A colleague and fellow geek introduced me to a new game just before Christmas, and to ring in the new year for our Monday group I decided to playtest it. Admittedly this was because half our players were still scattered around the globe, or attending to a number of emergencies. So with two players in attendance, I introduced them to “The Witch Is Dead”

Now, the rules for this roleplay game are simple. So simple, that this picture is the entire rules and scenario:

Looks simple, doesn’t it? Go on, have a game with some friends; grab a ten sided die, or jury rig some mechanism for generating  a number between 1 and 10; now try playing. Oh, anyone who isn’t the same species as another needs to work out how to communicate. 
I can’t wait to hear your stories.

So, anyway, last night the players rolled a rat and a spider, with the powers of confuse/distract and conjure dinner accordingly. With their witch dead, they worked out they weren’t about to eat each other, and that the rat moved fastest. A trail of blood led to a path, so it all seemed simple.

The rat carried the spider on its back down the path to the nearest village where many rough looking humans were milling about under strands of coloured cloth between buildings. After a few false starts to get up on a roof, the players realised I was badly describing bunting and a village fair. 

This was, to be fair, entirely deliberate on my part as the sort-of fluffy woodland creatures couldn’t read, and had no understanding of what they were seeing. 

After dodging dive-bombing pigeons, summoning a large dinner to attract said pigeons, and casting a distraction on the humans wondering why food was falling out of the sky, the animals left a small riot breaking out, which drew the attention of the guards. Meanwhile the rat and the spider kept crisscrossing the street on the bunting.

 Several false starts later, they identified a large building with noisy drinking people in it as the location of the cowardly witchhunter, and found the kitchen doors ajar. A number of stealthy maneuvers later, and the navigation of stairs and closed doors achieved, they snuck into the room where the witchhunter was drunkenly disrobing and cleaning his axe while trying to eat dinner.

We may have been drinking a bit by this point.

What followed was the application of several confusion charms, the summoning of multiple dinners, and some desperate lunges. The result was a broken mirror, gravy everywhere, an axe toppled on the floor, a knife stuck in the wall and an unconscious witchhunter who had knocked himself out on the bedpost.

Some more shenanigans to maneuver the knife were required to finally slay the foul human, and then the attempts to remove the eyes and transport them to the witch began.

Dearie, dearie me…

You’ve not lived until you’ve heard otherwise sane people describe how their spider might remove an eyeball, or have a debate about how intact the eyes needed to be.

I won’t tell you how the rat transported them, or the spider retrieved them (this is a game of imagination after all), but they managed to complete the task within the allotted session time.

Your turn