Overview
Hags represent all that is evil and cruel. Though they resemble withered crones, there is nothing mortal about these monstrous creatures, whose forms reflect only the wickedness in their hearts.
Faces of Evil
Ancient beings with origins in the Feywild, hags are cankers on the mortal world. Their withered faces are framed by long, frayed hair, horrid moles and warts dot their blotchy skin, and their long, skinny fingers are tipped by claws that can slice open flesh with a touch. Their simple clothes are always tattered and filthy.
All hags possess magical powers, and some have an affinity for spellcasting. They can alter their forms or curse their foes, and their arrogance inspires them to view their magic as a challenge to the magic of the gods, whom they blaspheme at every opportunity.
Hags name themselves in darkly whimsical ways, claiming names such as Black Morwen, Peggy Pigknuckle, Grandmother Titchwillow, Nanna Shug, Rotten Ethel, or Auntie Wormtooth.
Monstrous Motherhood
Hags propagate by snatching and devouring
human infants. After stealing a baby from its cradle or its mother’s womb, the hag consumes the poor child. A week later, the hag gives birth to a daughter who looks human until her thirteenth birthday, whereupon the child transforms into the spitting image of her hag mother.
Hags sometimes raise the daughters they spawn, creating covens. A hag might also return the child to its grieving parents, only to watch from the shadows as the child grows up to become a horror.
Dark Bargains
Arrogant to a fault, hags believe themselves to be the most cunning of creatures, and they treat all others as inferior. Even so, a hag is open to dealing with mortals as long as those mortals show the proper respect and deference. Over their long lives, hags accumulate much knowledge of local lore, dark creatures, and magic, which they are pleased to sell.
Hags enjoy watching mortals bring about their own downfall, and a bargain with a hag is always dangerous. The terms of such bargains typically involve demands to compromise principles or give up something dear - especially if the thing lost diminishes or negates the knowledge gained through the bargain.
A Foul Nature
Hags love the gruesome and add to their appearance with bones, bits of flesh, and filth. They nurture blemishes and pick at wounds to produce weeping, suppurating flesh. Attractive creatures evoke disgust in a hag, which might “help” such creatures by disfiguring or transforming them.
This embrace of the disturbing and unpleasant extends to all aspects of a hag’s life. A hag might fly in a magical
giant’s skull, landing it on a tree shaped to resemble an enormous headless body. Another might travel with a collection of monsters and slaves kept in cages, and disguised by illusions to lure unwary creatures close. Hags sharpen their teeth on millstones and spin cloth from the intestines of their victims, reacting with glee to the horror their actions invoke.
Dark Sorority
Hags maintain contact with each other and share knowledge. Through such contacts, it is likely that any given hag knows of every other hag in existence. Hags don’t like each other, but they abide by an ageless code of conduct. Hags announce their presence before crossing into another hag’s territory, bring gifts when entering another hag’s dwelling, and break no oaths given to other hags - as long as the oath isn’t given with the fingers crossed.
Some humanoids make the mistake of thinking that the hags’ rules of conduct apply to all creatures. When confronted by such an individual, a hag might find it amusing to string the fool along for a while before teaching it a permanent lesson.
Dark Lairs
Hags dwell in dark and twisted woods, bleak moors, storm-lashed seacoasts, and gloomy swamps. In time, the landscape around a hag’s lair reflects the creature’s noxiousness, such that the land itself can attack and kill trespassers. Trees twisted by darkness attack passersby, while vines snake through the undergrowth to snare and drag off creatures one at a time. Foul stinking fogs turn the air to poison, and conceal pools of quicksand and sinkholes that consume unwary wanderers.
Hag Covens
When hags must work together, they form covens, in spite of their selfish natures. A coven is made up of hags of any type, all of whom are equals within the group. However, each of the hags continues to desire more personal power.
A coven consists of three hags so that any arguments between two hags can be settled by the third. If more than three hags ever come together, as might happen if two covens come into conflict, the result is usually chaos.
While all three members of a hag coven are within 30 feet of one another, they can each cast the following spells from the wizard’s spell list but must share the spell slots among themselves:
For casting these spells, each hag is a 12th-level spellcaster that uses Intelligence as her spellcasting ability. The spell save DC is 12 + the hag’s Intelligence modifier, and the spell attack bonus is 4 + the hag’s Intelligence modifier.
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