#hag

Mothers Dearest 🌙✨

Lyra’s loving mothers~ They are a coven of hags fused into one. Each one takes turns being in control depending on the phases of the moon.

On the backs of infernal beasts the Green Annis, the true witch, answers the beckoning of her Reverend's call.

"Duchess" © Dmitry Khuzin, accessed at his ArtStation here

[This is the first of what I'm calling the fairy tale hags. I was inspired by a conversation with @strawberry-crocodile, where she pointed out that the hags in PF2e's Monster Core were all inspired by evil women in children's media. The sea hag got even more like Ursula than previously, the sweet hag is clearly the witch from Hansel and Gretel, the iron hag is inspired by Mother Gothel in Tangled, and the cuckoo hag is Paizo's take on the Other Mother. My own take is the beldam, if you're interested. So I started spitballing with fairy tale archetypes and Disney villains, and came up with four hags to match (and @abominationimperatrix contributed an idea for a skelm, who's also going to appear in this project).

First off, the brood hag, who I really wish I could call a cuckoo hag. She's inspired by the various wicked stepmothers and stepdaughters in fairy tales, which literalize intergenerational conflict and the creeping realization in a young person's life that their family doesn't always want what's best for them. The Brothers Grimm took a lot of wicked parents and siblings and made them "step" as part of their nuclear family propaganda, which expanded that fear to fathers as well. Is this new woman you're marrying a suitable match? Will her child from a previous marriage be a suitable heir? Although there's plenty of wicked stepfamily in Disney between The Evil Queen in Snow White and Lady Tremaine and her daughters in Cinderella, my primary inspiration was from a non-Disney fairy tale movie. Jack Frost is a Russian film which appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and is genuinely delightful. Malfushka is probably my favorite wicked stepsister on film. She wants precious stones, damnit! Stones!

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Brood Hag CR 3 NE Monstrous Humanoid This woman is subtly inhuman—her lips are an odd color, her eyes bulge, and her skin is the texture of parchment. She wears the finery of a noble.

Brood hags are social kleptoparasites. Unlike most hags, which lair far from human society, brood hags make themselves part of it. They intrude upon wealthy families through bluster and bullying, often claiming to be a long-lost cousin or imposing themselves as a marriage candidate. Once ensconced in a family, they live the high life, demanding an outsize share of resources to pamper themselves and forcing others to serve them. They are skilled at slander and psychological warfare, denigrating their possible rivals for an inheritance and gaslighting others into seeing their behavior as perfectly reasonable. And if all else fails, they kill their opposition and stage it as an accident, or frame another family member who asks too many questions. Like many other hags, brood hags have a taste for human flesh, but they disguise these anthropophagous feasts through cookery (although they would much rather order someone else to do the cooking).

The stare of a brood hag saps the will of whoever they gaze upon, allowing them to get away with audacious behavior with little protest. Brood hags prefer to have other people fight for them, but they can defend themselves with mind-altering magic. Their teeth are surprisingly sharp, but their bite is more dangerous for being able to transmit overwhelming negative emotions. Those killed by this lethal hate appear to have died of heart attack or stroke—which the brood hags can emphasize by smoothing out the wounds they inflict through magic.

Brood hags are somewhat unusual as far as hags go. Sages and hags alike speculate that they are a mutation of the normal process of hag reproduction; something between an ordinary changeling and a “true” hag. A brood hag can interbreed with humans and only have daughters, and her daughters are full brood hags themselves rather than changelings. Thus, a brood hag can marry into a family, raise her daughters as members of her coven, and then the wicked stepmother and her stepdaughters can siphon away all its resources, potentially for generations. Brood hags seek to marry up, and after a carefully positioned generation or two, a brood hag can even become royalty, with grim consequences for entire nations.

Brood hags look almost, but not quite, human. Most of them are able to pass themselves off as being merely ugly by human standards, but roughly one in ten of them have features of striking beauty. Brood hags are vain as a rule, and augment their appearances with makeup, fine clothes and jewelry.