This October marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Dragon #114. All year long, I have been waxing nostalgic about my gaming experiences from 1986 and how they set the tone for the next 40 years of my gaming life. I have also spoken at great length about the witches who have shared those gaming experiences with me over the last four decades.
So I would be remiss if I didn't mark this particular anniversary as something important.
But the question is, after spending so much time with the witch and this particular issue of Dragon magazine, what do I have left to say?
Turns out, more than I thought.
The Witch on the Page
I have already talked at length about how my understanding of witches and witchcraft grew out of my love of stories about witches, as well as historical documents, and modern occult and New Age interpretations of the witch. So seeing her in the pages of Dragon was exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for at the exact time I was looking for her.
Now, I had been working on my own witches for some time before this issue came out. Some of my earliest surviving notes date back to 1982 at the latest (could be 1981 even, but 82 is a safer bet). But Dragon #114 showed me something bigger than what I had been putting together in my haphazard collection of notebook pages.
This was a complete class.
Based on Ronald Pehr's Witch in The Dragon #20, Bill Muhlhausen created the original witch class, with Kim Mohan and Tom Moldvay revising the version in #43. Roger E. Moore expanded and revised it for #114, with Karen Martin, Robin Jenkins, and Kim Mohan editing.
Beyond the name, beyond the mechanics, and beyond the particular choices made in its design, the Dragon #114 witch taught me something very important.
The witch, as a class, could work.
Maybe not exactly the way I would have done it, but that was part of the lesson, too.
There was one thing about the Dragon #114 witch I never quite agreed with. She was presented primarily as an NPC, and the editors warned she might be too powerful for regular player characters. There was an implication that this character, while maybe not 100% evil, was certainly up to no good (or even good, for that matter; yes, there is a distinction).
But I wanted to play a witch, not just fight one.
I had already been thinking about witches as characters who could be heroes, villains, or anything in between. Their relationship with magic made them witches, not their alignment. And I certainly wasn't interested in limiting my witches to being somebody else's adversary.
That was another lesson I took from Dragon #114. Just because the designers had one particular use in mind didn't mean their rules could accomplish only that.
I knew the class was capable of more.
"Me and Thee"
The witch I was building and the Dragon #114 witch had many similarities. While I marveled at that back then, the reasons turned out to be largely mundane and practical. We were all reading the same books.
Back in Dragon #43, Tom Moldvay pretty much spelled this out in his revision of the witch class, which would eventually form the basis for the version in #114.
I detailed that here: Tom Moldvay on Witches.
Moldvay outlined six things he felt a witch class needed: herbalism, fascination or charm, a combination of clerical and magic-user abilities, sympathetic magic, secret religious practices, and powers tied to nature and the changing seasons. When I revisited his article in 2011, I added two more things I felt were essential: covens and ritual magic.
Looking back now, I find it remarkable how many of these ideas were already in my notes, even if I hadn't yet figured out how to turn them into workable game mechanics.
Among other things, we agreed that the witch should have a combination of clerical and magic-user spells, though I originally had my witches avoiding flashy magic and spells that did a lot of damage. So, no fireballs. I wanted witches to have magic that was more subtle, more personal, and often more frightening. Curses, charms, divinations, transformations, and magic that could affect people without necessarily blowing them up.
I already had the idea that witches could have healing magic, but never to the degree that clerics did. Herbal healing, potions, and magical cures all seemed perfectly appropriate. A witch should be able to tend to the sick, heal wounds, and perhaps cure certain ailments through her knowledge of herbs and magic. But she should not replace the cleric in an adventuring party. Maybe at low levels she could be a stand-in, but never once the real combat started. ETA: I am reminded of a scene in one of my Jackson playtests where Candy, the "thief," is a better healer than my witches.
Also, under no circumstances would a witch have a Raise Dead spell.
This was something Moldvay's discussion helped me articulate more clearly. The witch's relationship with nature and the seasons also meant a relationship with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Bringing someone back from the dead in the same body seemed to violate that cycle. Reincarnation, however, was another matter entirely. That fit the witch's worldview much better. Death was part of nature, not just another condition to fix with enough magical power.
The High Secret Order (HSO) spells were great, and many of them fit right into what I thought witch magic should be. I just had a group of spells I originally called "witchcraft" and later "hex magic." My witch was more focused on occult powers and familiars.
Sympathetic magic mattered most to me. The idea that a witch could use a lock of hair, a personal possession, a poppet, or some other object connected to a person to work her magic felt much more appropriate than simply pointing a finger and casting a spell. A witch's practice of magic should feel different, not just in the spells she can cast.
In my 2011 post, I suggested that clerics rely on faith, magic-users on intellect, and witches on personal connections and magical correspondences. A wizard might regard such things as unnecessary props, but to the witch they are part of the magic itself. This also gives the witch something distinctive to do in the game. She might need to gather ingredients, prepare a charm, or perform a ritual before a spell can take effect. These are not just trappings, this is good roleplaying.
Herbalism and alchemy were also natural fits. I had long associated witches with herbs, potions, and strange concoctions bubbling away in cauldrons. But there was also a practical design question here. How much healing could I give the witch before she started replacing the cleric? How much magical power could I give her before she became just another magic-user?
I asked these questions in 1986, and I still ask them when designing witches today.
