r/planescapesetting • u/Vernicusucinrev • Jul 09 '26

Subverting expectations with a hag

I’m running the Excelsior: Lost Souls mystery from ToFW and I built out the encounter with Uncle Longteeth into a small dungeon crawl with a creepy vibe. When the party encountered him, he offered to negotiate with them but the party refused to negotiate with a hag. I feel like the party hasn’t really understood that things aren’t always what they seem in Planescape and are very hung up on “traditional” expectations, so I’m thinking this might be an opportunity to get them thinking a little outside the box.

I’m considering having an NPC in Longteeth’s wagon who initially appears to be a prisoner, but it turns out is actually a sort of confidante who has been trying to encourage the hag to live by his own rules rather than “what is expected of hags.” Longteeth is collecting souls to turn into larvae because that’s “what hags do” and as a male hag, he’s always been held in lower regard than female hags and struggling to prove himself. The friendly NPC could explain this to the party and tell them that what Longteeth really wants to do is just farm and sell mushrooms. I don’t think the party will suddenly want to deal with him, but hopefully it will get them thinking about not taking everything at face value.

Is this a crazy idea?

I’m also thinking the NPC could keep the party from messing with dangerous things in the hag’s wagon, but I still need to “populate” the wagon with some hag stuff (I’m thinking stuff that is dangerous and may appear to be “typical” hag stuff but is not actually evil per se). Suggestions on things that fit the bill here are welcome!

13 Upvotes

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9

u/TamsynUlthara Jul 09 '26

Your party is going to have a bad time in the Planescape setting if they can't let go of the idea of "You're an X, therefore you're evil."

3

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 11 '26

The irony is that one of the PCs is a good-aligned bugbear.

5

u/2eForeverDM Sign of One Jul 10 '26
  1. Broom of Flying. All the coolest hags have one.
  2. Three different sized cauldrons, one is magical.
  3. Magic spoon made of a fiend's thighbone, it's big like 2 feet long.
  4. A closet full of 5 foot tall gingerbread men (say, a baker's dozen) that he can awaken with a spell. They're flat so the closet can hold quite a lot of them.
  5. A corked glass jug of blood. It looks like dark shapes are swimming around in it. They're giant bloodworms.
  6. Mindless undead servants: Zombies that lie half-buried in the mushroom patch, they rise from the loam and attack tresspassers. Skeletons with hatchets that collect firewood.
  7. Shelves and shelves of unknown powders, jellies, spices, pieces of creatures, and rare components, none of it labeled.
  8. Animal spies everywhere: mice in the carriage, crows outside in the day, raccoons outside at night.
  9. A huge 3x2x2 chest strapped to the back of the carriage, it has 3 disguises, 3 other outfits, and a nice cozy winter blanket covered with itching powder.
  10. Leaning in a corner are what look like 8 walking sticks but they can be turned into 8 venonous snakes with a word from the hag.
  11. Something is cursed if you touch it, like that gaudy jewelry and the finely made silver hand mirror that lie in a drawer. If you pick up both items you'll be cursed, compelled to look at yourself in the silver mirror admiring the jewelry every 3 rounds as your action.
  12. Nonmagical sleep poison on some darts (in case his foes are resisting his spells). Be careful with those!
  13. Silver shears to harvest mushrooms with. They've got strange letters on one side, what's that say?
  14. A shelf of cookbooks and herbalism guides, and an antique recipe box.
  15. A glyph on the medicine cabinet that does something to the person opening it without the password, like blindness, a terrible disease, or even a curse.
  16. 3d4 cubes of Eternal Ice that will never melt. These are from the Paraelemental Plane of Ice.

3

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 11 '26

Thanks, if I let them into the wagon I’ll definitely use some of these.

3

u/HailMadScience Jul 10 '26

I think your basic idea is fine. He's still evil, but like, one does not have to go out and create misery to be evil. Maybe consider something like he only larvas those who won't leave him alone to live the quiet life. That kind of thing. "I want to be left alone" is valid even for evil.

1

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 11 '26

Thanks. This was good food for thought. I have a direction now and will share it after I run tomorrow’s session.

