Basic Information
The hag is a human hunting monster of European folklore that may or may not be the distaff counterpart to the ogre. Taking the form of a large, ugly old woman the hag haunts moors, swamps, forests and similar desolate places, ambushing and eating travellers. In some legends the hag will also lurk around the outskirts of rural communities, snatching up straying children and unattended babies for her meals, as well as those foolish enough to be around after dark.
Hags are often conflated with witches and/or some of the unseelie fae that happen to resemble old women, but the huge size and the iron claws and teeth (as, for example in the case of Black Annis, a hag said to hunt in the North of England) usually give them away as something other.
Which Baba Yaga is - witch, hag, fae or, indeed, deity, is never entirely clear.
In most legends a hag is an unmitigated menace - if she is occasionally helpful, she is more likely to be a witch or similar human worker - but in some cases can be tricked or bribed into being useful.
The Blair Witch (she of the Project) may be one of these, or an actual witch, or something else.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- PCs can get themselves into a whole lot of trouble with target identification over this - if they go tooled up to fight a witch and instead find an iron clawed combat monster or a malevolent fae, hilarity may ensue.
- In a modern campaign, one of these may be a nasty surprise for PCs looking for missing children.
- Conversely, in a fantasy campaign, hag hunting may turn out to be a wild goose chase when children go missing from a community - the real culprits may be far more mundane.
