Night Hag

Night hags on Theros appear as leathery-faced crones that hold their single eye within their withered lips as they stare with eyeless sockets. They usually build their huts in The Underworld, particularly around the towering pillars of basalt and granite within the Mire of Punishment (see chapter 3). There, amid the lamentations of those who have offended the gods, night hags inhale the smoke of toxic balefires. They follow the visions the smoke invokes to the dreams of vulnerable mortals where they sow the seeds of folly. A Night Hag Senses the world around her with sensitive fingers, keen hearing, and the single eye she typically holds in her mouth. When a Night Hag uses her powers to transform, her eye often becomes a bauble or piece of jewelry she keeps close at all times.
Night Hag Sly and subversive, night hags want to see the virtuous turn to villainy: love turned into obsession, kindness turned to hate, devotion to disregard, and generosity to selfishness. Night hags take perverse joy in corrupting mortals.
Night hags were once creatures of the Feywild, but their foulness saw them exiled to Hades long ago, where they degenerated into Fiends. The night hags have long since spread across the Lower Planes.
Soulmongers. While a Humanoid sleeps, a Night Hag can straddle the person ethereally and intrude upon its dreams. Any creature with Truesight can see the hag’s spectral form straddling its prey. The ethereal hag fills her victim’s head with doubts and fears, in the hope of tricking it into performing evil acts in the waking world. The hag continues her nightly visitations until the Victim finally expires in its sleep. If the hag has driven her Victim to commit evil deeds, she traps its corrupted soul in her Soul Bag (see Night Hag Items) for transport to Hades.
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 monikers 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 macabre and festoon their garb with dead things and accentuate 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 menagerie 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.