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Pete
United Kingdom
Oxford
Oxfordshire
Brofist
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
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I'm just back from IndieCon, a four-day gaming convention held on the south coast of England. The breakout game of the con was undoubtedly Witch: The Road To Lindisfarne.
Here's a review of the plucky wee ashcan version I managed to score a copy of.
What's This Game About And What Do You Do In It?
Death stalks the once green and pleasant land of England, 1350.
An infernal plague runs riot in the filthy cities, bodies choke the streets, and good folk pray for their souls. In London, a young girl, Elouise, confesses to causing the plague, and for the crime of witchcraft she is condemned to death by burning on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Five men—a stern older Knight, his impressionable Squire, a craven Crusader, a suspicious Priest, and their dubious Guide—are tasked with escorting and safeguarding the witch as she makes her final two-week journey to Lindisfarne in a cage.
The journey will see each character struggling with their own demons, and ultimately, on Lindisfarne, each man will be confronted with the choice of burning the witch... or doing something else. Is the witch Innocent, or is she Guilty? Will the witch Burn, or will she be Set Free?
You, Possibly wrote:
You're right sister. Happily, Witch lifts nothing more than a dirty old slab of grimy colour from the film, and lays on plenty of rich situation, conflicted characters, and a compelling endpoint to make an excellent wee game. It's really nothing like the film in play.
As D&D is about exploring dungeons, Witch is about exploring characters; who is this young girl Elouise really? Why on earth did she confess? What secret history does she share with "Sir" Thorne? Why does the young Squire Berrick see the face of his sister when he looks at the witch? Why does the yellow piss of cowardice stain "Sir" Thorne's name? Why does the pious Brother Armond doubt that Elouise is truly a witch? Who is it that filled the purse of the dubious guide Ham prior to the journey, and why?
Witch owes a lot to Montsegur 1244: it's GM-less, structured freeform; you've got a fixed stable of characters; each character has 3 provocative questions that they should endeavour to answer through play; the journey from London to Lindisfarne is broken into a fixed progression of Acts accompanied by evocative boxed text that's to be read aloud by the players.
The Cake That Slices A Hundred Different Ways
The situation and characters in Witch are fixed: every game will always start the same way. Likewise, the broad passage of the journey will always be the same: first London, then Hangman's Woods, then Cliff Top Pass, with each character having a spotlight scene in which to explore their character, and their relationships with the witch and each other, at each point in that journey. The game will always ultimately arrive at the same endpoint: the pyre at Lindisfarne.
That said, the game really does play out differently every time. This diversity is enabled by the fact that relationships between the characters are only broadly defined; forex, we know that Sir Haydn detests "Sir" Thorne, but the "why" of that hate is left to the players. In my first game, it was revealed that "Sir" Thorne had taken Sir Haydn's youngest son with him to the Crusades, but sadly the boy died, alone and scared, in Outremer; in the second game, it was revealed that Sir Haydn's son and "Sir" Thorne were catamites, and Sir Haydn blamed the quite blameless "Sir" Thorne for this.
Yeah, Witch can be a grim game.
Stuff I Liked
 the text is so short that you don't even have to read the rules prior to play: hurrah for a boardgame-like experience of learning as you play.
the game has a definite end, namely the pyre at Lindisfarne; hurrah for deadlines and forcing the issue.
One aspect that I especially liked is that the Guilt or Innocence of the witch is known only to the witch's player. At the start of the game, the witch's player places a sealed envelope in the middle of the table: inside is written either Guilty or Innocent. The envelope is only opened after the players of the male characters have decided whether to burn the witch or set her free. If the witch Burns and she is Innocent, then Elouise's player gets to corrupt and blacken the final Epilogues that are narrated for each surviving character.
The fact that the sealed envelope stares you in the face the whole game, so that you cannot know objectively if the witch is really an innocent girl or just an infernal diabolist deploying the wiles of Satan to appear innocent, leads to some finely nuanced role-play that I very much dig.
No Resolution Mechanism Bar Chatting On The Railroad
There is no scene/conflict resolution mechanism in the game, beyond players having a chat about the fiction; Witch is a lot like Montsegur 1244 in that regard. Contrast this with Fiasco which guides the resolution of scenes through the giving/receiving of black/white dice; in that game, the act of a player picking up a die/having a die pushed towards them is a signal about how a scene is to resolve, and a cue to progress towards that resolution.
In Witch, this lack means that you need players to step up and decide on this or that result, and to cut scenes aggressively once they are baked; the system doesn't help you end scenes, or provide a shortcut to choosing this or that outcome. I'm quite happy to speak out and suggest cutting a scene, but there's little guidance about that in the text; this is fine in an ashcan, really, but I wonder if the final version wouldn't benefit from a little bit more guidance in this regard.
Certain aspects of the story are railroaded: the witch can escape her cage, but she will always end up back in captivity at the start of every Act. If you're not a fan of such determinism, then Witch might not be the game to float your boat. I'm fine with it, because we're not playing a game that is a sequence of events: it's all about exploring the characters, their relationships, and their ultimate choice at Lindisfarne.
Presentation
If you've seen copies of Poison'd or Cthulhu Dark, the Witch ashcan looks like those.
The ashcan is a tall, slim 12-page affair: the rules of the game take up just two A4-sized pages, folded down the middle and stapled together; nestled snugly inside you'll find 6 tall, slim character sheets, and a folded, A4-page "map" of the journey from London to Lindisfarne. Printed on thick, creamy paper, Witch looks pretty good for an ashcan. Much of the artwork for the game is still being created, so only one of those character sheets sports an illustration, albeit a lovely one of a pensive-looking Brother Armond by Jonny Gray.
Happily, the ashcan doesn't just look nice: the text is also a tool that guides you through play. I played the game on the Friday morning at IndieCon, and I ran a game on the Saturday night; I didn't even need to read the rules beforehand, preferring instead to follow the process of just reading out loud the short snippets of texts that tell you what to do in each Act. Good work there by Kevin and his editor Richard Lacy on making the game very easy to pick-up and play.
Given the talents of the folk involved, I'm quietly hopeful that the final published version is going to improve on the design of the ashcan.
Closing Thoughts
Witch is gonna slide real easy into my gaming bag right next to Montsegur 1244 and Love in the Time of Seið; it hits the spot for those times when you've got 2-3 hours, and you fancy playing a compelling story of hard judgements streaked through with medieval grime. It's not a game that I'm going to crack out every week, but I can see myself playing this a good handful of times a year.
Witch is tentatively slated for publication in early 2012.
Further Reading
 you can read a raw and unpolished early draft of the game here.
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Brofist
