karket place

A male witch is commonly referred to as a witch. The term "witch" does not differentiate between genders. However, some may prefer to use the term "warlock" to specify a male practitioner of witchcraft. The term "warlock" originates from Old English and is derived from the word "wǣrloga," which means "oathbreaker" or "traitor." It was historically used to refer to male practitioners who were accused of practicing dark magic or making pacts with the devil. Despite its historical connotations, some male witches today embrace the term "warlock" as a way to reclaim its power and redefine its meaning.

Digression: When a person is filled with magical talent but never given the opportunity to exercise it, the magic sometimes overflows, burning out their ability to control what spells they can cast. This is what a sorcerer is. Pure sorcerers can only cast a single spell (determined at random), but they can cast it many times per day. They may eventually learn to cast many variations of that spell, but they will never be able learn the variety of spells that wizards go. For them, it is not a cerebral event, but an organic, gut-churning, orgasmic experience.

Digression When a person is filled with magical talent but never given the opportunity to exercise it, the magic sometimes overflows, burning out their ability to control what spells they can cast. However, wizardry is very different over there, since it is wedded tightly with religion, and is seen as only a small part of the religious powers of the temples.

Despite its historical connotations, some male witches today embrace the term "warlock" as a way to reclaim its power and redefine its meaning. Ultimately, whether a male witch prefers to be called a witch or a warlock is a personal choice, and both terms are acceptable within the modern practice of witchcraft..

Goblin assassin witch

In Centerra, men and women are equally adept at magic. However, attitudes towards women and magic use vary across the continent (most of which is dominated by the Church). These attitudes usually take one or more of the following forms:

In truth, magic is dangerous and corrupting, and male wizards explode their heads, unleash horrible psychoplasmic plagues, and become skin-cars for demons with alarming frequency. Just the same, these prejudices are enacted against women with both communal shunning (in the east) and state-ordained executions (parts of the west).

A few women take to calling themselves wizards, with varying degrees of success. This usually involves lying about where they were trained. In a few rare cases, women have successfully gotten educations in wizard colleges or monasteries, always by disguising their gender. Wizards hate being tricked and will usually invest a lot of effort into making sure the witch is discredited, exiled, imprisoned, or executed for crimes against magic.

Digression: lots of people suffer under the tyranny of wizard institutions, not just the women who dare pay for an education there (wizarding colleges require shit-fuck-tons of money, wizarding monasteries usually require familial links and/or years of service).

So, wizards have rich traditions with rich, old institutions. Portraits of the last 50 headmasters hang in the halls. That sort of shit. They have libraries with thousands of spells (mostly variations).

Monastic wizard enclaves function pretty much the same way, except that they retreat from the world instead of entangling themselves in it.

And witches struggle to get any sort of tradition going. They have no libraries, small repertoires of spells, and only oral histories.

However, there is a lot of evidence that show that the most powerful spellcasters in the world have been women. Zandara the Magnificent disappeared the city of Bastoc, a feat that has never been replicated or even approached (although her detractors will point out that she studied at the College of the August Star in the middle of her illustrious career). And Ozur the Unscarred dueled every wizard she came across, and never lost a single one (although she was a pretty amoral character, and is pretty directly responsible for a lot of the evil witch stereotypes). And Yalys the Shaper created over a dozen life forms during her life, in a time when that was thought to be impossible. Even now, teams of wizards labor for years to create a single, viable organism.

Because of the way that magical talent is sought after and recognized in boys, girls are more likely to become sorceresses.

Digression: When a person is filled with magical talent but never given the opportunity to exercise it, the magic sometimes overflows, burning out their ability to control what spells they can cast. This is what a sorcerer is. Pure sorcerers can only cast a single spell (determined at random), but they can cast it many times per day. They may eventually learn to cast many variations of that spell, but they will never be able learn the variety of spells that wizards go. For them, it is not a cerebral event, but an organic, gut-churning, orgasmic experience.

Digression, cont.: Wizards don't like sorcerers because they are consistently overpowered by them. (Sorcerers get a bonus to caster level.) The only humanoids with more spellcasting power are the elves (let's not even get started on them). Because of the way sorcerous talents emerge, nearly all sorcerers are young people with mild brain damage, usually manifesting as poor impulse control. They tend to go mad. Some of them kill a lot of people. Very few live very long.

