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Witch Girls & Witch Girls Adventures

Lucinda: Will you stop reading? Let's go to town and have fun! It's the weekend, we've no classes today and I'm bored watching you read.

Monica: I'm studying up for our assigned essay on the women of the Golden Dawn and it's not boring at all. These are facinating women in the history of magic. You really should be more interested in your own history as a Witch.

Lucina: I don't understand you. What does all that goody-goody studying get you except loneliness and practice for being a social outcast?

Monica: Well, for one thing it gets me good grades, which, you know, you could use more of, by the way. And, for another thing, I'm not sure you're one to talk about being an outcast. You've got more demerits than the rest of the students here have combined!

Lucina: Everyone needs a hobby ...

Monica: Maybe people would like you better if you stopped hurting them all the time, like turning them into mice.

Lucina: Being turned into a mouse doesn't hurt.

Monica: Being a mouse you then feed to a snake sure does!

Lucina: Well, maybe, a bit. But it builds character ... and it's fun. And fun is something I could use more of right about now!

Table of contents

Contents
Note
Credit where credit is due
--- Spoiler Warning ---
--- Draft Warning ---
Thoughts
Adventures
Demerits
Resources
Elements
Worlds
Storytelling
Episodes

Quick Links
Hex-O Hex-O Catalog

 

Note

You may also be interested in gandering at some of items I post online at my blog tagged “Witch Girls”.

Credit where credit is due

Witch Girls and Witch Girls Adventures are the copyrighted and trademarked works of Malcolm Harris and Channel M.

This section of my site started as some posts to the Witch Girls Adventures page on Facebook. I wanted to start collecting that stuff here, and also give myself space to develop more ideas.


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Spoiler Warning

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This document will contain spoilers of the Witch Girls series of comics, the RPG Witch Girls Adventures and episodes and suppliments, maybe various books or stories and quite possibly turn you into a toad.

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It’s a Draft!

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This document is full of holes. This is a work in progress, but feel free to send me comments, suggestions or questions.

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Thoughts about Witch Girls

Back in 2003, I was into independent, self-published comics for a little while. Two of the titles I ran into were Witch Girls and Witch Girls Tales. I only managed to get the first issue of each title at that time.

Fast forward to 2009, I ran across information about an interesting new RPG about young witches in school, and a related comic called Witch Girls Tales. Further plans were in place for another title, Princess Lucinda, and other suppliments and maybe even a movie deal. I had a strong sense of Deja Vu when looking at the logo, and was able to dig up my mostly forgotten issues of the previous incarnation of the comic.

...
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Thoughts about Witch Girls Adventures

(I'm writing up my thoughts about the role-playing game for this, but I've not got a first draft yet.)
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... demerits to show for it

Princess Lucinda: "... there are rules against openly using magic on lowly mundanes even if they so deserve it. (And I have the demerits to show it)" [via]

Princess Lucinda mentioned demerits to show for her actions. Instead of Karma, it could be more school related, like demerits. Then the punishments could be inflicted indirectly based on carrying the demerits which could cause reactions to be different or encounters to change, or directly through school detention or additional assignments.

A simple model is just to track school-based demerits/honors. Demerits are subtractions and honors are additions, and one might start with 0. Positive numbers would mean the student has honors, and might mean better relations with the faculty, but might mean poor relations with the misfit (Mistt-fit?) crowd.

But, if one wanted to track this kind of thing in a more complex way, one might have demerits/honors with additional entities. So, one might have honors within their school, but demerits against their relationship with, say, the Argos Society, or the local Mundane population.

So, this would allow the simple system to scale to allow for complex tracking of faction-relationships.

Maybe a Star could "trade" these points by taking a demerit in order to affect some outcome, say a roll of the dice or some encounter?

Here's an idea. Maybe after accumulating a certain number of demerits or honors, one can trade the lot of them in for some award or ... um, whatever the opposite is ... a Police record? So, if one's accumulated 12 honors points, maybe the whole lot can be traded in for a "Magical Science Fair Award, Third Place" which adds a semi-permanent +1 to a Science Trait or something else useful like that. Maybe 12 demerits can be traded in for "Weekend in Jail" where one picks up a trait in Picking Locks from another inmate?

