Captain's Phlog 2020.05.17 ___________________________________________________ In their most recent RPG related phlog post, Alex Schroeder [1] described a mini-setting they were using. It was generated randomly using their very neat tool Hex Describe. Their story goes that it contained at least eleven witches! The rest of their entry was a very interesting mind exercise of in-setting witchery, their natures and customs. There is a nexus of two points there that I find worthy of more exploration... (A) Witches are incredibly old - possibly immortal. and (B) Witches often appear young and beautiful as a ruse to have children by tricking the lustful. Alex fleshes out a system by which female children are trained-up in witchery while males would be cast-off in more or less humane ways. The female child would be raised to apprentice in the witches arts. Here's some crude modeling... If at any time a quarter of the witches have apprentices | and their apprenticeships last until they are say 50 years old on average | and we assume witch populations are relatively stable... that would indicate that 1/4 of all witches are killed every half century! For very long lived and possibly immortal beings, this is a LARGE number. This got me wondering. Surely the pitchfork wielding mob isn't THAT successful in it's crusade. Is being an apprentice witch especially dangerous? I could imagine it to be quite risky. Do some daughters escape into the 'muggle' world and if so, are they hunted? Is there witch-on-witch violence? Clearly it isn't uncommon for witches to get along well enough given the cooperative nature of the hags in Macbeth or the rumored larger gatherings we call covens. What sort of internal political ecosystem does the witching world support? Are there cliques, factions, hierarchies? Is there an end-game for the witch? A certain death, rebirth, or transformation to which they aspire? I wonder... [1] gopher://alexschroeder.ch/1