Academic Press To Release Physical Version of Mountain Witch

Earlier this year, we wrote about The Mountain Witch and how its seemingly abandoned crowdfunding campaign had caused a maelstrom of emotions among backers. When the designer Tim Kleinert revealed he had brain cancer and released a PDF of the game after seven years, it seemed to mark the end of a long saga. But there is another twist in the tale: Central Michigan University Press (CMUP) are releasing a physical version and will work with Kleinert to ensure that all backers of his original campaign receive a copy.

The Mountain Witch will be part of a new series from CMUP titled Art & System: Games For Expanded Play. Edited by Tim Hutchings, best known for Thousand Year Old Vampire, the series has a dual goal: preserve RPGs that have gone out of print and push the medium forward. Alongside Mountain Witch, CMUP are also crowdfunding to release Liam Liwanag Burke’s seminal anti-colonial game, Dog Eat Dog, and Anna Anthropy’s inventive series of solo adventures, Princess With A Cursed Sword. 

Dog Eat Dog, despite often being described as one of the most clever and unsettling explorations of colonial power, has been out of print for at least a decade. But, like the new edition of Mountain Witch, Cursed Sword has never enjoyed a physical release. Anthropy has expanded on the digital version of Princess With a Cursed Sword with a new adventure called Thaumaturge, alongside vignettes of actual play from guest designers, art from Evlyn Moreau, and alternate rules to transform it into a duet epistolary game.

CMUP is a non-traditional publisher in many ways. Their flagship series, titled Scholarship and Lore, consists of games designed to work in a classroom. This includes support for large player counts or breaking groups of students into small sub-groups that play in parallel. Their published titles also come with curriculum guides for teachers and have undergone a version of double-blind peer review. In this mode, they’ve released titles like Rising Waters, a co-operative game about African-American sharecroppers surviving floods in the Mississippi Delta; Eyeball to Eyeball, a larp about the Cuban missile crisis; and Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, a multi-player adaptation of Hutching’s solo journaling experience.

Rascal sat down with Jonathan Truitt, the co-director of Center for Learning Through Games and Simulations that runs CMUP, to talk about how academics get involved in game publishing, how this new collaboration with Hutchings began, and this seemingly final chapter in the tale of The Mountain Witch.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)