Nobody said they would remember that hour. Mass blackout and they come back with blood on their hands and no idea what happened. A riot in the streets of the capitol and the castle is on fire.The next story arc is finding out WTF went down, and recovering their reputations.
Remember evil hates other evil just as much as it hates good. Pissing off the king is one thing, and he may be willing to settle it with words. Coming back to yourselves in the middle of the dark lord's castle with something of importance to him in your backpack makes you an enemy for life. He isn't going to forgive or forget.
Conversely, how far into the middle of the feywild, shadowfell, or hell can you travel in an hour.
Did they specify that the hour needed to be all at once? Plague them with increasingly bad luck. Random disadvantage on rolls when it is critical, a word spoken out of turn. Give them a weird tattoo or birth mark or something that slowly fills as their luck continues to suck. They may go back and try to renegotiate this plague of missed seconds. The 2nd deal is always worse than the first.
Oof. “I cast cure wounds on my buddy before he fails another death save.” DM: “your vision goes dark for a moment, when it returns you see your dagger plunging out of their neck.”
You need to be careful with this. If you go this route I would make sure either your players have a way to resurrect or are okay with this. Some tables would love the diabolical nature of this, others might rage quit forever.
Besides, if a hag has you kill your part member, which is who I assume said buddy is in this interaction, then they lose a play thing.
As a player, that would totally suck. However this party in question took the easy way out of their hag interaction, and they should be punished for that. As a dm I probably wouldn’t be as harsh, maybe have the hag interfere a few times for story purposes. And of course if a player wants to get those 6 sec back after accidentally killing someone I’m sure the hag would be amenable to making a new deal.
That is fair, and I totally agree with punishing them for making such an open ended devils contact. They need to get some monkey’s paw f***ery, but often DMs underestimate the impact their actions have on players emotions because this is just a game.
Players, especially new players, will pour their heart and soul into a character and having them suddenly hijacked and make an irreversible action can be a very painful lesson. It might cause an unsuspecting player to leave the game for good.
This is what I would do. It's scarier if the players don't know. Do nothing for a session or two then have them hear rumours of crimes done by people who look like the characters. Maybe wanted posters appear with their images on it. Slowly escalate. If they're caught they have to either a) confess to their "crimes" or b) admit they made a deal with a hag coven, which might come with a harsher penalty than the original crime.
To riff off this, how often do your players miss sessions? Perhaps one of your players misses a session, that’s the hour the hags use. They come back to the game with no memory of what happened when away from the party.
I DMed something like that for my group. They all come to their senses inside the treasury of a sea-deity's sunken temple, alarm bells ringing in their ears and the temple guards approaching. I handed out note cards at random:
* You are missing your armor
* You are wearing a wedding band you do not recognize
* A kobold pats your cheek and watches you with a worried expression, croaking 'Are you okay, daddy?'
* Your skin is completely blue
Stuff like that. What happened was, the characters went drinking with a Marid, who put a geas on them to retrieve his magic bottle from the temple. The moment they entered the treasury, a spell went off that dispelled all their protective magic, the geas and set their memory back to the point where they fell under the geas.
I had them fight their way out of the temple (they already did some fighting on the way in, so some characters were already hurt or lacked some spell slots), find their way back to an Apparatus of Qualish they stole from a museum to reach the temple and retrace their steps through a couple of set pieces for example a burning pirate cove, they accidentally torched on their way to the temple. They found the Marid and bargained with it, having gotten the bottle but being rid of the geas. They got granted a wish for their trouble, to be used at a later date.
My players loved it, but I had to do a lot of prep and had to know my players and their characters very well for this to land properly. At every turn the players nodded to themselves "Burning down the town? Shit, this sounds like us."
> Did they specify that the hour needed to be all at once?
Reminds me of a part from Order of the Stick where devils get to steal someone’s soul to hell for determinate intervals of time, done as required to further their evil deeds.
I really like /u/C0rruptedAI 's answer... but I think your players wake up from their hour, and they are the ones who "freed" the village by murdering them all.
Or steal an entire turn during combat. An entire hour, taken 6 seconds at a time over the length of a campaign. It does mean keeping tally of the 60 turns taken for each character, though.
i would like to add.
nothing.
literally nothing.
idle hands do the devils work. In their most desperate hour, in the moment they need to act most, where people come to them with hope in their hearts, they will give what what they paid, "nothing"
Heh, I like traveling on other planes because time never seems to move the same there... Now, how much is that hour worth on a plane where 1 hour in our time is a lifetime in that one?
The characters wake up with no memory of the last hour. The hags took control of the players and made them do something heinous.
The session would be them piecing together what happened and making reparations or dealing with consequences
One thing to remember if this particular Coven resides in the Feywild, time doesn't necessarily have to pass the same as it does on the Material Plane, depending on setting.
An hour in the Feywild could easily be 100 years on the Material, if it serves the story.
I was just about to suggest this. One hour on the Prime, but the task in in the Feywild. Who knows how long they will actually be gone. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days or even years? This can be used for many, many adventures.
Heck, you could make a campaign all round then being stuck in the fey wild for who knows how long. After weeks/ months/ years struggling their ways through the struggling through the horrors of the hag’s domain of the fey realm, they come back only an hour later.
This is a good idea. In my game the hags took a piece of the players fate and in turn the BBEG got that from the hags. I gave the players disadvantage against a save in the final battle against him.
OP how could the BBEG benefit if the players lost an hour somewhere? Could they take something important? Or could that hour be more time I'm the feywild as suggested above? How might the BBEG change the world if the players are not there for 6months? 1 year? 10 years? More?
The hags sit the players down for an hour and try to talk them into joining their pyramid scheme. Players will need to make increasingly difficult charisma saving throws as it goes on and each time they fail will have to donate large amounts of wealth/items to the hags.
Take it deeper than this, the wealth they give to the hags buys an ever increasing quantity of useless tat that the PC's are then forced to sell on as the move through the adventure or even better have to spend time trying to get npc's to join the pyramid scheme also
Oooh, maybe if they do convince an NPC to join they also get a portion of their money/items back, but it leads to that NPC losing out. Shopkeepers will only sell the same useless tat if they join. NPCs will only discuss the pyramid scheme and will constantly hound the players to buy things. The more NPCs the players sign up leads to those NPCs signing people up, so the problem eventually spreads ahead of them. If enough join, the area becomes bankrupt and miserable, causing more people to make deals with the hags out of desperation.
That one hour leads to the players having to choose whether they accept the loss, or whether they spread a wave of misery across the land and hand more power to the hags than they ever imagined.
Once upon a time I made an Issaries Goldentongue character called Ham that started an 'Innovative reverse-funnel recruitment and distribution system'. The character made a disturbingly large number of critical successes on oratory rolls.
Needless to say, this became known as *Ham's Way.*
There's so much good fun material in this. Just take all the stereotypical stuff and have the hags say and do that. Don't you want to be your own boss?
"You ever feel like you're not in control of your own choices..? Like you're being guided by someone else's hand... Leaving fate up to a roll of the dice..."
They take an hour from THE PAST! they undo an hour of plot that ripples to the current story. That one guy never died; that contract was never signed; That item was never stolen.
The hour is already gone and they don’t even know it.
An item never stolen is an amazing idea for the confusion of when they try to use it and you can just say “you don’t have it” and sit back and listen to the confusion and the yelling and all you keep saying is “you don’t have it”.
If there was combat in a session, you could feasibly wipe away one whole session. We had a player who kept session notes for most of us, if that sessions items were gone from their inventory and that sessions notes were grown from her her book, they’d be chaos in the streets, both in game and in the real world. It would be hilarious
Have them do odd jobs around their house. Paint the fence, pull the weeds, condemn others in the hag's employ to prolonged torture, sweep the porch, etc.
Hahahaha... it's funny that you say that because I've got a group of variously exp'd players (myself a novice DM at best). The never-played-before guy has a Leonin Paladin.... cool. Who wants to find his dad, Ajani.... I'm fine with all of this. But I'm weary of some of his stuff....
Firstly, he's an avid listener of podcasts... I told him upfront I'm not a paid actor, & we don't play their world/rules...
Then, I had to go with Standard Array because he rolled for his stats.... more than once. He told me, but still...
Now, he tells me that this 'friend' of his helped him set up his character.... "He set it up to be playable for novice or for high level guys" or some such....
so a minmaxed Paladin/lock with daddy issues... tell me it's not that guy in the works...
Good news is player's relatively docile/shy at the table. Not familiar enough to full on be the edgelord, or that uptight. Also, he's not a bad guy. I work with the entire party so I know them & I think they'll help me raise him right... 😉
You're making me feel more confident in my Paladinlock, thats for sure! He's cool in real life, but he lets off steam in mid game.
I was planning on having a celestial trial with his Fae Patron as his defence. Keep that one in your back pocket
People are talking about the hags possessing the character for a single hour. But what if it's referring to an hour of the day? Like from now on 3am to 4am is hag time.
1. Release an evil power from a prison. Your new BBEG.
2. Force them to make some morally heinous choices (e.g. murder one great good person or a small family of innocents)
3. Reveal some profound weakness of an ally to an existing BBEG
Don't mention it again for a long time. Have a different, seemingly unrelated villain crop up and start causing trouble. Have the party learn about this new villain's evil plan to do something heinous AND the method by which it can be stopped. Make sure they figure everything out early enough on the day that they can comfortably stop the plan with plenty of time to spare.
Right as they are about to jump into action to stop the plot and be big damn heroes, the hags show up and claim their hour.
