Baba Yaga Bog Oak

$303.00

Carved from 5,000-year-old Eastern European bog oak and housed in a hand-finished Black Walnut reliquary engraved with Baba Yaga’s chicken-leg hut, this ten-dice polyhedral set brings Slavic folklore to your gaming table. Each die bears a wickedly scrawled numeral, while the reliquary features a curling bog-vine engraved lid with a built-in soft suede lined dice rolling tray.

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Do you dare to enter the world of the Baba Yaga? Carved from oak that slumbered 5,000 years beneath an Eastern European bog, these ten dice polyhedral sets carry the stories of ancient forests in their weathered grain. They are nestled inside a handcrafted Black Walnut Reliquary whose lid bears a low relief engraving of Baba Yaga’s house surrounded by curling bog vines ready to ensnare the unsuspecting traveler.

These dice are crafted from Ancient Bog Oak that spent several millennia soaking in an Eastern European swamp. The dark, fetid waters of these swamps preserve everything from oak to historical artifacts, even ancient humans, such as the Tollund Man or the Elling Woman. Each face of these dark and twisted dice features a wickedly scrawled numeral unique to this dice set.

Born of Eastern European folklore, the Baba Yaga first appears in Slavic texts from the mid 1700s. She’s a mysterious fearsome crone who devours the unwary on one hand, and on the other she is depicted as a wise elder who grants cryptic guidance to those that win her favor. Her name combines “baba,” meaning “grandmother” or “old woman,” with “yaga,” a term linked to horror, disease, and malevolent spirits, encapsulating her dual nature of grandmother and malevolent spirit. Over centuries, storytellers like Alexander Afanasyev wove hundreds of tales around the Baba Yaga portraying the witch who flies in a mortar wielding a pestle. In these legends, she stands as the guardian of liminal spaces, the keeper of ancient wisdom, and the ultimate test of courage for any adventurer who dares knock at her door.

The Baba Yaga is fabled to live is a particularly unique hut. Said to be perched on chicken legs, her house is the inspiration of many of the moving houses and even castles (and yes we mean THAT castle) in modern fictions. The inspiration for the Baba Yaga’s chicken legged house is actually a structure unique to the Slavic fens. In these marshy bogs, its difficult to find dry ground, so they built their store houses and out buildings on the stumps of trees to keep them dry. We’ve chosen to depict the Baba Yaga’s hut in this manner as a nod to the Slavic craftsman who’s work would eventually inspire the moving castles of today.