Or, else, in addition to the demerits and honors points, these special awards can be given after particularly spectacular events, and act as a kind of "achievement" which gets noted on the Star's history. These would be ways of offering semi-permanent rewards for outstanding efforts, or whatever.

By semi-permanent, I mean there might be a limit on how long the effect of them lasts. For example, the +1 to Science could last only until the next "Magical Science Fair", or the effect could only last through the next Episode.

However, even when the effect of one of these awards expires, the not about having achieved the award should be retained as a part of the Star's personal story.
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Resources for Witch Girls Adventures players

I've started to collect a list of resources that may be of interest to players and writers working with the comics and role-playing game.

Canonical Material

Witch Girls and Witch Girls Tales comics, see mile high comics; but there's more than just the first issues of each. There's about five more issues that are currently only available directly from Malcolm Harris at a convention, and he's down to his last 2 boxes of those. So, they'll be not just hard, but impossible to get soon.

The naughty and nice editions of the core rules

The new volume of Witch Girls Tales comic

The quarterly in-character magazine, 13

Supplimental materials and episodes

Apocryphal Material

Hang out in the facebook discussions and you'll see various posts by people with ideas you might incorporate into your game that aren't from the core materials.

Maybe some people will start to publish additional details about their games online, via blogs or websites, but there’s not much out there yet.

Ephemeral Material

For teen and supernatural, also check out Sabriel by Garth Nix. Others I can think of off hand that aren’t like super obvious, such as Lemony Snicket or whatever: Helgerson's Horns & Wrinkles, Augarde’s The Various & sequels, Pierce’s Trickster’s Choice & Trickster’s Queen and other in that series. You might, maybe also find inspiration in The Sarah Jane Adventures, thought that’s more Sci Fi, obviously; but it’s got interesting pacing and “magic” in the form of technology. Also, there’s Sabrina, in comic and TV; but, I suppose I wasn’t going to go for the obvious stuff, eh?

Oh, I totally just remembered to mention Furlong's Wild Witch as well, which has two sequels: Juniper and Coleman.

Oh! Oh, and, more mainstream, of course, but there’s Kiki’s Delivery Service; but, not so mainstream, I say you should get the book because there’s more to the story, and there’s even a sequel that book.

Hey, how about the anime Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok? That’s sort of teen, since the Norse gods are mostly teens in the story, and definitely supernatural. Plus, it’s spiffy. I saw the series, but there's a whole manga series that tells more than the anime.

As for Sabrina, I don’t think I saw any of the animated series, either the old one from the 60’s or the new one. I did however come late to the anime-look comics. I especially think the essentially morally ambiguous Young Salem, 4-part, had some potential.

I also think there is reason to check out Snyder’s Green Sky series, beginning with Below the Root.

Ambient Material

Other Resources

Witchy-poo socks. How can you not have Witchy-poo socks? I've called striped socks “Witchy-poos” since I was little because of H.R. Pufnstuff. But, there's all kinds of places to get these things nowadays, even in malls at shops that act all alternative but are really owned by The Gap. A really great place, owned by cool people, to get these kinds of socks is Sock Dreams.

What about the idea of using charms or bangles as rewards for accomplishments in the game? Maybe a special charm for each season of episodes that a player completes, and maybe there's some in-game use for these charms. The Girl Scouts have used charms to mark achievements for a long time, apparently; but, it might work as an interesting thing for players to have and use.


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The elements in Witch Girls

One of the most overused metaphors for stories about magic and witches is the model of the four or five elements. It’s overused, but it’s also useful. It’s a simple model that can be used for some great storytelling. Here’s some ways to think about the elemental model that may lead to story ideas.
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The worlds of Witch Girls Adventures

Mundane world, Magical world. Maybe also Oz world, Natural world, Spirit world, Mechanical world, and so on ... celestial spheres, or dimensions? There's some overlapping but not through linear cartesean, euclidian connections. An example of this is the crossroads that leads to Oz, there's a link between worlds if you can find it; but it exists in a fuzzy, borderlands kind of way.

