Presentation-wise, we have one 46-page booklet, a two-sided character sheet and a fold-out 11" x 17" map of the Salem Village area, which I suppose could double as a GM's screen in a pinch. The art is all black-and-white, sparse but decent; done in a very appropriate woodcut style. The front of the rules booklet is an actual piece of period Witch Trial are from the Essex Institute in Salem; the back is a map of Salem Town (as opposed to Salem Village). There are maps in the book of a tavern, a hovel and a house (no scale is given, but size is self-evident from the furnishings) along with a short blurb on who lived there and their lifestyle. (There is supposed to be a map of a typical Salem farm on page 39, but the page is blank! More on this later.) The typeface is large and clear, but the "important game terms" are all in CAPITAL LETTERS, which can make a section of text confusing to read, there seems to be a fair amount of whitespace wasted (as with the centerfold illustration of a witch trial, which takes up two entire pages!), and, with no index, the proper information can be hard to find at times. (But with a book this short, you quickly get a feel for where things are.)
Characters are based on random rolls, consisting of Strength, Constitution, Speed, Agility/Dexterity, and Comeliness, for physical attributes; mental attributes are Wit, Knowledge, Inutition, Will, and Wisdom. (After stats are rolled, players get an additional 30% to distribute as they wish, to fine-tune their character.) All are scored on a percentile; higher is better. There's also rolls for a character's Age, Marital Status, Children, Height, Weight, Social Status, Home Town, and Occupation, thus giving a pretty good hook on who he/she is and where he/she's from. Advancement is by level and consist of adds to a character's stats, depending on whether he's playing a Witch or a Magistrate.
Events (combats, skill rolls etc.) are handled on a pretty straightforward roll-versus-roll system, with a small number of adjustments for Agility/Dexterity Tests and Intuition/Premonition Tests. Inanimate objects have their own Strength scores; tables are given for various tools and the adds they give to a character's Strength for, say, knocking down a wooden door or chopping through a stone wall with a hammer & chisel.
Combat, whether hand-to-hand or by weapon, deals Constitution damage - once your Consitution hits 0, you're dead. Healing is done through rest or (for Witches) by magic. There's reasonably detailed rules for dealing with parrying during melee combat, musket/pistol firing, and ordinary fistfighting.
The accusation & trial process naturally gets a significant amount of space (8 pages) and rules cover from the initial accusation stage, search of the suspect's home, arrest, bribery of corrupt officials, jail time, interrogation, and the trial itself. If the suspect can't bribe their way out and things proceed to the "trial" stage, well, there's only a 15% chance at best that the suspect can get out of either being hanged or jailed for life. Keeping from being arrested in the first place, therefore, is important. Fortunately for the Witches, they have the aid of magic...
Magic in "Witch Hunt" consists of very simple spells, largely dealing with causing an effect through a magical link with a target (for example, the Shrivel Curse, in which a Witch leaves a piece of fruit to wither and rot, having linked it magically to the target; the target withers and shrivels as the fruit does). Learning spells is done by making a Wisdom roll; most spells can be repeated at will, though they involve actions and equipment which, if discovered, can lead to a Witchcraft accusation. Witches, too, get Familiar animals such as snakes, toads, birds or the classic black cat; familiars aid the witch's Wisdom and Wit scores, as well as being a kind of alarm system informing the witch of approaching danger. A Witch also needs to control the spell cast; uncontrolled results usually backfire on the caster, with suitably dire consequences. Magistrates, though sworn to eliminate Witches, have their own set of spells they can cast in order to find Witches, break spells, or turn spells back on their caster.
The rules finish up with a small section for the "Town Crier" (the rules' term for the GM), rules for leveling and experience (Witches get most of their EXP for remaining free and casting spells, while Magistrates get theirs mainly from disrupting magic rituals, accusations and excuting witches), a short description of life in 1692 Salem, the aforementioned maps, a bibliography, and a short beginning adventure titled "The Shadow Of The Dark Man", most of which is missing in my copy of the rules.
It's hard for me to judge the game as it should be, as I've never run it, and the copy I purchased back in 1987 is missing 6 pages - 3 from the character creation section, the map of a typical Salem farm, and two of the three pages from the beginning scenario. Fortunately the design of the character sheet makes the first three pages unnecessary, the farm map is easy enough to fudge and who runs beginning scenarios anyway? ;)
There's a lot of nice little details here in a run-of-the-mill system; nothing that hasn't been done before, but it's not exactly the kind of game I could see running more than occasionally anyway. I'd say with some cursory research into the historical Witch Trials and a little creativity, you could run a decent game with these rules, have fun, and not feel as if you'd wasted your time with it.
