Captain's Phlog 2020.05.17
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In their most recent RPG related phlog post, Alex
Schroeder [1] described a mini-setting they were
using. It was generated randomly using their very
neat tool Hex Describe. Their story goes that it
contained at least eleven witches! The rest of
their entry was a very interesting mind exercise
of in-setting witchery, their natures and customs.
There is a nexus of two points there that I find
worthy of more exploration... (A) Witches are
incredibly old - possibly immortal. and (B)
Witches often appear young and beautiful as a ruse
to have children by tricking the lustful.
Alex fleshes out a system by which female children
are trained-up in witchery while males would be
cast-off in more or less humane ways. The female
child would be raised to apprentice in the witches
arts.
Here's some crude modeling... If at any time a
quarter of the witches have apprentices | and their
apprenticeships last until they are say 50 years
old on average | and we assume witch populations
are relatively stable... that would indicate that
1/4 of all witches are killed every half century!
For very long lived and possibly immortal beings,
this is a LARGE number. This got me wondering.
Surely the pitchfork wielding mob isn't THAT
successful in it's crusade. Is being an apprentice
witch especially dangerous? I could imagine it to
be quite risky. Do some daughters escape into the
'muggle' world and if so, are they hunted? Is
there witch-on-witch violence?
Clearly it isn't uncommon for witches to get along
well enough given the cooperative nature of the
hags in Macbeth or the rumored larger gatherings
we call covens. What sort of internal political
ecosystem does the witching world support? Are
there cliques, factions, hierarchies? Is there an
end-game for the witch? A certain death, rebirth,
or transformation to which they aspire?
I wonder...
[1]
gopher://alexschroeder.ch/1
