Every hag is a dark mirror. She takes something people find comforting and turns it round to face them. The Cinder Hag takes the hearth. The Green Hag takes the oldest rule of travel there is: when a stranger knocks, you let them in, and when you knock, you trust the person who opens the door.
She is hospitality with the face peeled back. And she is, by a distance, the most dangerous of the six, because she is the only one you invite in.
Danger you never feel
Most monsters announce themselves. Something is too big, too loud, too wrong, and the body knows to run before the mind catches up. The Green Hag is built so that moment never arrives.
She is the healer who set your daughter's arm. She is the old woman at the edge of the wood who always has bread and a dry bed for travellers. She speaks with the voice of the grandmother who raised you, because she has listened to you long enough to learn it. There is nothing to run from. There is only someone kind, being kind, for as long as it takes.
The site carries one line I keep coming back to when I describe her to new players. She had been the town's beloved healer for eleven years. When they finally worked it out, the part that broke them was not what she had taken. It was remembering how much they had trusted her.
That is the whole hag in two sentences. The theft is incidental. The betrayal is the point.
The one who talks first
In a coven, the other five are more powerful once a fight starts. The Green Hag makes sure a fight does not start until she wants one.
She scouts. She charms. She is the one who walks into the village a week before the rest of the coven, takes a room, learns which family has the debt and which elder has the secret, and builds the pact everyone else will later enforce. Her predation style is ambush, and an ambush is mostly preparation. By the time anyone draws a weapon, the ground has already been chosen, the exits already counted, and half the room already owes her a favour.
This is why I tell players that a Green Hag who rolls initiative has usually made a mistake somewhere earlier. Combat is the backup plan. The real work happened over tea.
Why she needs the rot
Here is the part of her that surprises people. For a creature this patient and this social, her strength is not portable.
Her weakness is called Away from Corruption. She draws her power from corrupted nature: cursed woods, swamps, land tainted by dark magic. After a full day away from ground like that, she cannot use coven magic, she has disadvantage on every saving throw and skill check, and her speed is halved, until she gets back to it.
Think about what that does to her at the table. The hag whose whole method is to walk into other people's lives and live among them is the one hag who cannot stay there. Every long con has a clock on it. She can charm a whole town, but she cannot move in. She has to keep a foot in the bog.
Design note
Every hag's weakness is meant to be the inverse of her power, and hard to solve by packing the right item. The Green Hag's power is reach into other people's homes. Her weakness ties her to the rotten places nobody wants to visit. The more she wants from a town, the further she has to travel from what keeps her strong, and that tension is what turns her scenes into decisions.
It also explains her hospitality in a new light. Why does the kindly woman live alone at the edge of the cursed wood, with the door always open? Because she has to live there. The welcome is not a lure she set up somewhere convenient. It is the only place she can be, so she makes the world come to her.
How the fiction becomes the rules
Her elements are poison and acid, with plant magic in her kit, and her coven magic is Acidic Swamp: a 30-foot circle of ground that sinks into caustic bog, thorned roots and steaming water. Creatures inside make a Constitution save. Fail, and they take acid damage and are Poisoned, with disadvantage on attacks and ability checks until they shake it off.
At character level 4 the roots hold as well. A creature that fails is Restrained, and the ground stays difficult terrain for ten minutes. At level 8 the swamp starts to breathe: at initiative 20, as a lair action, bubbles burst anywhere inside it for 4d6 acid damage, and anything still Restrained cannot step out of the way.
Read that sequence again with the lore in mind. She does not blow the room apart. She changes the ground under it until the room belongs to her. It is what she was doing all along with her bread and her open door, just faster, and in a language even the guards understand. The coven spell is her method made literal: bring the corruption with you, and then you are always home.
One hag, five ways to play her
Being a Green Hag is not a class. It sets what she is: her elements, her coven magic, her weakness. What she does with it is a separate choice.
A Green Hag Apothecary is the healer from the story, working out of a cottage full of jars that most of the village has drunk from at least once. A Green Hag Summoner never really travels alone, and travellers learn too late what followed her out of the bog. A Green Hag Oracle is the wise woman people walk miles to ask for a reading, and leave having agreed to something. A Green Hag Brute is the one nobody sees coming: the grandmother who stands up from the rocking chair and turns out to be much taller than she looked.
Each of them is the same creature. Each of them is the one who opened the door.
If you run her, run the welcome first. Let your players sit at her table, eat her bread and like her. The reveal only works if they were glad to be there.
Next in this series: the Night Hag, and why the one place you are supposed to be safe is the first place she goes.
Early Access
Six hags, six appetites.
The Green Hag is the second of six portraits. Get on the early access list and read the rest as they land.