Monday, January 03, 2011

Bog Hag

You might not know this, but I'm into Role Playing Games.
It all began in 2001 when I went to a tournament to play for the first time. I ended up going to a place near home to play with this dude that taught me everything he knew. Some say I'm a better game master than him, I don't think so but that is not the point. The point is that there is one game in particular that I like to play: The Legend of the Five Rings. It's based on The Book of Five Ring by Miyamoto Musashi, and it has a feudal Japanese setting.
I've been running games of L5R for some 5 years, maybe 6, and there is this creature that I really like: the Bog Hag. This creature, this hag, lives in bogs and swamps, hence the name, and it makes Count Orlok looks like the most beautiful creature alive. "Why dude?", "Why do you like this Bog Hag so much" you ask? Because of what it does.

The Bog Hag kills it's prey and then very carefully removes the skin from the corpse. Why? So it can wear it. It then goes into human civilization "dressed" as it's prey. Let's say it kills a maid, it goes and serves the maid's master, then one night silently kills the master and wear his skin from then on. Later meets with it's second prey's Lord, a member of the samurai caste, and now it has a samurai skin and so on and so forth and next thing you know you have an impostor as the governor of a city. When you deal with a Bog Hag you can't trust anyone because you don't know for sure who the hag really is or whose skin it is wearing. You can run a very interesting game full of intrigue with an adversary like that.

As you all can see this is not useful information, this is not a complain, this is not the story of the time I used a Bog Hag on one of my games. Why am I telling you all this? I know one, oh yes I do.

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