People say that the FeyWylds has beautiful butterfly dragons, tiny fairy people, and glitter.
But hags are a type of Fey that thinks that belief is an offence and will use that as a reason to make you suffer.
THE reason, not just a reason. As Hags live to make people suffer. They are like every witch in a fairy tale and every bad thing that happens when magic is involved in a Disney movie.
So, since I thought I knew everything there was to know about Fey and their quirks, I decided to find out what made these “evil and proud” Fey tick.
One kind of Hag was so bad that it was kicked out of the Fey Wylds. They came up with jokes that went too far and were so scary that even the Fey had to stop them.
As a player or DM, that should be all the warning you need to never underestimate a Hag.
Welcome to a Hag 5e Guide.
Hag Summarized
Hags came from the Fey Wylds, but their ruthless, cranky, and 100% evil energy doesn’t let them chill out.
A Hag only wants to ruin your day, while a Fey’s goals could be anywhere on the moral spectrum. Maybe it’s because you’re pretty, which makes them feel bad.
Maybe they want to try out a funny new trick and need to figure out how to get a person to ask for it.
Maybe they are hungry and want to eat that tasty child who keeps going through the woods to get to grandma’s house. A Hag gets what it wants every time.
- No matter how good a deal seems, the Hag always comes out ahead.
- There are always three people in a Hag Coven. The group isn’t always made up of only hags.
- The DM should make every move with a hag with the idea that they are part of a bigger plan, whether it was planned or not.
- Some of the worst stories about the Fey come from the Hags.
- A Hag never tells the party what they really want; they keep everyone guessing. Only what they can get from the party.
- A Hag thinks that things that are scary and ugly are cute and funny, and vice versa.
- Most of the time, the Seelie and Unseelie courts respect Hags, but they find them disgusting.
- If a Hag finds out you won a deal, you have made an enemy for life.
Hag Types
Different types of Hags are said to live on different planes and in different places, but there are five main types.
These Hags have a favourite place where they like to live. Due to the length of their plans, only the most powerful grandmothers and aunts are likely to take up resilience in new places.
It is possible for a hag to change from one type to another. This can happen by sheer willpower, but a ritual makes it easier.
Different types of Hags do this for different reasons, like as part of a ritual to get stronger or just “for the lulz.”
If a DM wants to make their own Hag, they only need to follow a few general flavour rules. A hag has a favourite area, a type of pain that they are especially good at because they crave it, and the ability to cast spells naturally if they are strong enough.
If a Hag is not in a Coven, she uses her charisma to cast spells. For Shared Spell-casting, the Hag must use Intelligence when she is in a Coven.
Sea Hags
- CR: 2
- Coven CR: 4
- Biome: Underwater, Shores
- Torment: Defile Beauty
Sea Hags are the most ugly and scary-looking of the Hags. This is something they love to do so much that they hate the normal idea of beauty that people have. They live in water that is dirty.
Even though they can’t cast spells like her sisters, Hags, they can still make people afraid just by looking at them.
She can also use the “death glare” action, which kills a creature outright if it fails a Wisdom save with a DC of 11.
A sea hag can make herself look fake, but she would rather make herself look worse.
Even though Sea Hags are the weakest of the usual Hags, they can quickly ruin a party’s day with their “death glare.”
If the tank in your group didn’t make a DC 11 save a sure thing, well, whelp. Death by Ugly is not the WORST way to die. At least it goes by fast.
Green Hags
- CR: 3
- Coven CR: 5
- Biome: Forests, Swamps, Moors
- Torment: Despair and Tragedy
Innate Spellcasting
- Spell Save DC: 12
- At-Will: dancing lights, minor illusion, vicious mockery
Hags are especially interested in tragedy and being used. They usually live in swamps, forests, and caves, where they build elaborate workshops out of things they find there.
A Green Hag will often pretend to be a villager to get adventurers and lost people to come into their hut.
Their natural spells are all about trickery and illusion, and they can imitate humanoid voices and animal sounds to help them with their complicated plans.
Night Hag
- CR: 5
- Coven CR: 7
- Biome: Lower Planes, Hades, Ethereal
- Torment: Corrupting the good to do evil.
