@@Drizztbc You might be thinking of the roving mauler, they are from the 3.5 magic compendium, tho they can't breath fire and honestly aren't super unique apart from their cool look and the fact that they will roll you over. The concept has been used in a lot of property tho like the allocer from ritual of the night so there must be another game out there in which they breathes fire.
@@heuclmeucl-heucl5351 roving mauler sounds about right. I think I remembered it off hand from a Dungeon Masters roundtable that had both Dungeon Dad and AJ Pickett joking about the monster. Thank you for the clarification!
@@matiasluukkanen7718 If you add the Kobold Press stuff, it might work with a Red Hag...I'm kind of wondering about what a hagspawn based on them would be Another thing might be something where the kid was conceived prior to the hag awakening as a hag there and something be tied into that. A situation where the teen girl had a boyfriend, and, well, the hag that "mothered" her decided to intervene there and she has the attachment to the kid from that. Possibly even have had the situation be one where the hag mother was intending for the girl to have a daughter, but ended up with a son...the older hag, possibly trying to see if she can create a more nightmarish hag by turning the actual, physical daughter of another hag of her own lineage...some of the older edition books had mention of a "True Hag" of sorts that may or may not exist which several hags want to emulate. So that might be a way to do that, perhaps trying to "line breed" to reduce the amount of humanoid in the ensuing generations...and has to protect their investment even if it is a hagspawn there
Canonically a hagspawn player character probably would have to be locked out of sorceror and maybe wizard but not warlock, i imagine a tragic character that ends up having a quest to become a full fledged male hag with a lot of horrific stuff like when a wizard aims for lichdom. In dnd it would be over as soon as they got hold of the wish spell tough, but being pathfinder they would be looking for means for quite a long campaign.
I once had a male Medusa as an NPC. The players met him in the Underdark. The NPC wore an iron helmet so that he didnt petrify anyone accidentally and hid his identity. It was quite the reveal when the medusa finally had to remove the helmet to help the party in a dire fight against a Drider ambush.
A hagspawn warlock would be such a fun character: making up for their magical ineptitude by literally making a deal with the devil just to make mummy proud
I wonder if hags wouldn't sometimes kidnap a male child and do this on purpose. They would make for good fighter/infantry, and the hag mother would have more influence over them than the average bewitched bugbear they might use for that purpose. They're probably smarter than bugbears, so could be field command for the hag's melee forces, if she has enough to need field command.
That's a good question. I would assume that there's a cost to creating a child that can't just be arbitrarily paid. Otherwise, the long life and relatively extreme power of a hag would make them the most populous species very quickly. Why not just eat every baby that's available while you're not already pregnant? Make them all female and, within a thousand years, there are billions of hags.
Actually now that I think about it, it actually sounds really awesome to have the idea that, in order for a hag to succeed its mother, it has to eat its mother. With that being the case, there's incentive to not make too many kids to simply make it a numbers game. There's also incentive to make only females, because males can't reproduce in this way. It also leaves it open for a confrontation between them to result in the death of the child instead of the mother, causing the mother to look for somebody else and also be very picky about who she is going to turn into a hag.
I built a whole adventure around that. Noble's son got kidnapped, traded to a hag. The party rescued a doppleganger pretending to be the boy (and missed all the clues it wasn't him), brought back the doppleganger to town where it made more problems. Then they still had a chance to save the kid when they went to the hag's lair, but took a long rest which gave her time to turn him into a hagspawn. I swear I'm not unfair, they just blew the chances I gave them.
I find funny the idea of a hagspawn that's lawful good solely out of spite for their hag mother. I can't help but imagine the banter if they ever met again during the campaing. Hag: "Oh Donny, why you have to be like this? Why couldn't you be more like your older sister?" Hagspawn: 'Oh boy, here we go again' Hag: "You don't need to be completely evil if you don't want to, but couldn't you at least be midly evil? We could start with slightly evil if you don't feel comfortably jumping straight to the next part"
@@Drak_From_The_Healer_Tribe I know what you’re talking about and I think it went something like this: “If only you’d been more evil. You could’ve been nasty or even mildly unpleasant.”
The idea comes to mind for a hagapawn from a night hag, who later is adopted by a circle of dreams druids. The Druid circle basically teaches this hagspawn ways to aid and heal people with the sleep and dream powers they innately have.
concept: a party of Hagspawn looking for their shared human father just to find out who the fuck was crazy enough to sleep with 5 separate hags AND still somehow end up with 5 hagspawn.
As soon as I heard this creatures lore I already started working on a friendly hegspawn npc that was treated as a monster but is actually a big harmless teddy bear. Im a sucker for characters who are horrfying in appearance but are actually kind and sweet, and this lads just fit the bill for me.
I’m about to play a CG Bard who is horrifying in appearance but is super friendly. Why is he horrifying? Because he’s an undead skeleton. However, he thinks he’s alive with a rare skin condition.
In Neverwinter Nights 2 we had a hagspawn NPC on the party - but since his theme was heavily into "messing with people's dreams", he got super lucky in the looks department.
I think the lore was that the hag mother legitimately loved his father which is why he was born to be handsome instead of hideous. The other members of the coven found out and force fed her his father as a result.
Hear me out for this Character/ NPC idea: Imagine a hagspawn who goes by the name Grandfather Solomon, but also answers to the nicknames of "Grandpappy, Papaw, Git, Curmudgeon, Hermit, Hoot," and " Blighter". He specializes in artificing armor and prosthetics for wounded martial class characters. The only conditions? Payment up front, you must have one or more bones of the original limb for him to use as spell components if it's a prosthetic, a keg of ale from " down yonder in Holler Crick hostel", and don't touch the thermostat in the workshop ( it's a mimic). His homunculus is a giant metal wolf automaton named " Ol' Blue" and he rides around on what appears to be a 1950's style push mower made from cradle scythe blades traded to him by a local farmer. 6 times out of 10 you can find him whittling talasmans on his porch sitting in his rocker, Blue on one side and repeating crossbow on the other. The other 4 times, he's in the shop doing commission work.
Why do I feel like this kind of person would be the go to artifice for the equivalent of an Orc Biker Gang and would be under their protection like one of the fam?
@@liamjacques5335, probably because Orc barbarians ( bikers) know grandpa Sol is fair, blunt, stubborn, and gives two hexed quarrels/ bolts in your rear if you cross him then tells you " get off my lawn before Blue gets a new chew toy.". XD
I suddenly feel like Granpappy Sol is gonna find a place in my world. I'll trade you for Nana. She's a night hag that I've used repeatedly in my games. She was one of the original hags that was ejected from the feywild (if you use that cosmology - she's among the oldest hags, either way). She appears just this side of fey crossings and, while she's just as vile as any other hag, she genuinely likes kids. You'll often hear kids in the area where she appears talking about going to Nana's for sweet cakes and hide and seek. Those same kids won't remember her once they're grown, and Nana will no longer treat them well. Her main goal is to create 9 loyal daughters who will form 3 covens, all ultimately subservient to her. Have fun with her if you can find a place for her. I usually use her as a neutral/helpful npc and for exposition
I actually had this idea as a sorcerer subclass. I didn’t know it was actually a thing 🤣 Also I could see a Nighthag spawn claiming to be a tiefling just to escape the stigma of being related to a hag.
@@azathoththe3rd I’m pretty sure being seen as a tiefling is better than being seen as a Hag. Anyone who knows what a Teifling is would at least understand that they are a people (regardless of personal opinions of that people). Hags on the other hand are invariably seen as either monsters or a desperate deal with the devil to anyone who knows of them.
@@azathoththe3rddepends on the setting. For instance, in Matt Mercer's setting they are widely accepted, where as in mine, a hagspawn would be likely more accepted, even if distrusted by most.
@@LegendStormcrow in Your world, I could imagine that a Nighthag spawn would have a rough time trying to convince people he’s NOT a Tiefling. Even if he did it’s still a rough sell lol. “No, I’m not a tiefling, I’m related to a monsterous, child eating old woman who has fucked over this village with bad deals and worse dreams.”
@@stingerjohnny9951 more likely that he'd be confused with an otherworldly monster. Some centuries before half the known world was lost to an invasion. Or they could assume the hagspawn was meant to fight the world's diety.