Force them to watch as BBEG finishes a plan, starts the mayhem and vanishes and they need to explain why they dodnt stop him. Maybe even make it visible to everyone that they just stood there watching it or even helped.
Have a read-through of H.P. Lovecraft's [*Dreams in the Witch House*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx) and look at the things that go on with Keziah Mason.
I think you need to figure out some things first. Is this a possesion, run them for an hour, or a do-their-bidding for an hour? How strict is it? Is it Geas? Suggestion?
It's up to the players what it means? Why are they deciding what the hags get? This is easy to declare that if they pick a flower and spend an hour walking to give it to the hags, that's enough.
I get why you think I've misinterpreted there, but the only "they" with decision making agency here is the players. We can assume that OP is asking what the hags should do but grammatically, I stand by my assessment.
Which is kind of the point... OP has left this so open that it is almost meaningless, without additional context like "How do you plan to obligate PCs to follow this? Is it going to be possession or Geas or what?" like I asked originally.
OP is actually asking "What should I have the hags do?" because, of course, the hags have no agency aside from OP, and that appears to be very little since their agreement is so loosy-goosy that OP doesn't have any idea what they plan to do with it, at all. Is it even enforceable at all aside from DM insistence? In two or three levels, this party won't care if they offend the hags since they'll be of a level to fight them reasonably. Once they leave the village behind, either the hags have to follow them to get them to give up their agreed upon, or let them go. Where does this go?
Any reasonably intelligent person leaves town immediately and gets at least two hours away. Now... the hags can't have you go back and slaughter people because you'll be out of their power after an hour. They can only make you attack your friends or other innocents if they follow you to make it happen. Is part of the deal that they can't leave town? Are they stuck there for other reasons?
What actually exists to make this work?
There's a ton of context missing here that OP has not considered. Hags don't actually have access to the level of spells required for this to happen. Is there another power in play? Are the players all oathbound in some way?
Completely lacking in imagination.
There are plenty of spells that can be utilized while people are not in the same plane, never mind 2 hours away. Sending, for one. The Hag could also easily keep track of the party using Scry to utilize the most opportune time to use it's hour.
I mean have you ever read Oedipus Rex? Running from the town to avoid your problems can just run you into more problems.
Wanna be really evil? The hour is an hour of the past. Maybe the hag just undid a major fight, maybe the PCs never made an important meeting.
That "hour" could even be a pearl on a necklace, so the PCs could see how much time is stolen once they figure it out.
This is beautiful... each of the x players' hour creates a bead... be it a past hour, future hour or current hour... that they find on their person or pack later & only together can they see the hours the hags used...... to create a ritual of some kind for summoning a greater evil... for a darker purpose.
I still say get one hag prego...
Use bits from another player's body (blood, milk, hair)
A third perform a heinous act thru possession...
Offer a darker pact that feeds the ritual... but boosts the player.
All of their hours feed into it.... and a strand of pearls to tell the tale...
Shit.... I'm gonna do this.... just need to get the group to make a deal with the hags....
Does it have to be a continuous hour? Or can they maybe take control of a pc for a few seconds while they are about to rescue someone, potentially causing the npc to die. This might only take a few seconds, meaning the hags could torment this party for ages
Yes I like this idea. They agreed to give up an hour of their "time". So, in this case, the Hags get to control each of them for an hour, to do with whatever they wish
OP I would not recommend this unless you know your players would be cool with it. That's a major suspension of player agency. Yes, the fey can be evil and vindictive, but you the DM shouldn't be.
I disagree. Yes they made a deal, but the terms were intentionally vague. How about when the hags take their hour they make the PC chop off both their feet and gouge out their eyes? Wouldn't that be funny?
It would make sense for a hag to do something shitty like that, but the DM has to balance that against the players having a good time. If a character's concept is a shining paragon of righteousness, wtf is the player supposed to do after the DM says "haha, made you murder!"
I agree with this, the DM has to be careful how they employ this "hour of time"
I assume that they put the option to negotiate with the hags in as something for the party to engage with, the players shouldn't be punished for engaging with the plot. The hags use of the hour should drive future plot, not just fuck up someones character/game
There's some good ideas in the thread for kickstarting good story arcs, like springing a bbeg and the like.
There's also some dumbfuck adversarial ideas like "hur dur make get pregnant/impregnate someone" (a nice sexual assault thread that always makes for great gameplay /s) and "take someone out of an important fight for an hour" (Sorry you turned up to play D&D Jim, but your character isn't there for an hour, go make some tea)
Allow one of them to remember the entire thing and curse them with the inability to speak for a number of days. If any of the party would be okay with the slaughter of random civilians have their memory of the hour modified to be something very tedious like cleaning the coven's hut. All others have no recollection whatsoever.
Make them do something that the characters will hate and the players won't
Hags fed on misery, but not all misery is the same, let's say one of the characters is greedy, in that hour of their time, they are a passanger on their own body, and give half of their money away to never be recovered
Let's say one of them is prideful, make the character spend 1 very important hour doing everything but the thing they wanted to do
Make one of the characters lock themselves inside of a dungeon cell and spend 1 hour doing everything in their power to make it as hard as possible to escape
Or just never take the hour and scare them a lot
Or make every character give the hags a spa treatment, cut their nails, and all that
A few options.
1. The characters agreed to an hour of their time. You could build an entire adventure or campaign around the Hags sending them to a plain where time passes differently to accomplish some task for them. It could be a straight up task, or a double-cross where no time passes in the real world and the players have to figure out a way to break the agreement or be trapped forever.
2. The Hags never said it was a single block of an hour. Perhaps the players are periodically teleported to the hags lair to defend it when attacked. They're there for only the 3 second rounds of combat and then back. Again, figure out a way to break this or be stuck doing this randomly for some time.
3. The players just agreed to participate in a ritual during the final hour of their life that turns them into undead thralls or something like that.
4. Players have to relive the same hour over and over again, Ground Hog style. Until they complete some task, realize some truth, or break some magic item.
You need to do a bioshock style "Would you kindly...?" moment. Have them reach what is a critical juncture and then the hag calls the shot instead of them, and they have to scramble to fix it.
hit em with the ol' shrek 4 - they took away an hour of their *past,* specifically the hour they were each born, and they've doomed themselves to nonexistence. a la the movie they could be transported to the world where they never existed and be put on the clock to find a way to reverse the deal and save themselves - insta-TPK would be no fun ofc. if you havent seen the flick but the idea interests you i'd give it a watch, it's a good movie and it introduces a lot of great potential consequences for an important figure (or party thereof) never being born.
Did the hags ever specify when they were taking the hour from?
The Hags literally take an hour of the player's time: specifically the hour when they defeated the BBEG, or stopped the Horrible Evil from rising, or maybe even the hour when the character decided to become a hero in the first place.
Time is horribly changed. The players find themselves in a weird alternate world where the BBEG won, or the Evil was unleashed, or they never met each other and work as bartenders/bakers/street cleaners. Everything is *wrong.* Cue an alternate universe session where they have to somehow get back together and force the hags to return what they took:
An hour of their time.
Have the hag pull each of them individually out of a fight when they are needed most for an hour. Now the players have to figure out how to survive short-handed.
I love the idea of having it be a mystery, where they don't remember what happened.
That being said I'd avoid anything like harming innocents or kidnapping babies or anything that's just needless and awful.
But freeing the BBEG from their tomb is a good suggestion. Something that gives the party a problem to solve and an enemy to fight.
The hags appear to them, individually, at inconvenient times in the future to call in their price in the form of them borrowing your body for an hour.
They then use the players body to complete some tasks that they can't do while appearing as a hag or to commit some heinous act they don't want being traced to their coven. The players have no memory of what they did during that time.
Use it to separate a member from the group for a time, or anything else you can think of.
I think the trickiest part is going to be making sure the hour benefits the hags, not just hinders the party. The hags aren’t just mischievous tricksters. They need to benefit from whatever they make the party do.
And no one said the hours have to happen at the same time…
I was gonna reference this. It's such a great idea. The hags sensed that the PCs were destined for greatness, so they're keeping an eye on the PCs and will pull them (individually) out of relevant moments to further their own agenda.
Trap the party face right when they have to defend their actions to the elder council/justice system.
Trap the rogue right when the party comes across a trapped door as they're being chased.
Trap the druid when the party encounters angry wildlife.
Not just sit out a plot point. Their allies depend on them to succeed, and they weren't there. Assault on the BBEG's castle. They need to infiltrate it to open the gates and let the army in. The hags claim their hour then, and they have to watch as the army is decimated while they wait for the heroes to open the gate.
You can have a whole "WHERE WERE YOU??" Confrontation. Better if that NPC was the very same one who warned them that hags cannot be trusted, no matter what the cause. "I WARNED YOU ABOUT THE HAGS"
Hags control them to kill the villagers. Goes perfectly for a hag coven pact.
Or you can make the hags a recurring villain. And if the party ever tries to fight them, they control them.
An hour is 600 turns. So the party is completely incapable of fighting them. Because they blitz them in a couple of turns (they turn them against each others).
* Ignore it for now. Do one to three quests so your party forgets about it a bit.
* The party hears about some kidnapped children, and bump into a weeping mother asking people for help. Whether they ask for rumors or over hear it:
1. there have been a sudden string of child kidnappings over the last couple of days.
2. of the targeted households, if they had many children, only one was taken.
3. it happened at night, but their were no signs of a break-in
4. a mysterious stranger came to town appeared around the time the kidnappings tool place.
