Good Witch, Bad Town
Three girls are dead in the town that invented the witch hunt. Find the hunter before the hunter finds the one real witch.
About this game
You're Vivian Marsh — eighteen, cheer squad, ghost-tour guide, and the only actual witch at Corwin College in Danvers, Massachusetts. Someone is killing students they believe are witches. They're wrong about every single one of them but you.
Opening scenario
The Poppet on the Memorial
Mid-tour on Hobart Street, lantern in hand, Viv finds a cloth poppet on the 1692 memorial stone with a strand of her own black hair wound around its throat.
Where you start
Your setup
Friday, 9:40 PM, mid-October. Day 1. Vivian "Viv" Marsh is working the 9 PM Black Lantern walking tour — the Danvers extension route, not the downtown Salem loop. Eleven people on the sidewalk: a bachelorette group from Worcester already half-drunk from the pub crawl leg, a dad with two bored teenagers, an older couple taking real notes. Viv has a battery lantern in one hand and a laminated script she hasn't needed since August. She's good at this — funny, warm, works the crowd, drops the temperature on cue when she gets to the 1692 material.
They're stopped at the Salem Village Parsonage memorial on Hobart Street. Actual ground. This is where the accusations started — Tituba, the Parris girls, the whole machine. Viv is three sentences into the bit when she sees it: a small cloth poppet propped against the base of the granite marker. Crude, hand-sewn, maybe four inches. Wound three times around its throat is a long strand of black hair. Her hair. She knows her own hair.
Context Viv carries into this moment: three Corwin College students dead in six weeks. Cheyenne Boyd, fell down a stairwell in the athletic center, ruled an accident. Junie Abbott, shot at the gas station out on Route 62, called a robbery gone bad. Priya Raman, drowned in the marsh off Endicott, September. Viv has privately concluded someone thinks these girls were witches. She is right. She is also the only actual witch at Corwin — trained by her grandmother Bethal, who died last year and took the secret with her. Nobody living knows. Bethal's grimoire is under the loose board in Viv's bedroom at her parents' house, where she still lives to save the dorm money; the hand-copied backup is sealed in a watertight case buried in the pines off the Endicott trail.
Her phone has been buzzing in her jacket pocket for the last ninety seconds. It's Mari Vega — cheer captain, best friend since fourth grade, brother works PD dispatch. Mari does not call during Viv's shift.
Dale Pruitt, Viv's boss, is somewhere back at the Water Street storefront closing out the pub crawl tab. The nearest streetlight is sodium-amber and about forty feet off. It's cold enough to see breath.
Things you can try
- Palm the poppet before anyone sees
- Scan the crowd for who left it
- Text Mari: third girl. we talk tonight
- Finish the tour like nothing happened
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.