Rick forced his eyes open. Everything was red.

“Daddy!”

He gasped, choking on nothing. His brain fumbled with thoughts.  There was nothing.  There was no air! He clawed helplessly at the crash jelly, his arms leaden in the thick substance. How could he feel for the emergency latch when his fingers could barely move? His hands tried to claw desperately to no avail, his body an animal acting on its own. Air! I need air!

“In case of an emergency, remain calm,” the instructional video had said. Rick tried to take a deep breath and failed. Fuck calm. Smiling, the actress dressed as a space explorer had waved her hands in a useless pantomime: “Find the emergency release lever…”

Where?! Where?!

“…three feet from the foot of the pod, near your right hip…”

His fingers found metal, beautiful cold metal.

“…and pull.”

With a hiss the lid of the crash pod slid open, and Rick clawed his way out. He fell to his knees, gasping for air.

Everything was red.

“Oh no,” Rick whispered.

The dim crimson emergency lights cast deep shadows on the other crash pods, occupants still, heart monitors flat. Without oxygen they had blacked out, and suffocated in their sleep.  But something had woken him.

“Daddy!” It was his daughter’s voice, begging him to stay, her arms and legs wrapped around his leg.

Rick shook his head to clear it. Hypoxia could cause hallucinations, and he needed a clear head  now more than ever.

“An emergency has occured, but stay calm. Please enter your assigned crash pod in a quick, orderly fashion.” It was an automated message, the voice of the woman from the instructional video. Rick eyed his dead companions in their crash pods uncomfortably. Laura, Paul, Peter, Hooch…  Systems chief, atmospheric specialist, pilot and biologist.  He was a mathematician pretending to be an engineer! How was he going to fix the ship?

“Daddy!”

“No!” Rick slapped himself. “Stay alert–”

“Daddy!” His daughter clung to his leg. “Please! Let me go with you!”

Rick picked the little girl up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You’ll make a brave explorer one day. When you’re old enough. But for now–”

He had to go. His launch was in ten minutes. Xerxes-9, first and only space station in sector 85.42.10.07 was out of air, and if his team did not succeed they would all die.

Rick set his daughter down. “When you’re scared, close your eyes and breathe, honey, and imagine me walking through that door. Hold that thought in your mind, and I promise, you’ll see me again.”

She fell to the ground cross legged and threw her hands to her eyes. He kissed her on the forehead and walked away, but she did not move her hands.

“Bye honey,” he whispered.

“An emergency has occured, but stay calm.”

Rick snapped to.  He had to figure out what was wrong with the ship. It was an emergency shuttle, not meant for these speeds and distances. He tried to remember the list of possible disasters Laura had outlined before the launch.

“Please enter your assigned crash pod–”

Hooch’s pod! The monitor was flat, but the pod was empty!

“–in a quick, orderly fashion.”

Rick raced to the door forcing it open as the ship shuddered. To his left, the red rimmed airlock remained intact: a yellow button to seal the passageway, and a red button to open the door into the dead coldness of space. To his right, flames licked the ceiling of the tiny passage beyond. A charred welding device slid down the hallway as the ship lurched, as did Hooch’s charred body. Rick’s heart sank.

He racked his brains… “In case of a fire–” the actress in the instructional video had said.

“In the control booth!” Rick murmured. Pulling his shirt over his nose, he plunged into the burning passage.  Smoke and sweat burned his eyes, the heated door to the control booth burned his hands. The fire extinguisher!

“Daddy!”

“Not now!” he mumbled to himself. Coughing uncontrollably, his eyes shut, he sprayed the flame retardant wildly into the passage.  He heaved and hacked on the floor, relieved to feel the sweat cooling on his ash-covered face. So little air, and most of it smoke.

A soft hiss made his heart sink even further, and suddenly Rick understood what had happened. “The biggest danger,” Laura had explained, “is that we have no debris shields.” A tiny piece of space trash had cut through the hull blocking the lines that supplied the crash pods. And Hooch…. “The welding device is located here,” Laura had said, “but never use it to patch leaking oxygen or fuel.”

