5 books to read if you play a Witch

The Witch is one of the most glaring oversights in the original Player’s Handbook. Already a staple of fantasy storytelling, the wizened old woman in the woods is a great addition to any D&D party. That’s why we made an entire base class so you can play one!

While our Witch class is cursed with magic (just as Sorcerers are born with it and Warlocks trade for it), there are plenty of other ways to approach a witchy character. Here are five books (give or take a few) with inspiring takes on what it means to be a Witch, along with what you can pull from the page and onto your character sheet.

Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill

A witch, a goblin, and a minor fey set out to kill the Erlking and save the village they call home. It’s three weirdos with big personalities on a quest they’re ill-prepared to undertake, the exact same formula that makes D&D so compelling to me. O’Neill pulls off a difficult trick: making her titular Jenny Greenteeth an unquestionable monster as well as a fully-rounded character with loves, hates, and a reason for being. You’ll learn to speak in the voice of a character that embraces their own grotesque appearance, useful if you’re playing a Witch who got their power from being drowned, burned, or hideously disfigured. O’Neill’s witch, Temperance, has her own magic that follows its own rules (it’s definitely Red Magic), which she must frequently explain to her monstrous companions. I think you can always find good character moments in the contrast between different base classes and how they get their power.

The Briar Book of the Dead by A.G. Slatter

For her unflinching look at the female experience, her gradual and hospitable worldbuilding, and her grasp of structure and tragedy, Slatter quickly joined Jonathan Stroud and Terry Pratchett on my short list of authors whose every work I’ll read as soon as I can get it. The heroes of Slatter’s previous novels mentor the protagonists of later ones, and I swear this is what every sitcom cameo and superhero extended universe wants me to feel; very few have accomplished it quite so effectively. While some might call this book a dark fantasy, I would call it gothic: a story of the past intruding on the present with the horror of inevitability.

If you’re going to play a Witch with our base class, you’ll have to think about how the past can’t be changed, and the debt it demands from the future. Read Slatter to meet heroines who fight to get the better of those questions.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Hoffman was at the height of magical realism literature in the 90’s, the same era that gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Hoffman’s witches would be portrayed by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in 1998. I love stories that cover multiple generations of a family, and stories that accomplish the difficult task of leaving the sole agency of the story in the hands of female characters without making them unbelievable or stereotypical.

Equal Rites and The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

This is an excellent place to start with the Discworld novels, a series with the same mix of love for epic fantasy, satire of fantasy’s entrenched tropes, and pop culture references that make a good D&D game. Equal Rites is a story about the first female wizard, which Pratchett frames as a story about “why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man.” It’s the first in a subset of Discworld novels about Granny Weatherwax, foremost witch of the Discworld.

I usually don’t put the same author on one of these lists twice, but witches bookended Pratchett’s 32-year run of writing Discworld novels. Plus, everything he began in 1987 with Granny Weatherwax came to fruition with his YA series about witch-to-be Tiffany Aching. We meet Tiffany at the age of 9 in her first encounter with, surprisingly, Jenny Greenteeth, and through five books we watch her grow to inherit the role of the greatest witch on the Discworld from Granny Weatherwax herself.

While D&D is great at stories about catacombs and unexpected journeys, witch stories are frequently about hearth and home and family. Playing a witch is your opportunity to explore questions about what your family got right, what they got wrong, and what you’re all going to do about it. These two books, and the others in their lines from Pratchett, will give you a template for playing that out from levels 1 through 20.

Build your next character with the Complete Witch, a 42-page base class for 5.0E and 5.5E. You’ll find 14 subclasses, an astounding 59 spells, and 11 familiars, so you can build exactly the witch you’re looking for! I’d recommend the Red Magic subclass if you like Greenteeth and Blood Magic if you liked Briar Book of the Dead.