’s the shadow behind the coven. The Patron no one names. The face in the mirror when the moonlight is hitting it wrong,  or maybe just right.

He is the Nemesis not of a single hero, or of the world, but of all the cosmos. Of memory. Of meaning.

He is the end that waits, and the beginning that never should have been.

And the worst part?

He’s almost here.

I can’t wait for you to meet him.

Questions

What. Envious. Genre.  What Genre am I envious of? Well none really. Though I do like hearing people talk about their superhero games. I can't ever keep one going for long.

 

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The Witches of Appendix N: Robert E. Howard, Part 3: Kull, Kane and "Accidental Feminism"

 Today I conclude this "mini-series" on the pivotal works of Robert E. Howard, one of the most influential authors in Appendix N, shaping the Dungeons & Dragons experience. 

I have already covered Conan in Part 1, and his horror stories in Part 2. Today I am going to talk two of his other characters, King Kull of Atlantis and Solomon Kane.

Kull of Atlantis: Silence Where a Witch (or even Women) Might Be

Kull’s stories are dreamlike, almost mythic, often more about philosophy than plot. Women of any kind are scarce, and witches are entirely absent. When sorcery intrudes, it comes from male figures: Thulsa Doom, the snake-men, necromancers, shadowy priests.

Is Kull even interested in women? Howard never shows him with lovers, nor does he pit him against the temptations or sorceries of an enchantress. Kull broods on law, on identity, on the shifting unreality of his throne, but not on witches, or even women for that matter. Their absence says much: the philosopher-king is concerned with metaphysical threats, not the seductions or mysteries that witches (and sorcerers) often embody in Howard’s other tales. 

Kull's most significant interaction with a woman comes from one of his earliest tales. A girl in his village is being burned at the stake for taking a lover from the wrong tribe. Kull, not seeing the justice in this, uses his own flint dagger to give her a merciful, quick death. For which he is hunted. 

Speaking of flint daggers. Kull is supposed to be taking place around 100,000 BCE. So really pre-history, but it feels more like 100 BCE in terms of "technology." Granted it is "lost age" the same sort you see working in Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age. Credit where it is due, Howard does do a great job of making it feel like Kull predates Conan by centuries. 

If Kull, and Conan, are covered well by Wasted Lands and other Fantasy RPGs, then Kane is dipping right into horror.

Solomon Kane: A Puritan Without Witches

If Kull’s Atlantean dreamtime excludes witches entirely, Solomon Kane’s early modern setting seems tailor-made for them. The 16th and 17th centuries were rife with witch trials and burnings, and Kane is a zealous Puritan avenger. You’d expect him to clash with witches by the dozen. But he never does.

Instead, Kane’s foes are vampires, demons, revenants, and African sorcerers. Women in his stories are usually victims or innocents caught in evil’s path, never witches themselves. Was this deliberate on Howard’s part? Perhaps he didn’t want women as Kane’s outright antagonists, preferring instead to cast him against inhuman horrors or exotic magics.

One exception worth noting is Nakari from The Moon of Skulls. She is cruel, manipulative, and queenly, with many of the trappings of a witch, save for actual sorcery. She does have a coven of sorts, her "Starmaidens" and she knows some Atlantean rituals.  She rules through charisma and cruelty, not spells. And despite her names she is neither demon nor vampire. Kane’s crusade against her feels witch-hunter-like, yet Howard stops short of giving her magic. Again, we see the absence: Kane fights monsters, not witches.

Kane is adventure fiction, but it dips into horror and horror themes more often than not. 

Kull, Conan, and Kane make up an interesting trinity of Howard protagonists. All are cut from the same cloth and each could be a reincarnation of the previous.

Accidental Feminism?

Now, I do want to say upfront that Howard considered himself a feminist. He had some very progressive views for his time, but also some fairly typical ones. People are complicated. 