“You idiot.” Rick wanted to cry. He knew in a panic he might have made the same mistake. He frowned as a gentle hiss signaled the air leaking from the shuttle’s cabin. There was no need to fix the oxygen lines to the crash pods now.  But what had Laura said about oxygen leaks? He fumbled his way back to the control booth and found the resin gun. Within moments the patch was sealed.

He took a deep breath. A deep, smoke-filled, low-pressure breath. Dread returned. How much oxygen was left?

Rick was nearly blind with panic as stumbled his way into the pilot’s chair in the control booth. He flipped through screens until he got the oxygen monitor.  Mumbling under his breath he did the math. Rick breathed a sigh of relief.  Barely.  Just barely.  Any less and….

“Daddy!”

There was enough air, for now.  Why was he still hallucinating?

“Daddy!”

Rick frowned. The others had remained asleep but something had woken him up…. He counted his breaths per second, calculated the oxygen depletion over the last minute and–

“Honey!” Rick shrieked, leaping out of his chair.

“Daddy!”

The vents. Her voice was coming through the vents. “Honey!” he shouted. “Honey where are you!”

“Daddy!”

Rick was back where he started, eyes high and low searching for the air vents. Tiny fingers stuck out, near the floor in the wall behind his pod. He grabbed a the screwdriver from the kit frantically removed the grate. He pulled his daughter into his arms, bawling as he did it.  He delicately brushed a strand of her hair out of her eyes, careful not to touch the bruise on her cheek.

“Please don’t be angry daddy!”

His daughter had stowed away during the launch. She must have snuck in before Paul sealed the vents. Outside of a crash pod, the turbulence could have killed her! Rick’s eyes fell on the crash pods, acutely aware of the irony. No, she had saved his life. Maybe all of their lives.

Rick kissed his daughter, silently crunching figures in his head. “I’m not upset, baby.  I’m just… so happy to see you.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Rick set his daughter down.  “I need to show you something.” He walked her to the control booth and sat her down in the captain’s chair. “This is where an explorer sits.”

Her eyes widened.

“And you, sweetie,” he gently tapped her nose, “are old enough to be the bravest explorer of them all!” If his calculations were correct, they only had a few minutes, but he kept his voice clear and steady.

Delight flashed across her face.

“In just two hours, when the shuttle lands on Ceali-7, this screen is going to tell you what kind of air the planet has.” His hand trembled ever so slightly as he pointed.

“Really?” she gasped in amazement.

“And when you push this button, you can send a message back home to Xerxes-9 and tell them all about it!”

“Me? I can do that?”

“Absolutely. But there’s one more thing.”

Rick’s daughter nodded attentively.

The automated message repeated once again. “An emergency has occurred, but stay calm….”

“Daddy… has to go somewhere.” I’m sorry honey. I did the math.

“No, Daddy!” she shouted, clinging to him. “No!”

“…Please enter your assigned crash pod in a quick, orderly fashion.”

Rick carried her with him out of the control booth and down the tiny passageway.

“You’re the bravest explorer I know. But when you’re scared, close your eyes and breathe, honey…” He set her down near the end of the passageway. “…and imagine me walking through this door.” His eyes fell on the buttons: one yellow, one red.

She fell to the ground cross-legged and threw her hands to her eyes. He kissed her on the forehead and walked away, but she did not move her hands.  He stepped over the red line, into the airlock chamber.

“Hold that thought in your mind, and I promise, you’ll see me again.”

He watched her nod, eyes closed, and he pushed the yellow button. A door slid between them, sealing the passageway from the airlock. Everything was red.

“Bye honey,” he whispered.

Rick pushed the red button.

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I have a confession: I will devour any show, good or bad, with even a drop of magic in it. But after watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Satanic Christmas special on Netflix, I decided I needed to take a step back and look at the origins of magic and what happens when it grips the popular imagination.

It’s fair to say that magic is never written on a blank slate. When writers decide how to imagine their mages, they’re drawing on ideas that have not only a history of their own, but present-day consequences. Magic has been alive and well as an idea for a very long time, and its past has more than a few skeletons, especially in the West.