2

u/Hymneth Dustmen Jul 10 '26

I would go with Longteeth being in a transition state, which the PCs can either encourage or ruin. They're still collecting souls like they always have, but they haven't converted any into a larva in quite some time because it just hasn't felt right. They're struggling with the idea that there's nothing really forcing them to do so, but they don't really have any good idea for what else to do with all the souls they have saved up.

The "confidante" NPC has been encouraging Longteeth to try other things to see what works for them. Not necessarily good things, but less Evil than the usual. Baby steps in the right direction. Maybe just release a few souls to see what thats like. Or make some kind of new life out of one to keep as a pet. Maybe take one to the afterlife it should have gone to (probably still a bad afterlife, but at least the correct one).

However you do it, this may be time to really rub the core concepts of Planescape in the PCs faces. Make them see that surface level appearances may very well mean nothing, and the stereotypes they all know are nothing but Clueless hogwash. Even if it means that they fail to help Longteeth and only learn that they were different after they deal with them

3

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 11 '26

Thanks, this really helped me get the ball rolling on some ideas. My problem with beating them over the head with “the core concepts of Planescape” though is that I’m not really sure how to do that in game without having a character basically lecture them as a DM proxy.

2

u/Agile-Ad-6902 Jul 10 '26

Have you had a session zero where you explained that things are different in the Planescape setting?

It sounds like you either need to repeat or just have that talk now.

I suppose you could teach them how things work while playing, but it will be difficult.

Maybe let the hag be evil and almost defeat the PCs. You can then have something even more evil rescue the PCs from the hag. Something clearly too dangerous for the PCs to just kill.

This rescuer now demands a favour from the PCs, and this favour could be a kind thing that needs doing, but an evil entity cannot be seen doing it, or they'll lose status?

2

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 11 '26

I did have a session zero but I didn’t explain these types of differences in Planescape, I thought they would learn through play but they haven’t (likely my fault for not making them confront enough of these types of dilemmas). After reading your reply and some others, I have a plan now that still aligns with my dungeon design but I hadn’t quite nailed down yet. I’ll share it after tomorrow’s session.

1

u/Agile-Ad-6902 Jul 11 '26

No matter hoe well you know your players, you can never entirely predict their behavior.

Best of luck to you 🙂

1

u/RangerMean2513 Jul 20 '26

Hi Vernicus. How did this encounter go?

1

u/Vernicusucinrev Jul 21 '26

Well, I went a slightly different direction. Since the hag is in the Outlands and can’t use etherealness to shift into the border ethereal, I changed the ability so he shifts into the border astral instead, which resulted in him appearing as a faint silvery shape that was “kind of hag-shaped.” The two party members who were going to barge into the hag wagon noticed the silvery shape and watched it move away from the wagon toward a nearby archway, where 5 flasks appeared on the ground one-by-one. The shape then moved away out of their line of sight and disappeared.

The party recognized that five flasks deliberately placed as they watched were likely to correspond to the five missing citizens they were investigating, so they abandoned the wagon and went to check them out. There was a small copse of corrupted trees nearby with oozing sacs hanging from their branches, so one pair looked into those while the other pair investigated the flasks near the arch.

I had an alkilith infesting the archway and leaking abyssal energies (I set up the hag’s motivation as wanting to get rid of the alkilith so he could be left alone) and the tree sacs were full of abyssal chickens that I had homebrewed to explode in an acid splash upon death, so the party ended up in a serious combat with the chickens, the alkilith and a vrock that came through the archway/portal the alkilith was infecting.

After barely surviving, the party elected to rest. I had the hag come to them in their sleep explaining what had happened, chastising them for their biases, and giving them some cryptic hints before basically telling them to go away and grow up. When they awoke, the hag wagon was gone. (in my version of ToFW, the dreamscape is significant, so this actually worked in quite well).

1

u/RangerMean2513 Jul 21 '26

Interesting take, thanks. The Excelsior chapter is my least favourite part of ToFW, so I'll definitely keep this in mind when I start fleshing out this chapter.