If Conan’s world has some witches and Kane’s and Kull’s are completely barren of them, what does that say about Howard? His female characters are sometimes villains (Salome, Tascela, Nakari), but they are also commanding presences, equal to or greater than the men who face them. When Howard leaves witches out, women almost vanish. But that absence makes it striking when he does put women at the forefront, because when he does, they are unforgettable.

Think of Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast, who is as fierce and ambitious as Conan himself. Or Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, a woman who makes her own choices and follows her own path. Red Sonya of Rogatino and Dark Agnes de Chastillon are not sorceresses at all, but warrior women who seize the agency the world denies them. These characters aren’t “witches” in the pulpy sense, but they are Howard’s women: strong, willful, larger than life, and often overshadowing the men around them. Red Sonya appears in one tale, yet "Red Sonja" has hundreds, including comics, novels, and a new movie out. Bêlit & Valeria have also appeared in plenty of comics together, often sans Conan, to prove they are interesting enough characters in their own right. Even if I am getting a bit of a Betty & Veronica vibe from them sometimes. Though Red Sonja has teamed up with Betty & Veronica in the past.

Bêlit, Red Sonja, (and Conan) and Valeria by Geof Isherwood

That duality shows up outside the stories too. In a famous letter to Harold Preece, Howard rattled off a litany of great women, from Sappho and Aspasia to Joan of Arc, Emma Goldman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, defending their genius, passion, and rightful place in history. “Women have always been the inspiration for men,” he wrote, “and… there have been countless women whose names have never been blazoned across the stars, but who have inspired men on to glory.”  

Howard’s pulp tales are not feminist manifestos, but they carry a paradox I’d call his “accidental feminism.” In his fiction, women may be cast as temptresses, pirates, or witches, but they are never weak. And in his private words, he saw women as philosophers, poets, and warriors equal to any man. It may be accidental, but it left us with heroines and enchantresses who still burn as brightly on the page today as they did nearly a century ago.

Conclusion

There are more Robert E. Howard tales. Lots more, and many that could be fundamental to what the D&D experience was going to become. But here is where I part ways with the author. I found his sword & sorcery tales to be captivating, his horror stories fascinating, and his heroes equally as wonderful in their own imperfect ways. There is a reason why we all know of Conan and Kane, and to a lesser degree, Kull. Even his forgotten "step-daughter," Red Sonja.

When it comes to witches, Howard doesn't give me enough, though what he does give is wonderful. Salome and Tascela are fantastic characters who I would have loved to see more of, or more to the point, more like them. Too bad that they died in their respective tales; they would have made great antagonists for Bêlit, Red Sonja, and Valeria.

Witchcraft Wednesdays: Unearthing Arcana, 1985

 I am working on a new witch project. Shocking, I know. But this one is largely more of an experiment of sorts. It's a big one—or at least I am making it a big one. I have no idea when it will be released, but I have some plans for it that I'm pretty excited about. I should really refer to it as a project and not a book, I feel this will grow into something akin to my recent The Left Hand Path - The Diabolic & Demonic Witchcraft Traditions project that also spawned The Witch Finder, Monstrous Maleficarum #4 - Lilith & the Lilim, and Myths & Monsters Vol. 3 - Lilith & Lilim; a whole series of related releases. 

As per my usual practice, I always go back to my research notes to ensure that I haven't missed anything or overlooked something that I really wanted to do but didn't fit in with the other books. When it comes to my research notes, I'm a bit of a packrat. I lost materials on failed floppies, dying hard drives, and just plain dumb luck, so I keep multiple copies of everything. Trust me, cheap storage has been the biggest quality of life improvement in my research since I first bought a computer for myself (in 1985) or got a library card (1977). 

As it turns out, 1985 keeps coming up for me. Part of my research involves re-reading, this time with a little more critical scrutiny, the first edition of Unearthed Arcana. I have re-read that, digging through this huge pile of notes and handwritten materials about games I played in 1985 (some of which will be headed into this new project). There are lots of forgotten treasures here. 

Memory is a funny thing.