Innate Spellcasting
- Spell Save DC: 14; +6 to hit with spells.
- At-Will: detect magic, magic missile
- 2/day: plane shift (self an only), ray of enfeeblement, sleep
A Night Hag is a bad person, unlike other Hags. This type of Hag was sent to Hades a long time ago because of how bad they were. The darkness of the Lower Planes has changed their body and soul.
Their wish to see pain and suffering has turned into a plan to spread corruption. Every emotion’s darkest parts can be brought out, and they are patient enough to make you do it yourself.
Instead of putting on an illusion, a Night Hag can change into a small or medium-sized female humanoid. All of her forms share the same stats.
A Night Hag lives on the edge of what is real and what is not. Their main strategy is to sneak up on an adventurer or group of adventurers and mess with their dreams.
They want to push them to the edge of their soul and personality by using doubt and personal fears to make them do things that go against who they are.
If they are successful and their target does these bad things, the Night Hag will catch the soul of the corrupt in their soul bag.
- Heartstone: The Night Hag can turn into a ghost with this black gem. The gem can heal any sickness just by touching it. The Hag needs 30 days to make the gem.
- Soul Bag: This black bag is a relic made from stitched flesh. It took seven days and a human sacrifice to make it, and it can hold one evil soul. A Night Hag can only catch a soul if she can get the person to do something bad on their own.
Annis Hag
- CR: 6
- Coven CR: 8
- Biome: Mountains or Hills
- Torment: the Weak and Fearful
Innate Spellcasting
- Spell Save: DC 13
- 3/day: disguise self, fog cloud
The Annis Hag is the largest of the Has, and it takes pride in that. They stand about eight feet tall and can tear apart a grown man. But they like to eat children.
The Annis Hag usually makes charms and trinkets out of the bones and flesh of children they have taken from a nearby village.
The Annis Hag will put these totems and other things at the end of a village’s territory to upset the people who live there.
When they’re not eating kids, they whisper in their ears to try to make them bad. An Annis Hag has a lot of fun pretending to be a nice old lady in the forest.
They tell the child gently that his or her dark thoughts are normal, which soon leads the child to become corrupt, and they laugh as the child is sent away.
A lot of the time, an Annis Hag will become the “tribe mother” of adopted ogres, trolls, and other jerks. These minions don’t get treated well, and fear and abuse are often used to keep them in line.
Children who have been kicked out of their homes often have nowhere else to go. Shouldn’t they end up being eaten?
Iron Token
Up to three “Iron Tokens” can be made at once by an Annis Hag. The Hag’s iron teeth and nails are used to make these.
The Hag pulls them out of herself first. Then, for 1 minute, shape and polish them. This token is usually a coin, a piece of jewellery, or a small mirror.
With an Iron Token, a Hag and the person who has the token can whisper to each other. The voice of the Hag is the only thing the token will send and receive. Often, these tokens are given to the kids they want to get to do bad things.
The sad youngling is given a trinket where old Granny can talk to them. Most of the time, they do this in the middle of the night when their guardians are sleeping.
Bheur Hag
- CR: 7
- Coven CR: 9
- Biome: Wintery Lands
- Torment: Cold & selfish actions, mortals freezing to death, slowly snuffing out villages with weather magic.
Innate Spellcasting
- Spell Save DC: 14; +6 to hit with spells.
- At-Will: hold pea rson*, ray of frost
- 3/day: cone of cold*, ice storm*, wall of ice*
- 1/day: control weather
- To cast, you need a grey staff
A Bheur Witch likes to do selfish things because they have to in order to stay alive in the freezing cold that their storms bring.
So, they will plant seeds of mistrust and greed in communities, pushing mayors to get rid of the weak and merchants to stockpile goods.
All the while, they make sure that the storms around them get worse, mostly because they want to hit villages that are easy to cut off from society with an avalanche.
A Bheur Hag is interested in dying slowly. They want to see how slowly people suffer from hunger and cold.
They will loosen the thatch on the village’s roofs, making it harder to keep out the cold. They don’t just want you to die of cold.
The Hag wants you to starve and die so that your body can become a symbol of pain. Your family will be too weak to pull you out of the corner where a small hole was cut for the winter to take you at night.
