Kickstarter veterans and Baltimore-based publisher Severed Books are back with a low fantasy brutal RPG.
In Sickest Witch, players are in a Coven, sharing magic points and harvesting body parts from foes to fuel their magic. The TTRPG community on Kickstarter likes the sound of that, and the campaign goal has been met. The rest of us have until April 26th to pledge support.
Severed Books already publishes Beneath the Inverted Church, which is a two-book series, adult only, and an Etsy star seller. This series already has Sickest Witch content.
The publisher says;
We’ve waited a long time to create our own system knowing that we were only going to do it if we had something different and fun to offer. Fans were introduced to the world of Sickest Witch in Beneath the Inverted Church back in 2018. Now, eight years later, they are getting their own core rulebook
While this is a rules-light game set in a bleak and low fantasy world, the Sickest Witch has a few other quirks. It’s not just that salted body parts are essential for magic but that the Coven shares magic points in a pool called the Cauldron. The sharing is deliberate because it means if one PC goes rogue and has their Witch do their own thing, the collective spend the magic points.
There’s a computer game/Dark Souls-inspired resource-sharing system that works over social media, and I imagine you can ignore it completely.
You don’t have to play a witch. The Coven will have up to one masked fighter. These combatants cover their faces so they can later interact with villages and the like without people recognising them from the body part harvesting dark magic users.
Nostalgia is not what Sickest Witch is going for. There are many old school systems that do that great. Even though this system borrows heavily from the past, it is not looking to recreate it.
The PDF of Sickest Witch, the adventure Bloody Property and the Player’s Guide PDF are the rewards for backers at $15.
At $18, backers get the Player’s Guide in print and digital.
The print and PDF copies of the core Sickest Witch rules plus stretch goals, many of which have been unlocked, are the reward at the $39 tier.
There’s a limited edition of the core rules, limited to 333 – of which half, thereabouts, have been pledged for already. This tier is unlocked for backers at $49.
Backers pledging $65 in support get the core rulebook and five copies of the Player’s Guide in a tier designed to jump groups from having nothing to everything they might need.
At $99, the even more limited (100) SKetch Edition with some original art from the game will go out to supporters. This has almost sold out.
The estimated delivery date for Sickest Witch is September 2025.