I am a psychologist by training. My Master's Thesis was on memory, and my Ph.D. dissertation was on information processing systems. Pardon me while I turn introspective for a moment here, but it is jarring to see something you know you did or had some sort of effect on you, and you don't recall it. A lot of these notes are doing that to me now. 

Case in point. 

In another 1985 flashback, I stumbled on something I am not entirely sure how to quantify. Let me see if you, my loyal readers, have the same reaction that my oldest just had a few seconds ago. Who does this "Masters of the Universe" character remind you of? Not the Sorceress, her younger reflection. 

Red hair. Wrist guards. Magical powers. Wears a lot of purple. Blue eyes. Yeah, that looks like a younger version of my witch Larina. 

Needless to say, I was a bit stunned by this. I had totally forgotten about this episode, "Origin of the Sorceress," until I saw the picture, and then it all came back. I mean, the timing is right. This episode aired on September 23, 1985. I rolled up Larina in July 1986. 

Now, I wasn't a huge fan of Masters of the Universe, but my younger brother was, and I *know* I saw this episode. After seeing this image, I remembered it. I even borrowed the evil wizard Morgoth from this and combined him with the DC evil wizard Modru as a villain in my own games. "Morgru" can still be found in my notes.

There is no way this didn't influence me. Additionally, the Sorceress was the only character on the show, besides Evil-Lyn, that I liked. Yeah, I have a type. 

I didn’t create Larina so much as channel her. Looking back now, it’s like she stepped fully formed out of 1985, the red hair, the bracers, the purple, the attitude. Maybe she’s not of that year, but certainly from it. Keeping in mind that by this point, I had already worn out a copy of "The Wild Heart."

Teela Na or Larina? Lari Na?

Honestly, looking at this image is just so odd for me, jarring even. I feel neuron activation going on, but it's getting lost in the translation of the last four decades, like trying to remember where you got a scar. The evidence is there, but the details are fuzzy.

The episode was written by J. Michael Straczynski, the same as Babylon 5. It's not a great episode, but it was a cartoon for kids and an extended toy commercial at that. I remembered the Sorceress as having more power, but that says a lot more about me than it does about my clarity of memory.

What else was going on in 1985?

Keep in mind I didn't choose this date out of the blue. Ok, a little, but there was a lot going on in 1985 that I consider peak for my AD&D 1st Edition experiences.

Movies & TV

"Legend" hit the big screens with one of the best devil make-up effects to date; Tim Curry's Darkness. Not to mention Meg Mucklebones, who was very much like the Jenny Greenteeth that my mom used to scare all of us with when we were younger. 

"Return to Oz" was not a great movie, but it gave us Fairuza Balk as Dorothy and the recently departed Jean Marsh as Madame Mombi, one of the scariest witches in film. Marsh would later go on to give me, ok, us, Queen Bavmorda in Willow, and Morgaine/Morgan Le Fey in Doctor Who (one of three characters she played in Doctor Who over the decades). Ten years later, Fairuza Balk would enter witch royalty as Nancy Downs in "The Craft" and later open her own pagan-themed online store. With a small stop along the way as Mildred Hubble in "The Worst Witch." 

On TV "The Midnight Hour" ran. Not a great horror movie by any stretch, but damn... Shari Belafonte? Yeah, that was a good reason to tune in. I remember the soundtrack being pretty good. I think I should re-watch it. 

"The Third Eye" was on TV, I sorta remember it, but while I know it filtered into my consciousness, it didn't quite have the same impact as the young Teela Na from Masters of the Universe. 

If 1986 gave me Larina, my enduring witch, then 1985 set the stage. A stage already filled with adventures from Ravenloft, to exploring the multi-versal strangeness of Killian's Towers (that...is for another day) and more. My notes have entries for Healers, Necromancers, and Sun Priests. Now I can also add more notes on Riddle Masters and Star Adepts. It was a time great productivity. 

This project should feel like it could have sat on the shelf alongside Unearthed Arcana and other AD&D books circa 1985-6. I think I owe that to myself.