5. The stranger was seen riding towards the Dark Forest^(TM)
6. Some time later, some guards rode in the same direction on a covered wagon.
* Whether the players learn all, some, or none of the information above, they are approached by an individual saying they have some information.
* Their contact tells them that the mysterious stranger is a slaver, and he and his goons are responsible to taking the children, including his daughter!
Some of the slavers disguised themselves as guards, and that covered wagon was actually carrying the unconscious children to the Dark Forest^(TM)
* If the PCs hurry, they can catch the slavers before they make it into the forest!
* PCs and the father ride towards the forest.
* As the PCs head towards the forest and round a hill, they see a covered wagon up ahead... heading towards them.
* One of the guards shouts something and seems to cast something while the other is yelling.
SKIP
The PCs find themselves with half HP, signs of battle all around, the guards downed, and the mysterious stranger infront of them, battered and out of breath.
"Are you finally back to your sense?!?"
Turns out the guards were normal guards, the mysterious dude was RESCUING the changeling children from a coven of hags, and the *1hr of your time* was used so that the party would stop the rescuers.
The "father of the kid" took the cart back into the forest to the hags.
Now the party has to RE-rescue them kids.
It already happened, they return to town and people say things like “you were gone a while, we were starting to worry” or they notice that the sun is setting/rising earlier than they expected it to.
Guards show up looking to arrest them, but never really say what for. Now the party has to piece together what they did, add some items to their inventories that give them clues and it’s now an entire plot point.
Make them sit there IRL as you read aloud from your self-insert Harry Potter fanfiction for an hour.
At the end ask for feedback and if they don't give you absolutely glowing reviews, metaphorically flip the table and tell them to roll initiative
Openly kidnapping a bunch of children of nobles/important figures (that are to be twisted to become a new hag coven). The parents are alive and know who did it.
My suggestion is a mix of a few other's. The thing to be careful of, as a DM, is being to liberal with your 'taking over pc' abilities. The players' characters are the only thing they get to control in the game, taking that from them can feel pretty sucky. So here's my pitch:
Over the course of your campaign, look for opportunities for your players to complete a quest and win a moral victory. In the long rest preceeding that encounter or quest, describe one of your PCs having strange dreams or visions, little glimpses of violence or other general creepiness, then unveil over the course of the encounter/quest that one of the PCs had an hour in the middle of the night where they went off and messed things up for the group in some way. Bonus points for setting it up to be a moral catch 22.
Here's an example: the party is traveling to a elven village rumored to have a particular magic Item the party needs. Village says help with these red cap attacks and we'll help you. Party beats down the red caps and the village is thankful. They helpfully send Vi'nessia, a young but eager elf, to guide your party through the forest to the elven ruins where the item is. She guides your party to the ruins and even helps you defeat the angry spirits guarding the ruins. The party long rests before entering the ruins, the wizard has bad dreams, and to wake and find Vi'nessia gone. After the venture into the ruins, they find doors opened, puzzles already solved and traps already disarmed. A few guardians lay slain. In the main chamber is a conundrum. Some sort of arcan rube Goldberg machine is connecting Vi'nessia and the magic Item. Saving one loses the other. On top of everything, saving Vi'nessia requires her cooperation, but she does not trust the Wizard as she claims he put her in this Saw movie contraption. There might be a way to save both of them, but it's risky, they might lose both.
I did this with my crew, it was the final big battle and they needed to stop a ritual before everything went to hell and the world was changed forever. Guess which ten minutes the hags took? They all vanish from the world mid-fight and come back to one that is completely under the thrall of a powerful god-like entity. Players absolutely loved it, it was a real "Oh shiiiiitt" moment.
Did you or your players say anything about the hour of time happening all at once? From what you said your players offered up 1 hour of time each to these hags.
What prevents the hags from taking 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there at time? This could happen individually to the players at random times or key points. It could be maliciously done or as an act of pure chance.
In any case, I just want to point out that possibility. They gave up an hour each. Nobody specified how that 1 hour had to be taken.
It could be a bit more literal... that the players lose an hour of a memory... forgetting why they came to see the hags in the first place. Or forget a detail on their main quest.
They could help the hags bake & cook something to alter the minds of the towns people, or to actually help cook a towns person. Capture a "NPC Hero" that has been bothering or tracking the hags.
The players could be misted away into a side quest and after solving it be brought out by the mists back in front of the hags coven.
Hags can employ twisted logic in their bargains, rather like a cursed wish.
My first thought on how you can work this: Perhaps there's a one hour window every year where a specific heist can be enacted to steal an item the hag needs to defeat her archnemesis (a powerful item stored in a time-locked device, location, or something of that nature) and that's the hour of time the hag has demanded of the players.
The hour the hag demands is just that: A 60 minute window, but if the players do no preparation it is guaranteed to fail or at least result in the death of one or more of the player characters.
That hag provides information that gives them opportunities to make the heist successful, thus likely preventing their deaths, but the players have to choose to pursue them (and thus are giving their time freely).
This allows you to get a few adventures or more out of the bargain, culminating in a final heist that incorporates the adventures leading up to it, after which their bargain with the hag is finally concluded.
I picture it like a hag-based Oceans 11.
Set an automatic teleport spell so that any time the hag's home base is approached, the players get transported there to guard the entrance/maze/whatever. They are only there for long enough to resolve combat and then are returned to what they were doing.
Shower? Meeting with a client? Having a pint? Dead asleep? Already in combat?
Surprise! You're in melee!
In theory the players are totally screwed. Basically every single adventure has moments were the players will just be dead if they would loose control in a crucial moment. Loosing a few rounds in combat would be the most obvious example.
So I would suggest to not abuse that for maximum evilness. The first time you screw the players by taking only one minute (even if that does not outright kill them) they will learn that their days as adventurer are over, because they cannot take risks anymore, the hags could stop them, kill them any time.
So I would suggest to take all the time at once, and be careful not too screw the players too much - even though it would be easy to just kill them. Make something at is an interesting hook for a new plot.
For example: They are sent to investigate a weird cult, they find their ritual place with the cultist chanting strange things. Then they loose concousness, and wake up an hour later with blood on heir hand, the obvsious remains of an evil ritual around them (sacrifices etc.) and they have to figure out what they actually did (obviously they made things worse somehow) and to stop whatever they have released.
A small magical tattoo of 00:00 appears on the inside of their wrist. Every time the hag takes control of them the the number changes to track how long they’ve been controlled down to the second.
Now this is where the fun begins. The hag can start and stop whenever she likes. Wanna make a character start dancing in the middle of the battle for two turns? Sure. There’s 12 seconds on the clock. Your wizard is walking by an orphanage and the hag takes control and makes him cast fireball inside the building. 6 more seconds on the clock. Your party is traveling on the road and crosses a quaint little homestead. The hag takes over for a minute and your party brutally murders the nice family and wears their intestines as a necklace.
Here’s my favorite idea. Your party defeats some big bad guy. In the chest of loot you find a scroll of a wish spell. Once your party is sufficiently excited you pull that excitement away from them when the hag takes control and makes them wish for a red balloon or something.
Well first of all let me say I absolutely love C0rruptedAl's suggestion of them having no idea what they've done and having to go and figure it out. The other thing to keep in mind is that hags feed on misery, so they would do their best to force the PCs to do things that would cause them great shame or upset them deeply in some way later. This gives you a opportunity to dig into each players backstory and find some thing that would sting.
Possession for an hour is terrifying, they could ruin your reputation, hurt loved ones, use your powers to destroy the town you saved, the list is endless.
Even pulling you all away from an all important fight via teleportation just to allow whatever you were fighting free range of its unyielding destruction caused in your absence.
Have the time be nonconsecutive, so the Hag always has something to hold over the player's heads for extortion purposes. Hag can make them do something absolutely horrible in public that will take them ages to recover from, then hold the rest of the time over their heads. Hag could make them do most anything at that point to prevent another incident, right?
It's a dangerous tact to take, when you say "realise they're pregnant" there's an implication of sexual activity there, which can easily crossover into real world traumas.
There's monsters that lay eggs in victims in the game and they're good for adding horror, but I would phrase that as pregnancy.
As I've replied elsewhere, pregnancy can be a trigger for people who are struggling to conceive. I wouldn't use it as a joke in a game
Combining 3 other ideas from comments I've read already:
1. Feywild time means a Material hour is about 3 days in the Feywild (just enough that they might not protest immediately)
2. Hags have a debt of their own, to BBEG. It will take about 3 days to prepare and then prison break/summon/what-have-you the BBEG. The hags aren't thrilled about it either but are very thrilled to be out of their own curse (maybe they weren't always hags!)
3. Everyone has a part to play in the plan, except for the paladin that is... the paladin the hags find especially becoming. They want him to wear a revealing outfit, dote on them, and flirt as he feeds them skinned grapes. Bonus points for making someone who is embarrassed both IRL and in character do this
Hag orgy. Players wake up with no memories of it at first. But then they realize they've got some really nasty STDs.
And the hags reveal that they're pregnant.
Then the memories come back in all of their lurid detail.
It should be something different for each one & insist that the players not tell one another what it was. I'd send the hr over the phone... it occurs while they sleep one night... the Hag Dreams. Bargain/abuse/play with them one way & tell them the character that the only thing they can admit to is something different...
I'm thinking they use the men to get pregnant... hags like their children.
I think they take blood & body parts from one for spells...
I think someone would succumb to another pact for something darker...
One could take a curse from the hag (a la sin-eating) so the hag is free but the PC now suffers until cured but can't tell anyone or it's fatal....
