The Witch

Class Document — Adventures Beyond the Mists

Level 1 at a glance

• Personal die: 1 at Trained (5-6).
• Signature live now: Old Craft (bank 1s as Mana; they leave the Pool), Casting, curses, battlefield control. (Deep Listening, banking 2s as well, unlocks at Level 5.)
• Command Capacity: 2 apprentices. Split Cap: 2.
• Starting Pool: 3 dice (1 personal + 2 apprentices).
• Hit Points: 4 base, plus armor.
• Starting Specialties: 3 Advancement Points on the Witch's Specialty Menu, priced by tier.

Flavor

You did not learn to control it. You learned to survive asking.

Somewhere behind you is a teacher who taught you three things and refused to teach a fourth, or a fen where something old still answers if you know how to ask, or a bargain you made once and have spent every year since paying down. Whatever the shape of it, you are a channel for something that was never entirely yours, and you have made your peace with the fact that it will not always answer the way you want.

You do not lead a household. What gathers around you is a circle, apprentices and the merely curious rather than soldiers, and their dice are as much a part of the working as your own. Your strength comes from two things at once: from the number of hands there are to gather it, and from what accumulates in the quiet, unremarkable moments of a fight, the misses nobody else would bother to notice. And from what you are willing to risk when you finally spend it.

A knight's household holds because he says it holds. Your power holds because something older than you agrees to lend it, for now, on terms you do not fully control. When a working goes right, it is uncanny and disproportionate, a curse landing clean through an enemy's whole guard, a fog rolling in exactly where it is needed. When it goes wrong, it does not always ask who is standing nearby.

Mechanics

This document assumes familiarity with Core Resolution (the shared Pool, hit ranges, and the bank-and-push loop), Wounds and Fatigue (Hit Points, wound direction, death and return), and Command Capacity (Company size and Bond). Only what is specific to the Witch is detailed below.

Command Capacity and the Circle

Starting Command Capacity is 2, rising to 3 at Level 9 (see the Level Table). A Witch's Retainers are apprentices or curious hangers-on rather than soldiers, and they matter less for the blows they land than for the dice they add, because every die in the Witch's shared Pool is a die that can bank Mana. Magic of this kind does scale by gathering more hands, which is the opposite of what an earlier draft of this class claimed, but each hand is a modest one. A Witch's Pool tops out at 6 (3 personal dice plus 3 apprentices), the smallest of the classes whose Pool grows at all, well under the Knight's and Skirmisher's 8.

A Witch who wants a larger circle can purchase one more apprentice with the Fourth Apprentice Specialty (see the Specialty Menu), the one place in the game Command Capacity is ever bought rather than granted. It is a deliberate, Witch-only exception, capped at a single extra hand.

Personal Die

A Witch begins play with 1 personal die and gains a second at Level 3 and a third at Level 7, the ordinary progression. Hit range starts at Trained (5-6) and widens to Veteran (4-6) at Level 9 through Mastery of the Craft (below). The personal die is deliberately the weakest of the wide-die classes early, because the Witch's power lives in Mana rather than in dependable hits, but a master Witch grows toward a state where almost none of her dice are wasted at all.

Hit Points

4 at First Level, before armor. Armor adds on top: Light +1, Medium +2, Heavy +3. This is the class's baseline under the Level 1 Hit Point table (see character-creation.md, Hit Point baselines).

Design note: the baseline runs inverse to how much a Company can soak. The Witch fields a Cabal and fights from behind it, keeping most direct hits off her Card, so the personal number sits low at 4. Her survival is meant to come from position and Wards, not from a deep Card. [PLAYTEST] The gradient is chosen, not yet confirmed in live combat.

Mana and The Old Craft

The dice that miss for everyone else are the ones you were listening for.

Any die in the Witch's shared Pool showing a 1, personal or apprentice, may be banked as Mana rather than counted as a miss. This is a choice made each time a 1 appears. A banked die is set aside and leaves the Pool for the rest of that turn's resolution. Mana accumulates across the whole fight and resets only between fights, unless a specific effect says otherwise.

Because a banked 1 is no longer in the Pool, it does not block a Blitz. A Blitz is read on the dice that remain in play: if every die still in the Pool has hit, the turn Blitzes. This is what lets a Witch reach a Blitz at all. Her lowest dice, the 1s that would otherwise doom the roll, become Mana and clear the way. A Witch who banks two 1s from a Pool of three is left rolling a single die that need only hit to Blitz, the same position as an Errant, though without the Errant's chain kit. A Witch's Blitz grants the standard bonus Action, which she most often spends casting a spell for free, drawing on her banked Mana, rather than rerolling.