For the curious, hag reproduction has a very curious meta-history. The concept first appeared in Dragon #125's "Ecology of the Green Hag", which says that Night Hags give birth to Green Hags by seducing human men, and Green Hags can give birth to Annis Hags by mating with ogres and hill giants. This chain of species was ignored and subsequently dropped in the 2nd edition sourcebook "Van Richten's Guide to the Witch" - which was never actually published, instead being bundled into "Van Richten's Monster Hunters Compendium III", alongside his "Guide to the Fiend" and "Guide to the Vistani". This source states that hags undergo periodic impulses to breed, which they do by seducing humanoid men. The fruit of such unions were seemingly normal girls of their father's race, save for their sterility, but when they reach 50 years old, they physically transform into hags. This lore was implicitly preserved in 3rd edition, save for the night hag; being more a demon that convergently evolved into a hag, this got a unique twist, in that its children will stay humanoids unless ritually transformed into new night hags, in the Dragon article "Ecology of the Night Hag" (#345). Paizo would later reverse-engineer this idea to apply to all hags, creating the PC race called "Changelings"; all female and naturally inclined towards magic - PF2e would state that changelings come in both female and male forms. 5e would provide the first real change to this lore, largely by saying that hags need to eat a human baby first in order to impregnate themselves, and the baby changing on her 13th birthday instead of her 40th.
When thinking of male hags a painting by John Bauer (1915) comes to mind. "Look at them," the Troll mother said "Look at my sons! You won't find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon." When I think of female hags, I think of the Alp, the mare.
In the Mask of the Betrayer campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2 one of your companions Gann (or Gannayev-of-Dreams) was an unusually beautiful and magically attuned hagspawn, if memory doesn't fail me, rhe reason for that was that his mother actually loved his father, which other hags considered weakness, so they forced her to eat him and abandon the child, which drove her to madness. This is all from memory, I havent playee NWN2 in almost 10 years, so I may have gotten something wrong there.
Tbh, the level in the labyrinth where you can hear Gann's mother's chanting and screaming is one of the most haunting video game moments ever, knowing who she is and what's happened to her. Masterfully done.
I love the idea of a hagspawn pc who actually has a wholesome and healthy relationship with his mother and sisters. Since hags tend to change what type they are over time, you could have an Annis or Night-Spawned character from his mother's "Youth-full indiscretions," before she settled down and went Green. "Hey, My Mum could help out, she's a whiz with potions! We have dinner every Sunday, I'll bring you over." *Knock Knock" "Hey Mum, I brought some friends to visit, they'd like to talk to you about something." "That's lovely dear, I'll set a couple more places at the table!" "Mom, he's up to something! You know he doesn't have friends" "Love ya too, you little brat!" "Honey, be nice to your brother! Oh, and dear, I'll need you to run to the store later, your sister's visiting from the UnderDeep next week, and we're all out of fish." "Is she bringing that Triton jerk with her? I know pickings are slim for a Sea Hag, but I really hate that guy"
Hag spawn druid/ranger with two wolf compainions, being hes sibling wolves (since the parents are the pack leaders so they won't be able to leave) with the ability to understand animal speech.
i had the same thought about a hexblood hagspawn but my idea was the hag who birthed it was in a dire situation where it couldnt simply just abandon the male child... maybe it was being hunted and didnt have access to any other beings who it could take a child from but the hag already had a daughter and having a full coven would give them the strength to fight their hunters... so tried to force the hagspawn's blood to awaken to its power. ends up turning him hexblood but still unable to use him in the coven, her and her daughter get slayn and the hexblood hagspawn (hexspawn?) survives (saved or maybe hid from the hunters).
Honestly I really like the idea that there could be female hagspawns. If the key detail about them is that they are not as gifted at magic at birth, it makes sense that sometimes even a female hag could be born not as a full hag. I know it's something that complicates stat blocks but the idea of playing underpowered monsters and leveling them up as a monster through play has always been an under explored system idea that has fascinated me. It comes from the fact that my dad made 3rd edition more interesting by allowing me to make characters that are classed monsters. It only becomes less feasible the lover level of a game you want to play so the idea of treating your race as another type of class has always been interesting, but not supported by the base system unfortunately.
There are so many monsters that I want to play as, I want to play as an illithid, that electric beholder whose name I can't remember, a Gnoll, a Hag turned into a small pixie, I wanna be monstrous
@@adrianrandom3448 I second Gnoll! Honestly any monstrous humanoid with a CR around one really has no excuses not to be a playable race officially. It would be easier to do this if every monster was built more like a character than an encounter so even if it wasn't stated you could just then slap a class on the monster, have a level adjustment if it is a higher CR creature, and call it a day. Unfortunately it's oblivious this isn't their approach because a base goblin stat block doesn't fully reflect the goblin player race.
Mrrhexx has a series of books for playing as a monster where the monster is your race and class, they're really well balanced from what I've heard and seen
I've always liked the Hag Spawn, there is a lot of potential for characters or situations just based on the nature of the creation. I was sad that WOC didn't take the opportunity to include them in Van Ricten's Guide to Ravenloft.
my god this video is a life saver, i have an npc in my game who is a vaguely neutral/friendly but mischeivous nighthag and she offhand mentioned having a son once, now i can build off that further
When they were first introduced into 5e, Orcs (not half-orcs) and Kobolds had negative stats, but when they were re-released, i think they did away with that.
Hagspawn are one of my favorite sub-races in DnD, there are many different story beats that can be told with these guys… one I’ve imagined is a Hagspawn who starts to tap into their magical inherence… and their mother who abandoned them starts to reach out through dreams in order to corrupt and bring them back to the Hut..
I just introduced a Hagspawn NPC who is a new player favorite. He's a wandering hermit type who just protects the land and the creatures on it. He was kept around by his hag mother and sisters who fed off his despair until one day he found hope through the main god of the campaign and he stopped being valuable to them. They kicked him out, but he basically said "screw you" and doubled back to rob them blind. So he has access to all these spooky magic items that he may give/lend to players, while still being like the sweetest guy ever.
Before I even finish watching the video, I'd like to share that I've played a "hagspawn-ish" character before. It was a eldritch knight x/monk 1 multiclass with hexblood as the race. First level as fighter with unarmed fighting style and con proficiency, then 1 as monk for unarmored defense and martial arts. The core of the build was punching the enemy and casting hex to improve the damage. The character was visually a fat old man with a huge bald spot but long hair along the circle of bald head, long nails and green skin, fat belly but thin arms and legs, with saggy skin... but it was only a 17 years old hagspawn, actually a young dude that wasn't evil, despite being a bit monstruous.
I ended up looking into hagspawn a while ago after reading "sea hag coven" as a possible source for a Fathomless Warlock. Hags are big on rugpulling, and covens like having a variety of minions, so getting power from your manipulative aunties is possible if you're a hagspawn. They're probably going to try to get you to do something awful or expose your source of power to your allies at the worst possible time, but hey, you grew up with these jerks and know there's always a catch. Maybe you can get the better of them. Or you also eat puppies and kick flowers and don't get why everyone else is so horrified.
I do like the Hexblood race from 5e as a hag/fae-equivalent for tiefling. That said, extra options are always nice. I have a small corner of a campaign world I'm working on where a coven of hags has enthralled the local baron and are in the process of converting all the locals (over the last 3 generations) into Hexbloods, using a magical artifact to keep anyone from noticing. I could mix some hag-spawn into there.
Interesting D&D creature lore. I've heard of male Medusas, but never a male Hag. Always thought they were "born" female only, but there are male Witches called warlockes. Curious if there are male Lamias or Harpies or are they born female only as well.
If I'm not wrong, male harpies do exist, but they look pretty much the same as female harpies so folks usually don't realize it. Doesn't help that they're not common as well
In dnd, what we call witches are called sorcerers. Warlocks require a patron as a source of their Magic. Sorcerers have Magic innately. Neither are sex-specific
For a long time, I've been fascinated by hags and my current campaign will have an old adventurer asking the PCs for help to stop his old Sea Hag lover (because "love is blind" stories are my weak spot). This gave me the idea to instead have their son doing this in place of his father. Thanks for the inspiration!
I heard the laugh about hagspawn having a good relationship with their mother and took that personally, so I've made a hagspawn character that not only has a very loving mother, but a caring grandmother and aunt
This actually inspired me for my next dnd campaign character. For my backstory, a powerful green hag goes about the process to make herself a daughter (I prefer the devouring an infant explanation as it's f'ed up). She succeeds and gives birth to twins. However, they are fraternal twins, one being the hag girl she wanted while the other is a male hag spawn. She initially wants to kill the hag spawn (partially out of irritation that the spawn being male ruined an opportunity for her to have a coven), but notices that being twins has tethered the souls of the twins. She realizes that her new hag daughter can use this bond to feed off her brother's latent magical blood. So the hag keeps him around as a slave/plaything for her and her daughter. The spawn's sister, while initially loving her brother, gradually inherits her mother's cruelty and starts to view him as more of a favorite pet/magic energy drink. This eventually comes to a head when a rival (good aligned) arch fey helps the spawn escape and becomes his patron.
I remember a male hag from Neverwinter nights 2 i think. He was handsome because his mother actually loved his father and vice versa so he was born with unparalleled beauty.
