Thank you to everyone who tuned in to the livestream playtest of my in-development tabletop game Witch Which? on May 28th 2025, and to anyone who’s watched it on Twitch since. The recording is now available on the Historical Games NetworkYouTube channel with improved audio, and embedded below (content note: the playtest includes themes of historical witchcraft trials and persecution).
This playtest is of the Which Witch? version of a general tabletop roleplay base system I’m writing, called World Weaver, that could be used for any historical topic or theme. Witches and witchcraft were the initial inspiration for the game, but I hope that it will be more widely applicable and used in other settings as well.
The main motivation behind World Weaver was to embed a mechanic in the game system that made players actively connect their ‘real-world’ inspiration to the characters and stories they create. For an assignment in a public history coursework unit back during my masters degree, I proposed an app that accompanied Dungeons & Dragons play with historical inspiration sources – a reference tool for players interested in the sources for the elements of the game setting that were so clearly drawn from mythologies and histories of other non-Western peoples, like the ‘Djinni’ monster class adapted from the نجلا or al-jinn of Arabic folklore.
However, I quickly realised when chatting to fellow tabletop-gaming friends that not everyone would take the step to seek information that was irrelevant to being able to play the game itself, and perhaps more importantly, that not everyone necessarily has the familiarity with historical topics to identify which of the various elements of the game are based on interesting sources. The World Weaver game concept was thus born out of an attempt to integrate this link to inspirations into the actual gameplay.
So, what is the game?
World Weaver is a ‘world within a world’ collaborative storytelling game, inspired by ‘sucked into a video game’ tropes (like in the 2017 Jumanji film, or similar to Dimension20’s Never Stop Blowing Up) The story takes place through two levels: Reality and the Historical Imagination. Players craft two characters: a Reality Character, and an Imagination Character – in this case, a Witch. This should be a version(s) of the witch that their Reality Character might imagine. The Reality Characters can be temporally and geographically connected, or can be totally separate, as they do not need to interact.
Most of the story takes place in the Historical Imagination, an amorphous space of imagination, in which anything that has been imagined about the witch throughout history is possible. In setting up the game, the players collaboratively establish key features of witches in the world of their Historical Imagination to set some initial scope, but they can add and change this as the story progresses. The game is facilitated by a World Weaver (or Weaver for short), who narrates the players to transition into Reality Moments, in which players describe an activity undertaken by their Reality Character that would provide a new detail about witches to add to their Imagination Character. This is the core concept of the game – all the narrative components of the character sheet have a link to their inspiration, whether that be history, pop culture, religion – anything you like! There is no restriction on what you can draw on to create your character, nor any value system for these sources, as the purpose of the game is to mechanically represent the way many sources are often merged together into one representation.
For example, a player might have their witch be able to fly with any broom or comparative cleaning instrument, inspired by the Hocus Pocus 2 witches flying on modern vacuum cleaners (as well as a standard broom), or might have their witch be able to traverse any body of water with a wooden plank as a vessel, as was described in the 1643 pamphlet about the Witch of Newbury, “A Most Certain, Strange, and True Discovery of a VVitch.” So the players would describe their source of inspiration as a moment of activity, like watching the film Hocus Pocus 2, or looking through a history journal and reading about this pamphlet, in order to make these more active, rather than passive, engagements. In this, the player has to think about the kinds of information available to their Reality Character, and this will shape the ideas they can bring to the game world. The game should be a set in a fantasy world, the parameters of which are decided by players in the game set up, and it is important that the players know that historical accuracy is not the purpose of this kind of game.
The scope of the abilities can be reasonably open as the Weaver has just as much scope to counter their solutions. For example, in the game that we played during the playtest, the players learn that a witchfinder is coming to their town and their friend has already been taken in for questioning, so they equip themselves with powers like entrancing a room of people or magically disappearing a wall. But in the context of a storytelling game, these allow for a more exciting and interesting story, rather than simply ‘breaking’ the difficulty of the task. We rush through the ending a little in the playtest, but even in a longer play session, big steps in the story simply give the Weaver the opportunity to go even bigger themselves.
You can read more about the game concept on my website if you’re interested, though only a preview of the rules is currently available, as this is still being workshopped for a proper release. There is also a link for any playtest audience (live or watching the recording!) to provide any feedback about the game system – any and all ideas are welcome!
Gender
This format has interesting potential for thinking about gendered histories because of the way this mechanic works to highlight connection between story and storyteller. The links between the Reality Characters and their Witches in this playtest were really interesting, even if we did not discuss it in detail during play, as the type of character really effected the details they would add. The purpose of the system is not to consciously puppet the Reality Character, but to think about what they would know or believe, and how those ideas would filter into a world of imagination. The players are still playing a meta role here in explaining what the Reality Character is thinking or feeling and why that connects to a particular idea.
Leandro’s character drew on his own personal achievements prompting him to think about the economic histories of the period he was studying, so his additions were relevant to this context. Tielah added a feature drawn from watching the TV series Charmed, and Marcus drew inspiration from the video game Baldur’s Gate III, which a character like Lenadro’s John would probably never have chosen to watch or play. Even in this quite simple story that we told in our playtest, you can see the way that the Reality Character’s identities shaped the way their witches operated.
For example, Tielah used her Reality Character to shape her witch’s personal story of isolation from community, of a maternal mentor, and of hiding a power that would make her stand out even more as different from those around her. Whether the players at your table discuss their designs directly during the process of playing Which Witch?, they’re bringing more of that depth to their play just in thinking about what information the Reality Character can access and what they would do with it. If you wanted to prompt your players to think more deeply about this, you could set a Reality context that would make them engage with specific gendered components of this history – for example, they could all be at a university in the late 1960s amidst the rise of the feminist movement’s martyring of the witch and the Burning Times.
In a more expanded ruleset for a future release, I hope to include some more materials for players to draw on both for their Reality Characters and their Imagination Characters, as the openness of the system could be limiting for some players who are not as familiar with the archetype in question (here witches). However, the purpose of the system is to allow anyone to play, with any amount of background knowledge. More material to draw on would give you a wider scope for relevant or powerful abilities, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that a player with less knowledge of the topic would be inherently disadvantaged. It is also a collaborative game, so players can also work together to suggest ideas and relevant additions to each other’s characters.
The other benefit I see in this system is that it helps normalise the idea of drawing on inspiration. Historical games are often very concerned with telling the players the historical sources they used in order to defend their games ‘accuracy’, but we are much less comfortable with discussing legacies of inspiration in fantasy media. Players do not get any increased benefit from drawing on historical sources or modern adaptations, nor does genre or medium impact the significance of the abilities they can add. All of these backgrounds are equally viable, the only thing you need to do to use them is to cite them, so the game instead rewards players for extracting ideas out of other media because they are acknowledging that process of adaptation directly.
Dr. Tess Watterson is an early career researcher who specialises in medievalism, gender, and games. She received her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2023 for her thesis on witchcraft, gender, and persecution in medievalist fantasy video games. Her earlier research has included medievalism and militainment in Robin Hood video games. Tess’s aim is to contribute to expanding pedagogical approaches for engaging with the past through experience and play.