Deep Listening — Level 5

At Level 5 the Witch learns to hear more of the quiet. She may now bank 2s as well as 1s: both faces may leave the Pool as Mana. This roughly doubles her Mana flow, and it widens the path to a Blitz, since a 2 now clears out of the way alongside a 1 rather than sitting as a dead miss. Deep Listening is the class's signature, the point its casting crosses from occasional into a real tempo.

Mastery of the Craft — Level 9

At Level 9 the Witch's own dice stop wasting faces. Her personal dice widen from Trained to Veteran (4-6), so a personal die now either hits (4-6) or banks as Mana (1-2), with only the 3 left over. Combined with Deep Listening, this is the hyper-efficient state the class builds toward: a master Witch is either striking or storing on almost every die she rolls. The widening applies to her personal dice only, never the apprentices, because a Pool-wide hit-range boost would be the runaway Company buff the game forbids elsewhere (see the Chancellor's first design decision).

[PLAYTEST] Pushing the personal dice one tier further, to Elite (3-6), would waste no face at all: every personal die a hit or Mana. That is the true break point the class is designed to approach, and it is held back as a playtest-gated option rather than shipped, so we can see whether Veteran is already enough.

Casting

A spell has a minimum number of successes required to work. To attempt one, the Witch commits banked Mana dice, at least as many as the spell requires, and rolls them against her own personal hit range (Trained, and Veteran after Mastery). Each die within that range is a success. If the roll meets or exceeds the minimum, it works. If not, the spell fails, and the Mana is spent either way.

Committing more Mana than the minimum only ever improves the odds of clearing the threshold; it never makes the effect bigger. If every committed die hits, that is a Blitz by the standard rule, and the dice may be picked up and rolled again for a chance at a second casting from the same commitment.

Casting happens two ways. Off a Blitz on an ordinary combat roll, the Witch spends the bonus Action to cast for free, at no cost beyond the Mana itself. On an ordinary turn, she may instead choose to cast deliberately, at the cost of that turn's attack entirely.

Single-Target Curses

Cheap, precise effects aimed at one enemy.

Cost	Effect
1	Force a reroll of any single die already on the table, ally or enemy.
2	Deal 1 damage to an enemy directly, no attack roll required. Bypasses Guard entirely, since it was never a combat hit to begin with.
3	Grant an ally a Guard-style negation on their next incoming hit, or strip an already-banked Guard token from an enemy, at range.

Battlefield Control

Pricier, area-wide effects. Difficulty follows the same 1 (easy) through 4-plus (rare, extreme) scale as single-target curses, but each tier costs a notch more Mana for equivalent difficulty, since touching a cluster or a stretch of field does more work than touching one Card. Committing more Mana than a spell's minimum only ever improves the odds of success; the area affected is fixed per spell and does not grow with additional Mana.

Difficulty	Example Effect
1 (easy)	A small patch of ground becomes difficult terrain, denying Speed to anyone who enters or starts a turn there.
2 (moderate)	A bank of fog denies ranged attackers within it any target beyond melee range.
3 (hard)	A sudden storm halves Speed for every combatant on the field, friend and enemy alike.
4-plus (rare, extreme)	All combo reading is suppressed for every Character in the area for the round, or the ground itself becomes impassable.

Area effects touch everyone within the area by default, allies included, unless the Witch commits 1 additional Mana above the spell's cost to exempt her own side. This is deliberate: the Witch does not have perfect, surgical control over weather and terrain any more than she has perfect control over a curse. Standing near a Witch mid-casting carries real risk.

Combos

The Witch does not read Pair, Triple, Straight, or Set. Mana and casting are the class's entire signature system, occupying the same design space that combo-reading fills for other classes rather than sitting alongside it. This is not a gap; it is a deliberate, complete substitute.

Worked Example

A Level 5 Witch commands a small circle: 2 personal dice at Trained (5-6) and 2 apprentices, also Trained, for a Pool of 4. She has Deep Listening, so she banks 1s and 2s.

On her turn she rolls 6, 2, 1, 4. She banks the 2 and the 1 as Mana (two Mana gained), and both leave the Pool. Two dice remain: the 6, a hit, and the 4, a miss. Not a Blitz, since the 4 is still in play and missed. She pushes the 4, hoping to clear it; it comes up 5, a hit. Now every die remaining in the Pool has hit: a Blitz. She spends the bonus Action to cast for free rather than reroll, committing three banked Mana at a curse that deals 1 damage directly through the enemy captain's Guard.