I find it personally funny how you used a clip of The Hag from DBD, an emaciated cannibalized husk of a person and one of the shortest killers in the game, for that bit on Powerful Build.
So, Japan has a widespread legend of Yamanba (Mountain Hag, basically) or Onibaba (Oni Hag or Demon Hag), who are considered be a mountain deity type yokai that eat people mostly travelers. However, there is a legend of this one spawn of Hag who grew up to be a legendary Hero. His name is Kintaro, (later Sakata no Kintoki) and he got red skin and said to grew up wrestling bears and wields a huge axe. Kintaro eventually make it to Kyoto and there he becomes a part of Yokai hunting crew under the Samurai Prince Yorimitsu of Minamoto clan.
I have an enemy kingdom of hags in my campaign right now. The bulk of their population are the hexbloods who can ascend to haghood by performing a ritual that requires other hag's help but because a new hag is a new rival, this is very rare. They're led by a king, the sole male hag who has forbidden male hexbloods from ever ascending because he wants to be the only one. I wish you'd come out with this video a month ago because I love the variation in your hagspawn. Maybe I'll just covertly retcon since they haven't truly made it to hag territory yet.
In line with hag themes, I'd love to see a revamp of the Verdant Prince! Sometimes I scroll through the Forgotten Realms wiki and look for old monsters that hadn't gotten any love and really latched onto the blurbs of the Verdant Prince. My Hexblood character is actually a Verdant Prince that was stripped of his power with a deal gone foul with a Green Hag and has to fight becoming what I suppose would be a Hagspawn now, given I ran into the same roadblock of what a AMAB hag child would become. I've been very happy with the picks that have popped up on the channel. When Song Dragons released I was so stoked because I had just changed up a lot of Curse of Strahd to incorporate long forgotten dragons and one of the major NPCs is a Song Dragon leading a pack of various lycanthropes. Keep up the amazing work Dungeon Dad!
Yes! I love the Uvuudaum! I had a headcanon that the Uvuudaum are powerful spellcasters of timelines/worlds abandoned to Far Realm corruption. They would transmute their brain into the iron spike found on their heads to resist the madness and mutation, and now seek revenge against the gods who abandoned them.
Played a few hagspawn in 5e before this video came out. It interesting to see your take on it. Though this reminded me I should make a dune hag spawn or maybe more hag variants off of kobold presses hags.
Well I think i know what race i want to play next campaign! Thanks again for another fascinating monster video, Dad. Your production quality has gone up so much as the channel grew this year! I look forward to seeing it continue that way.
Alright, ‘borrowing’ heavily from “Shrek 2”, a green hag is using magic to disguise their son as a handsomest boy to marry the beautiful maiden, which will break-up an existing romance, and get them a foothold in controlling a town/village. Mostly for shiggles.
I could see a situation where in order to stop a coven from making a Hag Dragon the party has to show a Hag Spawn that he is being abused and one they have the dragon they won't need him anymore. Angry smashing chaos is the perfect diversion grab the egg.
Hags are one of my favorite "humanoid" monsters. Being able to play as the "son" of a hag sounds like a really fun idea. I've got a couple of ideas of characters for the (Anis) Hag-Spawn and they both revolve around necrotic damage.
You mention that hagspawn are usually thrown to the wolves It gave me an idea of a hagspawn that becomes a druid through sheer existence, surviving on what little power they do inherit and nuturing it with the most primal of druidic methods An embodiment of the concept throw me to the wolves and i shall return leading the pack
How come youtube recommends this video to me when I've been looking to flesh out a character concept that could mesh really well with a hagspawn!! Loved this video, you made everything very interesting and easy to understand... And also very inspiring 😁
And kobolds get a -2 to strength because the 5e writers wanted to punish me for being a tiny dragon Bastard but they failed and i play them more then any other race especially since they got buffed
I ran a similar monster, being a caldron created "Grandsons" all burly human ape hybrids or fast gross rat hyrbids. Fun minions that met there end to a lantern and a bad falls jumping out of a burning inn
I actually play a character on Saturdays who was a male baby turned into a hag by a coven. it didn't work and all it did was give him a female body, which he now seeks to use magic to change. (he can't just use the change sex spell because the female body is manifesting from his nature being changed, rather than just a physical and chemical difference)
From hagspawn and hex-bloods to PF's Changelings. I love hags and their offspring. There's just so much potential. While I'm a PF bro and therefore will always love the Changelings(and hope they get an episode one day), I really liked learning about these guys. Their cool, and I'm already thinking up ways to use one.
Bro thank you for showing hags some love. They're some of my favorite creatures and you just keep pumping them out. I wish there were higher CR versions of hags, but the Hag Dragon you made is an excellent answer!
On Keith Baker's blog, he's said that hags can be any gender in Eberron and listed a few male examples. For that setting, I'd say a hagspawn would follow the same logic and are probably the result of manifest zones similar to how other planetouched in that setting arise or are some kind of Vedalis experiment.
I feel like a hagspawn Wild Magic Barbarian makes sense, their brutish build, and I could see them having a rage filled desire to be as magical as their mothers. And the rage combined with they latent fey powers, results in random bursts of magic.
I think male Hags can exists and still be on par with their peers just a very rare occurance but still a possibility in my head a hagspawn is more the result of a person being cursed or raised by a hag or a coven I love hags they are so colorful 😍 And I've always wanted to be a Hag Daddy
Really enjoyed this one! :D You're doing awesome with the spooky month videos! I dunno if this'd be eligible, but if you're game I'd love to see a video exploring demonic tiefling variants. My current understanding is that devils and demons can both have tieflings, but most cases we just see the infernal-aligned or succubus/incubus varieties. Horns, tail, fangs, claws, maybe hooves sometimes, funky color palettes. But afaik demons are just as capable of making tieflings be they obyriths, tanar'ri, loumara, etc. And individual demons may very well have dramatically different features. It's not practical to cover EVERYTHING ofc, but I'd absolutely love to see some exploration of what's possible for demonic tieflings generally and how they might interact with devilish tieflings given blood war stuff.
First off, thank you for this entry. It's been immensely helpful to some NPC threads I was putting together for my game. I'm currently DMing a campaign where one member of the Coven the players are about to face is an individual who is being used as the personal hunter of one of the hags, but the hunter isn't a hag or magic user themselves. I was trying to figure out how to make it work from a character perspective, like having him possessed or something, but I wasn't familiar with the hagspawn, just that all hags were female, and I wanted the hunter specifically to be male. But making the hunter a hagspawn just really fleshes this out. These characters haven't been introduced to the party yet, so thank you for giving me this idea.
It think it’s more interesting if the Hagspawn aren’t just all male. I found a similar Hagspawn race which features female Hagspawns, which honestly feels more interesting and tragic to me. Hagspawns could be any gender, as opposed to just male. You could get a lot of good drama out of it.
I feel like the tale of a female Hagspawn would be even more tragic. With males I can see the hags just going "oh well, tough luck" but a female child who for some reason doesn't inherit their magic would be the subject of so much abuse
I was thinking while listening to this about a swamp overrun by hagspawn, centered around defending a hag and/or her coven. The hag has been intentionally producing them to be a personal army for herself, and she even treats them kindly. After all, she's their "loving" mother. Perhaps to flip things, if there is a coven, she's using them to produce more hagspawn for her to control.
I would love to play this character as a transgender person on a quest to change their gender to female ! and gain ultimate power.......and become the monster she knows she is.
Once again, I think it could be interesting to see you try turning the Herculoids into D&D monsters, mainly because they are surprisingly iconic and predate D&D, yet haven't had any appearance in any D&D materials, to my knowledge. In world mythology, some creatures haven't made an appearance in D&D, to my understanding. The Aralez from Armenian mythology, which is basically a Celestial counterpart to the Hellhound; I've gone into describing that a few times in some prior comments. In Spanish mythology, there is a creature called the the Ramidreju; the Ramidreju is described as the appearance of a weasel-like creature with green fur and tusks on its snout. the Ramidreju is said to only show up once every hundred years or so, and they are also have the ability to seek out gold and treasures in addition to its fur being described as a literal magical cure-all. It could to see you try to translate these into D&D monsters in the future.
it also gives me idea of transmasc hag whos best friends w his sibling hagspawn the mother hag will be so pissed tho bc it might break the power of a hag coven so they both might really need to flee
The Uvuudaum is a monster i fell in love at first sight. I don't play 3th edition, I never played against or with an uvuudaum and yet, its one of my favourite monster from design and lore alone. Thanks you, SO MUCH, for providing it to us
If you think Hag is gender exclusive maybe, but in this case hag is a species, and it's hard to say to a son of a hag, "Even if you're born from a hag, you can't be one because you're a guy," especially if they are a hostile encounter in D&D. Gender exclusive terms have fallen out of fashion, but these terms can still be useful outside of a gendered way. Have you read any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld? They use Wizard and Witch as gender specific terms for spell casters but as the books go on it decides more apparent that the real difference is how each group uses magic, witches use practical magic while wizards use big magic, with gender simply being a common but not exclusive component, especially since the third book is all about the first female wizard and the last book introduced the first male witch.
