 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and do you know what I hate? Faye. You know what I love? Crushing Faye by dropping a house on them. That's why The Wizard of Oz is a household classic for me, telling the tale of a brave human amassing followers to defeat the evil Faye hag that has been playing her every move. But for some people, it's not enough to carry with them the lessons of a beautiful murder story, for their own home is plagued by the wicked witch of Worcestershire, and they need a deposit of information to aid them in these trying times. So, let's talk about hags from birth to death and all of the terrible little nightmares in between. Oh boy! You thought you were going to get informed about important D&D information? Well, hold onto your hats, because that's exactly what you'll be doing when you hear about Out of the Box encounters for fifth edition for what is assuredly the very first time. With the power of book, you too can connect tons of well-crafted, artful encounters into your own homebrew games with just a single click of a Kickstarter, link below. Plus, if you order within the very, very, very near future, you can get a discounted ticket to Nerdarchy, the convention starring me, James T. Nerdarchy, as well as a bunch of other people you wouldn't know. So, enjoy the last few days of 2019 by curling up with a good book that was made for Nerds by Nerds. So, hags are strange, enigmatic creatures that have the outward appearance of old crones living in a strange house on the edge of town, but are in fact horrid monsters that twist and pervert the image of the loving grandmother so that they can snatch up any strangers that try to touch their cookies. They steal and eat babies so that once enough babies have been devoured to gain the ultimate baby power, they can spit out a new baby that'll grow up into a hag by the age of 13, and they often stay in places that unnaturally merge the material plane and the Feywild, where they can both wreak havoc on the unsuspecting townfolk while also studying, practicing, and experimenting on their magical arts with the intention of growing their power greater and greater until they're able to craft the ultimate cookie. Their usual MO is to roll in on a cow, sell a bunch of snake oil that'll have unintended consequences, and also cost an arm, a leg, or a baby, and then peace out on a flying cauldron while cackling into the night. And unfortunately for us, hags don't seem to have an expiration date, so they'll live longer than anything. Dragons, elves, my especially the wizard joke, while they remain, their relationship with any surrounding settlements borders between unsettling, creepy, and downright repugnant. See, despite looking like the dark side of Betty White, hags have an overt sense of humor, taking delight in grossing out any stuck-up and prissy posh body that puts too much emphasis on sanitation, clean smells, and sexual attraction to anything other than these sweet husky gams. Their grossness is only emphasized by their homes, often layered with filth and adorned with nothing but oatmeal raisin cookies, but the raisins are spiders, and the oatmeal is oatmeal! And their magic, which while operating similarly to normal spells, have creepy methods of applying their magics, such as cure wounds, being a swarm of bugs stitching your injuries back together, magic missile being heat-seeking nude eyes that splatter all over you when they strike, and a poison cloud being, well, I'll let you use your imagination. The common wisdom for dealing with hags, besides don't, is that talking will only hurt marginally less than fighting, and you'll still come out covered in bodily fluid anyway. However, when dealing with hags, there are five main flavors of senior citizen that you'll have to watch out for, and these are the anise hags that live in the mountains and hills, burr hags that live in tundras, green hags that live in swamps, moors, forests, and greenlands, night hags that are often found in the lower plains to haunt the dreams of children, and sea hags that rise out from the ocean under the guise of mermaids just to turn around and reveal their wrinkly pruney bodies. While each hag has a specific type of terrain that it models itself after, it isn't unknown for them to mix things up and go to a completely incompatible terrain, so if your swamplings start to freeze over and you get buried under a blizzard, that's how you know you've got hags. As for the hags themselves, their only goal is to gain more power and rise up the ranks of the hag hierarchy. If you've seen my Feywild guide, then you understand the ununderstandable nature of the fey and how their court system works, but hags operate almost completely outside of that system. Instead, hags form a very close-knit trio of sisters called a coven, and this magical power of threes allows them to access the magics inaccessible for one hag alone. Most covens communicate with each other, trading secrets and baking recipes so that the elderly sorority will grow and prosper, all the while keeping those same hags at an arms reach away from their actual stomping grounds and only meeting up with foreign hags on bingo nights to discuss new ways of being old and creepy. In this way, when an adventurer deals with a hag, they're not just dealing with one hag or even three hags, they're dealing with the entire sisterhood. One dead hag attracts the ire of a dozen living hags, or if the hag was a bit of a hag, then perhaps her sisters will be happy to see her go and thank the adventurer for their help. It all comes down to the hierarchy of the hag. Like I said before, hags operate in covens, but beyond that, a hag status is dictated by how old, powerful, and influential they are with the rest of the populace. A particularly strong hag might be awarded the title of auntie, while hags that have baking skills that would rival even chef buddy are revered as grandmothers, signifying them as being even as powerful as an archfey and being able to walk into their courts despite disgusting looks because these grannies are packing more than pastries. The power balance generally doesn't allow for infiltration by a non-hag, but if a coven is short one member, any magical mortal that can handle being flirted with by mother Gothel could find a way to bargain themselves into a vacant slot, although like all fey, you have to be very careful in making such a deal. Which brings us to the most important detail that separates hags from their fey familiars. While it doesn't excuse their crimes of being feyfolk, and I still don't recommend it to any mortal wanting to keep their teeth, dealing with hags is a marginally better experience than dealing with most feyfolk, where the plans of most fey are very undefined and so provide absolutely no context for what is and isn't a good deal, plus the added problem of fey constantly redefining the rules based on their version of what is and isn't a proper interpretation of semantics bullshit, hags are much more simple than that. A hag wants power. You have power. You give power to hag in return of thing, and hag gives you thing. It's a symbiotic relationship. Of course hags being fey, they still try to sneak one over on you by fucking around with whatever they're giving you before the fact, so that it blows up in your face or creates a giant beanstalk so big that a giant from the city in the clouds descends from it and eats the narrator, but at least it's something to work with. This means that if the hag is too powerful to deal with the old fashioned way, you can still try bartering with it to see if she'll leave you alone for a while, and then you can call in the Inquisition. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, stay away from Granny's bedroom drawer, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to magically remove memories of things that I wish I could forget. But yeah, Davi out.