Maddening Feast
When a Bheur is fighting and kills an enemy, it will often stop fighting and start eating the body. Anyone who sees this must make a dc15 Wisdom save or be scared for 1 minute and 10 rounds.
With the frightened modifier, the creature can’t do anything and moves in a random way. When the player is in this state, the DM controls how they move.
If the creature makes the save, their Maddening Feast won’t hurt them for the next 24 hours.
Gray Staff: The only creature that can use the Gray Staff is a Bheur Hag. A Graystaff is a piece of grey wood that the Hag uses to focus her power.
Using this, she can use it as a forroom to fly or to boost her magic so she can cast stronger spells.
Weird Magic
In a trade, there is a way to get the attention of a Hag. During their endless lives, they gather strange recipes, horrible rituals, and strange things. Most of the time, a Hag’s macabre style is not subtle.
A DM can make one-time-use charms and trinkets for a Hag by using spells and monster effects used by creatures with a CR rating lower than or equal to their own.
For example, Cloud of Daggers is a 2nd level spell that fills a 5-foot area with daggers that do 4d4 damage to a creature.
A Green Hag can do this (CR 3) with the help of a magic mirror that, when broken, releases a version that uses shards of glass.
Most of these things in the collection, if not all of them, were not made by the Hag herself. Instead, they came from adventurers and powerful beings who were able to trade their way out of her schemes.
Because of this, you shouldn’t be sure about any Hag. They are Fey in body and spirit, and aisFey are never sure about anything except whether or not they are having a great time. Hags enjoy looking for trouble… and strangely powerful magic “shinies.”
Hags with more power, like Grandmothers, can make these things again with the help of two other Hags and powerful rituals.
Mounts & Transport
This collection of strange relics will eventually end up in the Hag’s collection of cars. Hags are said to light up the town in a fancy house with bird legs, flying mortar and pestles, the traditional broom, dragon skulls, and even bird nests.
Most of the time, the Hags are the only ones who can drive these cars. The vehicle is sometimes too scared to cross the Hag to let an Archfey use it.
Bargains
A Hag will learn a lot of scary rituals, secrets that aren’t supposed to be known, and local stories over the course of her life.
Through a Hag’s strange ways, an adventurer or group of adventurers who are in trouble could easily find the answer or way out.
The problem is that Hags are still Fey and think they are better than everyone, even other Hags.
So, they pretty much live to make a strange deal that works out for the Hag. If they make it a sore spot, the party will be angry for a long time, which will make the Hag happy.
Most of the time, the only “moral” behind a Hag’s plans is the fall a mortal can bring on themselves. One of their favorite tricks is to use double-talk that plays on the pride of mortals or their flaws.
But an old favorite is the weight of something that is important to you versus something that you want.
Hag Society
Hags are known for being cranky and like to be alone, but they keep in touch with each other and share what they know.
Night Hags are still part of the Fey or at least come from the Wylds, so they still follow a set of rules. Most of the time, this is only for Hag and sometimes for other Fey.
When a hag goes into the territory of another hag, she will let them know she is there. They will bring gifts to a hag host when they visit, and most surprising of all, they will never break a promise or oath made to another Hag.
Most people think that through their network of contacts, a Hag knows or is only a couple of steps away from any other Hag in the world.
Hags might be high-level members of the high-functioning antisocial club who are also paranoid. But they still have a deep desire for family.
If you don’t cover every track, everyone knows when a Hag is born or dies. If you make a hag mad, they will find out.
Reproduction
Hags are often linked to lost children for a scary reason, and a big part of that is how they have babies. A Hag steals and eats a human baby as its first meal.
Then, a week later, the Hag will have a daughter who looks just like the person she ate. When the child turns 13, she will look just like her hag mother.
A Hag could choose to raise their own Hag. Hags, on the other hand, are more likely to watch from the shadows because they are paranoid and like to be alone.
So first, enjoy watching the human family bring up the Hag. Then, enjoy the trouble that the child’s 13th birthday will cause.
Hag Covens
The magic that the Hags use is full of rituals that are based on superstitions. A rule of three is used in many of them. People who have seen the way the world works say that even the planes tend to fly in groups of three.
