CJ Carella's Witchcraft | Retro RPG
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- Опубликовано: 2 янв 2021
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The Price of Freedom | Retro RPG
• The Price of Freedom |...
The Price of Freedom | Rules Breakdown
• The Price of Freedom |...
Description: CJ Carella's WitchCraft, or more informally WitchCraft (ISBN 978-1891153402), is a modern horror role-playing game published by Eden Studios, Inc. It is based on the Unisystem game system and had been previously published by Myrmidon Press. In both cases it was designed and written by C. J. Carella. WitchCraft was the first RPG to use the Unisystem game system.
Player characters can take on the role of various types of magic-using humans known as the "Gifted". Other characters can be "Lesser Gifted" (less magically capable, but have more mundane skills), the "Mundane" (non-magical humans) or even various supernatural races such as Vampires, Spirits, or Bast (intelligent shape-shifting cats). There are several different associations (called Covenants) described in the main rulebook, and several more in the supplements. Some of the Covenants, such as the divinely inspired Sentinels, fight centuries-long battles, both in open war and more subtle battles of intrigue and magic. Other Covenants, such as the Rosicrucians and Cabal of Psyche are mutual aid societies, but even these neutral societies are being drawn into the fight to stop or delay the "Reckoning". Precisely what the Reckoning is no one can say, but more and more Gifted and Supernatural beings are rising with every passing year, and what is at stake may well be the whole of reality.
WitchCraft draws heavily on modern Neo-Paganism and its practices, with the caveat that while it does this, it in no way espouses one belief system over the other. WitchCraft features a creator deity, although the exact nature of the creator is left undefined. The WitchCraft setting includes dreamworlds, fae creatures, versions of werecreatures and vampires and many other things inspired by a wide range of mythology.
WitchCraft, like all Unisystem games, is quite dangerous in combat, and as such the game promotes more of a thinking approach to problem solving than some other RPGs. The magic system breaks into several types of metaphysical arts including Magic, Seer (psychic) powers, Necromancy, Divine Miracles, and others which are defined in supplements.
Many comparisons have been drawn between WitchCraft and the World of Darkness games, in particular Mage. Both games feature magic using creatures in a horror influenced contemporary setting, though there are many differences. The system used in Eden's Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG is heavily modeled after WitchCraft. The Buffy core book even gives advice on how to convert Buffy characters to WitchCraft characters. 
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The idea of mundanes/ordinary peoples disbelief in magic cancelling out Witches abilities to cast magic is sooo awesome, really like it.
It's a really cool idea, the concept of the normal people unconsciously enforcing reality on those that would change it.
I'm sure there was a fantasy series of books which had a similar idea, where the magical people had laws to control the mundanes, because their power to cancel out magic basically would destroy their society.
As a classic rpg collector your reviews remind me of my experiences with said games, a thing that fills me with joy, so thanks for your excellent work. Witchraft ("Brujería" in the spanish version) was one of my favorite games back in college. I think it manages to compress all the maniacal scope of the World of Darkness in a more streamlined and comprehensive setting. Do you plan on review its sequel, "Armageddon: The End Times"? It's a great game, a sort of metaphysical war movie with angels, demons and pagan gods against what it's basically Cthulhu with the serial numbers filed off. Anyway, your channel is great, keep up the good work, cheers from Barcelona!
Cheers mate, thanks for the kind and thoughtful comment. I've never played Witchcraft, but I do love the Unisystem games, and really do feel as if it catches everything about the World of Darkness in a compact & interesting game.
I'm pretty sure that the first edition of Witchcraft had images for the character archetypes.
I have to admit that I don't know, as the Eden studios version is the only one I've seen. Cheers for letting me know.
@@RPGGamer I just checked it and it does indeed have character images for the character archetypes.
Thank you for your amazing review!
Thank you for the very kind comment.
I have been playing WitchCraft for over ten years now. I always was the Chronicler (GM) and to this day WitchCraft is my favorite RPG setting to create stories in.
My favorite part is, that it's very much like a mixture of World Of Darkness and Call Of Cthulhu, but in WitchCraft the tone is more positiv than in WOD and the characters have more power to stop the abominations than in COC.
When looking through Witchcraft I looked at it like the World of Darkness, whereas now reappraising it, I wonder if the best way to play is more like Buffy, a more fun spin on fighting darkness.
@@RPGGamer
Well, I personally would place it halfway between the two.
