the authors open fetish that complements the themes of their work

Spite Hag

"Maleficent Profile" © Phil Dragash, accessed at his DeviantArt here.

[Of course I would do a Maleficent inspired hag for this Disney Hags project. Maleficent is the most iconic of the Disney villains: she's the one who gets the most to do in Kingdom Hearts, she got the first live action revisionist remake, she even gets to fight Mickey Mouse at Disneyland! Her combination of fey, dragon and devil ("and all the powers of Hell!") makes sense in a Generic Medieval European Fantasy milieu, but D&D and its spinoffs are not Generic Medieval European Fantasy (no matter how much they like to pretend to be). As a courtesy, because the dragon form spells are among the most complicated of polymorph effects, I did include stats for her dragon form as well.

If you'd like to support my writing, please consider joining the Creature Codex Patreon.]

Spite Hag
CR 12 NE Fey
This woman has an alien beauty, tall and lean with sharp facial features. She is a pale green color, and curving horns rise from her head in place of hair.

When a fey creature is pushed past its breaking point, it may make a pact with some archdevil or demon lord in order to grant it the ability to take its revenge. In so doing, the fey is transformed into a spite hag, a monstrous witch that can call down terrible dooms on those who have wronged her. No matter how minor the slight, a spite hag will pronounce a terrible fate upon its perpetrator, oftentimes by not cursing the offender directly but targeting instead an innocent loved one. They are firm believers in disproportionate retribution and collateral damage; a social snub from a king might well be returned with the destruction of his entire kingdom. Any attempt to thwart her curses will draw her direct attention, leading to a violent retribution.

Spite hags are incredible magicians, mixing the inherent ability to hurl flames and conjure walls of thorns with witch casting granted by her fiendish patron. She can use her curse of doom in combat, but doing so takes time, and she will only do so if she feels well protected from foes. If she must fight with physical force instead of magic, or if they just want to show off, she transforms into a dragon. No matter the type of dragon, a spite hag’s draconic form matches the hag’s own color scheme. Spite hags have a tendency to underestimate foes, leading them to fight to the death out of arrogance.

Although they are capable of being charming, a spite hag is always motivated by a desire to cause suffering, often in byzantine ways. Spite hags enjoy the anticipation of pain as much as its infliction, setting esoteric triggering conditions and long delays on their curses of doom. Oftentimes, a common harmless object, such as a piece of flax or a spinning wheel, is set as the trigger. Spite hags delight when their victims change their entire lives in a desperate attempt to delay or avoid their doom, only to spring it upon them when their guard is down. Most spite hags carve out their own terrible territories in hostile wilderness, reinforcing their boundaries with curses and monsters. Spite hags do not have allies; they have minions. The closest thing a spite hag has to a friend is her familiar, who she dotes on and expresses genuine grief if something bad happens to them—grief that will become magnified into horrible rage. Few spite hags join covens, but those that do must be unquestionably in charge.

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if you’re an active follower of mine, i do recognize your username and/or icon. i smile when i see it in my activity. i get excited when you add funny tags to things. i get really happy when you reblog my op posts. so thank you, i appreciate you massively.

Game Hag

"The Queen of Hearts" © Vitor Hugo, accessed at his ArtStation here

[The next fairy tale hag, based on the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Because Alice and Looking Glass are beloved children's novels firmly in the public domain, there are tons of interpretations of Wonderland characters, and even several versions in D&D and Pathfinder. The Gary Gygax module "Dungeonland" is a scene-by-scene riff on the plot of Alice, except that all of the characters have powerful magic and most of them want to kill you. "The Harrowing" in Pathfinder is a much looser homage, set in a pocket dimension themed around a deck of cards and with as many characters who want to engage you with nonsense and their own quirks as fight. The game hag is aimed somewhere between these.

If you want to see some of the routes I didn't take with this monster, check out the post Variations on a Theme: the Queen of Hearts. If you'd like to support my writing, check out the Creature Codex Patreon!]

Game Hag
CR 9 CE Outsider (extraplanar)
This woman has a head slightly too large for her body, her expressions exaggerated through wrinkles and creases. Her skin is an unnatural color, and she is clad in fine but eccentric clothing.