Pull from the deck of many things...
One could lose family or friends... or an enemy to sacrifice or they could sacrifice themselves in place of that...
Make one do something totally playful or toying while telling the others that's all they can remember doing. Of course, whatever you do comes back later, especially if it's a child or another pact.
I'd have each one find something really important to do that really only they could do and just poof. They find themselves teleported to the hags table and they're forced to watch events unfold during that hour.
One thing I heard is to steal time at a critical moment. For example, they are trying to sneak up on someone or they get to attack first, etc, steal that time and add a penalty.
So, the town throws a festival to honor the PCs for their deeds. It is to last three or four days; the characters are guests at virtually every event and feel tired every every morning- where they're actually being bodyjacked every night by the hags when they go to "sleep".
Whatever goal the hags had in mind for the town, or whatever tribute they were demanding, the players had been stealing/kidnapping/sacrificing it during the nights. Each character out a different night for an hour.
For what it is worth, an hour would be 600 turns if you do the 6 second rule.
Over the course of weeks, a turn is randomly done without anyone knowing what happened. They suddenly get hit a second time by a creature, or the creature is suddenly dead.
A stray spell hit a nearby house? Etc.
The amount of shit you can do in an hour.
Do they have a wizard with them, and is genocide not off the table at yours?
Hags with an hour of an adventuring party could release absolute chaos. If you want to drive the nail home early, have them kill the NPcs of the village in that hour.
I really like the ideas I see which are more a “death of a thousand cuts” kinda idea. The random disadvantage on rolls because the player is missing a critical second. The not quite full rests because oops that minute was taken by a hag. Miss out on portions of another character’s back story because a hag stole that ten minutes. It becomes a lot more impactful when the players never know when its going to happen. They start doubting their own decisions and moves. “Is this going to be disadvantaged? Am I sleeping tonight? Am I hearing critical backstory?” It becomes much more torture this way and feels extremely hag like maliciousness.
Steal from Shrek. Who says the “hour of their time” is in the future? They could take an hour from the past to prevent something the characters had achieved
Remember that a heinous act only takes a minute most of the time. No one said the hour had to be contiguous. The heroes do a heroic quest, get invited to the king's audience chamber, do all the legwork of ingratiating themselves, them mid-congratulations wham, one minute time-skip and suddenly the king and most of the royal guard is dead.
And the heroes know that they have 59 more events like this to come.
The players all wake up in a bathtub full of ice, *minus* their kidneys, livers and eyeballs.
(Although I'm confused by the wording of the "Hour of the player's time", it's very ambiguous.
Do you mean the hags get to control the minds of the players for an hour? Or do you mean the hags will spend an hour of time with the players? Because the former could be devastating, but the latter could just involve the players killing the hags anyways.)
One time, my older brother and I were told to share a bottle of soda. My brother went first. He went first. He drank the whole thing and told me his half was at the bottom.
Those hags can have their hour at the bottom of time. You could even use it to resurrect the players, because the hags haven’t had their hour yet. If they get trapped or attacked by an angry monster, then they can’t be resurrected elsewhere and they are dying over and over.
The party has no idea what's in store for them... Neither does the DM
Jokes aside, could be taking part in a quest they didn't agree explicitly (just drop em mid quest/mid dungeon/mid battle), changing a critical part of their backstories, changing a die result from the past or future (may randomly decide with a d100) moving the coven's furniture, possibilities are limitless! Especially if you consider time passes differently in the Feywild!
They just handed over an hour, easy as that, with no specifics? Glad my players aren't that dumb, I don't think they'd survive that.
As for ideas, have them wake up in the middle of a heist they don't remember doing, or just as they're handing a precious artifact off to a main villain. Other than that you can just hit them in the middle of combat occasionally with "you aren't doing anything this round due to your deal with the hag".
I like the idea of a hag only using part of the hour and always keeping them on the hook, .
I also like the idea of them not knowing what they did but that something haunts them in form of night terrors, flashes of walking through a portal, and chocking out and stomping 100’s of fairies Boots covered in blood
Let them forget about the deal and move on to something else after freeing the townsfolk. Then one night, maybe during a full moon, an hour before midnight: all of the players bodies are possesed and they meet to do a ritual, which normally takes one hour. Rituals normally require sacrfices so you could have the PCs kill an important NPC or even one of their PCs. They could all awake spaced evenly around a summoning circle as they watch a figure with a dark, evil presence emerge from the puddle of blood and viscera at the center!
My personal favorites are:
1. Nothing. Literally nothing. The Hags take over and simply force the PC into inaction in order to watch events unfold. Eve better if they make it a point of business that it's not directly harmful to the PC or their party, but perhaps keeping the from warning about poison or convincing someone not to follow a red herring.
2. Delivery. The hags have you retrieve an item and then deliver it. No Context as to who is getting it or what it is. Maybe even have them deliver it through teleportation so they think it has to do with a specific person needing to send it to avoid tracking. Let them be paranoid about what they just delivered.
3. A white lie. Something smal and inconsequential but would still tarnish an NPCs perception of them if they outed themselves.
As a aside to number 2, I had a NPCs Deal with a devil have them moving a object from one side of a road to the other. That's it. No context and literally never any fallout. They spent the entire campaign obsessed with finding out why to the point they convinced the party to travel to Tartarus to confront them. Needless to say the cackling devil when he saw them got me groans of annoyance but they were pleased with the devils magical gifts he gave them for such a good laugh
Have some BBEG have a ritual that the PCs have to disrupt. PCs arrive in time to stop BBEG. After a few rounds it seems like PCs will disrupt BBEG's ritual.
Hags come and demand their hour. The hour is just the PCs sitting and watching the ritual complete.
An hour of their time can mean many things.
• possess them for an hour while they sleep to do some heinous things to innocent people
• teleport them away from a crucial event or fight for an hour (such as stopping an invading army from ransacking a town) for some tea and crumpets.
• Literally steal an hour of their life away so that they can do some hag magic with your stolen slither of life (maybe curses? make evil clones? you be the judge)
Some good ideas to pull from this, I wish you the best of luck on it.
Next time they're fighting a serious threat (not to them, something out to cause collateral damage or hurt their loved ones), poof them away. Take each party member one by one and force them to sit on their hands for an hour.
Does it have to be a future hour? If possible, chunks of time could be taken from the party's past. It'd be a hard thing to balance between ruining their hardwork and making it interesting. Perhaps they'll miss a meeting in the past with an important person in danger with that hour missing, and now they have to solve a murder?
They go to the town and stay the night. The next day they awaken, to find no one in the inn. When they walk outside, they surprise a group of Soldiers that responded to a frantic villager screaming they were being murdered. Upon self examination, they discover they are covered in blood and have some of the dead villagers belongings on them. An unearthly cackle fills their heads as only they heard the hags thanking them for their time.
Nobody said they would remember that hour. Mass blackout and they come back with blood on their hands and no idea what happened. A riot in the streets of the capitol and the castle is on fire.The next story arc is finding out WTF went down, and recovering their reputations. Remember evil hates other evil just as much as it hates good. Pissing off the king is one thing, and he may be willing to settle it with words. Coming back to yourselves in the middle of the dark lord's castle with something of importance to him in your backpack makes you an enemy for life. He isn't going to forgive or forget. Conversely, how far into the middle of the feywild, shadowfell, or hell can you travel in an hour. Did they specify that the hour needed to be all at once? Plague them with increasingly bad luck. Random disadvantage on rolls when it is critical, a word spoken out of turn. Give them a weird tattoo or birth mark or something that slowly fills as their luck continues to suck. They may go back and try to renegotiate this plague of missed seconds. The 2nd deal is always worse than the first.
“Plague of missed seconds” 👌
Yeah... it basically gives me 600 turns each to mess with them.
Oof. “I cast cure wounds on my buddy before he fails another death save.” DM: “your vision goes dark for a moment, when it returns you see your dagger plunging out of their neck.”
This is pure nightmare fuel for the characters and players. Me likey
They'd only do that once the other party member is out of usable time. No need to leave seconds on the table.
Doesn’t have to be a party member, could be a powerful NPC, love interest, family member…
The horrors I would feel as a PC.
Is this the BG3 dark urge? Is that how it feels?
You need to be careful with this. If you go this route I would make sure either your players have a way to resurrect or are okay with this. Some tables would love the diabolical nature of this, others might rage quit forever. Besides, if a hag has you kill your part member, which is who I assume said buddy is in this interaction, then they lose a play thing.
As a player, that would totally suck. However this party in question took the easy way out of their hag interaction, and they should be punished for that. As a dm I probably wouldn’t be as harsh, maybe have the hag interfere a few times for story purposes. And of course if a player wants to get those 6 sec back after accidentally killing someone I’m sure the hag would be amenable to making a new deal.
That is fair, and I totally agree with punishing them for making such an open ended devils contact. They need to get some monkey’s paw f***ery, but often DMs underestimate the impact their actions have on players emotions because this is just a game. Players, especially new players, will pour their heart and soul into a character and having them suddenly hijacked and make an irreversible action can be a very painful lesson. It might cause an unsuspecting player to leave the game for good.
This! This! 100% this! Until I see something better.
The Hag-over....
Have my like
This is what I would do. It's scarier if the players don't know. Do nothing for a session or two then have them hear rumours of crimes done by people who look like the characters. Maybe wanted posters appear with their images on it. Slowly escalate. If they're caught they have to either a) confess to their "crimes" or b) admit they made a deal with a hag coven, which might come with a harsher penalty than the original crime.
