#void hag

"Pathfinder Character: Changeling Mesmerist" © Istvan Straban, accessed at his ArtStation here.

[Inspired by conversation around the sweet hag. Notice that I am only doing small racial abilities, a la the Advanced Race Guide and Inner Sea Races, rather than doing whole subtypes as in Blood of the Coven. That's because I like the smaller, subtler differences between changelings more. And because the Blood of the Coven abilities are wildly out of sync with each other, power-level wise, especially when the feats from that book are taken into account. These are all small, situational bonuses, except for the groac'h, which mostly reflects my belief that Exotic Weapon Proficiency is not a very good feat, and nets are not very good weapons.]

Variant Changeling Traits The multifarious lineages of hags all may occasionally breed with humanoid men, and thus be mothers to changelings. These changelings are influenced by their haggish mothers, granting them the following hag racial traits:

Capacitor (Ame-Onna): The changeling gains a +2 racial bonus on saving throws made against electricity effects.

Cast the Net (Groac'h): The changeling gains Exotic Weapon Proficiency (net) as a bonus feat.

Crocodile Charmer (Cuca): The changeling gains a +2 racial bonus on Handle Animal and wild empathy checks made to influence reptiles.

Daughter of Darkness (Void Hag): The changeling gains a +1 racial bonus on all saves against fear and sleep effects. Under the night sky, this bonus increases to +2.

Discerning Palate (Sweet Hag): The changeling gains a +2 racial bonus on Perception checks made to taste.

Soft Fall (Dogai): The changeling treats all falling damage as if the fall were 10 feet shorter.

Sure Footed (Ut’lun’ta): The changeling gains a +2 racial bonus to Acrobatics checks made moving through rubble, scree or on uneven stone surfaces.

Image © Paizo Publishing

[Starfinder has a number of D&D/Pathfinder monsters... in SPAAACE. The void hag is one of these, and one that I think translates better back to Pathfinder than say, scavenger oozes do. My issue with the void hag as written comes from a disconnect between its abilities and its flavor text. The Alien Archive goes into great detail about how a void hag makes its robes, which would involve jaunts between multiple star systems and nebulae. But the void hag doesn’t have any way to quickly move through space, nor does the entry talk about them having space ships to make the trip. Space is big, y’all. So I gave it starflight.]

Void Hag CR 10 CE Monstrous Humanoid This woman has gray skin pocked with craters, as if she was made out of the surface of the moon. She wears strange robes which move with her as a second skin, and her long hair glimmers with starlight. She is very tall and lean, with long limbs, her spindly fingers ending in claws.

Void hags are powerful hags native to the airless expanses of space. They typically live on desolate moons, asteroids or even comets, plotting how best to subjugate other creatures and increase their knowledge and power. Void hags are incredibly intelligent and incredibly arrogant, and enjoy punishing other creatures for not being as brilliant as they are.

A void hag is only seen as a peer by other such creatures once she has woven her starlight robes. Doing so is time consuming and dangerous, requiring the hag to weave the energy of a coronal mass ejection and the particles of stellar dust into a shroud. The starlight robes provide the hag with a potent defense and a potent offense, and she never willingly removes them. The greatest insult a void hag can suffer is to have her robes stolen or destroyed.

On occasion, a void hag will make planet-fall and join with other hags in a coven. Void hags cannot stand to be in anything except a leadership position within these covens, and they will kill rivals who attempt too often to assert authority. Covens comprised of only void hags do exist, and are somewhat more stable, but each member usually has a plan to betray their fellows if they need to, and to fight against such betrayals themselves. A coven with a void hag adds the following spell-like abilities to their coven magic ability: mass inflict pain, reverse gravity, and slay living.