Question about Hags

Is there a lore-friendly reason for a hag to raise a captured baby instead of simply eating it to reproduce?

The baby tastes really fucking bad.

Hello.

Maybe the hag wants a servant, or a minion who can walk among civilized people. Or perhaps the hag is bound by a debt to raise and protect the child.

I'm bored and lonely. Fuck it, I'm making the next magically attuned baby an apprentice. At least then I've got more to talk to than my familiar.
Oh hey, this one is magically attuned. Now.. what do babies eat? Guess I'll just try a bunch of stuff, and if it dies I'll eat it and make the next viable baby an apprentice.

Gann wasn't kidnapped, though. He was a hagspawn.

I like this one.

"Nanny Bonegrinder, why do you have ten fingers and I only have nine?"

"Nanna had to make sure you weren't a cookin' babe sweetpea."

This, it wants a catspaw.

Conceivably, if the hag was commited to ruining the parents life, promising them that she would raise the child to become a malicious sociopath could be one of the worst punishments imaginable.

Boredom.
Loneliness.
Want for a loyal apprentice and/or little helper later in life.
Ease of adopting compared to having her child. Some vestigial remnant of maternal instinct from a time long since past.

Pick any combination, You want OP. I'm assuming your going with a setting where hags are living creatures like everyone else, and not just manifestations of nature's cruelty, because if it were the latter, you wouldn't even need to bother asking the question, or any question actually, on how it would act.

A hag would capture and raise a baby BECAUSE she can't reproduce and have offspring of her own.

Hags are created.

This is pretty much how it works in Elder Scrolls

I think OP is using 5e hags, who eat babies and then give birth to "humans" that turn into hags when they are 13. What if the child was just old enough to not be considered a baby, but the hag still stole it because it promised it would?

Are you telling me that 5e Hags are literally given the reproductive and gastrointestinal systems of a Yoshi?

Yep. I'm not sure what happens if the baby's a dude though.

You are now aware of where Futa's come from

And why they're fucking aweful

Some odd hags collect kids. Sort of like a crazy cat lady collects cats.

He was the hag's own child though.

>Well, turns out the old lady died, and her pet kids ate her

Aren't hags just witches?

D&D is wierd, user.

Hush, voice of reason, don't you know D&D is all they know?

No.

Hags are very powerful, strange witches who have gone beyond humanity, and become truly feylike or even monstrous creatures.

It's a little like comparing a student at a university with a physicist at CERN. Same thing in a vague sense, but one is completely different than the other as well.

Hags are a kind of evil fey that treat everything corrupt, disgusting, and vile the same way we treat everything pure, clean, and good, and vice-versa. They're all super ugly and despise life, and want nothing more than to corrupt and/or destroy it.

A witch is just another word for a female spell caster

Maybe like Rapunzel. The baby has some magical ability the hag wants to siphon. Maybe she needs virgin blood for her rituals and having a daughter she keeps locked in a tower means she has a constant supply.

>Question implies settings where Hags are Monstrous Magical humanoids like Baba Yaga and that wierd mountain lady who disguises herself as a midwife so she can easily steal babies in Nip-Nong folktales rather than old witches
>Answer question In context of implied kind of setting
>"Dehaaah. Yoo andswered wit Dee-En-Dee Lore! Yor toopeed and only no Dee-En-Dee!"

Sorry Autismo, but not everyone is interested in derailing a thread to go "Well in [insert setting here], they do this!"

none of those settings went full magical realm and had them eat babies to make kids, though.
That's D&D at work right there.

Yes, yes they are.

> (OP)
>Maybe like Rapunzel. The baby has some magical ability the hag wants to siphon.
>Maybe she needs virgin blood for her rituals and having a daughter she keeps locked in a tower means she has a constant supply.
Fuck, that's actually a really good idea.
>Villain adopts a group of orphans and uses Restoration and Feign Death to harvest and restore their organs and bloods for magical rituals

That's a really fucking efficient way to be evil.

What is magical realm-y about eating babies?
...
Do you have a baby eating fetish, user?

It's never just eating babies with you, user.
It's always eating babies for the purpose of reproduction or some weird shit like that.

>It's always eating babies for the purpose of reproduction or some weird shit like that.
It could be worse, it could be consensual sexin the missionary position.

What? Witches eat children all the time. If anything, the way hags reproduce is trying to avoid magical realm by saying sex never enters the equation. They just take a regular witch thing and make it an explanation for why hags are still around.

hags are still around because there's people to be witches, duh.
No need to add a whole additional layer there.

The real problem here though is that warlocks being a playable race means that hags can't just be witches. Witches are already a thing, a very mechanically balanced thing that isn't automatically evil or necessarily monstrous at all. But people want to play as warlocks and friendly witches, especially with pop culture in the last half-century being inundated with them. So hags, the classical monstrous beings with vague mysterious powers are turned into an inhuman creature separate from 'normal witches.' But now hags are always evil and ugly and very unsexy, so how do you make new hags? You make them eat babies, something that's already in their job description, and it makes new ones. Or you keep them completely ambiguous and mysterious, in which case the book flavor doesn't affect you anyway.

Those are just more hag-y witches.

>warlocks being a playable race
Wait, I thought they were a class? Am I out of the loop?

They're a class, mistyped.

The child could be more valuable as is. Maybe has some fancy lineage, serves as an eternal hostage, or maybe the hag's just insane and likes the kid for no good reason

Great fluff.

Stolen.

For spite and corruption. Hags will do nearly anything if it hurts somebody else, especially if it's a long drawn out pain that destroys them inside. A hag would easily raise a child after a king sold them to her for security of his kingdom, letting the king know how wonderful the child is progressing and twisting.

Depends on:
>the system
>the setting
>the plot

Would that mean the person's meat actually tastes pretty good then? Hags would probably find delicious food disgusting.

>eating babies to reproduce
...that's a thing? I suddenly wish I still owned a Monster's Manual.

Don't you?

Brilliant

ok. fair comment. but could you actually give a useful answer in there somewhere?

Humans taste like pork, apparently.

Witchguard

With a baby?

God that is worse