wanna make a hag bbeg but the stat blocks make them way weaker then i want

[Salgood]

Hey im dming a campaign and love hags in lore and the idea of them but I've actually ran them but i planned on making a hag bbeg but the highest challenging rating I've found for them is cr 6 so i was wondering if there were any other stat blocks i can pull from to make a challenging bbeg for the party

[Razade]

Give them Sorcerer Levels.

[Psyren]

Templates! That's the easiest way to power up a monster.

Not sure which edition you're playing, but assuming PF, a fun set to use are the "creature class templates" which give a monster level appropriate class abilities (e.g. spellcasting) without you having to pile on a bunch of caster levels. For example, your Hag could become a Druid Creature (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/templates/simple-class-templates/druid-creature-cr-1-2-or-3/) and gain a bunch of druid spells, a wisdom boost, as well as potentially a wild shape ability if it has enough HD, giving your hag a nice swamp witch flair. This spellcasting might also stack with any the hag already possesses, depending on the one you're looking at.

[Saintheart]

Question is: how lazy do you want to be, and what sort of BBEG do you want the hag to be?

If you're looking for pre-baked creatures that are hags (or have 'hag' in their name) there's a couple of options out there already which are higher than CR 6:

Night Hag (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/nightHag.htm) - CR 9 - MM1, p. 193.
Shrieking Hag - CR 10 - Unapproachable East p. 64.

But the question is whether you want the hag to be a commander of a force, a spellcaster, just a big melee combat brute, or whatever. What sort of enemy do you want it to be? That will change what approach is the right one for your final encounter.

Take the simplest difference, the Annis Hag (CR 6 and likely what you've been looking at) and the Night Hag (CR 9). Annis Hags are just straight-ahead brawlers looking at their stats, Night Hags are much more about debuffing and casting. And so require different approaches to combat.

If you've got a "base" in mind - e.g. the Annis Hag because it hits people - and you want to customise the monster a bit more, then you've got 3 potential ways to do it under the rules:

(1) Stick a template on it, as Psyren said. This is a fairly straightforward and low-calculation way to improve a monster and so is fairly popular.
(2) Stick class levels on it, in which case you need to work out what class works best for it.
(3) Advance its Hit Dice. This is a bit more fiddly and doesn't give the creature a lot of additional abilities, but it also preserves a monster's monster-ness while still (theoretically) allowing it to take on higher level parties. And note that - at least in the case of the Annis Hag - you're not "meant" to advance it by HD because the statblock doesn't allow for that. (You can, of course, but it's hacking the rules and it makes it a bit tougher to work out what the resulting creature's CR actually is.)


Self-promotion, but I did a guide on the tools available to improve 3.5 monsters. You can find it here. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?650844-A-3-5-DM-s-Guide-to-Using-and-Improving-Monsters) Or by all means ask the questions here.

[Troacctid]

The Daughters of Sora Kell are three powerful half-fiend hags with class levels from the Eberron setting. It shouldn't be hard to transplant them into whatever setting you're using. Fighting all three of them at once should give you a pretty solid EL. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20161101150323/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20041025a

[King of Nowhere]

Common ways to improve monsters are
- adding healt dice. They give lots of tankability, not much offence. Use them too much, and the monster will just be an ineffective pile of hit points
- increasing base stats. Always good to give the elite array to a boss monster, but only works up to a point
- adding class levels. Self-explanatory. Problem with powerful monsters, they may end up with low level useless class abilities and low level useless monster abilities
- gestalting class levels. A possible solution to the problem above, you give the monster class abilities without giving them (too many) extra hd
- adding items. You'd be surprised how much of a difference they make. Beware that those items will almodt certainly be looted by the party

[Clause]

A were x, night hag will be a full and solid BBEG.
And if you put a coven: lich sand hag, werewolf night hag and a greeenbounded conjured green hag?