Search for a playable hag class for D&D 5e and you will find the same post about forty times. It goes like this. Sea Hag is a Sorcerer, because she is magical and unpleasant. Green Hag is a Warlock, because illusions. Night Hag is a Warlock too, or a spooky Wizard. Annis Hag is a Barbarian, because she is big and hits things.
Then a few features get bolted on. A cantrip that deals cold damage instead of fire. A subclass called Coven of the Drowned. Done.
I understand the appeal. The maths is already solved, the class is already balanced, and you can be playing on Friday. I did the same thing in the first draft of this book, and it took a real table about two sessions to show me why it does not work.
The problem is not that the mapping is lazy. The problem is that the question is wrong.
A hag is not a job
Every class in fifth edition answers the question what did you train to do. Wizard is a person who studied. Fighter is a person who drilled. Rogue is a person who learned to get into places. Class is a career.
A hag is not a career. She is a thing that exists. Ask "what class is a Sea Hag" and you have already assumed that being a Sea Hag is an occupation she picked up, which is roughly like asking what class a wolf is.
Worse, it flattens the six of them into one. If Sea Hag is Sorcerer and Green Hag is Warlock, then a table with both of them has a caster and a caster. The thing that makes them different is a paragraph of flavour text and a damage type. Nobody plays a damage type.
So we stopped asking what class a hag is, and asked two questions instead.
What you are, and what you do with it
The design splits along two axes that never touch.
What you are is your hag. There are six: Cinder, Green, Night, Sea, Annis and Bheur. Choosing one sets three things and nothing else. Your element, which decides the offensive spells you can reach. Your coven magic, the one shared catastrophe your coven can spend per long rest. And your weakness, the specific thing that can be used against you.
What you do with it is your class. There are five: Witch, Brute, Apothecary, Summoner and Oracle. Two subclasses each, ten in total, level 1 to
- This is the career layer, and it is where the actual mechanics of your turn
live.
| Approach | What a Sea Hag looks like | What it plays like |
|---|---|---|
| Map to a class | Sorcerer, draconic bloodline, fire spells rewritten as cold | A cold damage sorcerer. Nothing about her is a hag, and nothing about her is the sea. |
| Two axes | Sea Hag is thunder, lightning and water, Maelstrom as coven magic, and Damp Skin as a weakness. Then Brute, or Witch, or Oracle, and the class decides the turn. | Two Sea Hags at the same table can share nothing except what they are, and play nothing alike. |
The payoff is that the six hags stop competing with the five classes for the same design space. A Cinder Hag Brute and a Cinder Hag Oracle are the same creature. They burn the same things. One of them does it by walking into the room and the other by drawing a card at dawn and deciding who it lands on.
The test we used
Every feature had to survive one question: could this belong to any other hag, or any other class? If yes, it was flavour, not design, and it went back.
That test killed a lot of early work. A "hag" feature that let you cast a cantrip as a bonus action is not a hag feature, it is a caster feature with a hat on. The Witch's blood ritual circle survived, because paying for a spell in your own hit points is a specific relationship with magic that a Fighter does not have and a Cleric would find obscene.
The same test is why the Brute exists at all. Once you separate hag from class, you can ask what a hag who refuses spellcraft looks like, and the answer is a woman who fights with her fists and treats black magic as a tool she has not bothered to master. That is a class. It is not a Barbarian with warts.
Design note
Three of the five classes were rebuilt during playtest, and the reason was always the same. If a player could not tell me what their class felt like after two sessions, the class was a spell list with a name on it. The Summoner took the longest. She started as a pile of conjure spells and only became a class once the minions cost something specific to make.
What the split costs
It is more work, and it is worth saying so.
Two axes means every offensive spell needs to know which hag can reach it, and every utility spell needs to know which class can. That is a gating system, and it has to be right or a player finds out at level 7 that half their list is illegal. The character builder does this automatically, but the machinery underneath is real: the spell list is filtered by element on one side and by class on the other, with named exceptions where a class earns access to something outside its lane.
It also means balance stops being a single number. A Cinder Hag Witch and an Annis Hag Witch are the same class with different spell pools, so they do not deal the same damage, and the gap has to stay inside a range nobody notices. That is why the book has a simulator. Every class and subclass gets run through encounters, and every new spell is priced against the published spell already sitting at its level. When a spell came out ahead of a published spell two levels above it, it got cut back, and the reason was a number rather than a feeling.
Reskinning avoids all of that. It also produces a Sorcerer.
What to take to your own table
You do not need our book to use the idea, and this is the part worth stealing.
If you are building a playable monster of any kind, separate the lineage from the career before you write a single feature. Ask what the creature is, and let that decide the resources it has and the costs it pays. Then ask what a member of that species might have made of themselves, and let that decide what happens on its turn.
Do it the other way round and you will always end up back at a Sorcerer with a new coat of paint, because you started from a Sorcerer.
The six hags in this book are a food chain, a set of appetites and a set of weaknesses. What any individual hag does about that is her own business. That is the whole design, and it took throwing away a working draft to find it.
Early Access
The classes are free to read.
All five classes and ten subclasses are written up on the site. Get on the early access list for the design notes as the rest of the book is built.