Introduction
I saw recently someone post a note on hag covens, on whether hags are still scary. God. Who was it. Explorateur? Mage Advice? One of these blogs. I'll find it.
It has me thinking about the hags of my world. Hopefully I can transition this thinking into a tool or useful thing for you to walk away with, but for now I just want to understand why my reaction to the questions is: no, absolutely not.
I'd want to do this by interpreting hags in my own community, because as with most rpg Aspects (character classes, monster types, skills and proficiencies, whatever), an analog exists in the real world, allowing the game to become, beyond a bit of fun, a means of studying the real world from a safe, blameless distance.
Perhaps I'll step into blame here.
Hags: immediate adjectives that spring to mind are ugly, outcast, alone. I erase the word 'horrid' for what it draws up regarding 'evil'. But maybe it doesn't. A horrid stench is an offensive one. I'll add it back in. Hags brim with a sort of 'offensive presence', whether the quality of their warts or the stench of their breath or the shrillness of their cackle.
Let me open up this discussion to include the notion of male hags, which are rarer, certainly, but something I don't want to completely write out of the storybook. I think men are rarer to be labeled hag in large part because it's generally regarded as more okay if a man is alone. A woman alone had better be a widow, says society, and she better still be grieving. She better have tried to be together with somebody, society says, because women shouldn't be alone. If not, we've got all sorts of nasty words for her, whereas a man might be a hermit or a recluse or God, a Bodhisvatta or wise man who has chosen the hills or the high peaks for his meditations because Togetherness is too lowly a state for someone in pursuit of Higher Forms.
The woman is in her hut, the man is on his peak.
Yuck. But, these things exist.
And let's not forget the folks between or beyond genders too.
Woof. Deep water.
Let's go simple for a second.
I think I like, of the words I chose for hag, 'ugly' and 'alone'. I know we have this notion of a coven or a witch's gaggle, but I'll focus on the hag of my mind, which is the one out in their mud-hut, infreqently visited by Prince and Princess Lifting Their Skirts (ware the the pig shit!) because they heard Yekki Bruna might have a potion that can get him up and get her a baby.
I want to clarify my position on ugliness before we proceed: to me ugliness is 'at a remove from conventional standards and not so by choice'. A shriveled arm is, by majority percentage, 'not the standard body structure'. Warts covering the entire face except for one eye is not the way most faces come. I'm fighting the urge to couch ugliness as anything but. Even the notion of 'deform' is not a trivial word to anyone who feels 'deformed' or who has been made to feel less than as a result of 'not matching' the conventions of their society. In fact many of these people change societies as a result of this negative attention; many of these people take their own life in order to change societies to the Kingdom of the Dead, where we all hope we are more accepted. Many of these people seek new faces, new places, masks, whatever. We all combat this sense of an Ideal that, when matched, provides some surety in an unsure world. We combat it because we think our problems derive from not being It.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes though our problems are the men with pitchforks chasing our poor scarred body through the hayfields.
This is sad to me so let me not speak about ugliness without caring for it.
Let me put forward the Hag then as a potential Hero of Deformity, in that way.
The Notion of the Good Hag
So traditionally I think we read in the hag a certain bitterness. 'She's angry because she's ugly and been mistreated and spat on'. This is not an uncommon convention. It's the easy read to an incomprehensible circusmstance.
'It lives by itself because no one loves it'.
It's also where we get notions (I suspect) for things like the hag coven. Only family could love creatures like those. We see notions of this mocked with mentions of inbreeding, in Deliverance or similar films; a full 100% of the jokes I hear about Kentucky. Again: the target locales these things crop up in are places where there are less people, again reinforcing this idea of aloneness. The Inner City Hag is a rarer convention, broadly speaking.
The Hag, however, (often referred to in their neutrality), is also a cultivator. They are usually befriended by beasts. Baba Yaga with her hut (a great monstrous chicken-leg hut); many of Miyazaki's grotesquely-faced witches who are comforted or kept company by creatures, birds, a fat cat, whatever. Something loves the hag but it is not the community whose edge she perches at.
The Hag provides something right? It is often the potion brewer, a salve-maker. It's rarely made true that it is out in its garden making the world green and beautiful (this position, traditionally, is often left to the surprisingly winsome farm-woman), but inside the hag's hut—perhaps so that they cannot be seen or harassed by teenage idiots—is a person or creature of Manufacture. Brewing, collecting, growing. I sense the hag as something kin to a mushroom. They have aspects of decomposition, of willingness to put both hands in the body of a pig to pull out its still-beating heart and understand it as necessary, of course, for that boner potion.
There is an aspect then to the Hag of a being at the verge of death. What is death after all, but that very loneliest of places? (At least until we get over the bridge and meet all those ghosts supping at pools of blood in the earth and join them in slurping; all of them willing to overlook our flaws or make no note of social convention anymore).
We have seen a huge burst of interest in mushrooms, broadly, in literature. Go watch Fantastic Fungi. Go read Mushrooms Demystified. Go read about the use of mushrooms on breaking down oil spills or watch a Joe Rogan podcast at all. I don't find any of it particularly central to whether mushrooms are good or bad, it's just clear that we are coming onboard with mushrooms as something other than aspects of cheese worth cutting off. Rot and decomposition are a central focus as we aim our environmental lens on how waste goes away, because heaven knows we know how waste is produced, right? At this point? Is anyone still really wondering if plastic is a problem given the Charybdis in the North Pacific? The gulls in Bacigalupi's Windup Girl are cut open to reveal straws and microplastics. (But they're in our shampoos to get rid of dandruff and old, dead hairs and we need them to swirl our iced vanilla lattes, don't we?).
