For a month, a coven of high-tier hags had their way with a small town at the edge of wilderness (about 3000 inhabitants). No power in the town could see through their disguise or oppose them effectively. At the end of the month, town is emotionally and physically massacred and there is nothing left there for the hags to drain. What would this town be like after that? All townsfolk dead as they tried to swarm in the sewers? A local church, with dead childten stacked 10ft high? A single man left "surviving" only on peoples' ears?What is to be found in a town, thoroughly hollowed out by such a coven?
I impregnate the hags, next question.
>>93243565What system? Post their character sheets.
All the corpses have ruptured bladders and are drenched in urine
>>93243614What are you on about? These are NPC Hags.
>>93243964NPCs have truncated sheets. Also, you didn't answer the first question.
all the men are dead with crushed pelvises
I had something like that in a oneshot, OP. There was a witch in the woods near a village. She had power over time and death, but was still weak due to fighting against some heroes in an age past, so she could only slowly spread her influence and gather power a bit at a time. In the end she reduced the village to a husk. Some villagers fled to the nearby city, others tried to confront her but were killed and raised as undead, the village chief who stayed in his home became a ghost.
>>93243565Three thousand dead is a lot. Way more than three hags should be able to kill themselves in a month. You'd need them to kill 100 people a day, which by the second day would see most people fleeing for their lives without even trying to figure out what's happening. The best way to kill the entire town would be either to recruit a considerable number of minions (evil humans, orcs, goblins, etc.) or to turn the city into an elaborate death trap. I'll expand on both. If you pick the first one, choose your favourite minion and put yourself in their shoes. If they're man-eating orcs, the town plaza will most likely look like a slaughterhouse or a butcher's market, the town hall like a pig pen, and the church will have become desecrated and evil as it has become the hags' workshop.If instead you choose to make the town into a death trap, I see three main options. The first and easiest is to poison the water and let the townspeople accuse and execute each other, before swooping in to slaughter the few diseased individuals remaining at the end. The second is to spread disease, quarantine the city and let them all succumb while tormenting the dying. The third one is to use one of their powers as hags (some hags can control the weather) to make everyone die of cold in the middle of a bright summer, sabotaging the houses at night so that no one can be protected from the cold. All these options require the town to be inescapable, but if the town has walls it should be easy for the hags to dominate a monster that will stand guard at the gates and let no one escape.
>>93243565>a coven of high-tier hags had their way with a small townDamn, they're eager.
>>93244588OP here. Thanks. Methodical, but not quite hag way. I'm thinking of a slow cookup over first three weeks, inducing insanity, all sort of unnatural urges, paranoia, escalation of cult insanity, complete destruction if family and perverting virtues to a point of complete insanity. (mother providing for her children to a point of force-feeding them to death, town guard "protecting" his family by entombing them in a cellar, etc.) Crazy shit, but my horror ideas are often lacking. Girl, scrubbing herself raw and bleeding to death in order to get rid of "taint".
>>93244059NPCs don't even have sheets. Or statblocks, if you're using a system worth using.
I love the old-fashioned witchy woman as a villain. It's something primeval and evocative.
>>93243614>>93243964>>93244059that guy is not me, I'm the OP.It's D&D 5e using the blood hag stat block for the leaders, with the minions being dankwood hags.Some stats altered for flavor but mostly irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion.
>>93245748Oy v-...
>>93245255If you want them to get close and personal, the hags can target a section of the city (probably the ruling class), let them be free from disease or poison, but psychologically torture them in the way you described.This way, you have most of the city just plain dead, and the closer your players get to the city center the more insane people seem to have gotten before their grim demise. Otherwise, I would say three weeks is too short a time to subvert the whole city, and limiting yourself to a 300 inhabitants section for the more graphic stuff will probably be way easier.Another option would be that most people fled when the disasters started striking, but the hags manipulated a select few into staying only to drive them mad until they killed their families. If you're attached to the idea of the whole town being dead with no survivors, I would suggest using other covens of much lower ranking hags who work in the service of the main three.
>>93243565One game I played in had a trio of hags take over a town each.The first had flooded her town with polluted water (she could breathe underwater) and offered the survivors hardtack food for alchemical reagents.The second had flooded the countryside with giant bugs that ate most of the wildlife and stored food, but were somewhat edible. She'd also covered her town in briars and was slowly converting the populace into mindless spriggons that served her will The third just slaughtered everyone in her town.I figure if you use multiple towns each affected by different hags, you can get more mileage out of their different effects on townships.
>>93245748Hags/witches often get crow/raven motifs, but I like to push it a bit further back and hit them with dinosaur theming. Subtle magic and bargains are fine and all, but when it's time for the final confrontation, there's very few bits of magic better than turning into a dinosaur. Really scratches that monkey part of the brain.
>>93253097wouldn't it scratch the reptile part?