@@endormorre6567I think we should still keep some gendered language. It makes things confusing as fuq if we don't use it at all or blur the lines. I never thought wizard or witch was gendered, though. Out of the books I've read they were just job titles essentially. It's just that men gravitate to wizard and women witch. Just like irl men gravitate to being mechanics and women to nursing.
Ow story hook A coven of hags tasks the party to hunt down a hag spawn and bring him back to the hag why because hes the son of baba yaga and any daughter born of him would be a terrifying powerful hag Have you done slaymate yet
Small note - I wouldn't have said anything but this is the second video in a row so I'll bring it up - "reagents" is normally pronounced with three syllables: re-agents. Stress on the A. It's not usually homophonous with "regents". But! Love your work, and this is a fun one as usual!
As someone pretty stringent about balance and character building, you could give the sea hag spawn a feature to reflect their ugliness aside from the debilitating -2 charisma - it could be as simple as disadvantage on any social checks using charisma, except for intimidation which they have advantage for. A flat -2 stat disbalances a whole lot and kinda locks out a lot of class options for a pc; remember, charisma isn't just attractiveness, it's also force of personality and self certainty.
I love the idea of an early campaign Arc of the party investigating a group of bandits and their odd non-typical bandit goals, with the party learning their leader is a hagspawn, leading to the Hagspawn leader using his bandit following to further his hag mother's goals
as a trans woman i feel like there could be a very compelling story for a trans hagspawn sorcerer pc who has had to work harder to try to be accepted by her mother possibly even eventually realizing she doesn't want to be like her after all. also whether intentional or not i really appreciate you saying hagspawn are assigned male at birth not that they're always "men" it really feels nice cause alot of "nerdy" spaces can be pretty transphobic even if only accidently so thank you for that :)
That is definitely a story I could see being really interesting to play out at the table or even just as a backstory thing! Also yes it definitely was intentional. I knew this creature would likely hit a lot of notes that resonate one way or another with trans folks, and I think that’s really cool! Since the trans experience is outside of my personal experience, I didn’t feel super comfortable diving too deep into that in the video itself, but, I did want to make sure my use of language was careful here to put forth my best effort to be inviting to trans stories told through these guys. It truly warms my heart to read the comments on this video from trans people either just saying they like the monster or brainstorming their own character ideas. I’m definitely not perfect by any means but I do always try my best to make my channel welcoming for everyone, which absolutely includes my trans viewers. Thanks for watching!
A hag spawn sees a building collapsing and leaps into action and tries his best to brace the crumbling building while the people scramble to get out as fast as they can. After everyone escapes by the skin of their teeth, they look back a the 7 foot tall physically fit but not overly muscular hag spawn quickly losing strength as the weight of the building piles up on top of him before the crumbling building crashing down on top of him, while he's bellowing in physical agony as he pushes a small little girl who was left behind by mistake to safety. The tiny girl tries to dig the brave and compassionate "giant" boy from the debris but only to find his mangled and crushed frame, with the help of the other townsfolk after seeing how desperate she was to find and thank him for protecting her. She saw his crushed body and weeps...while the townsfolk out of respect for giving his life to save a bunch of strangers who he didn't even know in the slightest, mourn. It was the least that they could do...
Most likely a wandering hagspawn was passing a very old small to mid-sized town saw what was happening due to the old foundations slowly giving way due to old age and quickly realized what was happening and leaped into action with no concern or regards for his own safety, only thing in his mind is to get everyone out of the collapsing building as quickly as possible. Using his size and strength to hold up the crumbling building for as long as possible until everyone is evacuated safely. Rest in peace, big guy. If he was able to ask "did I do good?" I'm sure many of the townsfolk would respond with "yes...yes, you did good..." I'm certain that he would if he were able to, he would give the townsfolk a brief but warm and gentle closed mouth smile then close his eyes and join his spark of life with other kindred spirits in for a lack of a better term "the well of all sparks of life" for when a spark of life is ignited, there is great joy but...when spark of life is extinguished, the planes of existence weeps... for all life is sacred. Even ones you may not expect at first.
@@moonlightdawn7249 that's...shockingly extremely close to what happened at the beginning...like a near 1 to 1...are you just that good or am I just that predictable...?
A while ago for my homebrew world I detailed out different types of hag offspring that I collectively referred to as Hagspawn, and the rare make hag (which I called Churls), also have lesser magical ability. Didn't know about these guys beforehand, neat to see I accidentally made almost an identical version of the official (and your updated) Hagspawn. Hadn't gotten around to making stats for them yet though so this is super helpful!
In a pathfinder campaign right now that has three hag descended characters in it. With some it’s roleplay and less mechanics, and some homebrew to make everything fit and balanced, but three ‘siblings’ who are a changeling human psychic marauder, a similar halfling winter witch, and a hag-riven bloodrager yeti.(yes, it took some juggling and making abilities phase in over time on the young yeti to balance it). Given the campaign involved some hags it let us nicely have a background for the three worked into the campaign.
Thanks for watching folks. Let me know what monster you'd like to see next time!
nightmare dragon!
I’m not sure what it’s called but there’s a monster that has a lions head but is shaped and moves like a wheel…. Also it breathes fire
@@Drizztbc You might be thinking of the roving mauler, they are from the 3.5 magic compendium, tho they can't breath fire and honestly aren't super unique apart from their cool look and the fact that they will roll you over. The concept has been used in a lot of property tho like the allocer from ritual of the night so there must be another game out there in which they breathes fire.
@@heuclmeucl-heucl5351 roving mauler sounds about right. I think I remembered it off hand from a Dungeon Masters roundtable that had both Dungeon Dad and AJ Pickett joking about the monster. Thank you for the clarification!
what happens if a hagspawn gets with a hag? is the resulting child something like a true hag?
Playing a hagspawn warlock who's fey patron is just their overprotective hag mother sounds like a fun idea
With hags being as they are, even "loving" hag mother is probably more akin to hag smother.
@@matiasluukkanen7718 If you add the Kobold Press stuff, it might work with a Red Hag...I'm kind of wondering about what a hagspawn based on them would be
Another thing might be something where the kid was conceived prior to the hag awakening as a hag there and something be tied into that. A situation where the teen girl had a boyfriend, and, well, the hag that "mothered" her decided to intervene there and she has the attachment to the kid from that.
Possibly even have had the situation be one where the hag mother was intending for the girl to have a daughter, but ended up with a son...the older hag, possibly trying to see if she can create a more nightmarish hag by turning the actual, physical daughter of another hag of her own lineage...some of the older edition books had mention of a "True Hag" of sorts that may or may not exist which several hags want to emulate. So that might be a way to do that, perhaps trying to "line breed" to reduce the amount of humanoid in the ensuing generations...and has to protect their investment even if it is a hagspawn there
He can be his own patron. As an "half" hag he can not do magic in the same way his mother do.
Canonically a hagspawn player character probably would have to be locked out of sorceror and maybe wizard but not warlock, i imagine a tragic character that ends up having a quest to become a full fledged male hag with a lot of horrific stuff like when a wizard aims for lichdom.
In dnd it would be over as soon as they got hold of the wish spell tough, but being pathfinder they would be looking for means for quite a long campaign.
@@Vender02that isn’t a warlock then it’s a sorcerer a warlock is using dark borrowed power channeled from another entity
I once had a male Medusa as an NPC. The players met him in the Underdark. The NPC wore an iron helmet so that he didnt petrify anyone accidentally and hid his identity. It was quite the reveal when the medusa finally had to remove the helmet to help the party in a dire fight against a Drider ambush.
You mean a medudesa?
@@WalkinStereotype 😎👉👉 yes
ohh. an eye.off. drider vs medusa :) winner has to eye-off a spectator
Maedar already exist though
Although there is something about medusae made by curses in the forgotten realms.
Male medusas are a thing in d&d, though
A hagspawn warlock would be such a fun character: making up for their magical ineptitude by literally making a deal with the devil just to make mummy proud
this is so full of angst potential i love it
Nah, their patron IS their mother. Go Fey Warlock, forced to do their mother's bidding to make up for their terrible genetics.
I wonder if hags wouldn't sometimes kidnap a male child and do this on purpose. They would make for good fighter/infantry, and the hag mother would have more influence over them than the average bewitched bugbear they might use for that purpose. They're probably smarter than bugbears, so could be field command for the hag's melee forces, if she has enough to need field command.
