Are Hags scary now?

Setting the power of our Substack coven against the Hags.

Last week I asked for your help fixing a problem: how could we make a group of Hags “feel” like a coven?

I was a little underwhelmed with the coven options presented in the monster manual, so using your suggestions, I homebrewed a selection of my own. You can read about them in detail here:

Hag covens aren't scary. Let's fix that.

But playtesting is always important, it's time to reveal how these ideas went down at the table:

Tactics

The idea here was to give each coven member a specific role and largely it worked well. Having an Annis Hag on the front line locked down the melee players and our artillerist Sea Hag proved useful on the backline (even though the dice were against them). I’m not sure the Green Hag felt as effective in support, so possibly needs a few more options to boost the coven; probably an expanded spell list including some healing spells.

Communal Health

The Coven essentially shared one pool of HP, with damage split equally amongst them.

This was one of the ideas I was most excited about, and when the players first encountered it they were immediately intrigued by the fact that their damage was being shared amongst the coven.

I did encounter two, linked issues that will need development. First, the players were seeking either a ‘solution’ or a weakness to the strategy that they could exploit. They started attacking other coven members to see what happened and seemed a little disappointed to discover the same effect. As a result, they started hitting the biggest source of HP (the Annis Hag) with the knowledge that this would eventually kill the weaker members of the coven.

I think the solution is to make this ability a reaction, that each coven member can choose to absorb the damage of weaker members. That way, the coven can use this trait more tactically, and the players can create ways to exploit it. A Paladin might risk an attack of opportunity from the Annis Hag to burn her reaction, knowing that if he can reach the Sea Hag he will deal the full amount of damage.

I think giving more healing options to the Green Hag would also help increase the frustration of dealing with this problem.

Initiative Swapping

Each Hag was able to gift their action to another member, allowing them to take additional turns.

This proved to be one of my favourite options and really helped the Coven feel like a team. Combat started with a big gap between both sides, so the fact that the Annis Hag was able to take the dash action and then still get a free attack courtesy of one of her coven members caused a surprise for the players and gave me some flexibility.

Group Castings

Each Hag could take an additional ‘Coven Action’ which then on initiative count one would fire as a powerful spell.

I’m still excited about this idea, but I butchered the execution in play. The spells need to hit harder, and positioning the Hags in a triangle formation for the area of effect proved tricky. I think I would change this to a fairly standard area of effect in future versions for simplicity.

I also completely forgot to use Concentration, so the players didn’t get a taste of how they could break the spell.

Finally, the idea of rhyming triplets to cast the spell didn’t really land - I think they took place too far apart for the players to put together what was happening. I think a single line repeated might have been simpler and more effective.

The ideas here require development, but showed promise.

Unbreakable Spirit

The idea here was that each Hags ‘spirit’ would remain on the battlefield after they were reduced to 0hp. Unfortunately this was abandoned entirely because I was running short on time and I knew this was one lever I could pull on to speed things up. I think it would have worked well however and would keep the Coven actions on the table for longer.

Final Thoughts

I’m known to be overly critical of my own work, but I was actually relatively pleased with how all of this worked. Really the biggest problem with this combat was that I was rushing to complete it before the shop closed, which is a separate issue I’ll need to address!

It might take a little longer for me to revisit these ideas, but I’m sure I’ll give a further update in the future with a second version of this Coven.

Mostly, I enjoyed using the power of the community to crack this problem. If you have your own design challenge I’d be thrilled if you left a message in the comments so we can turn our own Substack Coven towards it.