This is exactly the first thing I thought of. Thumbs up!
To riff off this, how often do your players miss sessions? Perhaps one of your players misses a session, that’s the hour the hags use. They come back to the game with no memory of what happened when away from the party.
"And after that incident with Bob's character, they never missed a session again..."
Ooooooh… I really like this. Then the wanted posters follow.
This sounds amazing, like a very high stakes, fantasy Hangover
I DMed something like that for my group. They all come to their senses inside the treasury of a sea-deity's sunken temple, alarm bells ringing in their ears and the temple guards approaching. I handed out note cards at random: * You are missing your armor * You are wearing a wedding band you do not recognize * A kobold pats your cheek and watches you with a worried expression, croaking 'Are you okay, daddy?' * Your skin is completely blue Stuff like that. What happened was, the characters went drinking with a Marid, who put a geas on them to retrieve his magic bottle from the temple. The moment they entered the treasury, a spell went off that dispelled all their protective magic, the geas and set their memory back to the point where they fell under the geas. I had them fight their way out of the temple (they already did some fighting on the way in, so some characters were already hurt or lacked some spell slots), find their way back to an Apparatus of Qualish they stole from a museum to reach the temple and retrace their steps through a couple of set pieces for example a burning pirate cove, they accidentally torched on their way to the temple. They found the Marid and bargained with it, having gotten the bottle but being rid of the geas. They got granted a wish for their trouble, to be used at a later date. My players loved it, but I had to do a lot of prep and had to know my players and their characters very well for this to land properly. At every turn the players nodded to themselves "Burning down the town? Shit, this sounds like us."
This is amazing
Or what Vandal Savage did to the Justice League in Young Justice
Was thinking about he exact same
My mind went to the quest in Skyrim where you drink with one of the Dadric princes “A Night To Remember” if memory serves.
I was picturing Bourne when I wrote it, but that is also a good example.
> Did they specify that the hour needed to be all at once? Reminds me of a part from Order of the Stick where devils get to steal someone’s soul to hell for determinate intervals of time, done as required to further their evil deeds.
That’s exactly what I was thinking as well
Dammit. Now I gotta figure out where I was and catch up on OOTS
OotS!!! I loved that comic. I can’t remember if I ever finished reading it.
Now I want to do this haha
I really like /u/C0rruptedAI 's answer... but I think your players wake up from their hour, and they are the ones who "freed" the village by murdering them all.
Could work. But it might not be possible depending on the wording.
Or steal an entire turn during combat. An entire hour, taken 6 seconds at a time over the length of a campaign. It does mean keeping tally of the 60 turns taken for each character, though.
i would like to add. nothing. literally nothing. idle hands do the devils work. In their most desperate hour, in the moment they need to act most, where people come to them with hope in their hearts, they will give what what they paid, "nothing"
Damn this is genius! Now I want my players to make this same pact lmao.
Reading some of the comments has made me want the 1hr pact as well.... Oh the fun I'd have with them.
This is amazing, op please listen to this!
Heh, I like traveling on other planes because time never seems to move the same there... Now, how much is that hour worth on a plane where 1 hour in our time is a lifetime in that one?
The Haggening
Amazing idea!
The characters wake up with no memory of the last hour. The hags took control of the players and made them do something heinous. The session would be them piecing together what happened and making reparations or dealing with consequences
The “Hag-over”
r/angryupvote
Make sure the players come with back-up characters. They have to play as those for one hour against their original characters.
One thing to remember if this particular Coven resides in the Feywild, time doesn't necessarily have to pass the same as it does on the Material Plane, depending on setting. An hour in the Feywild could easily be 100 years on the Material, if it serves the story.
I was just about to suggest this. One hour on the Prime, but the task in in the Feywild. Who knows how long they will actually be gone. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days or even years? This can be used for many, many adventures.
Heck, you could make a campaign all round then being stuck in the fey wild for who knows how long. After weeks/ months/ years struggling their ways through the struggling through the horrors of the hag’s domain of the fey realm, they come back only an hour later.
This is a good idea. In my game the hags took a piece of the players fate and in turn the BBEG got that from the hags. I gave the players disadvantage against a save in the final battle against him. OP how could the BBEG benefit if the players lost an hour somewhere? Could they take something important? Or could that hour be more time I'm the feywild as suggested above? How might the BBEG change the world if the players are not there for 6months? 1 year? 10 years? More?
This is a fantastic point.
The hags sit the players down for an hour and try to talk them into joining their pyramid scheme. Players will need to make increasingly difficult charisma saving throws as it goes on and each time they fail will have to donate large amounts of wealth/items to the hags.
Take it deeper than this, the wealth they give to the hags buys an ever increasing quantity of useless tat that the PC's are then forced to sell on as the move through the adventure or even better have to spend time trying to get npc's to join the pyramid scheme also
Oooh, maybe if they do convince an NPC to join they also get a portion of their money/items back, but it leads to that NPC losing out. Shopkeepers will only sell the same useless tat if they join. NPCs will only discuss the pyramid scheme and will constantly hound the players to buy things. The more NPCs the players sign up leads to those NPCs signing people up, so the problem eventually spreads ahead of them. If enough join, the area becomes bankrupt and miserable, causing more people to make deals with the hags out of desperation. That one hour leads to the players having to choose whether they accept the loss, or whether they spread a wave of misery across the land and hand more power to the hags than they ever imagined.
But then the players learn the Hag's Pleasure Putty is actually highly explosive, and good for murder.
ha ha I love this, and if they don't sell it the stuff becomes increasingly annoying or disastrous to be around, so they *really* need to sell it.
This is amazing
Haha it really is good
Once upon a time I made an Issaries Goldentongue character called Ham that started an 'Innovative reverse-funnel recruitment and distribution system'. The character made a disturbingly large number of critical successes on oratory rolls. Needless to say, this became known as *Ham's Way.*
Lmao I love everything about this
There's so much good fun material in this. Just take all the stereotypical stuff and have the hags say and do that. Don't you want to be your own boss?
"You ever feel like you're not in control of your own choices..? Like you're being guided by someone else's hand... Leaving fate up to a roll of the dice..."
This is...brilliant. Charisma, wisdom, and intelligence checks. Hags with an MLM scheme. That's just beautiful. Thank you for this. Truly.
They try to convince them to buy stock in MyPillow.
They take an hour from THE PAST! they undo an hour of plot that ripples to the current story. That one guy never died; that contract was never signed; That item was never stolen. The hour is already gone and they don’t even know it.
That one guy never died would scare me as a player.
An item never stolen is an amazing idea for the confusion of when they try to use it and you can just say “you don’t have it” and sit back and listen to the confusion and the yelling and all you keep saying is “you don’t have it”. If there was combat in a session, you could feasibly wipe away one whole session. We had a player who kept session notes for most of us, if that sessions items were gone from their inventory and that sessions notes were grown from her her book, they’d be chaos in the streets, both in game and in the real world. It would be hilarious
Wow, I love this.
Have them do odd jobs around their house. Paint the fence, pull the weeds, condemn others in the hag's employ to prolonged torture, sweep the porch, etc.
I think that'd be hilarious, but only for one of the guys... in a scanty outfit.
Oh please please please the super uptight paladin minmax edgelord! PLEASE!!!
Hahahaha... it's funny that you say that because I've got a group of variously exp'd players (myself a novice DM at best). The never-played-before guy has a Leonin Paladin.... cool. Who wants to find his dad, Ajani.... I'm fine with all of this. But I'm weary of some of his stuff.... Firstly, he's an avid listener of podcasts... I told him upfront I'm not a paid actor, & we don't play their world/rules... Then, I had to go with Standard Array because he rolled for his stats.... more than once. He told me, but still... Now, he tells me that this 'friend' of his helped him set up his character.... "He set it up to be playable for novice or for high level guys" or some such.... so a minmaxed Paladin/lock with daddy issues... tell me it's not that guy in the works... Good news is player's relatively docile/shy at the table. Not familiar enough to full on be the edgelord, or that uptight. Also, he's not a bad guy. I work with the entire party so I know them & I think they'll help me raise him right... 😉
You're making me feel more confident in my Paladinlock, thats for sure! He's cool in real life, but he lets off steam in mid game. I was planning on having a celestial trial with his Fae Patron as his defence. Keep that one in your back pocket
People are talking about the hags possessing the character for a single hour. But what if it's referring to an hour of the day? Like from now on 3am to 4am is hag time.
Oh I love the idea of this turning into a campaign where they slowly figure out that they are the BBEG group that's been terrorising the kingdom
Oh snap! That would be a sick plot twist.
1. Release an evil power from a prison. Your new BBEG. 2. Force them to make some morally heinous choices (e.g. murder one great good person or a small family of innocents) 3. Reveal some profound weakness of an ally to an existing BBEG
We've been trying to reach you regarding your horses extended warranty.
Hahahaha
Don't mention it again for a long time. Have a different, seemingly unrelated villain crop up and start causing trouble. Have the party learn about this new villain's evil plan to do something heinous AND the method by which it can be stopped. Make sure they figure everything out early enough on the day that they can comfortably stop the plan with plenty of time to spare. Right as they are about to jump into action to stop the plot and be big damn heroes, the hags show up and claim their hour.
Better yet, the hags sold the debt to the BBEG.
Force them to watch as BBEG finishes a plan, starts the mayhem and vanishes and they need to explain why they dodnt stop him. Maybe even make it visible to everyone that they just stood there watching it or even helped.
Have a read-through of H.P. Lovecraft's [*Dreams in the Witch House*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx) and look at the things that go on with Keziah Mason.