They do that, already. Hexbloods can be male, even tho they're basically larval hags.
That's a good question. I would assume that there's a cost to creating a child that can't just be arbitrarily paid. Otherwise, the long life and relatively extreme power of a hag would make them the most populous species very quickly. Why not just eat every baby that's available while you're not already pregnant? Make them all female and, within a thousand years, there are billions of hags.
Actually now that I think about it, it actually sounds really awesome to have the idea that, in order for a hag to succeed its mother, it has to eat its mother. With that being the case, there's incentive to not make too many kids to simply make it a numbers game. There's also incentive to make only females, because males can't reproduce in this way. It also leaves it open for a confrontation between them to result in the death of the child instead of the mother, causing the mother to look for somebody else and also be very picky about who she is going to turn into a hag.
I built a whole adventure around that. Noble's son got kidnapped, traded to a hag. The party rescued a doppleganger pretending to be the boy (and missed all the clues it wasn't him), brought back the doppleganger to town where it made more problems. Then they still had a chance to save the kid when they went to the hag's lair, but took a long rest which gave her time to turn him into a hagspawn. I swear I'm not unfair, they just blew the chances I gave them.
@@TrollOfReason still a needed thing to point out for others to potentialy use for their game
I find funny the idea of a hagspawn that's lawful good solely out of spite for their hag mother. I can't help but imagine the banter if they ever met again during the campaing.
Hag: "Oh Donny, why you have to be like this? Why couldn't you be more like your older sister?"
Hagspawn: 'Oh boy, here we go again'
Hag: "You don't need to be completely evil if you don't want to, but couldn't you at least be midly evil? We could start with slightly evil if you don't feel comfortably jumping straight to the next part"
The rest of the party thought they were getting a boss fight, but no! It’s an awkward family reunion.
@@msf2399That's even worse!
Is this a KND reference? 🤣
@@DragoonSensei Yep, I didn't remember the words exactly so I improvised with what I did.
@@Drak_From_The_Healer_Tribe I know what you’re talking about and I think it went something like this: “If only you’d been more evil. You could’ve been nasty or even mildly unpleasant.”
I think a good idea for a character motivation for a hag spawn would be to find their father in hopes of having a non abusive parent
bro
And I oop
Their face when their dad is just as awful as their mom
@@ezraoberheim1081they find a childs grave stone
@@ezraoberheim1081just like real life
The idea comes to mind for a hagapawn from a night hag, who later is adopted by a circle of dreams druids. The Druid circle basically teaches this hagspawn ways to aid and heal people with the sleep and dream powers they innately have.
concept: a party of Hagspawn looking for their shared human father just to find out who the fuck was crazy enough to sleep with 5 separate hags AND still somehow end up with 5 hagspawn.
This is great
A blind bard?
@@gliscaradu1424or desperate, or, perhaps, extremely unprejudiced
As soon as I heard this creatures lore I already started working on a friendly hegspawn npc that was treated as a monster but is actually a big harmless teddy bear. Im a sucker for characters who are horrfying in appearance but are actually kind and sweet, and this lads just fit the bill for me.
The Hunchback from Courage the Cowardly Dog came to mind as an inspiration for this character.
I’m about to play a CG Bard who is horrifying in appearance but is super friendly. Why is he horrifying? Because he’s an undead skeleton. However, he thinks he’s alive with a rare skin condition.
@@voltageauthor he sound like a fun pc.
@voltage2576 a rare skin condition; a complete lack of skin.
@@עומרשרייבר-ל4ר he is. I don’t think I have ever had so much fun playing a character before.
In Neverwinter Nights 2 we had a hagspawn NPC on the party - but since his theme was heavily into "messing with people's dreams", he got super lucky in the looks department.
I think the lore was that the hag mother legitimately loved his father which is why he was born to be handsome instead of hideous. The other members of the coven found out and force fed her his father as a result.
Thank you! I was just about to mention Gannayev and how I couldn't believe he didn't get a mention here!
@@KimiTakami Oh, Gann-of-Dreams. 🥰 He was such a beautiful, glorious, vain bastard. 💖💖💖
Hear me out for this Character/ NPC idea:
Imagine a hagspawn who goes by the name Grandfather Solomon, but also answers to the nicknames of "Grandpappy, Papaw, Git, Curmudgeon, Hermit, Hoot," and " Blighter". He specializes in artificing armor and prosthetics for wounded martial class characters. The only conditions? Payment up front, you must have one or more bones of the original limb for him to use as spell components if it's a prosthetic, a keg of ale from " down yonder in Holler Crick hostel", and don't touch the thermostat in the workshop ( it's a mimic). His homunculus is a giant metal wolf automaton named " Ol' Blue" and he rides around on what appears to be a 1950's style push mower made from cradle scythe blades traded to him by a local farmer. 6 times out of 10 you can find him whittling talasmans on his porch sitting in his rocker, Blue on one side and repeating crossbow on the other. The other 4 times, he's in the shop doing commission work.
Why do I feel like this kind of person would be the go to artifice for the equivalent of an Orc Biker Gang and would be under their protection like one of the fam?
@@liamjacques5335, probably because Orc barbarians ( bikers) know grandpa Sol is fair, blunt, stubborn, and gives two hexed quarrels/ bolts in your rear if you cross him then tells you " get off my lawn before Blue gets a new chew toy.". XD
I suddenly feel like Granpappy Sol is gonna find a place in my world. I'll trade you for Nana. She's a night hag that I've used repeatedly in my games. She was one of the original hags that was ejected from the feywild (if you use that cosmology - she's among the oldest hags, either way). She appears just this side of fey crossings and, while she's just as vile as any other hag, she genuinely likes kids. You'll often hear kids in the area where she appears talking about going to Nana's for sweet cakes and hide and seek. Those same kids won't remember her once they're grown, and Nana will no longer treat them well. Her main goal is to create 9 loyal daughters who will form 3 covens, all ultimately subservient to her. Have fun with her if you can find a place for her. I usually use her as a neutral/helpful npc and for exposition
I actually had this idea as a sorcerer subclass. I didn’t know it was actually a thing 🤣
Also I could see a Nighthag spawn claiming to be a tiefling just to escape the stigma of being related to a hag.
As opposed to having Tiefling stigma
@@azathoththe3rd I’m pretty sure being seen as a tiefling is better than being seen as a Hag. Anyone who knows what a Teifling is would at least understand that they are a people (regardless of personal opinions of that people).
Hags on the other hand are invariably seen as either monsters or a desperate deal with the devil to anyone who knows of them.
@@azathoththe3rddepends on the setting. For instance, in Matt Mercer's setting they are widely accepted, where as in mine, a hagspawn would be likely more accepted, even if distrusted by most.
@@LegendStormcrow in Your world, I could imagine that a Nighthag spawn would have a rough time trying to convince people he’s NOT a Tiefling.
Even if he did it’s still a rough sell lol. “No, I’m not a tiefling, I’m related to a monsterous, child eating old woman who has fucked over this village with bad deals and worse dreams.”
@@stingerjohnny9951 more likely that he'd be confused with an otherworldly monster. Some centuries before half the known world was lost to an invasion.
Or they could assume the hagspawn was meant to fight the world's diety.
For the curious, hag reproduction has a very curious meta-history. The concept first appeared in Dragon #125's "Ecology of the Green Hag", which says that Night Hags give birth to Green Hags by seducing human men, and Green Hags can give birth to Annis Hags by mating with ogres and hill giants. This chain of species was ignored and subsequently dropped in the 2nd edition sourcebook "Van Richten's Guide to the Witch" - which was never actually published, instead being bundled into "Van Richten's Monster Hunters Compendium III", alongside his "Guide to the Fiend" and "Guide to the Vistani". This source states that hags undergo periodic impulses to breed, which they do by seducing humanoid men. The fruit of such unions were seemingly normal girls of their father's race, save for their sterility, but when they reach 50 years old, they physically transform into hags. This lore was implicitly preserved in 3rd edition, save for the night hag; being more a demon that convergently evolved into a hag, this got a unique twist, in that its children will stay humanoids unless ritually transformed into new night hags, in the Dragon article "Ecology of the Night Hag" (#345). Paizo would later reverse-engineer this idea to apply to all hags, creating the PC race called "Changelings"; all female and naturally inclined towards magic - PF2e would state that changelings come in both female and male forms. 5e would provide the first real change to this lore, largely by saying that hags need to eat a human baby first in order to impregnate themselves, and the baby changing on her 13th birthday instead of her 40th.
When thinking of male hags a painting by John Bauer (1915) comes to mind. "Look at them," the Troll mother said "Look at my sons! You won't find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon." When I think of female hags, I think of the Alp, the mare.