Anyway: we know plastic is a sin and we know our overproduction of waste materials identifies that we overconsume unnecessarily and are passing this off to the Unknown Future World to put up with. Given these knowns, some of us are fascinated with ways to counteract that. One could call the fascination 'druidic' in nature, right? An act of balancing the environment? If we can make mushroom hats that fall to the ground and break apart on our death (Stamets) then have we not done something -good-? Have we not counteracted something? The great machine pouring liquid plastics into molds over and over again somehow suffers a tiny, mousey blow? One less set of hands at a factory in China, and the subsequent lack of one tiny billow of black smoke overhead, crawling towards Korea?
Sure, all tiny, but we are tiny.
Regardless: mushrooms—the zeitgeist, generically, has mushrooms in its guts, growing. Look at proliferation (ha) of things like The New Weird, of Annihilation by VanderMeer. Of the hagworlds in Baldurs Gate 3. Flash back fifteen, twenty years, these weren't the mixed-moral exploration zones of the games and books then. Certainly not with the same propensity or 'is it really bad, the swamp?'.
Perhaps I'm speaking over my pay-grade here, and simply riddled with my own obsessions. But it does make think that hags, mushrooms, the world at the edge of the City of Factories and Castles is more 'in the right' anymore. I don't know that there's Glory in the Heights of the Skyscraper, or even Space, as there was in years past.
Or if there is, it's circumspect surely, and falls pretty easy under the weight of any reasonable scrutiny.
This to say: if anything's scary, really, in the Now, for me, it's wizards. Technocrat wizards. Robes made of sharp, white polyester. Towers free of dust. Elemental winds chained to the floor. Bleaching agents. That scent not of death, but entrapment. Of being kept alive under the drip. The hag mixes and makes, fuses so that things continue to dissolve as appropriate. The wizard suspends in horrified stasis for study. If that wizard happens to operate under the protection of a kingdom, or shows up at the wildest parties, drunk on some stupefying pink sparkly drink, the more horrifying. These are your liches, perhaps, or somewhere before it. Somewhere in the decision making process, when the wizard is still grappling with their own mortality and aspirations, eager to trap themselves in this world, rather than be eaten by the earwigs.
Let's sum this up. I don't want to bore you.
Mage Advice was trying to determine how to make the hags of Curse of Strahd as horrifying as possible. Evidently (I've not read the module, only played to the gypsy caravan, and only once in perhaps the wrong company for such an adventure) they eat children.
Okay. I'm just not sure it would be hags doing that.
Now, I grant, these things can be written into the literature—into the game—and therefore We Must Attend to the Literature. But I say fuckallthat.
It seems Mage Advice is trying to gather ways to make Hags more powerful, not more horrifying.
So this blog post in response seems to rotate around several things:
1) an explanation that hags, as entities, should not be made horrifying, but instead made a valuable contest of morality.
A hag holding a dead child over a cauldron is a morally complex circumstance: why is it holding the child this way, we ask? It must be for the hags own betterment right? (And not that the child suffered a horrid case of birwoin plague and the waters of a curative must be soaked in what comes from the buboes to save the community
.
.
.
right?)
2) that there are everyday hags. Hags who are removed from the contest of sexuality and other social ambitions. Who are, in a way, heroes to the loneliness that haunts us, each. Who are as much worth consulting for the wisdom of their tiny, rugged, colorful sanctuaries as the austere monk floating, legs crossed, at the height of the mountain.
3) and to create something gameable, something interesting, some tool.
So, here are
d10 Hag Hooks That Don't Involve Bitterness At the World For Being Ugly or Alone
1 — Young hag thinks everybody should get a dose of what it means to be alone. How they doin that?
2 — The hag holds court with all local cows to try to save its own, which won't speak for some reason; villagers are upset, obviously. All cows in one yard! Somethings afoot!
3 — The hag is camping and waiting for the dead they miss dearly, so really would not prefer your company. You're making an awful racket with all your dumb plotting.
4 — One person -did- get sick drinking the hag's fall concoction. They were though a legitimate pervert.
5 — The hag's grounds have become the only source of actual growth in a town believed blighted. Will it reveal its secrets!? NO! Get the fuck off my property.
6 — One of the hag's two sisters have died; the body has the weight of the hag's grief holding it. It drowned in the town well. No worse than any other dead body in water, but everyone thinks it is.
7 — The hag has spread wooden coins among Society Gold and those little mischief makers are converting the gold to wood, to wood, to wood.
8 — The hag has taken up refuge in the cemetery to consider something, maybe even just what grows over bodies; others don't take kindly to the prolonged visit; they've been temporarily turned to stone; the hag doesn't feel the need to explain that it's temporary, so naturally, more stone statues every day.
9 — HAGDEATH. The house remains. Oh boy. Think of who would want that place demolished and how hard it would be to do so. The animals! Acting so smart and strange :/
10 — Hag eats a baby. Only way to get rid of what would've been a horrible future. Thank goodness her body can break it down. If she had a tongue, she'd explain. Instead there's a mushroom there.
Okay: so most of these ideas revolve around misconception, don't they.
Isn't that just sitting back into the fundamental (and can I say fundamental without meaning base, traditional... conservative?) aspects of haghood and monstrosity?
'It's just misunderstoooooood.'
Well that's okay. Because that's 3/4 of the problems we face in this world. The other 1/4 most have to do with our own procrastination or an overlaying of circumstance that creates seemingly bad luck or poor timing. The major problem, major major problem (ask David Foster Wallace) is that we don't see each other right.
Look a hag in the eye. Don't avert your gaze. Mehates how hags are in perennial storytime subservience to matters of Aesthetic. WHAT ARE THEY DOING OUT THERE IN THE WILD BECAUSE THEY AINT WAITING FOR A PRINCE!?...
Kk. Moralizing. Those are my thoughts on hags.
- Hugh