| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm running an urban steampunk campaign, and I'm trying to make a hag lair in the city.
Where is an interesting place to put a hag lair in the big city? It's a steampunk setting. The city has 4 quarters: Rich, Poor & Industrial, Not-so-poor & Industrial, and one being Gentrified.
I was thinking maybe a park or graveyard, or maybe a meat locker or slaughterhouse. The PCs have already explored a haunted house, an abandoned church, and they also did a heist at a private phlogiston factory adjacent to a mansion.
It's for 5th Edition, I'm homebrewing the hags, and customizing their coven spells to be more curse-like.
The mission will be to rescue kidnapped orphans (one of the PCs runs an orphanage, and she went on a month-long adventure without telling me her safeguards. OOPS! ***evil grin***).
Thanks!
One of the hags could be the coven's public face - a fortuneteller in an obscure part of the city, offering corrupting advice and performing crude divination via unsavory means.
The hags could be malign though rarely present landlords of a slum tenant-house, or maybe even a guest house who often make their guests vanish.
I remembered a Simpsons episode where a madame was thought to be a witch and I thought... why not a brothel/ variety house?
Also: Elbow hag.
.
.
5th edition stats:
Tiny Fey, chaotic evil
Armor Class 13 (natural armor)
Hit Points 17 (5d4+5)
Speed 20 ft.
Str 8 (–1), Dex 14 (+2), Con 12 (+1), Int 15 (+2), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 15 (+2)
Saving Throws Dex +4, Int +4, Wis +4, Cha +4
Skills Arcana +4, Medicine +4, Perception +4, Stealth +4
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 14
Languages Common, Giant, Sylvan
Challenge 1 (200 XP)
Actions
- Claws And Teeth. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 1d3+2 piercing damage.
- Hexing Eye. One creature within 30 feet that can see the hag suffers disadvantage on one of the following rolls made before the beginning of the hag's next turn, as chosen by the hag: the next attack roll, the next ability check, or the next saving throw. Any creature affected by this ability cannot be affected again until it finishes a long rest.
- Hexing Hand. Melee Spell Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: incapacitated for 1 round or spend one hit dice and recover hit points accordingly (the hag's choice). Any creature affected by this ability cannot be affected again until it finishes a long rest.
- Hexing Voice. Spell. One creature within 30 feet that can hear the hag has to make a Charisma saving throw (DC 12) or become either charmed or frightened for 1 minute (the hag's choice). Any creature affected by this ability cannot be affected again until it finishes a long rest.
Give then ranks in Profession (grocer) and they can start a Haggen.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I like the idea of the Fortune Teller! I can use her as a clue.
It's a 5th level party of 6 PCs. Rogue, Monk, Warlock, Cleric, Fighter/Wizard, Cleric/Sorcerer.
EDIT:
I have some good ideas for encounters, but I need help with the locale.
Where do hags hang out in the big city?
One hag is large, one is medium, and one is small. I have a role for the big and medium one. The small one can be the Fortune Teller! I pictured her as a hunched over crone, so she can use Disguise Self to be more acceptably Fortune Teller-like.
Maybe I can use the Elbow Hag as an "emergency" hag in case the PCs kill the Fortune Teller before the big coven battle. She can be hiding, so searching for her could a complication during the fight.
I already have ideas for minions and guardian monsters.
Have you seen the flue hag? Might give you some ideas regarding urban hags.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
They could run a soup kitchen, with a huge pot of really cheap stew that never comes off the fire--they just keep tossing in new, uh, cuts of meat every night.
The cheapest pie shop in town is another option.
I found a uncommon race called Changelings, which are children of Hags. These Changelings appear to seek out their mothers to transform into hags.
You could have a random NPC join up with the PCs, and then turn on them when they encounter the hag.
What if the hags don't have a single "base", but rather have several "bases" located throughout the city in extremely specific locations, as to perform a geoglyphic ritual that requires the orphans as reagents of the spell?
It could be like 5-9 key points in the city that draws a geoglyph, like a constellation, and the ritual opens a portal, summons a blood moon, something ;)
I like the wax museum idea!
