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The Witch’s Way: a dark fantasy solo role-playing game

The Witch’s Way is a solo role-playing game written by Dominik Marchand, a dark variant of his game The Tea Road. You are a witch withdrawn from the world and you keep the journal of your bargains: an ordinary deck of 52 cards decides who reaches you, and you write down what your pacts undo afterwards. A full game runs two to three hours, alone, with no game master and no group, in your browser.

  • Free
  • No account
  • In your browser
  • At your own pace
Start a game

2 to 3 hours, in one or more sittings.

How you play

  1. You prepare your lair.

    The game builds a reduced deck out of an ordinary 52-card pack. You do not know what is in it.

  2. You draw a card, and it asks you a question.

    A heart is an ordeal a petitioner crosses to reach you; once you have written, it is you who judge their conduct, and your humanity rises or falls according to your verdict. A diamond is a vision of your domain. A club is a bargain.

  3. You strike the bargain, or you do not.

    Each bargain offers one creation against three possible prices. You may grant none of them, and the petitioner may refuse the price and leave.

  4. The threads pull tight.

    Every price agreed slips a spade into the deck. When it comes out, you write what that bargain undid in the life of the one who paid it.

  5. The ace of spades closes your story.

    You choose how it ends.

Content warnings

This game deals with the following subjects.

  • blindness
  • witch hunts
  • punishment
  • cruelty
  • grief
  • extinguished bloodline
  • illness
  • death
  • mutilation
  • loss of memory
  • loss of reason
  • loss of voice

Your well-being comes before the rules

You can skip any card, write something entirely different from what it suggests, or stop playing whenever you want. Nothing obliges you to follow a question that makes you uncomfortable.

I X-carded myself…

About The Witch’s Way: a dark fantasy solo role-playing game

The Witch’s Way is a journaling solo role-playing game, the official variant of The Tea Road by the same author. The skeleton is identical, a deck of 52 cards and a journal kept in the first person, but the register moves from the contemplative to dark fantasy, and what the game tracks is no longer a fortune but a humanity, which the player raises or lowers themselves. Published by Dominik Marchand under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. JDR Ninja offers a playable version in five languages, free and without an account.

Frequently asked questions

How is it different from The Tea Road?
The rules are the same, everything they say changes. Where the merchant undergoes events whose sign is fixed in advance, the witch judges the conduct of those who come to her and decides herself whether her humanity rises or falls. The tone is harsher, and so are the prices asked.
Do I need to have played The Tea Road?
No. The two games are played independently, in whichever order you like.
Does the game force me to judge people?
Every ordeal ends in a verdict, favourable or unfavourable, and that is the engine of the game. If a card makes you uncomfortable you can skip it: it leaves play and nothing is recorded.
Is the game hard to read?
In places, yes. The prices agreed touch on the body, on memory, on reason, on lineage. The full list of warnings is shown before you begin, and any card can be skipped at any time.
How long does a game take, and do I need an account?
Two to three hours, in one sitting or several. No account, no subscription, no deck of cards to fetch. The game is saved in your browser, and the journal prints or downloads as a PDF.
Who wrote The Witch’s Way?
Dominik Marchand, who publishes it under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence as a variant of The Tea Road. This online version is an adaptation made by JDR Ninja, permitted by that licence. The lineage goes back to LEADS, by Nicolas Ronvel.

Play

2 to 3 hours, in one or more sittings.

Start a game

Credits and licence

Original game by Dominik Marchand, published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Get the original game on itch.io and discover the author’s other games.

Based on LEADS by Nicolas Ronvel (CC BY 3.0).

This text was adapted and translated by JDR Ninja for this online version.

This game was written in French. This version is a machine translation and may contain mistakes. Read the French version