Which Witch is Really the Witch

On Saturday nights, I head up to the Adventure Game Store and play Witchhunter. One of the game's creators actually runs the game for us, so it makes a good game even better.

Witchhunter is a game based during colonial times on an Earth similar to our own. The major difference is that all those old wives tails and myths about monsters and witches are actually true. Player characters are parts of secret organizations that hunt these monsters down to make the world safer for humanity.

I play a German nobleman named Dieter Mannheim. He is a member of the Stalkers of the Unseen hunt and trained in the fighting tradition of the Freifechter Fencing Guild. That basically means that I have special maneuvers while wielding a greatsword. Due to a game mechanic called complexity, I sacrifice some of my combat skill while wielding the weapon, so while I do lots of damage when I hit, I don't hit often against major villains. However, Dieter's primary abilities focus around Command and Charm skills.

The other members of our witchhunting team include a German hunter, a German brawler, a French artisan, an English inquisitor, and a Dutch graverobber. These aren't your average heroes, eh?

We had our third session last night. Our first session, we hunted down an immortal pirate with a zombie crew. In the second session, we stopped a demon that was disguised as an angel hunting down sinners.

Last night we got to dig through a lot of misdirection to figure out who in the town was a witch. Our first suspect was a slave girl that witnesses saw kill a tree just by touching it. However, she had an alibi. She was with her master at the time cleaning out the cellar, and now she was deathly ill. The problem with her alibi was that her master, Abigail Green, was our second suspect, and even the slave girl said that Ms. Green was using witchcraft against her. Our final suspect was a Mr. Henry Sutton. Ms. Green accused him, but he was her major competitor in the lumber trade, so it could have been simply trying to eliminate the competition.


The climactic battle pitted our party against a demon, the witch, and more than a dozen mind-controlled lumberjacks. It looked grim at the outset, but I learned the value of parry and kept the two major villains at bay while my teammates worked through the minions. Once they were handled, we made short work of the other two.