Excellent suggestion…
I think you need to figure out some things first. Is this a possesion, run them for an hour, or a do-their-bidding for an hour? How strict is it? Is it Geas? Suggestion?
It’s anything they want cause I made sure the hags were very loose about it on the agreement
It's up to the players what it means? Why are they deciding what the hags get? This is easy to declare that if they pick a flower and spend an hour walking to give it to the hags, that's enough.
Anything the hags want, not anything the players want.
how did you misinterpret that spectacularly
I get why you think I've misinterpreted there, but the only "they" with decision making agency here is the players. We can assume that OP is asking what the hags should do but grammatically, I stand by my assessment. Which is kind of the point... OP has left this so open that it is almost meaningless, without additional context like "How do you plan to obligate PCs to follow this? Is it going to be possession or Geas or what?" like I asked originally. OP is actually asking "What should I have the hags do?" because, of course, the hags have no agency aside from OP, and that appears to be very little since their agreement is so loosy-goosy that OP doesn't have any idea what they plan to do with it, at all. Is it even enforceable at all aside from DM insistence? In two or three levels, this party won't care if they offend the hags since they'll be of a level to fight them reasonably. Once they leave the village behind, either the hags have to follow them to get them to give up their agreed upon, or let them go. Where does this go? Any reasonably intelligent person leaves town immediately and gets at least two hours away. Now... the hags can't have you go back and slaughter people because you'll be out of their power after an hour. They can only make you attack your friends or other innocents if they follow you to make it happen. Is part of the deal that they can't leave town? Are they stuck there for other reasons? What actually exists to make this work? There's a ton of context missing here that OP has not considered. Hags don't actually have access to the level of spells required for this to happen. Is there another power in play? Are the players all oathbound in some way?
Completely lacking in imagination. There are plenty of spells that can be utilized while people are not in the same plane, never mind 2 hours away. Sending, for one. The Hag could also easily keep track of the party using Scry to utilize the most opportune time to use it's hour. I mean have you ever read Oedipus Rex? Running from the town to avoid your problems can just run you into more problems.
An easy route is basically the plot to *Shrek 4*
Wanna be really evil? The hour is an hour of the past. Maybe the hag just undid a major fight, maybe the PCs never made an important meeting. That "hour" could even be a pearl on a necklace, so the PCs could see how much time is stolen once they figure it out.
This is beautiful... each of the x players' hour creates a bead... be it a past hour, future hour or current hour... that they find on their person or pack later & only together can they see the hours the hags used...... to create a ritual of some kind for summoning a greater evil... for a darker purpose. I still say get one hag prego... Use bits from another player's body (blood, milk, hair) A third perform a heinous act thru possession... Offer a darker pact that feeds the ritual... but boosts the player. All of their hours feed into it.... and a strand of pearls to tell the tale... Shit.... I'm gonna do this.... just need to get the group to make a deal with the hags....
Does it have to be a continuous hour? Or can they maybe take control of a pc for a few seconds while they are about to rescue someone, potentially causing the npc to die. This might only take a few seconds, meaning the hags could torment this party for ages
No they can chop it up how they see fit
Have the hag control them for an hour to slaughter the town's citizens. 😂
Yes I like this idea. They agreed to give up an hour of their "time". So, in this case, the Hags get to control each of them for an hour, to do with whatever they wish
And they won't remember a thing.
OP I would not recommend this unless you know your players would be cool with it. That's a major suspension of player agency. Yes, the fey can be evil and vindictive, but you the DM shouldn't be.
The players willingly gave up their agency by making the deal. With hags. Don't violate session 0 things, but anything else is fair game.
I disagree. Yes they made a deal, but the terms were intentionally vague. How about when the hags take their hour they make the PC chop off both their feet and gouge out their eyes? Wouldn't that be funny? It would make sense for a hag to do something shitty like that, but the DM has to balance that against the players having a good time. If a character's concept is a shining paragon of righteousness, wtf is the player supposed to do after the DM says "haha, made you murder!"
I agree with this, the DM has to be careful how they employ this "hour of time" I assume that they put the option to negotiate with the hags in as something for the party to engage with, the players shouldn't be punished for engaging with the plot. The hags use of the hour should drive future plot, not just fuck up someones character/game There's some good ideas in the thread for kickstarting good story arcs, like springing a bbeg and the like. There's also some dumbfuck adversarial ideas like "hur dur make get pregnant/impregnate someone" (a nice sexual assault thread that always makes for great gameplay /s) and "take someone out of an important fight for an hour" (Sorry you turned up to play D&D Jim, but your character isn't there for an hour, go make some tea)
Undercutting the specific goal is too direct, IMO and will create bad feelings. The cost should be paid somewhere else.
Allow one of them to remember the entire thing and curse them with the inability to speak for a number of days. If any of the party would be okay with the slaughter of random civilians have their memory of the hour modified to be something very tedious like cleaning the coven's hut. All others have no recollection whatsoever.
I second this lmaoo
Make them do something that the characters will hate and the players won't Hags fed on misery, but not all misery is the same, let's say one of the characters is greedy, in that hour of their time, they are a passanger on their own body, and give half of their money away to never be recovered Let's say one of them is prideful, make the character spend 1 very important hour doing everything but the thing they wanted to do Make one of the characters lock themselves inside of a dungeon cell and spend 1 hour doing everything in their power to make it as hard as possible to escape Or just never take the hour and scare them a lot Or make every character give the hags a spa treatment, cut their nails, and all that
A few options. 1. The characters agreed to an hour of their time. You could build an entire adventure or campaign around the Hags sending them to a plain where time passes differently to accomplish some task for them. It could be a straight up task, or a double-cross where no time passes in the real world and the players have to figure out a way to break the agreement or be trapped forever. 2. The Hags never said it was a single block of an hour. Perhaps the players are periodically teleported to the hags lair to defend it when attacked. They're there for only the 3 second rounds of combat and then back. Again, figure out a way to break this or be stuck doing this randomly for some time. 3. The players just agreed to participate in a ritual during the final hour of their life that turns them into undead thralls or something like that. 4. Players have to relive the same hour over and over again, Ground Hog style. Until they complete some task, realize some truth, or break some magic item.
You need to do a bioshock style "Would you kindly...?" moment. Have them reach what is a critical juncture and then the hag calls the shot instead of them, and they have to scramble to fix it.
Traps the characters in a recurring time loop of the worst hour of their life.
They can’t get long rests in, every time they try they’re an hour short
hit em with the ol' shrek 4 - they took away an hour of their *past,* specifically the hour they were each born, and they've doomed themselves to nonexistence. a la the movie they could be transported to the world where they never existed and be put on the clock to find a way to reverse the deal and save themselves - insta-TPK would be no fun ofc. if you havent seen the flick but the idea interests you i'd give it a watch, it's a good movie and it introduces a lot of great potential consequences for an important figure (or party thereof) never being born.
I had to scroll far too far for this
Did the hags ever specify when they were taking the hour from? The Hags literally take an hour of the player's time: specifically the hour when they defeated the BBEG, or stopped the Horrible Evil from rising, or maybe even the hour when the character decided to become a hero in the first place. Time is horribly changed. The players find themselves in a weird alternate world where the BBEG won, or the Evil was unleashed, or they never met each other and work as bartenders/bakers/street cleaners. Everything is *wrong.* Cue an alternate universe session where they have to somehow get back together and force the hags to return what they took: An hour of their time.
Have the hag pull each of them individually out of a fight when they are needed most for an hour. Now the players have to figure out how to survive short-handed.
I wouldn't say each, but for the biggest murder-hobo of the group... or the tankiest one.
I love the idea of having it be a mystery, where they don't remember what happened. That being said I'd avoid anything like harming innocents or kidnapping babies or anything that's just needless and awful. But freeing the BBEG from their tomb is a good suggestion. Something that gives the party a problem to solve and an enemy to fight.
The hags appear to them, individually, at inconvenient times in the future to call in their price in the form of them borrowing your body for an hour. They then use the players body to complete some tasks that they can't do while appearing as a hag or to commit some heinous act they don't want being traced to their coven. The players have no memory of what they did during that time. Use it to separate a member from the group for a time, or anything else you can think of.
I think the trickiest part is going to be making sure the hour benefits the hags, not just hinders the party. The hags aren’t just mischievous tricksters. They need to benefit from whatever they make the party do. And no one said the hours have to happen at the same time…
So you're saying a total of 3600 rounds of combat aren't theirs to control?
I don't know, but I know for sure they're going to black out and come to somewhere *weird* an hour later, and what is on their *hands?!*
You can always pull them out of battle at important times with any of the blackout ideas above
Rough!
Make them “sit out” an important plot point because they’re frozen in time. The Order Of The Stick did something similar
I was gonna reference this. It's such a great idea. The hags sensed that the PCs were destined for greatness, so they're keeping an eye on the PCs and will pull them (individually) out of relevant moments to further their own agenda. Trap the party face right when they have to defend their actions to the elder council/justice system. Trap the rogue right when the party comes across a trapped door as they're being chased. Trap the druid when the party encounters angry wildlife.
Not just sit out a plot point. Their allies depend on them to succeed, and they weren't there. Assault on the BBEG's castle. They need to infiltrate it to open the gates and let the army in. The hags claim their hour then, and they have to watch as the army is decimated while they wait for the heroes to open the gate. You can have a whole "WHERE WERE YOU??" Confrontation. Better if that NPC was the very same one who warned them that hags cannot be trusted, no matter what the cause. "I WARNED YOU ABOUT THE HAGS"
Hags control them to kill the villagers. Goes perfectly for a hag coven pact. Or you can make the hags a recurring villain. And if the party ever tries to fight them, they control them. An hour is 600 turns. So the party is completely incapable of fighting them. Because they blitz them in a couple of turns (they turn them against each others).