In the Mask of the Betrayer campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2 one of your companions Gann (or Gannayev-of-Dreams) was an unusually beautiful and magically attuned hagspawn, if memory doesn't fail me, rhe reason for that was that his mother actually loved his father, which other hags considered weakness, so they forced her to eat him and abandon the child, which drove her to madness.
This is all from memory, I havent playee NWN2 in almost 10 years, so I may have gotten something wrong there.
Everytime i hear that name, i reinstall mask of the betrayer.
Oh good, someone mentioned Gann. God, Mask of the Betrayer was awesome.
Tbh, the level in the labyrinth where you can hear Gann's mother's chanting and screaming is one of the most haunting video game moments ever, knowing who she is and what's happened to her. Masterfully done.
I love the idea of a hagspawn pc who actually has a wholesome and healthy relationship with his mother and sisters. Since hags tend to change what type they are over time, you could have an Annis or Night-Spawned character from his mother's "Youth-full indiscretions," before she settled down and went Green.
"Hey, My Mum could help out, she's a whiz with potions! We have dinner every Sunday, I'll bring you over."
*Knock Knock"
"Hey Mum, I brought some friends to visit, they'd like to talk to you about something."
"That's lovely dear, I'll set a couple more places at the table!"
"Mom, he's up to something! You know he doesn't have friends"
"Love ya too, you little brat!"
"Honey, be nice to your brother! Oh, and dear, I'll need you to run to the store later, your sister's visiting from the UnderDeep next week, and we're all out of fish."
"Is she bringing that Triton jerk with her? I know pickings are slim for a Sea Hag, but I really hate that guy"
I like the idea of a Hag Spawn being “left to the wolves “ and ends being raised by the wolves Mowgli style 😁
Hag spawn druid/ranger with two wolf compainions, being hes sibling wolves (since the parents are the pack leaders so they won't be able to leave) with the ability to understand animal speech.
Imagine a hagspawn that is also a hexblood. After dabbling in dark fey magic, the hagspawn has unlocked the true nature of their cursed fey blood.
i had the same thought about a hexblood hagspawn but my idea was the hag who birthed it was in a dire situation where it couldnt simply just abandon the male child... maybe it was being hunted and didnt have access to any other beings who it could take a child from but the hag already had a daughter and having a full coven would give them the strength to fight their hunters... so tried to force the hagspawn's blood to awaken to its power. ends up turning him hexblood but still unable to use him in the coven, her and her daughter get slayn and the hexblood hagspawn (hexspawn?) survives (saved or maybe hid from the hunters).
Probably the closest you can get to a male hag!
Honestly I really like the idea that there could be female hagspawns. If the key detail about them is that they are not as gifted at magic at birth, it makes sense that sometimes even a female hag could be born not as a full hag.
I know it's something that complicates stat blocks but the idea of playing underpowered monsters and leveling them up as a monster through play has always been an under explored system idea that has fascinated me. It comes from the fact that my dad made 3rd edition more interesting by allowing me to make characters that are classed monsters. It only becomes less feasible the lover level of a game you want to play so the idea of treating your race as another type of class has always been interesting, but not supported by the base system unfortunately.
-trans hag-
There are so many monsters that I want to play as, I want to play as an illithid, that electric beholder whose name I can't remember, a Gnoll, a Hag turned into a small pixie, I wanna be monstrous
@@adrianrandom3448 I second Gnoll!
Honestly any monstrous humanoid with a CR around one really has no excuses not to be a playable race officially.
It would be easier to do this if every monster was built more like a character than an encounter so even if it wasn't stated you could just then slap a class on the monster, have a level adjustment if it is a higher CR creature, and call it a day. Unfortunately it's oblivious this isn't their approach because a base goblin stat block doesn't fully reflect the goblin player race.
Mrrhexx has a series of books for playing as a monster where the monster is your race and class, they're really well balanced from what I've heard and seen
Wouldn't that be a hexblood?
I've always liked the Hag Spawn, there is a lot of potential for characters or situations just based on the nature of the creation. I was sad that WOC didn't take the opportunity to include them in Van Ricten's Guide to Ravenloft.
my god this video is a life saver, i have an npc in my game who is a vaguely neutral/friendly but mischeivous nighthag and she offhand mentioned having a son once, now i can build off that further
When they were first introduced into 5e, Orcs (not half-orcs) and Kobolds had negative stats, but when they were re-released, i think they did away with that.
9:23 Thanks for including us!
(Any/all)
I LOVE when a youtuber gives a homebrew player options lmao
Hagspawn are one of my favorite sub-races in DnD, there are many different story beats that can be told with these guys… one I’ve imagined is a Hagspawn who starts to tap into their magical inherence… and their mother who abandoned them starts to reach out through dreams in order to corrupt and bring them back to the Hut..
I just introduced a Hagspawn NPC who is a new player favorite. He's a wandering hermit type who just protects the land and the creatures on it. He was kept around by his hag mother and sisters who fed off his despair until one day he found hope through the main god of the campaign and he stopped being valuable to them. They kicked him out, but he basically said "screw you" and doubled back to rob them blind. So he has access to all these spooky magic items that he may give/lend to players, while still being like the sweetest guy ever.
Not often we get videos in such quick succession
Thanks for the hard work father of dungeons
there is now a NPC called the father of dungeons in my game. my players say F you.
@@great-roleplaying-debbie I take that as the highest compliment
Before I even finish watching the video, I'd like to share that I've played a "hagspawn-ish" character before. It was a eldritch knight x/monk 1 multiclass with hexblood as the race. First level as fighter with unarmed fighting style and con proficiency, then 1 as monk for unarmored defense and martial arts. The core of the build was punching the enemy and casting hex to improve the damage.
The character was visually a fat old man with a huge bald spot but long hair along the circle of bald head, long nails and green skin, fat belly but thin arms and legs, with saggy skin... but it was only a 17 years old hagspawn, actually a young dude that wasn't evil, despite being a bit monstruous.
I ended up looking into hagspawn a while ago after reading "sea hag coven" as a possible source for a Fathomless Warlock. Hags are big on rugpulling, and covens like having a variety of minions, so getting power from your manipulative aunties is possible if you're a hagspawn. They're probably going to try to get you to do something awful or expose your source of power to your allies at the worst possible time, but hey, you grew up with these jerks and know there's always a catch. Maybe you can get the better of them. Or you also eat puppies and kick flowers and don't get why everyone else is so horrified.
I do like the Hexblood race from 5e as a hag/fae-equivalent for tiefling. That said, extra options are always nice.
I have a small corner of a campaign world I'm working on where a coven of hags has enthralled the local baron and are in the process of converting all the locals (over the last 3 generations) into Hexbloods, using a magical artifact to keep anyone from noticing. I could mix some hag-spawn into there.
I was wondering if you'd mention the hexblood, and very glad you did. Neat video as always!
Me who's currently playing a DnD 5e campaign as a Wild Magic Hexblood Sorcerer when I see the video title: "is for me?"
Interesting D&D creature lore. I've heard of male Medusas, but never a male Hag. Always thought they were "born" female only, but there are male Witches called warlockes. Curious if there are male Lamias or Harpies or are they born female only as well.
If I'm not wrong, male harpies do exist, but they look pretty much the same as female harpies so folks usually don't realize it. Doesn't help that they're not common as well
In dnd, what we call witches are called sorcerers. Warlocks require a patron as a source of their Magic. Sorcerers have Magic innately. Neither are sex-specific
@@PxsDDsimple but effective 👌
They aren’t very spooky, but seeing a stat block for Selkies from Gaelic myth would be awesome!
For a long time, I've been fascinated by hags and my current campaign will have an old adventurer asking the PCs for help to stop his old Sea Hag lover (because "love is blind" stories are my weak spot). This gave me the idea to instead have their son doing this in place of his father. Thanks for the inspiration!
I heard the laugh about hagspawn having a good relationship with their mother and took that personally, so I've made a hagspawn character that not only has a very loving mother, but a caring grandmother and aunt
The Unapproachable East has been so neglected in 5E, there’s so much room for adventure.
More monsters from that region in the future @DungeonDad?
This actually inspired me for my next dnd campaign character. For my backstory, a powerful green hag goes about the process to make herself a daughter (I prefer the devouring an infant explanation as it's f'ed up). She succeeds and gives birth to twins. However, they are fraternal twins, one being the hag girl she wanted while the other is a male hag spawn. She initially wants to kill the hag spawn (partially out of irritation that the spawn being male ruined an opportunity for her to have a coven), but notices that being twins has tethered the souls of the twins. She realizes that her new hag daughter can use this bond to feed off her brother's latent magical blood. So the hag keeps him around as a slave/plaything for her and her daughter. The spawn's sister, while initially loving her brother, gradually inherits her mother's cruelty and starts to view him as more of a favorite pet/magic energy drink. This eventually comes to a head when a rival (good aligned) arch fey helps the spawn escape and becomes his patron.
