4 thoughts on “There are things in the Deathlands.”

  1. Killing a harvester hag is surprisingly easy. The problem is, that sets free every ghost she’s ever consumed. Of course, when it’s YOUR spirit she’s coming for, you might not have a choice. Just… stay out of the Deathlands, really.

  2. The harvester hag represents a sizable payday for Deathlands scavengers, though they’ll often recruit whispers or rail jacks to help out.

    The trick is to use the lightning hooks and spirit anchors to connect her to a plasmic cage; the damn things are big enough to hold a child, and once they’ve got the energy torn out of the hag they shine like a star, so you’ve got a limited window to get them sealed into the leviathan skin bag before they’ve attracted every hungry thing for miles.

    Still, if you can get it back and sell it to the Spirit Wardens, the payoff is worth six months of spirit scrabbling. The hag even concentrates the energy, it makes a clear-burning lightning oil once processed. 

    I hear that those who stand too close when the lightning oil is burning weep slow, silent tears of blood and occasionally lapse into languages that no longer exist, but that’s really a small price to pay for such high quality goods.

    You don’t have a plasmic cage? Rent one. That’s how it works. Nobody is rich enough to own one, except people who don’t go out anymore. If you were to buy one, you’d have to make it worth your while and go after bigger game out there. Trust me, son, you’re not ready.

  3. Now, when you’re hunting harvester hags, the obvious thing to watch out for is false harvesters. They look like a hag, but that’s just mimicry to scare off ghosts and various hungry spirits: the things are actually bog-standard tentacle monsters wrapped up in old rags, completely immune to your spirit anchors and way too squirmy for lightning hooks to be at all useful.

    Less obvious are the Cold Women. There’s differences in appearance between them and Harvester Hags but really you need to be familiar with both to spot them, and almost nobody’s THAT comfortable with traveling the deathlands to make that claim. Nobody knows quite what their deal is: some say they’re the “demons of the unknown” that the sage-explorer Vyasa wrote of ages ago, but that’s really just wild conjecture. Professionals will keep at least one bottled ghost handy when hunting hags: if you think you’ve found a hag, release it. if it gets harvested, you’ve found your quarry. If not, consider a careful tactical withdrawal from the area in question. Because whatever you were facing, now you’ve got an angry unleashed spirit, too.

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