It synergizes with my long term goals of making the PCs super paranoid about statues, and gargoyles in particular, which will lead to them being jaded by gargoyles and statues, and then I can super ambush them around level 20.
I can even have a waxworks in the basement! I like the idea of making a kind of maze with life-sized dioramas. I can use them as exposition or as creepifying tableaus.
Running a cookie shop.
http://www.imgrum.org/tag/Geoglyph
You could have a Wax Museum, Fortune Teller, Slaughterhouse, Abandoned Theater/Opera House, a Steam/Bathhouse, a secret entrance to an underground lair in a Public Park, and a Farmhouse outside of town, or something.
But if all the locales of these various Hag "dens" are drawn out on a map of the city, it depicts an unholy symbol for their ritual.
Also, what if the Hags have taken one orphan to each locale for the ritual, but the Hags need one more item before they can begin the ritual... and it's something the PC's carry....
And the ritual would summon a Blood Moon for a year, empowering all Hags everywhere and acting like a beacon to summon other Hags...
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Industrial?
....this BEGS for a nice hag with change shape (or some magic solution to have a public persona).
I mean... high efficiency human suffering? Crushing will of the people with hard, long, dangerous labor? Exposing young, unmarried women to situations where they will likely get poisoned or caught in a place without proper fire escapes? Workers that mysteriously disappear (and no one asks, since they all assume they ran away from the hell hole)?
MACHINES THAT GROUND UP CHILDREN FLESH, AND YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEMAND THE CHILD FOR MONEY TO COVER THE COST OF THE GOODS THAT GOT DAMAGED WITH HIS BLOOD?!
This demands a hag.
Although it might be fun to have 4 hags- each one representing another terrible image from a Dickens novel. I am sure you could create a hag for the rich/gentrified areas that could do set up changeling girls as romantic interests for the key figures of the town only to break their hearts. Ooo, and you could do orphanages for the poor area! Horrible, horrible orphanages!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
They should be homeless. That makes it REALLY hard to track them down. And who else is invisible in plain sight to the vast majority of the populace? The police are uninterested in the populace they prey upon, the middle classes ignore them, the working classes are simply glad that there but for the grace of god go them...
If it's not bad enough to make even an Abadaran start to reconsider whether the whole city thing is a good idea after all, you haven't used enough Dickens.
Yes. If lamashtans don't get smug and share it on "ripped off face" book, saying "how is that civilization thing working out for you?", then it is not worthy of Dickens.
Needs another step in there. Hags don't want there to be more hags than they strictly need unless they have some kind of leverage or control over them.Also, what if the Hags have taken one orphan to each locale for the ritual, but the Hags need one more item before they can begin the ritual... and it's something the PC's carry....
And the ritual would summon a Blood Moon for a year, empowering all Hags everywhere and acting like a beacon to summon other Hags...
What if the control of the hags was external, like from an evil wizard or sorcerer, or from a Witch. Maybe even from an Anti-Paladin or evil Eldritch Knight...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
They could run a soup kitchen, with a huge pot of really cheap stew that never comes off the fire--they just keep tossing in new, uh, cuts of meat every night.
The cheapest pie shop in town is another option.
I like/hate the way you think.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am sure you could create a hag for the rich/gentrified areas that could do set up changeling girls as romantic interests for the key figures of the town only to break their hearts.
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am sure you could create a hag for the rich/gentrified areas that could do set up changeling girls as romantic interests for the key figures of the town only to break their hearts.
Ooh, Hag-run 'finishing school' that teaches young ladies the skills* they need to succeed in the cut-throat world of the aristocracy, and teaching the occasional not-aristocrat how to fake it and infiltrate that world, in a sort of wicked version of Pygmalion.
(Marrying well. Concealing affairs. Poisoning rivals. Manipulating the husband with flattery, drugs and gaslighting. Pitting rivals and household staff against one another for fun and profit. Securing lines of inheritance *before* your husband's 'hunting accident.' Shifting blame / framing others for your misdeeds.)
And keeping in touch to use some of them as spies and agents. I like it.
