Long form: How do Maskwitches live?

What do they say to one another? What do they think about and how to they present themselves to the community and to one another?

In Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland as players you take on the role of Maskwitches, charged with the care of the local hunter gather community.

To the ordinary people of The Land you are mysterious, perhaps frightening, perhaps well-loved figures, who resolve the problems of the community in the name of preventing the manifestation of evil spirits.

The game gives you some information about the purpose of the Maskwitches: that they roam from community to community, that they know things other people don’t, that they’re part of a larger network of witches.

You’ll learn than maskwitches wear masks which determine what they are good at, and carry amulets which represent their weaknesses. These amulets are key weapons in battling evil spirits and are almost the only thing that can hurt a spirit.

The book also presents a collection of things that witches do in order to find, weaken, identify, and ultimately fight a spirit, and how to play through such sequences of a story at the gaming table.

And there’s setting information about how the People of Forgotten Doggerland live.

The rest is left for you to discover. You will determine a great deal about your characters, the people you meet and the setting.

Maskwitches is a story-telling game, which means there’s a lot less division between the traditional “games master” role, and that of the players. You’re not presented with nearly as much reliance on a hidden scenario only available to the GM or a hidden map to work your way through. As a group, you’ll determine much, much more of what happens, and even what the game itself is all about.

That means that the details of how the Maskwitches “work”, how they operate and present themselves to one another and the people they protect is up to you. The book doesn’t tell you beyond the establishing strokes - you’ll discover the details, and much more, in play.

Key aspects of the setting itself might vary wildly between games.

Maskwitches is a bit different to a traditional RPG, and has some different underlying structures and assumptions. You’re free to invent so much more: the very nature of the setting can be explored and defined by play.

We’ve seen games at the table that focus on whether the Maskwitches are real at all. Are they conjured up from the collective imagination of the community, like the spirits they battle? That game was a real classic, a “Do Mesolithic witches dream of electric…” wait sheep don’t live in Doggerland at this time. Uh electric red deer? You get the idea. It was a Mesolithic Blade Runner where the witches discovered they were as non-real as the spirits they were fighting. And then explored what that meant. We never reached a firm conclusion, but the group was happy to end the story at a poetic moment, which to my mind is perfect.

We’ve seen games where the players worked as a team of people we might call “normal” but operating in costume and within a tradition, resolving problems in practical ways like social workers. “Normal” is the least useful word ever in a game like this. They’re identity-fluid, magic social- and mental-health workers and as my social worker friends will tell you ain’t nothing “normal” about that.

We’ve seen games where the Maskwitch characters were wildly eccentric, each with their own unique approach and a personality that was way “out there”, very much embracing ideas of being “a witch”. Those witches didn’t work as a team within the story, and that was the story. They very much enjoyed developing their origin stories and the tensions between them, with the “jobs” in society merely forming a backdrop to their personal stories and the story of their relationship. In this game a character died, and then narrated their trials in coming back from the newly invented land of the dead.

Depending on your group, it might be well worth heeding the advice in the book to discuss your expectations beforehand. Then again, I know groups who absolutely thrive on the reveals of who their characters are, and the push and pull as they come together to work out what their story is all about. That’s a really rewarding approach for people who really know and trust one another, and who are prepared to just see where improvisational storytelling takes them.

Maskwitches doesn’t give you all the facts about the setting. It aims to give you plenty of inspiration and enough to get going, and then invites you to explore.

I think this is what the mighty Paul Beakley’s of the excellent Indie Game Reading Club referred to when he mentioned that Maskwitches doesn’t have a lot of setting. Initially I was boggled by this idea! Most of the book, in my estimation at least, is pure setting! But Paul is right, in terms of an imaginary average RPG: it is not the kind of setting where we get a load of setting facts to absorb and remember. It’s more of a set of material conditions and factors in play. The game wants you to decide the facts that weave those together for yourselves.

Who are the Maskwitches and how do they live? You tell me.