Mother Sorrow's Guide to Witchcraft

The Witch Class

Wizards are occult academics. They have their books and their towers, institutions full of hoarded arcane knowledge, and that means that even when they have different specializations and focuses of study, they tend to gravitate towards the same few spells. Shield, Haste, Sleep, and of course, everyone's favorite, Fireball.

Witches are different. They're garden occultists, learning magic from oral traditions and the personal grimoires of their predecessors, a bespoke magical tradition contained to a single line of witches, passed down from mother to daughter or mentor to apprentice in an informal, non-institutional way.

That's why the Witch class of Mother Sorrow's Guide to Witchcraft comes with not just one, but three subclasses, which provide essentially all of your witch powers. A witch who wants to fling fire at foes can't just stop into the arcane academy's library and learn Fireball, she must be a witch of the tradition of the Sawtooth Grin, carrying a living Jack O'Lantern lit with a fell flame that can spit the fire out to consume their foes. A witch of the Feast Unknown cooks up humanoids in her cauldron and becomes a hulking monstrous bruiser when she's had her cannibal feast, a Dollmaker witch can create poppets and sympathetically link them to targets using their hair or blood in order to torment them with needles or matches, a witch of Bitter Soil brings swamp rot to the area around her which she can then use to kill foes with poison and necrosis.

A total of eighteen included sub-classes covering a massive variety of different themes and powers means that it's possible to have an entire coven of six witches with no overlap between them.

In addition to the Witch class itself, Mother Sorrow's Guide to Witchcraft includes articles on how to make things witchier: Discussions of the Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes, how they relate to witch stories, and how to incorporate them into your D&D game, the relationship between the townsfolk and the spirits of the woods and where witches fit in as being neither of one place or another, an expanded discussion on the distinction between the Wizard and the Witch that was given in more compressed form above, and so on.

Stretch Goals

$1,000 - Spirits of the Woods. The article discussing the concept of the wood spirits will be expanded into a default set of wood spirits with mechanics for the tensions between them and how witches can bridge them. The townsfolk inexorably grow less tolerant of your strange witchiness over time, but start out reasonably indifferent to you. The wood spirits begin unfriendly to you, but there's no constant pressure against befriending them, so once you make friends with them, it sticks. You can befriend both, at least in theory, but many things which benefit one of them harm the others. Part of the garden occultism of witches means that each region has its own unique spirits, but the default set included with this stretch goal will be designed to be flexible enough to use in most campaign settings, so you can use them as the basis for a witch adventure either as a standalone or short campaign or drop them into an ongoing campaign.

$2,000 - Birds and Beasts. Three new subclasses focused on animal powers and allies, bringing the total number of subclasses up to 21. Witch-y poetic names pending, but the concept for these is a witch of Beasts, themed after wolves, bears, and black cats, a witch of Birds, themed after ravens and owls, and a witch of Bugs, themed after spiders and centipedes. Just like the other subclasses, these can be mixed and matched pretty freely, so you can have the Animal Witch who uses all three, or you can take Bugs alongside the Feast Unknown and Bitter Soil to create a cannibal swamp witch who's friends with creepy-crawlies, or take Beasts with Drawing Down the Moon and Crowned By Thorns to make a nature-friend-themed Witch who can both befriend and turn into animals and talks to the trees, or whatever.

$3,000 - New Illustrations. I have a large library of existing illustrations from old books that hit the New Illustrations stretch goal in ages past, so this book will be thoroughly illustrated no matter what. At this stretch goal, though, I can hire an artist to make unique illustrations for this book, specifically.