A great game. Conspiracy-X was my favorite of the Unisystem Games, but Witchcraft was my first.
All Flesh Must be Eaten was the first one I got, and was astounded by how well they recreated the feeling of that genre, and I've been slowly catching up on the other Unisystem games.
Nice compact format...
I agree.
I had the Myrmidon version back in the 90s. Never played it. I was impressed how much they crammed into the book. I ran WoD and it seemed to cover the Witchcraft world and concepts much better than Mage: the Ascension.
I don't actually own a copy of Mage, so can't say. But it's always been sold to me on having a fantastic Magic system. But background wise it always seemed the most boring of the World of Darkness games, whereas Witchcraft really sells you on having a whole intricate interesting gameworld which is nearly the same as ours.
They way the term Mundanes is used. Makes me think the fables/A Wolf Among series took a lot of inspiration from witchcraft.
Mundane as opposed to Magic makes sense to me, as that's the term used in Shadowrun as well, and as a massive fan of the game since it came out in 1989, that's the term that I'm familiar with. Have to admit that when my kids got into Harry Potter and they would use the term Muggle, it really annoyed me.
Since Shadowrun and Witchcraft both use it, I wonder if they both appropriated the term from somewhere else?
Thanks for the tip about it being free. A little bit of this and Conspireacy X, put some Cthulhu and WoD as well, eventually some Kult if you want to spice things up. And Mechs from Victorian Era. :P
Good stuff!
There is one thing in the video, that I have to correct: You cannot increase your Attributes that much. 5 is the human Maximum and 6 is a very rare case of a person exceeding that limit. So a Strength of 7 or 8 is impossible for human or bast characters.
Additionally you can increase an Attribute only once. After that it stays at that level.
An average human Attribute is between 2 and 3, everything above is uncommon or exceptional.
Therefore bow and arrow are usually a lot weaker than guns, unless you are a vampyre or other supernatural being or enhance you're Attributes magically.
And another thing:
Please don't call the hookcross "Swastika". A Swastika is a religious symbol used by Buddhists. The hookcross is the symbol of the Nazis. Those two should not get mixed up!
It's been a while since I did this video, but I think my point still holds, a 357 magnum does d8x4 damage, whereas a crossbow does d10xstrength damage, so is definitely preferable to any strong character, and as far as I'm aware crossbows don't rely on strength like a longbow.
As for the Swastika, I've never heard the term hookcross before, over here it's the crooked cross, but that's not commonly used. I'm afraid the Swastika was co-opted by the Nazi's, and sadly will always be connected to them, much like their salute which very much resembled many other salutes such as the Olympic salute (which of course no one can perform these days without looking fairly dodgy).
While the Nazi's did a lot to corrupt the use of various symbology, it's just something we'll have to live with, and definitely not the worst thing they did.
@@RPGGamer I know that English and French speakers often say "Swastika", but that's not correct. The word was "Hakenkreuz" which literally translates to hookcross. A Svastika is a religious symbol. The word itself means "it is good" or "it is blessed".
Anthropologists and Historians use the terms "Hakenkreuz" and "Swastika" to distiguish between the Nazi-Symbol and other uses (most of them having a positiv meaning).
I played witchcraft a lot and imo is a better version of vampire from both a mechanical and worldbuilding prospective, in the 2nd manual (mystery codex or codex mysterium, I'm not sure how it's called in english) they even made vampires playable and they managed to put basically the entire vampire the masquerade manual in like 4 pages. It's very easy to play and the mechanics of the game are mostly fast so you have all the time to do dialogues and other narrative stuff which is the point of the game, you should always be acting and the game encouragesyou to do so by not giving xp for killing stuff but doing it for how well you play your character. Every manual of the witchcraft series adds a lot of fun stuff and 1 broken power. The game lends itself to be whatever you want due to it's mechanical simplicity, it's ment to be customizable and in very little time you can make homebrew add ons to play whatever you want, I used it to play stuff ranging from medieval fantasy to cyberpunk, story driven campaign with lovecraftian horrors to big dumb anime robots.
It is a lovely game, nice to know the expansions added some great stuff to the game. I do adore the biblical connections that Vampire weaves into it's mythos, but Witchcraft does manage to fit a lot more into it without feeling as crowded as the World of Darkness did once they'd added Werewolves, Wraiths, Mages, Changelings, Zombies and Demons (where is there room for the normal people).