Like elsewhere in the world, Europe has always been rich with magical beliefs. Legends of powerful sorceresses like Circe and Medea predate Christianity, but magic was and still is a part of everyday life. Tales of untrustworthy fae, told to children at night for centuries, continue today in shows and books like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. But magic has always been more than just tales. Centuries ago, Westerners practiced their own lesser magics: agricultural rituals, amulets to protect from the evil eye, and in some places they relied on the counsel of druids, depicted dramatically in Amazon’s exciting Britannia about the Roman conquest of the British Isles.

Eventually Christianity made its way across Europe often via missionaries targeting the nobility. As monarchs violently expanded their domain, Christianity spread, trickling down to the rest of society and fusing itself with folk beliefs. The Christmas tree, for example, has pagan origins, rooted in Nordic legends featuring a pine tree. The pentagram and pentacle, ancient Sumerian symbols, made their appearance in Christian texts as a representation of the five senses, the five wounds of Christ and the five joys that Mary had of Jesus. Magic still remained, with the poor often holding on to their old traditions, using both Christian and non-Christian explanations for their spells, incantations, medicines and herbs. Even monks practiced “natural magic” recording the magical uses of herbs in folk traditions and making monasteries centers of healing.

The Arthurian legends capture this relationship well. While the legend of Arthur may have arisen from a 5th century Roman-affiliated military leader, it is the wizard Merlin who set the mold for what most of us in the West think of as “magic.” Some say he might have been a Welsh bard, others hypothesize that Merlin was a title, not his name. A merlin, according to these historians, was a wise man who knew magic and lived in the woods as a hermit… very much like a druid. Merlin is typically celebrated as a magical aid to Arthur’s Christian rulership. Perhaps the most disturbing re-imagining of the Arthurian legends is the BBC’s Merlin, in which a young Merlin happily aids a Christian monarch’s persecution of magical creatures, a proxy for the pre-existing culture of the British Isles subdued by Christian “civilization”.

Several centuries later, the persecution of magic became very real and very violent. By the 14th century, charges of “witchcraft” were at the forefront of a cultural war against European folk traditions and Romano-Persian science. Priests who practiced folk healing traditions were among those accused of witchcraft (one might see echoes of this in the plotline of Netflix’s Castlevania).  By the 15th century, the European witch hunts were in full force, heralding 200 years of torture and murder. People of all stripes were accused of witchcraft, the witch hunts often inflected with sexism and personal conflicts, but in broad strokes it was an act of cultural genocide. Everything non-Christian was viewed as Satanic–an idea some people still hold today–and dehumanized to the point that it was acceptable to torture and kill people in the most brutal ways.

In 1486 Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer Against Witches) used as sort of a witch hunting guide, heavily relied upon by the Inquisition. Kramer took existing traditions and perverted them into descriptions of Satanism. “It is always necessary,” Kramer insisted repeatedly: “for the demons to cooperate with sorcerers.” Magic, previously derived from nature, was increasingly thought of as demonic. Some of his assertions are lesser known (Kramer concluded from Egyptian fertility rites that male redheads were considered vampires with voracious sexual appetites that should be burned at the stake), but many popular conceptions of witchcraft derive from this document, making their way into stories by the Brothers’ Grimm and Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Stories of the Black Sabbath and the Malum Malus (the evil apple of knowledge) were most likely inventions of Christian extremists to rationalize the persecution of people practicing folk traditions. Today they are key story elements in TV witch stories like Salem and the new Netflix adaptation of Sabrina.

A far cry from the Archie spinoff comic of the 70s and the cute sitcom of the 90s, Sabrina was recently rebooted both as a graphic novel and as a Netflix show… depicting Sabrina as a Satanist. Throughout The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, nature is the domain of witches and Satan, while mining is the centerpiece of the mortal town and symbolic of its dominion over nature. In the Christmas special, Sabrina’s family celebrates the winter solstice and lights the Yule log to keep out evil spirits, while praying to Satan in the same breath. The problem here is that people who practiced the tradition of the Yule log were most certainly not Satanists, and I’m not sure but I doubt that Satanists would ever light a Yule log. Only the people responsible for the witch trials and the Inquisition would actually conflate these practices. And that’s where Netflix’s rendition of Sabrina (and the graphic novel upon which it’s based) becomes troubling.