I remember a male hag from Neverwinter nights 2 i think. He was handsome because his mother actually loved his father and vice versa so he was born with unparalleled beauty.
I find it personally funny how you used a clip of The Hag from DBD, an emaciated cannibalized husk of a person and one of the shortest killers in the game, for that bit on Powerful Build.
So, Japan has a widespread legend of Yamanba (Mountain Hag, basically) or Onibaba (Oni Hag or Demon Hag), who are considered be a mountain deity type yokai that eat people mostly travelers. However, there is a legend of this one spawn of Hag who grew up to be a legendary Hero. His name is Kintaro, (later Sakata no Kintoki) and he got red skin and said to grew up wrestling bears and wields a huge axe. Kintaro eventually make it to Kyoto and there he becomes a part of Yokai hunting crew under the Samurai Prince Yorimitsu of Minamoto clan.
Hags are some of my favorite monsters in D&D, great vid interesting lore
I have an enemy kingdom of hags in my campaign right now. The bulk of their population are the hexbloods who can ascend to haghood by performing a ritual that requires other hag's help but because a new hag is a new rival, this is very rare. They're led by a king, the sole male hag who has forbidden male hexbloods from ever ascending because he wants to be the only one. I wish you'd come out with this video a month ago because I love the variation in your hagspawn. Maybe I'll just covertly retcon since they haven't truly made it to hag territory yet.
In line with hag themes, I'd love to see a revamp of the Verdant Prince! Sometimes I scroll through the Forgotten Realms wiki and look for old monsters that hadn't gotten any love and really latched onto the blurbs of the Verdant Prince. My Hexblood character is actually a Verdant Prince that was stripped of his power with a deal gone foul with a Green Hag and has to fight becoming what I suppose would be a Hagspawn now, given I ran into the same roadblock of what a AMAB hag child would become.
I've been very happy with the picks that have popped up on the channel. When Song Dragons released I was so stoked because I had just changed up a lot of Curse of Strahd to incorporate long forgotten dragons and one of the major NPCs is a Song Dragon leading a pack of various lycanthropes. Keep up the amazing work Dungeon Dad!
Yes! I love the Uvuudaum! I had a headcanon that the Uvuudaum are powerful spellcasters of timelines/worlds abandoned to Far Realm corruption. They would transmute their brain into the iron spike found on their heads to resist the madness and mutation, and now seek revenge against the gods who abandoned them.
Played a few hagspawn in 5e before this video came out. It interesting to see your take on it. Though this reminded me I should make a dune hag spawn or maybe more hag variants off of kobold presses hags.
Well I think i know what race i want to play next campaign! Thanks again for another fascinating monster video, Dad. Your production quality has gone up so much as the channel grew this year! I look forward to seeing it continue that way.
Gann from Mask of the betrayer is a really good night hagspawn that was your compaion throughout the dlc of neverwinter nights 2.
Alright, ‘borrowing’ heavily from “Shrek 2”, a green hag is using magic to disguise their son as a handsomest boy to marry the beautiful maiden, which will break-up an existing romance, and get them a foothold in controlling a town/village.
Mostly for shiggles.
I see 3 untalented Hagspawn wizards desperately trying to cast coven magic, who physically overpower hags to conduct experiments on them.
A Hag can’t curse you if you break her nose first!
The Hagspawn use the power of their coven to well and truly cast Punch.
I could see a situation where in order to stop a coven from making a Hag Dragon the party has to show a Hag Spawn that he is being abused and one they have the dragon they won't need him anymore. Angry smashing chaos is the perfect diversion grab the egg.
I really appreciate the background music. Brings back nostalgia😎
Ah the Hag Spawn, takes me back to Mask of The Betrayer
Hags are one of my favorite "humanoid" monsters. Being able to play as the "son" of a hag sounds like a really fun idea. I've got a couple of ideas of characters for the (Anis) Hag-Spawn and they both revolve around necrotic damage.
In some not quite D&D book i read of a creature called the hagling. I think you'd be able to do a lot with them.
ah, new character aquired. Hagspawn who aspires to become a great wizard to spite his mom for not thinking he'd ammount to anything as a spellcaster.
Hmm... Hagspawn feylock that is a complete mommy's boy.
I love that you included a clip from beyond belief with Jonathan frakes 😂
He’s thrown out of the house, and has to start a interplanar OF account to survive.
I like the idea of a hagspawn that learns magic and becomes a wizard purely to go back and kick their families asses out of spite
You mention that hagspawn are usually thrown to the wolves
It gave me an idea of a hagspawn that becomes a druid through sheer existence, surviving on what little power they do inherit and nuturing it with the most primal of druidic methods
An embodiment of the concept throw me to the wolves and i shall return leading the pack
How come youtube recommends this video to me when I've been looking to flesh out a character concept that could mesh really well with a hagspawn!! Loved this video, you made everything very interesting and easy to understand... And also very inspiring 😁
In the Volo book, Orcs get a -2 Charisma
Same with the original Volo's Guide. Although it might have been Intelligence? I can't quite remember.
@@FilmGuy7000 Thanks my man, it was the Volo book, not Eberron. I misremembered.
Same book Kobolds got -2 Str as well I believe
Volos was the best book 5e made.
And kobolds get a -2 to strength because the 5e writers wanted to punish me for being a tiny dragon Bastard but they failed and i play them more then any other race especially since they got buffed
Your narration over the clips from Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction was amazing lol
I ran a similar monster, being a caldron created "Grandsons" all burly human ape hybrids or fast gross rat hyrbids.
Fun minions that met there end to a lantern and a bad falls jumping out of a burning inn
YESSSSS, one of my all time favorite monsters!! These boys play a big part in my homebrew folk horror game. Thank you so much for posting!!!!
I actually play a character on Saturdays who was a male baby turned into a hag by a coven. it didn't work and all it did was give him a female body, which he now seeks to use magic to change. (he can't just use the change sex spell because the female body is manifesting from his nature being changed, rather than just a physical and chemical difference)
How to tell your dnd friends your trans without telling them a masterclass
@@criticaltipper7699
that would be cute. but no, I just like exploring gender for narrative purposes. mine is settled
I'm making the hunchback of Notre Dom with the hag spawn
Micro machine man bard
From hagspawn and hex-bloods to PF's Changelings. I love hags and their offspring.
There's just so much potential. While I'm a PF bro and therefore will always love the Changelings(and hope they get an episode one day), I really liked learning about these guys.
Their cool, and I'm already thinking up ways to use one.
Nice, mad maggie can now have e son as creepy as she is in Descent into avernus!
Bro thank you for showing hags some love. They're some of my favorite creatures and you just keep pumping them out. I wish there were higher CR versions of hags, but the Hag Dragon you made is an excellent answer!
On Keith Baker's blog, he's said that hags can be any gender in Eberron and listed a few male examples. For that setting, I'd say a hagspawn would follow the same logic and are probably the result of manifest zones similar to how other planetouched in that setting arise or are some kind of Vedalis experiment.
Sad you never mentioned Gann of Dreams from Neverwinter Nights 2 Mask of the Betrayer. An excellent portrayal of Hagspawn.
I feel like a hagspawn Wild Magic Barbarian makes sense, their brutish build, and I could see them having a rage filled desire to be as magical as their mothers. And the rage combined with they latent fey powers, results in random bursts of magic.
Nice, using BG3 spoilers without any spoiler warning in the video. Good job.
I think male Hags can exists and still be on par with their peers
just a very rare occurance but still a possibility
in my head a hagspawn is more the result of a person being cursed or raised by a hag or a coven
I love hags they are so colorful 😍
And I've always wanted to be a Hag Daddy
Really enjoyed this one! :D You're doing awesome with the spooky month videos!
I dunno if this'd be eligible, but if you're game I'd love to see a video exploring demonic tiefling variants. My current understanding is that devils and demons can both have tieflings, but most cases we just see the infernal-aligned or succubus/incubus varieties. Horns, tail, fangs, claws, maybe hooves sometimes, funky color palettes. But afaik demons are just as capable of making tieflings be they obyriths, tanar'ri, loumara, etc. And individual demons may very well have dramatically different features.
It's not practical to cover EVERYTHING ofc, but I'd absolutely love to see some exploration of what's possible for demonic tieflings generally and how they might interact with devilish tieflings given blood war stuff.
