23 October 2012

Hag

Hags appear prominently in Slavic folklore; I thus plan to make them a regular feature of my Umathelan campaign.

I am going to steal the T&T description of the hag from Trollamancer's Critter Guide (a most recommended site for all T&T enthousiasts).

Here's my version, slightly adapted to Umathela:

Hags ("Suberiads" in Gloranthan lingo) are a general class of unkind female mystics, some living, others more like liches, some are former witches or wizards, others are merely uncharitable wretches who have fallen into the wiles of Gark or Nontraya. They are more or less mortal and can be harmed by ordinary weapons, although many of them will have magical protections of various kinds. Most hags will have the ability to control mystically a kind of weather or element or animal [Anaxial's Roster p222: A Suberiad can command any non-sentient creature that inhabits her lair, whether or not it was born there. In addition to mundane animals, this often includes undead or other monsters. Suberiads can always sense events occurring anywhere within their dwelling.].

Nearly all have some sort of attribute drain attack. Many hags make a sort of Mental Attack; their Mental-MR equals 2D6 (doubles add & roll again) times five. The victim must fight back using Mental Combat ability [magic-using classes get one die per level, everyone else uses 3 dice; adds are calculated like combat adds but based only on INT & LK (over 12); and Charisma functions as CON]. If they defeat a victim (reduce CHR to zero), they will either transfer permanently 2D6 points of their chosen attribute, or enslave the victim as a mindless zombie.

2 comments:

  1. Nice drawing - Where did you get that from?

    Yea, I like your hag :-)
    However, you say that magic-users get 1D6 per level as against 3D6 for the fighting classes. Isn't it a bit odd that a level 2 wizard should be less efficient in mental combat than a first level warrior?
    As for the mental combat adds, whay not count CHR and using POW (kremm) as mental CON. That would make a lot of sense to me.

    Anyway, congratulations for the post. More! More!

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  2. I agree, 3D6 should be the minimum Mental Combat ability, irrespective of class and level.

    I also fully agree that POW would definitely make more sense than CHR. However, players usually invest more in their POW than in their CHR. It's just to take advantage of that (yes, I'm an evil GM). I may wanna change that, should I implement more sensible spirit combat rules.

    As for the drawing.... I googled it up using "Russian hag" or a similar search string.

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