As the show goes on, it’s revealed that witches are archaic and highly patriarchal, and Sabrina, the modernist half-mortal, is an iconoclast feminist icon. But what if the older power structures were actually more matriarchal than their Christian successors? In Ireland and Wales, it may have been female power among the Celts, especially as druids, that Christians found reprehensible. Moreover, historians view Christian accusations of witchcraft as an instrument of patriarchy: during the Salem witch trials, sixteen women were accused, thirteen of whom were past child-bearing age, largely in an attempt to seize their property and influence. That’s why it’s so troubling that Sabrina re-casts witches as agents of patriarchy instead of its victims.

In contrast, the Showtime period piece Penny Dreadful handled magic in a very different way. From the Renaissance through the Victorian era, there had been a strong interest in re-discovering ancient knowledge.The rediscovery of Greek philosophers brought about the Enlightenment and the advent of science, but with it came a parallel interest in re-discovering the Occult. In Penny Dreadful, the central character Vanessa Ives struggles with her own powers, and the ethics that surrounds them. The story is very much an example of the Victorian fascination with the occult, prominently featuring vampires, the devil and inner struggles with evil.  But the show breaks from the mold of the Malleus Maleficarum and the genocide of the Inquisition in Vanessa’s backstory, where she studied under a hedge witch who practiced “natural magic”, modeling magic as a tool for good in the right hands, a key element of Vanessa’s inner struggle to use mystical powers for good or evil. In the magic of Penny Dreadful, Christian and non-Christian mythologies and moralities interact, instead of one subjugating the other.

Much like Vanessa Ives and perhaps the occult aficionados of the Enlightenment, today self-described neo-pagans, wiccans, and witches seek to reconnect with long-lost traditions. Some find Sabrina‘s latest incarnation all in good fun, but others are disurbed by the way that the victims of witch hunts and inquisitions of the past are now re-imagined as perpetrators. It’s only been a few decades since the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and 90s, with three Wiccan high school students in Memphis, Arkansas being not only wrongfully conflated with Satanists, but convicted of murder with questionable evidence.

“They weren’t witches!” Tim Robbins’s character in the Hulu show Castle Rock insists as people in a bar tell ghost stories of dark deeds done in the past. “They were Satanists.” With a single line, Castle Rock is much more mindful of the distinctions, and to a lot of people that tiny bit of effort makes a huge difference.

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#1 The WikiHow Method

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a WikiHow article on how to play roleplaying games with yourself. It’s aimed primarily at six-year-olds however, so if you’re older than that you might want to move on to the other options.

#2 Play with an AI

Latitude has developed something called the “AI dungeon.” Type in actions to interact with a completely unpredictable text-based dungeonmaster in settings ranging from mystery to fantasy to cyberpunk. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like trying to play DnD by with your phone’s Google Assistant and the AI is more of a random word generator, which can sometimes break the immersion.

If the base AI isn’t working for you, one of the cooler features is community generated dungeons, like these:

#3 Play Beyond Zork: Coconut of Quendor

Alright, maybe it’s not DnD, but I swear, this game is just as fun as when I played it when I was twelve. Best of all, the folks at dosvideogames have put it online with an emulator and you can play it for free! And if you need a soundtrack, try this one from MC Frontalot:

#4 Play Baldur’s Gate 3

Okay, you gotta wait a while– early access isn’t even until September 30th–but Baldur’s Gate 3 will use DnD’s 5e rules and it looks like a blast. Developed by Larian Studios, some of you might recognize some game mechanics and features from Divinity: Original Sin 2, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. I’m crossing my fingers hoping that they’ll have a Dungeon Master mode like they did in Divinity so that you can play your own virtual campaigns with those pesky friends who are too busy or too far to meet in person!

If none of these work for you, you can always do what I usually do and procrastinate by re-playing Skyrim for the 100th time write fantasy novels and short stories. Whether you’ve got dice, a computer, or just some paper and a pen, adventure awaits!

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