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Author: WanderingBrowser

Feb 12th 2014 at 8:58:01 PM

A tabletop game addition:
* Throughout the various editions of TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons, the monsters known as hags (literally an entire [[WitchSpecies species]] based on the WickedWitch archetype]] depend on mating with humanoid males to reproduce. Typically, such men are mind-controlled or fooled by the hag using shapeshifting to assume a more pleasant form. They are often eaten or simply murdered once the hag is done with them.
** It's implied that hags can have more unique offspring by mating with certain kinds of fathers, such as powerful demons.
** In TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms, hags can also have male offspring of a rather different nature called Hagspawn, as well as hag daughters.
** According to DragonMagazine, in "standard" 3.5, a Night Hag's daughters are born totally normal and must be subjected to a long, complicated ritual before they enter puberty in order for them to become Night Hag's in turn. Disrupting the ritual ruins things and leaves them trapped as humans forever. Night hags normally bear far more daughters than they ever intend to transform, simply to ensure they always have some spares to fall back on.
** In TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}, a hag's daughters form an entirely unique race called changelings, who need to be deliberately transformed into hags, otherwise they remain their own race. It's never clarified whether changelings can breed or not, or what happens if they do. When they first appeared in the Carrion Crown adventure path, it's mentioned that hags can bear male offspring, but no further details on them are given because hags [[EatsBabies always consume them at birth]].
* In various games, most notably TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons, [[HarpingOnAboutHarpies harpies]] depend on humanoid males to fertilise their eggs, though some instead give them much rarer males who are kept safe for just that purpose or else let them reproduce asexually. In the TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} setting, specifically, harpies depend on humanoid males to father their daughters, but tradition expects that they eat them after doing so.
** TabletopGame/{{Ravenloft}} features a monster called the Red Widow, a giant, sapient, shapeshifting [[OneGenderRace female]] spider that mates with humanoids to fertilise her eggs. Then, taking this trope more literally, she paralyses the father, implants the eggs in their body, and the hatchling spiders eat him alive from the inside out like parasitic larvae after they hatch.
** The TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} take on the [[{{Youkai}} jorogumo]] has pretty much identical modus operandi.
* Nymphs, dryads and various other "fae" of a similar nature are commonly depicted as needing to couple with mortal men to father their daughters in multiple games.
* {{Medusa}}s are commonly portrayed as relying on human males (usually petrified after the act) to produce the next generation. In TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons, even though male medusas do exist in 2nd edition, they are so rare that most females have no choice but to rely on human fathers. In 3.x, TabletopGame/{{Eberron}} removed the rarity value and made male medusas as common as the females, a footstep that 4th edition followed.