I am sure you could create a hag for the rich/gentrified areas that could do set up changeling girls as romantic interests for the key figures of the town only to break their hearts.Ooh, Hag-run 'finishing school' that teaches young ladies the skills* they need to succeed in the cut-throat world of the aristocracy, and teaching the occasional not-aristocrat how to fake it and infiltrate that world, in a sort of wicked version of Pygmalion.
(Marrying well. Concealing affairs. Poisoning rivals. Manipulating the husband with flattery, drugs and gaslighting. Pitting rivals and household staff against one another for fun and profit. Securing lines of inheritance *before* your husband's 'hunting accident.' Shifting blame / framing others for your misdeeds.)
Gail Carriger has an excellent Finishing School series! :-D
This is just a one-shot adventure, not an extended storyline, so I doubt I'll use the multiple site, unholy symbol idea with the hags. But I might use it later for some other BBEGs.
There's all kinds of nooks and crannies and occupied or abandoned facilities involved in a sewer system or catacombs that could be used by hags or suborned minions, if not where the hags themselves lair. Could hide a workshop down there and the hag or coven as a whole just visits it every so often.
In any city big enough to have sewers, they just beg to be used by the criminal element and/or subterranean monsters. In Green Ronin's Freeport setting, one of the most hazardous jobs in the entire city is sewer patrol, due to the numerous smugglers, scavengers, serpent people, and eldritch cults operating below the streets. The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer also made frequent use of sewers as the perfect way for vampires and demons to move about town unseen--and safe from the sun.
City lighthouses are generally left alone as long as they keep functioning, aside from occasional messages to them, but they can offer access to a lot of a city without too much travel time. So those are another option that's removed but not too removed from the city, so there's a certain amount of privacy, especially with good sound-proofing.
Freeport also provides an infamous example of what can happen at a lighthouse that has minimal supervision...
I am sure you could create a hag for the rich/gentrified areas that could do set up changeling girls as romantic interests for the key figures of the town only to break their hearts.Ooh, Hag-run 'finishing school' that teaches young ladies the skills* they need to succeed in the cut-throat world of the aristocracy, and teaching the occasional not-aristocrat how to fake it and infiltrate that world, in a sort of wicked version of Pygmalion.
(Marrying well. Concealing affairs. Poisoning rivals. Manipulating the husband with flattery, drugs and gaslighting. Pitting rivals and household staff against one another for fun and profit. Securing lines of inheritance *before* your husband's 'hunting accident.' Shifting blame / framing others for your misdeeds.)
Looking at this and the matron, I can think of a good, basic progression for a story line with these districts- orphanage first (easy to start with low stakes since you can just have 'local asks you to find out about an orphan that stopped showing up), then the finishing school (mostly because the spy one would take notice of the party after the matron was taken down- then you can set up medium level intrigue and assassinations), and then finish in the industrial.
I mostly put industrial last, since it is better to put 'child grinding machines' as the last in the series (shock value and all). Also... I can imagine it is possible to make some nasty boss monsters made from dead children mixed with industrial machinery. That could make a nasty undead (preferable if you have multiple, as in 'oh god, how many dead children is this?!')
I am not sure how well you can differentiate rich from gentrified. I can't quite distinguish them well enough to create an efficient core concept. Maybe if you shift the orphanage to the middle class area, and use something else for the extremely poor area (drugs or disease are a fairly simple set of paths to take for that)
In the royal palace and/or grand cathedral, of course.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Undead Children Voltron??????
:-O
In a 3.5 campaign with half of this group, I put them up MM3's Charnel Hound, a Huge undead canine cobbled together from a multitude of corpses, and when the bodies fell apart, I had them rise up as zombies.
They were not happy.
***evil grin***
Undead Children Voltron??????
:-O
In a 3.5 campaign with half of this group, I put them up MM3's Charnel Hound, a Huge undead canine cobbled together from a multitude of corpses, and when the bodies fell apart, I had them rise up as zombies.
They were not happy.
***evil grin***
A tad bit of an interesting idea for ya, if a coven is involved.
-Hag 1: With her knowledge of herbal remedies and magics, Hag one can serve as a wise woman or wet nurse for a prominent noble family. In her time serving this family she may have gathered dirt on them or on other families, and instead of using it for ham-fisted black mail, she helps them with cover ups and the like, earning their trust and favor, which in turns makes her privy to more than she ought to know.