First off, thank you for this entry. It's been immensely helpful to some NPC threads I was putting together for my game. I'm currently DMing a campaign where one member of the Coven the players are about to face is an individual who is being used as the personal hunter of one of the hags, but the hunter isn't a hag or magic user themselves. I was trying to figure out how to make it work from a character perspective, like having him possessed or something, but I wasn't familiar with the hagspawn, just that all hags were female, and I wanted the hunter specifically to be male. But making the hunter a hagspawn just really fleshes this out. These characters haven't been introduced to the party yet, so thank you for giving me this idea.
Man Hag? You mean the Mag? Or the Han? 😅
This is such a cool idea! I love unconventional characters for D&D, makes the whole party dynamic much more interesting
It think it’s more interesting if the Hagspawn aren’t just all male. I found a similar Hagspawn race which features female Hagspawns, which honestly feels more interesting and tragic to me. Hagspawns could be any gender, as opposed to just male. You could get a lot of good drama out of it.
I feel like the tale of a female Hagspawn would be even more tragic. With males I can see the hags just going "oh well, tough luck" but a female child who for some reason doesn't inherit their magic would be the subject of so much abuse
I was thinking while listening to this about a swamp overrun by hagspawn, centered around defending a hag and/or her coven. The hag has been intentionally producing them to be a personal army for herself, and she even treats them kindly. After all, she's their "loving" mother.
Perhaps to flip things, if there is a coven, she's using them to produce more hagspawn for her to control.
I would love to play this character as a transgender person on a quest to change their gender to female ! and gain ultimate power.......and become the monster she knows she is.
Once again, I think it could be interesting to see you try turning the Herculoids into D&D monsters, mainly because they are surprisingly iconic and predate D&D, yet haven't had any appearance in any D&D materials, to my knowledge.
In world mythology, some creatures haven't made an appearance in D&D, to my understanding. The Aralez from Armenian mythology, which is basically a Celestial counterpart to the Hellhound; I've gone into describing that a few times in some prior comments. In Spanish mythology, there is a creature called the the Ramidreju; the Ramidreju is described as the appearance of a weasel-like creature with green fur and tusks on its snout. the Ramidreju is said to only show up once every hundred years or so, and they are also have the ability to seek out gold and treasures in addition to its fur being described as a literal magical cure-all.
It could to see you try to translate these into D&D monsters in the future.
You specifically said "assigned male at birth" at one point, so now I have the idea of a trans Hag Spawn who wants to be accepted by her Hag family. 😢
Same
My brain immediately went to trans-fem hagspawn too lol
I appreciate that he used the language, and it got my brain working, too
it also gives me idea of transmasc hag whos best friends w his sibling hagspawn the mother hag will be so pissed tho bc it might break the power of a hag coven so they both might really need to flee
YWNBAH
The Uvuudaum is a monster i fell in love at first sight. I don't play 3th edition, I never played against or with an uvuudaum and yet, its one of my favourite monster from design and lore alone. Thanks you, SO MUCH, for providing it to us
Wouldn't a male Hag just be a Warlock?
To be a warlock you need a patron
If you think Hag is gender exclusive maybe, but in this case hag is a species, and it's hard to say to a son of a hag, "Even if you're born from a hag, you can't be one because you're a guy," especially if they are a hostile encounter in D&D.
Gender exclusive terms have fallen out of fashion, but these terms can still be useful outside of a gendered way.
Have you read any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld? They use Wizard and Witch as gender specific terms for spell casters but as the books go on it decides more apparent that the real difference is how each group uses magic, witches use practical magic while wizards use big magic, with gender simply being a common but not exclusive component, especially since the third book is all about the first female wizard and the last book introduced the first male witch.
Yuggoloths
@@endormorre6567I think we should still keep some gendered language. It makes things confusing as fuq if we don't use it at all or blur the lines.
I never thought wizard or witch was gendered, though. Out of the books I've read they were just job titles essentially. It's just that men gravitate to wizard and women witch. Just like irl men gravitate to being mechanics and women to nursing.
@@smithsmith1956true as a male “witch” would either focus on magic or alchemy defaulting them to wizard or alchemist respectively
Ow story hook
A coven of hags tasks the party to hunt down a hag spawn and bring him back to the hag why because hes the son of baba yaga and any daughter born of him would be a terrifying powerful hag
Have you done slaymate yet
"Assigned male at birth"... really?
Small note - I wouldn't have said anything but this is the second video in a row so I'll bring it up - "reagents" is normally pronounced with three syllables: re-agents. Stress on the A. It's not usually homophonous with "regents".
But! Love your work, and this is a fun one as usual!
As someone pretty stringent about balance and character building, you could give the sea hag spawn a feature to reflect their ugliness aside from the debilitating -2 charisma - it could be as simple as disadvantage on any social checks using charisma, except for intimidation which they have advantage for. A flat -2 stat disbalances a whole lot and kinda locks out a lot of class options for a pc; remember, charisma isn't just attractiveness, it's also force of personality and self certainty.
I really liked the homebrew version of Hagspawn by DM Tuz. Very nice illustrations too.
I love the idea of an early campaign Arc of the party investigating a group of bandits and their odd non-typical bandit goals, with the party learning their leader is a hagspawn, leading to the Hagspawn leader using his bandit following to further his hag mother's goals
as a trans woman i feel like there could be a very compelling story for a trans hagspawn sorcerer pc who has had to work harder to try to be accepted by her mother possibly even eventually realizing she doesn't want to be like her after all. also whether intentional or not i really appreciate you saying hagspawn are assigned male at birth not that they're always "men" it really feels nice cause alot of "nerdy" spaces can be pretty transphobic even if only accidently so thank you for that :)
That is definitely a story I could see being really interesting to play out at the table or even just as a backstory thing!
Also yes it definitely was intentional. I knew this creature would likely hit a lot of notes that resonate one way or another with trans folks, and I think that’s really cool! Since the trans experience is outside of my personal experience, I didn’t feel super comfortable diving too deep into that in the video itself, but, I did want to make sure my use of language was careful here to put forth my best effort to be inviting to trans stories told through these guys.
It truly warms my heart to read the comments on this video from trans people either just saying they like the monster or brainstorming their own character ideas. I’m definitely not perfect by any means but I do always try my best to make my channel welcoming for everyone, which absolutely includes my trans viewers. Thanks for watching!
It's good to know more about hag in general, full of ideas now for a hagspawn
A hag spawn sees a building collapsing and leaps into action and tries his best to brace the crumbling building while the people scramble to get out as fast as they can. After everyone escapes by the skin of their teeth, they look back a the 7 foot tall physically fit but not overly muscular hag spawn quickly losing strength as the weight of the building piles up on top of him before the crumbling building crashing down on top of him, while he's bellowing in physical agony as he pushes a small little girl who was left behind by mistake to safety. The tiny girl tries to dig the brave and compassionate "giant" boy from the debris but only to find his mangled and crushed frame, with the help of the other townsfolk after seeing how desperate she was to find and thank him for protecting her. She saw his crushed body and weeps...while the townsfolk out of respect for giving his life to save a bunch of strangers who he didn't even know in the slightest, mourn. It was the least that they could do...
Most likely a wandering hagspawn was passing a very old small to mid-sized town saw what was happening due to the old foundations slowly giving way due to old age and quickly realized what was happening and leaped into action with no concern or regards for his own safety, only thing in his mind is to get everyone out of the collapsing building as quickly as possible. Using his size and strength to hold up the crumbling building for as long as possible until everyone is evacuated safely. Rest in peace, big guy. If he was able to ask "did I do good?" I'm sure many of the townsfolk would respond with "yes...yes, you did good..." I'm certain that he would if he were able to, he would give the townsfolk a brief but warm and gentle closed mouth smile then close his eyes and join his spark of life with other kindred spirits in for a lack of a better term "the well of all sparks of life" for when a spark of life is ignited, there is great joy but...when spark of life is extinguished, the planes of existence weeps... for all life is sacred. Even ones you may not expect at first.
@@moonlightdawn7249 that's...shockingly extremely close to what happened at the beginning...like a near 1 to 1...are you just that good or am I just that predictable...?
@@blakewyattdunfee2 who knows? Maybe the former? Maybe the latter? No one can say for certain.
A while ago for my homebrew world I detailed out different types of hag offspring that I collectively referred to as Hagspawn, and the rare make hag (which I called Churls), also have lesser magical ability. Didn't know about these guys beforehand, neat to see I accidentally made almost an identical version of the official (and your updated) Hagspawn. Hadn't gotten around to making stats for them yet though so this is super helpful!
In a pathfinder campaign right now that has three hag descended characters in it. With some it’s roleplay and less mechanics, and some homebrew to make everything fit and balanced, but three ‘siblings’ who are a changeling human psychic marauder, a similar halfling winter witch, and a hag-riven bloodrager yeti.(yes, it took some juggling and making abilities phase in over time on the young yeti to balance it). Given the campaign involved some hags it let us nicely have a background for the three worked into the campaign.