Dream Pastries

These pastries look and taste like small mincemeat pies. Made with the bones of the innocent, the hags’ dream pastries allow Barovians to enter a trance, wherein they can escape to heavenly places full of joy.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

A creature that eats one in its entirety must succeed on a DC 16 Constitution saving throw or fall into a trance that lasts for 1d4 + 4 hours, during which time the creature is incapacitated and has a speed of 0 feet. The trance ends if the affected creature takes any damage or if someone else uses an action to shake the creature out of its stupor.

Significance

When adults can no longer afford the hag’s dream pastries, the hags offer to trade their pastries for the Barovians’ children, thus preying on the adults’ selfishness while acquiring the ingredients they need to make more pastries. This is how the hags sow corruption in Strahd’s domain and why they don’t take the children by force. The hags are interested only in children who have souls. They prick each child with a needle; if the child cries, that's a sign that the infant has a soul.

Rarity

Very Rare, only made by hags

Weight

.5 lbs