The Abyss corrupts all things, even the already corrupted. When a night hag haunts the dreams of a powerful demon or chaotic evil cleric too many times, its heartstone may absorb the chaotic energy and fuse with her body, transforming her into a game hag. All game hags have a gem, their former heartstone, embedded in their body somewhere—some hide it, whereas others display it proudly. Either way, the corrupted gem no longer functions to protect the hag and allow her to pass into the Ethereal and bind souls. Instead, it grants the game hag the ability to cheat fate and declare the “rules” of the world, at least within a small radius around herself.

Many game hags are found in the Abyss, carving out petty fiefdoms of larvae, minor demons and hordlings. Game hags are obsessed with games of skill and chance. They decorate themselves and their lairs in motifs stolen from playing cards, board games and sports, and wish to play their favorite games constantly. A game hag is a bad sport—she always wants to win, will cheat to ensure that it happens, and threaten or attack anyone who points out her cheating or who manages to beat her anyway. Despite or perhaps because of their chaotic nature, they delight in mocking laws and institutions. Most game hags give themselves a royal title, impose strict hierarchies upon their subjects and enjoy mock trials to harangue and humiliate a victim. “Sentence first, verdict later” is a common saying among game hags, and the sentence is almost always death.

Game hags treat combat as a game. Her abilities allow her to impose a “rule”, instructions that grant boons to those who follow them and banes to those who don’t. They enjoy making the rules difficult or even impossible for her enemies to follow—and if she can’t follow them herself, she can just cheat. Game hags love singling out a target, and will pronounce a death sentence on a foe who overcomes her damage reduction, resists her spells or simply irritates her. Game hags are especially fond of hordlings—they enjoy the random nature of their bodies and abilities—and can even summon them to aid in battle or just to have an extra hand for bridge. Game hags fight to win, but many of them are so used to getting their own way that they don’t consider the possibility of losing, and so fight to the death.

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Fashion Hag

InkTober 2018 Cruel" © Jenny Spreu, accessed at her deviantArt here

[The second (and third) fairy tale hags don't come from fairy tales, rather British novels adapted by Disney into animated movies. The model for the fashion hag is Cruella De Vil. I went with this art because it makes her look spindly and inhuman but isn't just straight the design from the 1961 A Hundred and One Dalmatians. Every adaptation since then has made her much more conventionally attractive, culminating in the 2021 revisionist reboot that makes her an ersatz Harley Quinn played by Emma Stone, and a plucky working class rebel to boot. This completely misses the point. Cruella De Vil in the original novel was a nasty parody of upper class excess and entitlement. So perhaps it's appropriate after all that Disney, one of the most excessive and entitled corporations, decided that she wasn't that cruel after all. Mine is.

Mechanically, I wanted her to be more disruptive than damage dealing, and more defensive than the annis hag at the same CR. The sinister stitching ability is lifted from the tatterdemalion witch archetype. Of course, if you asked a fashion hag, she'd say that witches got it from them.

Want to support what I do? Want to see bonus monsters, or sponsor creatures of your own? Come join the Creature Codex Patreon.]

Fashion Hag
CR 6 CE Monstrous Humanoid
This monstrous woman is rail-thin, with knobby joints, high cheekbones and skeletal fingers that end in claws. Her hair and makeup are elaborate, and she wears striking clothing made from a wide variety of different furs and feathers.

Some hags have a passion for fashion, and they don’t care how many lives it takes to achieve glamor. Fashion hags are obsessed with furs, feathers, skins, teeth and claws; any clothing or jewelry made from animal parts. They consider the fur of young animals much softer and better to work with, and so preferentially target animals at their most helpless. They prefer to use animals that are valued and beloved by others—pets, zoological specimens, sacred beasts living in a temple or protected wilderness. After all, inflicting emotional pain is just as much fun for them as inflicting physical pain. Fashion hags are incredibly spoiled and vain, and don’t understand why they shouldn’t always get what they want. Especially if what they want is dozens of puppies to skin and turn into a coat.

