How Witch Hunter Got Started

So, in Atlanta, a small group of us gathered together to talk about creating a brand new roleplaying game.

The first thing we did was to start with the basic pillars of the world that we were creating. The developers of D&D used the term "sacred cows" and I'm going to use it here, too. We sat around and thought about the sacred cows of our game system and our world.

We knew, for example, that our game was going to have both horror and swashbuckling in it. We knew that our game was going to be set in the Colonial Period of American History. And we knew that it was going to feature an alternate history. Meaning, we would not be sticking to historical events 100%, but instead focused on what we think might have happened if magic were real.

For example, one thing that was discussed early on was that the Aztec Empire was still going to be around, because the Aztecs were going to have repelled the Spanish Invasion of South America. That meant that the Aztec Empire was still around, and that Spain was still a vital force in world politics, because one of the great detractors in Spain's power was the influx of gold into Spain from the New World. When there was so much gold coming in from the New World, the price of gold devalued, and Spain saw a great deal of inflation.

It was these kinds of things that we looked at right off of the bat with Witch Hunter. Other things started to fall into place during the planning session, like the fact that we wanted men and women to be on equal footing in this setting. However, we did decide to keep slavery.

One of the major things we got our minds wrapped around was the the paradigm of the Colonial World. In a typical horror game, people can often easily dismiss the supernatural or the horrific. For example, if the main characters in a horror game see something moving in an old house, often the supporting characters will dismiss what they saw. "Oh, it was just the wind. It's just your mind, playing tricks."

However, in the world of 1689, the paradigm would be totally different. What we discovered was that unlike most horror games, where people are loathe to believe in ghosts and goblins, one of the major tensions of this game was that people were all too ready to leap to the wrong conclusions.

So the sighting of a bear in the woods might get inflated into a story about a vicious beast. A case of epilepsy might be interpreted as someone being possessed by evil spirits. The problem for the Player Characters in Witch Hunter, then, is the rampant paranoia and superstition that pervades every aspect of the culture. People actually believe too much. I was particularly thrilled about this aspect of the game, because it was something that I knew wasn't in many horror games out there, if at all.

Well, that's all for now. Next time, I'll talk about the trials and tribulations of coming up with a system.