-Hag 2: Serves as either a madam of a brothel or a diviner for a thieves guild/gang. In this position she strives to gather secrets of the undercity, and occasionally sells them if certain parties gain or lose her favor. She should perhaps have several different identities she maintains so if one is revealed she can retreat into another for a while. This hag should use her powers a bit more liberally so as to make the scum of the city fear her for what harm she can inflict with her magics as with her secrets, but should never know she is a hag.
-Hag 3: This hag lives in the wilds, and manages the monstrous population or bandit populations. She is in charge on ensuring that the farms and roads that keep the city fed and wealthy function and fail in accordance with the plans of the other two hags.
The three hags together can influence in subtle ways nearly every aspect of the city, and while not all powerful would definitely be a force to be respected should anyone learn their secret. Plus Hags 2 and 3 have plenty of red herrings to use should adventurers begin to get too close to uncovering their secrets, setting up a local monster or thieves guild to look like a mastermind of the operations while they quietly lie low and wait for the city to return to normal. The one aiding the noble household has slightly less luxury since her circle of minions would be considerably smaller, but would likely rely on whatever security the rich and powerful have in place already.
Like this?Undead Children Voltron??????
:-O
In a 3.5 campaign with half of this group, I put them up MM3's Charnel Hound, a Huge undead canine cobbled together from a multitude of corpses, and when the bodies fell apart, I had them rise up as zombies.
They were not happy.
***evil grin***
Yes, but a bit opposite in construction.
The mechanical bits would be the main part that can be seen inside, and the minced child bits are stuffeed in between the cogs and levels, seeping out with every movement. Occasional limbs may be seen coming out (undersized secondary claws?)
Maybe have the machine parts fall off in the same way, and then you just have a legion made up of severed arms with a couple torn up child heads sprinkled at the top. The idea of just being made almost entirely out of a single type of part just seems more..... sinister. This wasn't a sudden culling of the workers for parts- it was slowly taken, one at a time, by having tiny child hands shoved in to 'repair' the machines.
Lots of great ideas, but the structure of the night will be:
1. PCs get home, discover kids gone
2. PCs find hags and kids
3. PCs kill hags and rescue kids
Well,
0. PCs fly dirigible from dinosaur-filled jungle to steampunk city on top of giant beanstalk after some "random" encounters.
My group meets less than once a month, so I try to keep the sessions action packed. It's mostly in-character hack and slash. There are definitely distinct personalities and some problem solving involved, but a session of primarily roleplaying encounters with me pretending to be 3 or more old women would be kind of a let down, I'm thinking. Also, I plan on introducing an aiji-dowager-like character in the future once the dauphine reaches majority. So I'll get my politically fraught tea-drinking scene yayas once she makes her appearance.
EDIT:
Drejk,
It was more like if you mushed together a bunch of plastic soldiers into a dog-shaped statue, killed the Huge evil dog (30+ feet tall!) in a big fight, went to catch your breath, and then all the plastic soldiers (zombies) got up all at once and started fighting you before you could whip out your wand of cure light wounds.
The zombies might have been ghouls or wights. It's been a while.
Lemeres,
The city is a bit of a combination of Sigil and New Crobuzon, and there are Cogwrought mechanical folk, so I'm sure there are ReMade around, too.
Laundry services: no ones going to notice a large boiling pot with people stirring it
Pot shop (poor persons resteraunt. Game of thrones bowl o brown)
Candle maker
I'm still leaning towards the wax museum. I can use it for exposition of historical figures and events.
I'm still leaning towards the wax museum. I can use it for exposition of historical figures and events.
oooooo.... wax golems.
Yeah, they are always fun- they inevitably go crazy, try to kill the original, and can get class levels so it can stay actually relevant.
The really fun part here is that you can start off with it as a fun little side diversion, but then make it more serious- you can turn 'scooby doo mystery' into 'invasion of the body snatchers'!
You can have a hag that makes wax golems on the express condition that they will eventually gain sentience and try to murder the person they are modeled after.
She helps with the murder (you got to get soup stock somewhere), and then blackmails the golem (obviously you target high class people whose position and fortunes are worth exploiting).