Warning: As a potential Death Trope for successful examples, many unmarked spoilers are ahead.
Burn the Witch! in Tabletop Games.
- Being burned at the stake is mentioned to be the fate of most "witches" (read: people with supernatural powers) caught by either the Inquisition, after being tormented at its hands, or the people of certain countries in Anima: Beyond Fantasy. Since in that game spellcasting can be done even tied and/or gagged, presumably the chains and the like used to hold the victim would nullify their powers.
- Atmosfear: Anne de Chantraine was an innocent burned alive at the stake due to accusations of witchcraft as a teen.
- In The Chronicles of Aeres, the human kingdom of Hesmoor was once part of the Imperium, and so still is ruled by a brutal order of witchfinders dedicated to hunting down and slaying all mages and magical creatures they can find.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The generic module "The Apocalypse Stone" has a sort of subversion. The player characters come upon a town where they are about to "burn the witch". They must (to pass a test of character they don't know about, anyway) find out the truth about her guilt. At first it appears she is innocent, and the missing child she's accused of killing can be found elsewhere - but looking into it more carefully reveals that yes, she is still a witch who's into human sacrifice and worships a devil. Even if the burning takes place, the local good-aligned community leader intends to quickly strangle her under the cover of smoke instead, so that's another aspect that's subverted.
- Played straight with the Order of Seropaenes from the sourcebook Tome of Magic, with the binder playable class standing in for the witch.
- Occurs in the backstory of Vecna, a half-fiend necromancer and demonologist who ascended to become first a lich and then a full-fledged god. One of the first things he did after mastering his powers was come back to the city where he was born, and from which he was exiled when they tried to burn him at the stake and only succeeded at killing his mother. He effortlessly slaughtered every last one of them, save for the city's leaders; them he spared because they had dared to offer their own lives in exchange for the lives of their citizens.
- In Fading Suns this used to be the Urth Orthodox Church's policy with psychics, but after the Eskatonic Order showed that their powers could fight the Symbiots the Church began to grudgingly accept "Penitent" psychics. Though the Temple Avesti still likes to go on Witch Hunts, making them extremely unpopular among the populace, at least one Avestite has been burned at the stake for accusing a well-loved Amalthean healer of heresy.
- The Fighting Fantasy gamebook Spellbreaker contains a notable subversion in that the witch hunters are the good guys, fighting against an evil coven of witches and warlocks that are trying to free a powerful demon from its mystic prison. The reader can even encounter a supposed witch-burning, although the young woman about to be burned is actually innocent, and the warlock is actually the inquisitor who's about to burn her, having framed her as a way of throwing suspicion off himself.
- House Karanok in Forgotten Realms burns every arcane caster they can get their hands on. Presumably, they haven't yet gotten their hands on Elminster. Why? They still exist.
- Hunter: The Reckoning implies repeatedly that the Salem and Inquisitorial witch hunts were both justified and effective. Of course, in the Old World of Darkness, that's not entirely ridiculous.
- In Necromunda the religious fanatics of House Cawdor and members of the Cult of Redemption possess an intense loathing of psykers and Wyrds, believing that the best fate for such witches is immolation by flamer weaponry. During the 1st and 2nd Edition of the game Redemptionist Crusade even had a rule that they would automatically burn any Wyrd they capture at the stake unless their comrades could rescue them.
- Pathfinder: After the First Mendevian Crusade, the demons of the Worldwound changed tactics and began corrupting crusaders and sending cultists to infiltrate them, leading to the capture of the Crusade's forward base Drezen. The Crusaders responded by forming an Inquisition, which uses burning as a main form of execution. And while Properly Paranoid, they've burned a lot of innocent people along with the guilty.
- The Ravenloft zigzags this trope. In general, practitioners of arcane magic are feared and shunned in all save a few of the most "enlightened" Domains, such as the comparatively high-magic land of Darkon, but people actually being dragged to the stake and burned by a lynch mob generally doesn't happen without a lot of provocation or unless you're in one of the more backwater regions. Played straight with the domain of Tepest, which is based on a combination of Witch Trials Salem and Grimm Fairy Tales — their Darklord is even a coven of hags called the Sisters Mindefisk. Unusually, their ire is directed less at magic-users and more at fey, whom they live in terror of; "witches" are people who are willingly in league with the fey, although they're so backwards that they can't identify that Magic A Is Magic A and so anyone who practices non-clerical magic is a "witch" in their eyes. Burning them is justified because the malevolent inquisition steadily amassing political power has its roots in the domain's worship of a sun god named Belenus. Tepest is regarded as one of the most backwards and primitive domains in the Demiplane of Dread.
- Tepest features heavily in the 2nd edition module Servants of Darkness, which gives PCs the opportunity to derail this trope, proving an accused woman's innocence by exposing the evil fey creature which is truly to blame for the misfortunes plaguing a Tepestani village. This is referenced in the 3e sourcebook covering the Tepest region, which reveals that the head of the Tepestani Inquisition was actually shaken so much that he has since tried to stamp down the anti-fey and anti-witch hysteria that his organization is building its power around.
- The majority of Warhammer magic users end up in this manner. Unusually for this trope, many of the witches actually are in contact with malign supernatural beings. In one piece of background material a witch hunter burns a 6-year-old girl at the stake because her parents went to a mad scientist to heal her broken leg and ended up mutated as a result. The witch hunter got her drunk because he knew that she was an innocent who just had the misfortune to have the traveling doctor be an insane lunatic, but she couldn't be allowed to live because of the mutations.
- In Warhammer 40,000 is actually somewhat nuanced on the subject. There's a distinction between psykers and witches. Psykers have an innate connection with the warp. There's always a chance they could be possessed, but they can (provided that they're strong enough, and receive the proper training, and are lucky not to attract a dangerous demon) avoid anything demonic and even work for the Imperium in rare cases. Witches, on the other hand, are those who deliberately use rituals and spells to draw power form the warp, usually by making some pact with some malevolent warp entity or daemon. Also, inquisitors and witchhunters are very numerous and diverse. Some of them are diehard witch-burners, others are compromising pragmatists, others are severe radicals who will use witches for their own purposes. In fact, the Imperium needs psykers, Astropaths for communication and Navigators to guide starships through the Warp, and just about every branch of the Imperial military uses sanctioned psykers, there are even many Inquisitors who are psykers. While those who are too weak to use for those purposes can be fed to the God-Emperor. So, needless to say, a lot of Inquisitors try to take psykers who aren't involved with Chaos alive. If a witch is deemed dangerous enough however, they'll burn the whole planet just to be safe. Outside of the Inquisition itself this distinction is almost completely unknown, and all psykers get lumped together as witches; the more sophisticated might avoid using the term for sanctioned psychers out of politeness.
- This is the core concept of the party game Werewolf (1997). There are monsters hiding in the village and killing people at night, but you can't tell them from the innocent villagers by looking at them. What's the solution? Grab a pitchfork or a torch, form a lynch mob, and tie a rope to the old hanging tree.