Fashion hags never go anywhere without multiple layers of dramatic and high quality clothing, which is more than just vanity. They can weave magic into clothing that protects them or enhances a particular attribute the fashion hag wishes to accentuate. This usually requires concentration and attention to detail, but when pressed a fashion hag can completely make itself over, magic included, on the fly. They use their spell-like abilities to hinder and humiliate foes, and can even use magic to stitch an enemy’s eyes or mouth shut. Fashion hags are surprisingly strong considering their typically spindly builds, and once opponents are suitably softened up, fight with their bare hands to feel the blood on their claws.

All fashion hags can, with time and the proper materials, create permanent magical clothing in addition to their personal arrays. They sell and trade these to others, especially for rare furs and other animal parts. Many of the cloaks of resistance, bracers of armor and other minor magical gear in the hands of monsters without their own magical traditions were made by fashion hags. Fashion hags consider many goblinoids kindred spirits for their shared love of animal abuse, and often recruit goblins and bugbears to act as their cronies. A fashion hag may even employ adventurers to get her particular materials, although the hag’s haughtiness and bullying makes her a poor patron in the long term. Fashion hags can and do join covens, and are happy to take a subordinate role as long as they are given time and space to work on their projects.

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Brood Hag

"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!

Want to help me do what I do? Come join the Creature Codex Patreon here!]

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.

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Surprise! You’ve been Isekai’d into a D&D World… but it’s specifically a 3.5 Edition D&D world and due to a weird Glitch in the system you have been assigned not just a Base Class, but also one of that edition’s weird and wacky Prestige Class as well! Spin this wheel to see what you got!

(I added a short little summary for each Class explaining the basic gist of it. Although obviously you can also look them up to get more detailed info)

“Weevil Man” © Jason Lenox

[From the Fighting Fantasy book Phantoms of Fear. I changed the name for petty taxonomic reasons. The term “weevil” in English typically refers only to beetles in the Curculionoidea, which usually (but not always!) have long snouts. This is in contrast to most other languages with Germanic roots, in which the various versions of the word refer to all beetles. So I changed it to one of these other languages–”vifill” is the Old Norse version.]

Vifill
CR 4 CN Monstrous Humanoid
This stooped creature resembles a cross between a beetle and a man, with a human-like face, craggy and worn. Its hair is shaggy and grows behind two pairs of antennae. It has two arms and two legs, each ending in a pincer-like claw. A large carapace grows on its back in the shape of a dome—short spurs and spikes protrude from it.

The vifills, or beetle men, are cantankerous hermits with insect features. Their carapace is formed from wing covers fused together—vifills cannot fly, and are somewhat sour about it. This does provide them with exceptional protection, however. They are omnivores that can consume just about anything organic—a vifill will happily eat hair, leather and sinew. Vifills do not hunt humanoids intentionally for food, but are very territorial and tend to throw axes first, ask questions later.

The axe is a nearly sacred object to vifills, able to be tool and weapon both. Most vifills are skilled carpenters and trappers, living in caves or hollows secured by wooden beams and protected by wooden traps. Springing branch spear traps, pitfalls and deadfalls are favorite choices. They typically live alone, but form temporary families in order to care for children. Once the children are grown, young and parents alike go their separate ways and rarely if ever see each other again. Vifills are superstitious when it comes to magic, and an ostentatious display of spellcasting is a sure fire way to intimidate them.

A vifill stands about five feet tall with its permanently stooped posture. Their maximum lifespan is similar to that of a human, but their rough and tumble lifestyle means that few survive to be elderly. 

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I think what might help the whole "low engagement in fandom spaces driving creatives out because they don't see the point in sharing anything only to get crickets or critics" is not the shaming tone of "look this is how you get nothing, you entitled shits" that tends to be very pervasive, but rather pointing out how actually rewarding it can be to leave nice comments.

I like to leave very long rambling comments on people's fics and that has actually netted me some very real, genuine friendships and we've become cheerleaders for each other. My friend has a D&D Podcast that she doesn't get ANY sort of engagement out of, so I started listening to it at work and livereacting the things I enjoy about it and showing her my investment and it makes her very happy and it makes me happy that she's happy.

Being nice to people... is actually a good enough reason to do things, shockingly enough. You don't have to do it. No one should shame you for not doing it. But it doesn't actually cost anything to make other people happy, especially if they created something that made you happy.