Covens are partly social things. They're a secret community, and if a coven sticks around long enough, they usually end up being based on either (a) family or group of families, or (b) a bunch of women in a singular profession. Aside from a bunch of old ladies teaching their granddaughters how to turn snakes into rabbits (or curse people), there's also just a bunch of women hanging out, eating food, and shooting the shit.

Digression: For comparison, a big chunk of colleges are just young men experimenting with drugs and alternative sexualities, and a big chunk of wizard monasteries is sweeping floors and fasting.

In the countryside, towns who discover a coven in their midst usually try to disband it using social pressures. Neighborly surveillance, friendly interventions, loss of the meeting place, husbands pleading with their wives “You've got to stop meeting with those. . . witches! What if the paladins found out? I don't want anything to happen to you. I love you.”

Small towns might have more understanding views of witches, though. Sure, you're surprised when your 17-year old daughter fires off a magic missile, but if she did it to stop the guy who was robbing your shop, bully for her!

Townsfolk are very rarely stupid/cruel enough to do the whole torches and pitchforks thing. If things escalate, they'd rather just go to a city and contact a college or the Church.

Major cities have colleges, and when they find out about about witch covens, this is what usually happens: A bunch of wizards and guards show up at the witch's house during dinnertime. They round them up, see if the witches have developed any spells that they don't already have in their files (they often do), throw the ringleaders in jail, and fine the rest.

Darker colleges will have a heremancer or two among their ranks, and these scary dudes will perform a barancation (drilling holes in the crown of the head, pouring some stuff inside, casting some spells) and burn out a witch's ability to cast spells forever.

Monastic wizard enclaves will usually do pretty much the same thing, but minus the city guard and with a few more shaven-headed acolytes.

Witch Hunters (The Third Lantern of the Church of Hesaya, mostly paladins but also other types of specialists) like to catch the witches in the act. Kick down the door. Witches who make a fuss are killed. The other ones are rounded up and put on trial. The worst offenders are burnt at the stake. The others are also burnt at the stake unless their families can pay their fail/fee (most of which goes to the Church), and then the surviving witches go to Angelmar where they can atone for their sins in person, in front of the Godhead. Then they go on probation for the rest of their lives.

Lots of people don't like the witch hunters, because they've killed a lot of people's grandmas, mothers, and sisters. This often extends to paladins, who are often met with distrust. No one likes a cop at the reunion when grandma is smoking weed out back without a license.

Digression: If these paladins sound like assholes to you, remember that their unswerving morales are also their greatest virtue. These are the same guys who charge into fight demons when normal men shit their pants and go mad. These are the paladins who unhesitatingly throw themselves into the jaws of death to protect their part of the world. (Don't fuck with them.) They're probably too uncompromising to make good PCs in most games (but there are other orders of more reasonable paladins if a player still wants to play a holy knight).

Also don't forget that there are plenty of evil witches, plague covens, corrupt colleges, and diabolical wizard towers. Everyone has a right to be evil! Huzzah!

It's no fun to play a woman in a game if the DM uses fantasy prejudices to shit all over you. That sucks.

But I believe that gender issues should not be excluded in a setting, because (a) your group can just choose to ignore them, (b) sexism is interesting, and fantasy sexism potentially much more so, (c) it brings up questions of morality, which can lead to interesting discussions (although your group may prefer black and white morality (“all orcs are evil”) which can be great because it allows your group to go straight to the part with the unambiguous heroism)

So if a player wants to play a witch, it shouldn't be a big deal. Adventurers are already sketchy people who smell like blood and carry too many weapons. No one trusts then anyway. Only after they save the town will they go from “those murderers, thieves, and witches who probably want to steal our gold and bugger our horses” to “those murderers, thieves, and witches who might be sort of okay”.

The terms “college” and “university” are synonymous with schools of wizardry (a university is a collection of colleges), but these huge institutions usually exert their tentacles into all sorts of other worldly affairs, from politics to finance to warfare. So “military college” = “military college of wizardry”. The idea of going to college and learning non-magic stuff is unheard-of.

The wizards of Shar are also experimenting with allowing a few women into their wizarding colleges (which teach non-wizarding topics, too! Like mathematics! How insane!) But everyone knows that Shar is pretty batshit anyway, and is probably going to be overrun by sexual deviants and orcs any day now.

At the edge of the map, on the next continent over, the women of Basharna and Abasinia suffer no such prejudices, and learn magic freely alongside the men. (However, wizardry is very different over there, since it is wedded tightly with religion, and is seen as only a small part of the religious powers of the temples.)

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