Note what happened: the two lowest dice on the table, the ones that would have wrecked anyone else's Blitz, were exactly what fueled the working and cleared the path to it. That is the whole class in one turn.

Level 1 Starting Specialties

The menu a first-level Witch spends its 3 starting Advancement Points on. Costs are the standard Specialty tiers (see character-creation, Starting Specialties): universal picks are open to any Character, picks marked (exclusive) are this Class's own, and a requirement in parentheses must be met. Spend the 3 points however you like across the menu: one Tier 3 pick, a Tier 2 plus a Tier 1, or three Tier 1s.

• Arcane Ward (2, exclusive) — spend Mana to reduce incoming damage; keeps the caster up.
• Hex (2, exclusive) — 2 Mana to Stun an enemy.
• Dice Alteration (2, exclusive) — spend a 1 to nudge another die a face.
• Sympathetic Siphon (3, exclusive) — bank allies' 1s as Mana.
• Iron Constitution (2) — +2 Hit Points against a base-4 Card.

The Fourth Apprentice is not a Level 1 option: it requires Command Capacity 3, above a Level 1 Witch's 2.

Costs shown are the audited tiers. Arcane Ward, Dice Alteration, and Hex still read the old flat 3 in their full writeups below; reconciling those prices is the pending catalog re-price sign-off (see specialty-tiers-and-pricing.md).

Appendix

1. Design Decisions

2. The circle scales the working; more hands mean more Mana. An earlier draft insisted magic "does not scale by recruiting more hands," and that was wrong for how this class actually plays: every die in the Pool can bank Mana, so a bigger Company is a bigger engine. Command Capacity now grows (2 to 3, with an optional 4th by Specialty), and the flavor was rewritten to match. The Pool is still capped small, 6 or at most 7, so the Witch never rivals the Knight's or Skirmisher's Pool of 8.

3. Both axes grow, to a deliberately small Pool. Personal dice climb to 3 and Command Capacity to 3, the ordinary progression on both, but ending below every Company class. The Witch is meant to be a touch stronger than baseline for a Character who invests fully, since it profits doubly from its own dice, once as hits and once as Mana, and that surplus is accepted rather than trimmed.

4. Banking a 1 removes it from the Blitz check. This is the hinge of the class. A banked 1 leaves the Pool, so the Blitz reads only what remains, which is the one thing that makes a Blitz reachable for a class rolling weak Trained dice. It also gives the Witch a genuine, Errant-adjacent moment when she strips her Pool down to a die or two.

5. Deep Listening inverts the old "each 1 worth 2" idea. Banking both 1s and 2s doubles Mana flow more smoothly than doubling the value of a single face, and it advances the "waste no die" identity a step, since a 2 stops being dead weight.

6. Mastery widens personal dice only, and stops at Veteran. Widening the whole Pool would recreate the runaway Company-wide hit-range buff cut from the Chancellor. Widening only the Witch's own dice keeps the "every die used" endgame personal to her. Veteran is shipped; Elite, the true no-wasted-face break point, is held as a playtest-gated option because it also makes a late Witch a strong attacker.

7. No traditional combo reads. Mana and casting are a complete substitute for Pair, Triple, Straight, and Set, the same choice made for the Squire's Assists and the Ranger's Focus.

8. Testing Done and Pending

No worked combat has yet exercised the Witch's current, finalized kit. Considerable conceptual and probability work went into the casting math and the cost structure, but the class was rebuilt substantially in this pass (growing Company, the banking-clears-the-Blitz rule, Deep Listening, Mastery, the Specialty menu), so none of the earlier reasoning about the old Mana rate carries over. The worked example above is the first walk through the new kit.

Specifically pending:

• Realistic Mana flow on the new economy. The old class generated about half a Mana a turn and cast once a fight; this one should ramp to roughly two a turn by the end, plus free Blitz-casts. Whether that lands as "active controller" or "casting too freely" is the single most important thing to watch, and the Command Capacity ceiling and Deep Listening are the dials.

• The hyper-efficient endgame. Whether a Mastery Witch with the whole Pool feeding Mana or hits reads as a satisfying near-break power fantasy or actually breaks, which decides whether the Elite step ever opens.

• Friendly fire and the +1 Mana exemption in a real multi-ally scene. Never tested where it costs the Witch's own side something.