Hags know that magic they use will come back to them three times. However, since they use Wyld magic, this could be a big part of the problem.
This means that if you want to cast stronger spells without destroying your body, the spell’s rebound effects need to come from three different places.
At least, this is the reasoning Hags use to find that sweet spot where they don’t like big crowds but love big pools of mana.
A Coven can only have three members and will always start out with three other hags, who are often different from each other.
Since they have a taste for power, losing their third member often makes them desperate, and high-level magic users are sometimes brought in to help.
Hag Eye
A coven makes a Hag Eye by putting varnish on a real eye. Even though it’s not required, it’s often attached to a pendant. There can only be one Hag eye in a coven at a time.
The ritual needs all three Hags, who can’t be blind, and it takes an hour of focusing only on the Hag Eye ritual.
If the three hags did anything other than the ritual while it was being made, it would have to start over.
Some crazy covens have cut off an eye or decorated the third socket so they can share the eye. Usually, instead of sharing the hag eye, a trusted minion is in charge of keeping it safe and moving it.
A hag of the coven can use an action to see something through the Hag Eye as long as it is on the same plane of existence.
Shared Spellcasting
As long as all three hag coven members are within 30 feet of each other, each of them can cast a spell from the list below. Even though they can cast on their own, they must share the spell slots.
For the purposes of casting, each Hag is treated as a 12th-level spellcaster whose ability to cast spells is her intelligence.
- Spell Save: DC 12+ Hags Int Mod
- Spell Attack Bonus: 4+ Hag’s Int Mod
| Lvl | Slots | Spells |
| 1 | 4 | Idea ntify, a ray of sickness |
| 2 | 3 | Hold person, locate object |
| 3 | 3 | Bestow curse, counterspell, lightning bolt, |
| 4 | 3 | Phantasmal killer, polymorph |
| 5 | 2 | Canother planer plane, scrying |
| 6 | 1 | Eyebite |
Hag Lair
Because Fey are magical, wherever a Ha decides to live will slowly start to change to fit their needs. For example, Annis Hags and Green Hags can make the trees in a forest start to weave together and turn plants into monsters.
A Sea Hag, on the other hand, will make rogue waves, cross seas, and endless storms on the coasts she lives on.
Often, the most important thing is that where they live can also be a Fey Crossing. These are places where the lines between the Wylds and the Material are thin, letting the Hag escape or take advantage of the weirdness of the area.
If the Hag is an old woman, she’ll get a set of lair actions that fit her personality. A DM can change how a character acts by looking at their nature, what they know, and their past.
The Grandmother Hag can use Lair Actions when her initiative count is 20. The same action can’t be used twice in a row.
For example, a Bheur Hag might make a huge snowstorm, and a Night Hag might send a player to a prison dimension.
How To Fight Hags
When a Hag says she will do something, be careful. If she says yes right away, you should wonder what the catch is.
If she thinks about the decision for a long time, she may be trying to get you to agree with her or make your part of the deal worse.
Hags are very interested in strange items, spells, and trinkets, and they won’t hide it. So, you can usually get a Hag to do what you want by showing her something shiny enough.
A Hag doesn’t care much about beauty and style. So a party will have to think like a Hag, who likes things that are dark and scary.
Find an unusual spell or ritual recipe to trade with them. This is a simpler way to deal with them.
Tips for DMing Hags
Hags don’t care what other people think of them because they know they are the best part of the scene.
A Hag could make a “Bond.” These things are not good. One bond was to take a child from every generation of a certain family line because their ancestor kicked her door too hard.
They can be funnier, though, because she may be looking for her daughter so she can find and train her. Also, don’t feel sorry for her. Remember, she had to eat a child to make a child.
Hags like to mess with the lives of regular people. As they age or get stronger, they will grow into whole societies or kingdoms.
Most of the time, a party can only trick a Hag without getting in trouble if they trade her something weird, unique, or just plain ugly. Hags are Fey, so when they really want something, they are terrible at hiding it.
Most of all, the Hag has a secret plan. So, even if you don’t have a plan right away as a DM, you should keep the Hag’s deal in mind for when you do.
The Hag might be watching in the form of different NPCs who don’t stand out. They might have even shown you the way without you knowing it.