The power of fascination was another interesting idea. Witches in folklore and fiction have always been able to beguile, charm, or otherwise influence others. Morgan le Fay and Circe came to mind, along with countless other witches from stories, television, and movies. I liked the idea of this being more than another charm spell. It was part of what made a witch a witch.
The religious aspects of witchcraft were a little more complicated. Moldvay drew on historical and anthropological interpretations of witchcraft, including Margaret Murray's work. Murray's theories about a surviving, organized pre-Christian witch-cult have long since been discredited, but they were enormously influential on twentieth-century ideas about witches, including modern Paganism and fantasy fiction. Not to mention, great for my gaming ideas.
Like Moldvay, I drew on many of those same sources. But I was also interested in the idea that a witch's relationship with the supernatural differed from a cleric's. A witch might honor gods and goddesses, work with spirits, bargain with supernatural powers, or call upon something older and stranger. Her magic could be spiritual without working the same way as clerical magic.
This eventually became an important part of my own ideas about Patrons and how witches gain and use their powers.
The two things I added to Moldvay's list in 2011, covens and ritual magic, were also missing from many early attempts at witch classes.
Witches working together are a fixture of folklore and literature, from the Weird Sisters in Macbeth to the witches of modern television. I wanted covens to mean something mechanically. Maybe three witches working together could accomplish something none of them could do alone. Maybe certain spells required a coven, or their effects grew stronger as more witches participated.
Ritual magic went hand in hand with that. Not every spell should be something a witch could cast in the middle of combat. Some magic should take time, preparation, special ingredients, and perhaps the right phase of the moon or time of year. That sort of magic was often much closer to the witchcraft I had been reading about than anything in the Player's Handbook.
Of course, these ideas weren't all fully formed in 1986. Some were little more than margin notes, or, more often, on paper bookmarks, and others were things I wouldn't find good mechanical solutions for until much later. But the foundations were there.
And that brings me back to Dragon #114.
The witch in those pages wasn't my witch. I would have handled some spells and abilities differently, and I wanted to explore ideas the article never touched on. But that was perfectly fine.
What mattered was that we approached the same problem from similar directions, used many of the same sources, and found that a witch could be something different from either a cleric or a magic-user.
Not necessarily better or more powerful. Just different.
There is a line from one of Larina's binding rituals that goes, "I bind you to me, and me to thee. I bind us with the power of three times times."
I think that fits well here. My witch and the Dragon #114 witch were never quite the same, but they have been connected for forty years. One influenced the other, and my own understanding of both has changed over time.
And I suspect that neither of them is quite finished with me yet.
"If Anyone Falls"
Of course, I can't talk about Dragon #114 without talking about Larina.
I have already gone into great detail about her origins and evolution in my Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986 post back in July. I don't want to repeat all of that here, but something about her relationship with this particular issue of Dragon is worth exploring.
When I created Larina in July 1986, she was a witch in concept but a magic-user on her character sheet. I had my own witch class in various stages of development, but it was hardly complete. So she was a magic-user, with the understanding that she was really something else. I have a rather distinct memory of saying "I am going to play her like a witch." She wasn't the first; hell, she wasn't even my fourth witch character (well, maybe my fourth), but she was the one I explicitly called a "witch."
When Dragon #114 came along, I immediately made her a magic-user/witch. Suddenly, there were rules for something I had been trying to represent for years.
But I didn't quite appreciate then how much those rules would change the way I thought about her.
She wasn't simply a magic-user who happened to call herself a witch anymore. Her witchcraft was something distinct, something she could study and practice alongside her more conventional magical education. That distinction became part of her story.
And more importantly, it made me think about what she could do that other characters couldn't.
Larina was never going to be the most powerful combat spellcaster in the group. That wasn't what interested me about her. I wanted her to know things. I wanted her to understand the strange and mysterious, to recognize a supernatural threat when others couldn't, and to know what to do about it.
The witch class helped me explore that. But then something interesting happened.
Over the years, as I kept working on my own witch classes and playing others (Bard Games, Mayfair, AD&D 2nd ed), Larina became a kind of measuring stick for them. I could look at a new version of the witch and ask myself, "Can I make Larina with these rules?"
It was a useful question, even if it wasn't always fair. After all, not every witch should be Larina, and I'd created plenty who were nothing like her. But she represented a particular understanding of what a witch could be, and if the rules couldn't support that, then I wanted to know why.
In 1986, I was adapting Larina to fit the witch class in Dragon #114. Forty years later, I often evaluate witch classes by how well they represent her.
So, somewhere along the way, the relationship had reversed.
And that brings me to something else.
The witch in Dragon #114 was a collection of rules. A good collection of rules, one that influenced me enormously, but rules nonetheless. Larina was the character who lived with the consequences of those rules.
She gained experience, learned new spells, met other characters, developed relationships, changed her beliefs, and survived campaigns that sometimes ended long before I wanted them to.
She eventually became a character I could play in games that had no witch class at all. The mechanics changed, sometimes dramatically. But I still knew who she was.
This taught me something about character classes that I don't think I fully understood in 1986. A class needs to be more than a collection of powers and abilities. It should help players create a particular kind of character, one with a recognizable identity and a place in the game world.
And if it does that well, the characters it helps create might eventually become something larger than the class itself.
That certainly happened with Larina.
Forty years ago, Dragon #114 helped me figure out how to play her.
Forty years later, she is still helping me figure out how to write witches.
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