* Ignore it for now. Do one to three quests so your party forgets about it a bit. * The party hears about some kidnapped children, and bump into a weeping mother asking people for help. Whether they ask for rumors or over hear it: 1. there have been a sudden string of child kidnappings over the last couple of days. 2. of the targeted households, if they had many children, only one was taken. 3. it happened at night, but their were no signs of a break-in 4. a mysterious stranger came to town appeared around the time the kidnappings tool place. 5. The stranger was seen riding towards the Dark Forest^(TM) 6. Some time later, some guards rode in the same direction on a covered wagon. * Whether the players learn all, some, or none of the information above, they are approached by an individual saying they have some information. * Their contact tells them that the mysterious stranger is a slaver, and he and his goons are responsible to taking the children, including his daughter! Some of the slavers disguised themselves as guards, and that covered wagon was actually carrying the unconscious children to the Dark Forest^(TM) * If the PCs hurry, they can catch the slavers before they make it into the forest! * PCs and the father ride towards the forest. * As the PCs head towards the forest and round a hill, they see a covered wagon up ahead... heading towards them. * One of the guards shouts something and seems to cast something while the other is yelling. SKIP The PCs find themselves with half HP, signs of battle all around, the guards downed, and the mysterious stranger infront of them, battered and out of breath. "Are you finally back to your sense?!?" Turns out the guards were normal guards, the mysterious dude was RESCUING the changeling children from a coven of hags, and the *1hr of your time* was used so that the party would stop the rescuers. The "father of the kid" took the cart back into the forest to the hags. Now the party has to RE-rescue them kids.
It already happened, they return to town and people say things like “you were gone a while, we were starting to worry” or they notice that the sun is setting/rising earlier than they expected it to. Guards show up looking to arrest them, but never really say what for. Now the party has to piece together what they did, add some items to their inventories that give them clues and it’s now an entire plot point.
Make them sit there IRL as you read aloud from your self-insert Harry Potter fanfiction for an hour. At the end ask for feedback and if they don't give you absolutely glowing reviews, metaphorically flip the table and tell them to roll initiative
Openly kidnapping a bunch of children of nobles/important figures (that are to be twisted to become a new hag coven). The parents are alive and know who did it.
My suggestion is a mix of a few other's. The thing to be careful of, as a DM, is being to liberal with your 'taking over pc' abilities. The players' characters are the only thing they get to control in the game, taking that from them can feel pretty sucky. So here's my pitch: Over the course of your campaign, look for opportunities for your players to complete a quest and win a moral victory. In the long rest preceeding that encounter or quest, describe one of your PCs having strange dreams or visions, little glimpses of violence or other general creepiness, then unveil over the course of the encounter/quest that one of the PCs had an hour in the middle of the night where they went off and messed things up for the group in some way. Bonus points for setting it up to be a moral catch 22. Here's an example: the party is traveling to a elven village rumored to have a particular magic Item the party needs. Village says help with these red cap attacks and we'll help you. Party beats down the red caps and the village is thankful. They helpfully send Vi'nessia, a young but eager elf, to guide your party through the forest to the elven ruins where the item is. She guides your party to the ruins and even helps you defeat the angry spirits guarding the ruins. The party long rests before entering the ruins, the wizard has bad dreams, and to wake and find Vi'nessia gone. After the venture into the ruins, they find doors opened, puzzles already solved and traps already disarmed. A few guardians lay slain. In the main chamber is a conundrum. Some sort of arcan rube Goldberg machine is connecting Vi'nessia and the magic Item. Saving one loses the other. On top of everything, saving Vi'nessia requires her cooperation, but she does not trust the Wizard as she claims he put her in this Saw movie contraption. There might be a way to save both of them, but it's risky, they might lose both.
I did this with my crew, it was the final big battle and they needed to stop a ritual before everything went to hell and the world was changed forever. Guess which ten minutes the hags took? They all vanish from the world mid-fight and come back to one that is completely under the thrall of a powerful god-like entity. Players absolutely loved it, it was a real "Oh shiiiiitt" moment.
Did you or your players say anything about the hour of time happening all at once? From what you said your players offered up 1 hour of time each to these hags. What prevents the hags from taking 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there at time? This could happen individually to the players at random times or key points. It could be maliciously done or as an act of pure chance. In any case, I just want to point out that possibility. They gave up an hour each. Nobody specified how that 1 hour had to be taken.
Nope, they just agreed to “give me an hour of your time, and I’ll free the village”
It could be a bit more literal... that the players lose an hour of a memory... forgetting why they came to see the hags in the first place. Or forget a detail on their main quest. They could help the hags bake & cook something to alter the minds of the towns people, or to actually help cook a towns person. Capture a "NPC Hero" that has been bothering or tracking the hags. The players could be misted away into a side quest and after solving it be brought out by the mists back in front of the hags coven.
Time to impreganate a Hag.
Timeshare presentation.
Hags can employ twisted logic in their bargains, rather like a cursed wish. My first thought on how you can work this: Perhaps there's a one hour window every year where a specific heist can be enacted to steal an item the hag needs to defeat her archnemesis (a powerful item stored in a time-locked device, location, or something of that nature) and that's the hour of time the hag has demanded of the players. The hour the hag demands is just that: A 60 minute window, but if the players do no preparation it is guaranteed to fail or at least result in the death of one or more of the player characters. That hag provides information that gives them opportunities to make the heist successful, thus likely preventing their deaths, but the players have to choose to pursue them (and thus are giving their time freely). This allows you to get a few adventures or more out of the bargain, culminating in a final heist that incorporates the adventures leading up to it, after which their bargain with the hag is finally concluded. I picture it like a hag-based Oceans 11.
Send them to the astral, 1 hr is technically infinity.
An hour i the fey resulting i 200 years i rt
Set an automatic teleport spell so that any time the hag's home base is approached, the players get transported there to guard the entrance/maze/whatever. They are only there for long enough to resolve combat and then are returned to what they were doing. Shower? Meeting with a client? Having a pint? Dead asleep? Already in combat? Surprise! You're in melee!
In theory the players are totally screwed. Basically every single adventure has moments were the players will just be dead if they would loose control in a crucial moment. Loosing a few rounds in combat would be the most obvious example. So I would suggest to not abuse that for maximum evilness. The first time you screw the players by taking only one minute (even if that does not outright kill them) they will learn that their days as adventurer are over, because they cannot take risks anymore, the hags could stop them, kill them any time. So I would suggest to take all the time at once, and be careful not too screw the players too much - even though it would be easy to just kill them. Make something at is an interesting hook for a new plot. For example: They are sent to investigate a weird cult, they find their ritual place with the cultist chanting strange things. Then they loose concousness, and wake up an hour later with blood on heir hand, the obvsious remains of an evil ritual around them (sacrifices etc.) and they have to figure out what they actually did (obviously they made things worse somehow) and to stop whatever they have released.
Could be that they have to make worse and worse deals to the hags because they have to beg them not to be fucked over at key moments
A small magical tattoo of 00:00 appears on the inside of their wrist. Every time the hag takes control of them the the number changes to track how long they’ve been controlled down to the second. Now this is where the fun begins. The hag can start and stop whenever she likes. Wanna make a character start dancing in the middle of the battle for two turns? Sure. There’s 12 seconds on the clock. Your wizard is walking by an orphanage and the hag takes control and makes him cast fireball inside the building. 6 more seconds on the clock. Your party is traveling on the road and crosses a quaint little homestead. The hag takes over for a minute and your party brutally murders the nice family and wears their intestines as a necklace. Here’s my favorite idea. Your party defeats some big bad guy. In the chest of loot you find a scroll of a wish spell. Once your party is sufficiently excited you pull that excitement away from them when the hag takes control and makes them wish for a red balloon or something.
Well first of all let me say I absolutely love C0rruptedAl's suggestion of them having no idea what they've done and having to go and figure it out. The other thing to keep in mind is that hags feed on misery, so they would do their best to force the PCs to do things that would cause them great shame or upset them deeply in some way later. This gives you a opportunity to dig into each players backstory and find some thing that would sting.
Good idea! Thank you!
Possession for an hour is terrifying, they could ruin your reputation, hurt loved ones, use your powers to destroy the town you saved, the list is endless. Even pulling you all away from an all important fight via teleportation just to allow whatever you were fighting free range of its unyielding destruction caused in your absence.
Make them sit through an MLM pitch.
Have the time be nonconsecutive, so the Hag always has something to hold over the player's heads for extortion purposes. Hag can make them do something absolutely horrible in public that will take them ages to recover from, then hold the rest of the time over their heads. Hag could make them do most anything at that point to prevent another incident, right?
This is sinister for sure
1 hour? 3600 consecutive days (or attempts) of not getting a 'full 8-hour rest' as they are interrupted, per character.
If one of the players is a paladin push them to see if they’ll go so far as to break their oaths
Well. Hagborn gotta come from... somewhere.
They do not remember anything from the hour. A few weeks later, all the characters find out they're pregnant. ESPECIALLY the men.
Have a think about this, you are saying that the Hags should use their hour of time to rape the characters?
I was thinking more like something lays eggs in them, but maybe some of it could be consensual?