I really like the idea, suggested in the materials I’ve already read, that there are worlds. For example, there’s a Mundane world and a Magical world. This could then be a Fantasy world. Other worlds might then also be the Oz world, for when those episodes are done. The idea of being able to move from world to world is not linear so much as moving from one to the other. Maybe there's places where the two overlap, but they are not necessarily directly connected. There may also be a Spirit world and a Natural world. Or, even, a Mechanical world, which might be kind of steampunk. Any world can exist, with its own set of rules and ideas.

It’s an exciting way to go, and opens up a whole lot of flexibility in storytelling for both Directors and Stars!

Worlds can be used to provide homes for characters from various genre sources. For example, a high fantasy setting could be used to introduce character and elements from the books in the Alanna series, which is pretty much high fantasy. Those characters seem like they’d be, if not home, at least comfortable in a fantasy setting. Other genres can be associated with other worlds, as appropriate and then let the madness begin as they mingle!
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Storytelling in Scenes, Acts, Episodes, Seasons

The process of creating a character is a constant journey of crossing thresholds to meet opposites and resolve conflict in cathartic denouement. A typical story fractal in theatre is:

  • Exposition
  • Conflict
  • Climax
  • Denouement

This structure is something that is generally seen within each story, repeated. Another way to look at this is to think about the mythic cycle for storytelling developed from Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Christopher Volger developed this in "The Writer's Journey" and further demonstrated by Stuart Voytilla in "Myth and the Movies" as a large cyclical pattern of separation, descent, initiation and return; which itself can be divided again into more specific elements I won't go into here.

On another level, one can view an adventure as an even simpler continual cycle of equilibrium, disorientation and a return to equilibrium. Taken this way, the GM creates disorienting dilemmas which the players attempt to resolve, whether these are large story arcs or merely complications. This collective, dynamic between players and GM reminds me of an anecdote I've heard about the filming of The Hidden Fortress, a Kurosawa film which helped inspire Star Wars. I’ve heard that the writers would write a segment, then Kurosawa would film the scene, but place the characters in an impossible situation. Kurosawa would then hand the plot back to the writers and tell them to figure out a way for the characters to get out of the jam. So, the plot is a extemporaneous collaboration between the writers and the director ... where the characters slide from one impossible situation to the next ... which, as a role player, sounds like a great deal of fun.

The structure of a Witch Girls episode could a format of a teaser followed by four acts. Each element in the structure is itself a miniature story fractal with a build climax and then typically some kind of hook that holds attention toward the next element instead of a denouement. The final act generally holds some denouement to wrap all the acts together after the final climax.

Occasionally, this structure also contains a brief coda at the end of the episode which may or may not reflect on the action of the episode. This final event can be thought of as an opportunity to work in any last jokes or other elements that didn’t make it into the rest. This could also be used for some kind of bloopers or de-brief to give players a chance to transition out of character and back into real life; which is a meta structure that brings the players through the full experience of liminality into the imaginary world and back again, just as the teaser was a pre-liminal transition.

So, I suggest thinking about using the structure of an episode as the skeleton on which a session or a campaign can by developed:

  • Teaser
  • Act One
  • Act Two
  • Act Three
  • Act Four
  • Coda

This becomes a larger fractal, which can be repeated many times, and collected into a larger grouping around some particular overall arc. The overall arc can be defined by some recurring theme which is resolved through a season. This overall story arc is another important element to develop that gives meaning to the overall experience, links episodes, and creates a more vibrant texture to the collective storytelling.
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Episode Ideas

There are many resources one might look to for ideas, including any book or film; and, there’s always The Big List of RPG Plots by S. John Ross and more obscure resourses like the Thirty Six Stratagems. However, here’s where I'll be collecting ideas that come to me for story ideas.

Sed dapibus consed tristique - Nostie euipit donec eetuercil lobore coreetue alisit, iril essisit viverra, exer leo diat enisit.


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John Griogair Bell - Arlecchino Malbenvolio

“Clown with a Bad Attitude”

Original material is Copyright © 1995 – 2019 J G Bell
Comments, Questions, Suggestions?

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