• Level Table

Finalized. Like the Squire, Ranger, and Errant, the Witch grows a standalone signature system rather than combos. It keeps the universal 100 XP per Level (see character-creation, Advancement). Both its axes grow to a small ceiling: personal dice to 3 (Levels 3 and 7) and Command Capacity to 3 (Level 9), for a maximum Pool of 6. Deep Listening at Level 5 is the signature, and Mastery of the Craft at Level 9 the capstone.

Level	Fixed class grant	AP granted	Cumulative AP (incl. 3 starting)	Personal dice	Cmd. Cap.	Pool
1	die at Trained (5-6); Command Capacity 2; Old Craft (bank 1s, they leave the Pool); Casting; curses; battlefield control	3 (starting)	3	1	2	3
2	—	2	5	1	2	3
3	+1 personal die	—	5	2	2	4
4	—	3	8	2	2	4
5	Deep Listening (bank 1s and 2s as Mana)	—	8	2	2	4
6	—	4	12	2	2	4
7	+1 personal die (3-die cap)	—	12	3	2	5
8	—	5	17	3	2	5
9	+1 Command Capacity (3); Mastery of the Craft (personal dice widen to Veteran 4-6)	—	17	3	3	6
10	—	6	23	3	3	6

A full arc to Level 10 grants 23 Advancement Points, the same as the scaffold classes. The Witch spends them across two competing draws: Bond in its apprentices (it is one of the signature-system classes that does have a Company to deepen) and the Specialty Menu below, plus Guild, Skills, and gear. The Fourth Apprentice Specialty is the only way to push the Pool past 6, to 7.

1. The Witch's Specialty Menu

Bought with Advancement Points through ordinary Advancement, 3 points each. The menu is meant to grow; these are the launch set. A Witch cannot afford all of them and its Bond investments too, so each is a real choice.

Sympathetic Siphon (3). Flavor. Every failure in the room is a thread you can pull. Effect. Whenever an ally within 10 squares of you rolls a 1, in combat or on a Check, you may bank it as 1 Mana. The whole party's misses become your fuel. The range keeps it from scaling without limit in a large host.

Arcane Ward (3). Flavor. The power you hoard will spend itself keeping you alive, if you ask it to. Effect. As a reaction, when you take damage, you may spend any number of stored Mana; each Mana spent reduces that damage by 1. Mana becomes armor, at the cost of the working you were saving it for.

Dice Alteration (3). Flavor. A word under your breath, and the die lands a hair differently. Effect. When a die in your Pool shows a 1, instead of banking it as Mana you may spend it to shift one other die in your Pool up or down by one face. This competes with banking that 1, so it is a real choice each time a 1 appears.

Hex (3). Flavor. Not fire, not fog. Just a small wrongness that stops a swing before it starts. Effect. Spend 2 Mana to apply Stunned to one enemy: they lose their Action on their next turn, though their Move remains (core-rules, Part Nine). A precise single-target counter that reuses the named Condition rather than inventing a new state.

Overdraw (3). Flavor. You can always have more, if you are willing to give up the sure thing. Effect. You may treat any die showing a 6 as if it showed a 1, banking it as Mana instead of taking the hit. Trading a guaranteed hit for fuel is usually a poor bargain, which is exactly the point: this is the overdrive for the moment you need Mana more than you need the blow. It is the class's deliberate flirtation with breaking, and the dial we watch most closely.

The Fourth Apprentice (3, Witch only, once). Flavor. The circle has room for one more. Effect. Raise your Command Capacity from 3 to 4, admitting one more apprentice and taking your Pool to a maximum of 7. This is the one place in the game Command Capacity is purchased rather than granted, a deliberate, Witch-only exception, capped at this single hand and available only once the Level ladder has already brought you to 3.

A Named Focus (3). Flavor. A staff, a skull, a ring that was old before you were born. Effect. A found relic that adds one die to your Pool, usable for Mana and casting, within the 3-die personal cap. The Witch's take on a Named Weapon, tuned to the working rather than the blow.

1. Growth Potential

2. New spell tiers at the 4-plus difficulty band. Only two examples, suppressing combos and reshaping terrain, are defined so far. This band has the most room to grow as the class matures, and it is the natural home for the reality-bending workings a veteran Witch reaches for.

3. The Sorcerer as this class's legendary ceiling. Earlier design treated a reality-bending Sorcerer archetype as what a Witch becomes many sessions in, rather than a separate starting class. The Mastery and Overdraw path, the Witch pushing toward using every die at once, is the mechanical seed of that ending.