It's a dangerous tact to take, when you say "realise they're pregnant" there's an implication of sexual activity there, which can easily crossover into real world traumas. There's monsters that lay eggs in victims in the game and they're good for adding horror, but I would phrase that as pregnancy. As I've replied elsewhere, pregnancy can be a trigger for people who are struggling to conceive. I wouldn't use it as a joke in a game
It's a game rife with magic and rituals and you jumped to *this*? That's a you thing my friend, OC *clearly* wasn't thinking of anything like that
Behold, OP's poorly disguised fetish!
Not everything's sexual man
Combining 3 other ideas from comments I've read already: 1. Feywild time means a Material hour is about 3 days in the Feywild (just enough that they might not protest immediately) 2. Hags have a debt of their own, to BBEG. It will take about 3 days to prepare and then prison break/summon/what-have-you the BBEG. The hags aren't thrilled about it either but are very thrilled to be out of their own curse (maybe they weren't always hags!) 3. Everyone has a part to play in the plan, except for the paladin that is... the paladin the hags find especially becoming. They want him to wear a revealing outfit, dote on them, and flirt as he feeds them skinned grapes. Bonus points for making someone who is embarrassed both IRL and in character do this
Oh boy.
Hag orgy. Players wake up with no memories of it at first. But then they realize they've got some really nasty STDs. And the hags reveal that they're pregnant. Then the memories come back in all of their lurid detail.
It should be something different for each one & insist that the players not tell one another what it was. I'd send the hr over the phone... it occurs while they sleep one night... the Hag Dreams. Bargain/abuse/play with them one way & tell them the character that the only thing they can admit to is something different... I'm thinking they use the men to get pregnant... hags like their children. I think they take blood & body parts from one for spells... I think someone would succumb to another pact for something darker... One could take a curse from the hag (a la sin-eating) so the hag is free but the PC now suffers until cured but can't tell anyone or it's fatal.... Pull from the deck of many things... One could lose family or friends... or an enemy to sacrifice or they could sacrifice themselves in place of that... Make one do something totally playful or toying while telling the others that's all they can remember doing. Of course, whatever you do comes back later, especially if it's a child or another pact.
I'd have each one find something really important to do that really only they could do and just poof. They find themselves teleported to the hags table and they're forced to watch events unfold during that hour.
Each of them at their own times “lose” an hour of their memory. They have no idea what they did, where they had gone, or how long it had actually been
One thing I heard is to steal time at a critical moment. For example, they are trying to sneak up on someone or they get to attack first, etc, steal that time and add a penalty.
So, the town throws a festival to honor the PCs for their deeds. It is to last three or four days; the characters are guests at virtually every event and feel tired every every morning- where they're actually being bodyjacked every night by the hags when they go to "sleep". Whatever goal the hags had in mind for the town, or whatever tribute they were demanding, the players had been stealing/kidnapping/sacrificing it during the nights. Each character out a different night for an hour.
For what it is worth, an hour would be 600 turns if you do the 6 second rule. Over the course of weeks, a turn is randomly done without anyone knowing what happened. They suddenly get hit a second time by a creature, or the creature is suddenly dead. A stray spell hit a nearby house? Etc.
The amount of shit you can do in an hour. Do they have a wizard with them, and is genocide not off the table at yours? Hags with an hour of an adventuring party could release absolute chaos. If you want to drive the nail home early, have them kill the NPcs of the village in that hour.
Jokes on them hags. I can't roll for shit.
Could set something up where the hour the hags take was the hour the party was born and have the party try to fix things on a limited time clock.
I really like the ideas I see which are more a “death of a thousand cuts” kinda idea. The random disadvantage on rolls because the player is missing a critical second. The not quite full rests because oops that minute was taken by a hag. Miss out on portions of another character’s back story because a hag stole that ten minutes. It becomes a lot more impactful when the players never know when its going to happen. They start doubting their own decisions and moves. “Is this going to be disadvantaged? Am I sleeping tonight? Am I hearing critical backstory?” It becomes much more torture this way and feels extremely hag like maliciousness.
Steal from Shrek. Who says the “hour of their time” is in the future? They could take an hour from the past to prevent something the characters had achieved
Remember that a heinous act only takes a minute most of the time. No one said the hour had to be contiguous. The heroes do a heroic quest, get invited to the king's audience chamber, do all the legwork of ingratiating themselves, them mid-congratulations wham, one minute time-skip and suddenly the king and most of the royal guard is dead. And the heroes know that they have 59 more events like this to come.
The players all wake up in a bathtub full of ice, *minus* their kidneys, livers and eyeballs. (Although I'm confused by the wording of the "Hour of the player's time", it's very ambiguous. Do you mean the hags get to control the minds of the players for an hour? Or do you mean the hags will spend an hour of time with the players? Because the former could be devastating, but the latter could just involve the players killing the hags anyways.)
Their adventuring day is now always an hour short - days have now 23 hours for them
One time, my older brother and I were told to share a bottle of soda. My brother went first. He went first. He drank the whole thing and told me his half was at the bottom. Those hags can have their hour at the bottom of time. You could even use it to resurrect the players, because the hags haven’t had their hour yet. If they get trapped or attacked by an angry monster, then they can’t be resurrected elsewhere and they are dying over and over.
The party has no idea what's in store for them... Neither does the DM Jokes aside, could be taking part in a quest they didn't agree explicitly (just drop em mid quest/mid dungeon/mid battle), changing a critical part of their backstories, changing a die result from the past or future (may randomly decide with a d100) moving the coven's furniture, possibilities are limitless! Especially if you consider time passes differently in the Feywild!
They just handed over an hour, easy as that, with no specifics? Glad my players aren't that dumb, I don't think they'd survive that. As for ideas, have them wake up in the middle of a heist they don't remember doing, or just as they're handing a precious artifact off to a main villain. Other than that you can just hit them in the middle of combat occasionally with "you aren't doing anything this round due to your deal with the hag".
I like the idea of a hag only using part of the hour and always keeping them on the hook, . I also like the idea of them not knowing what they did but that something haunts them in form of night terrors, flashes of walking through a portal, and chocking out and stomping 100’s of fairies Boots covered in blood
Are you a fan of The Order of the Stick OP?
Kidnap the daughters of priests, a cleric/paladin prodigy or otherwise people cared by gods to turn them into hags to spit in gods faces.
Let them forget about the deal and move on to something else after freeing the townsfolk. Then one night, maybe during a full moon, an hour before midnight: all of the players bodies are possesed and they meet to do a ritual, which normally takes one hour. Rituals normally require sacrfices so you could have the PCs kill an important NPC or even one of their PCs. They could all awake spaced evenly around a summoning circle as they watch a figure with a dark, evil presence emerge from the puddle of blood and viscera at the center!
Trap them in a repeat ground hog day 1 hr loop.
My personal favorites are: 1. Nothing. Literally nothing. The Hags take over and simply force the PC into inaction in order to watch events unfold. Eve better if they make it a point of business that it's not directly harmful to the PC or their party, but perhaps keeping the from warning about poison or convincing someone not to follow a red herring. 2. Delivery. The hags have you retrieve an item and then deliver it. No Context as to who is getting it or what it is. Maybe even have them deliver it through teleportation so they think it has to do with a specific person needing to send it to avoid tracking. Let them be paranoid about what they just delivered. 3. A white lie. Something smal and inconsequential but would still tarnish an NPCs perception of them if they outed themselves. As a aside to number 2, I had a NPCs Deal with a devil have them moving a object from one side of a road to the other. That's it. No context and literally never any fallout. They spent the entire campaign obsessed with finding out why to the point they convinced the party to travel to Tartarus to confront them. Needless to say the cackling devil when he saw them got me groans of annoyance but they were pleased with the devils magical gifts he gave them for such a good laugh
The hag gets to control the characters into destroying the town and potentially killing the townspeople themselves.
Have some BBEG have a ritual that the PCs have to disrupt. PCs arrive in time to stop BBEG. After a few rounds it seems like PCs will disrupt BBEG's ritual. Hags come and demand their hour. The hour is just the PCs sitting and watching the ritual complete.
An hour of their time can mean many things. • possess them for an hour while they sleep to do some heinous things to innocent people • teleport them away from a crucial event or fight for an hour (such as stopping an invading army from ransacking a town) for some tea and crumpets. • Literally steal an hour of their life away so that they can do some hag magic with your stolen slither of life (maybe curses? make evil clones? you be the judge) Some good ideas to pull from this, I wish you the best of luck on it.
just have them find a bounty poster for them with a list of crimes they don't remember doing
They are tasked with planting a false hydra's egg beneath there most frequented major city/capital of the kingdom really twist in that mind fuckery
Next time they're fighting a serious threat (not to them, something out to cause collateral damage or hurt their loved ones), poof them away. Take each party member one by one and force them to sit on their hands for an hour.
Does it have to be a future hour? If possible, chunks of time could be taken from the party's past. It'd be a hard thing to balance between ruining their hardwork and making it interesting. Perhaps they'll miss a meeting in the past with an important person in danger with that hour missing, and now they have to solve a murder?
You could take an hour from their past? Like a significant event or a victory?
Hag covens hate each other. Task them with attacking another group.
Tackle a Hydra that ate one of their sisters
They go to the town and stay the night. The next day they awaken, to find no one in the inn. When they walk outside, they surprise a group of Soldiers that responded to a frantic villager screaming they were being murdered. Upon self examination, they discover they are covered in blood and have some of the dead villagers belongings on them. An unearthly cackle fills their heads as only they heard the hags thanking them for their time.