Baba Yaga and the hut on hen's legs
"Izbushka, izbushka, turn your back to the forest and your front to me." Say it to the right hut and it turns round on its hen's legs, and the door faces you. Who you find inside depends on the tale.
The witch of the tales
Baba Yaga is hard to pin down. She lives deep in the forest in a hut that stands on hen's legs. She flies in a mortar, steers with the pestle and sweeps away her tracks with a broom. Her fence is made of bones and topped with skulls whose eyes light up at night, and the tales call her Baba Yaga Bone-Leg.
In some tales she wants to eat the hero. In others she feeds him, gives him a bath and tells him which way to go. In "Vasilisa the Beautiful" (Afanasyev, No. 104) a girl is sent to her to fetch fire and set impossible chores. Three horsemen ride past the hut, one white, one red, one black, and Baba Yaga explains that they are her bright day, her red sun and her dark night. Vasilisa comes home carrying a skull with fire in its eyes, and the fire burns her stepmother and stepsisters to cinders.
Vladimir Propp, who took the Russian wonder tale apart to see how it worked, argued in 1946 that Baba Yaga guards the border between this world and the next, and that her hut is the gate. The hero who passes her test goes on. That reading stayed with us.
Baba Yaga rendered from her 3D model.
Ours
In Forgotten Eras Baba Yaga is an enemy, and Ivan will have to fight her. Evil is too small a word for her, though. We think of her as balance gone wrong: the keeper of old truths, whose riddles cut deeper than her spells. She also knows what the rune of Veles really did to Ivan and the Wolf.
As I wrote her, she feeds on people's will, and she never stops testing what people really want.
The hut is her weapon
Her hut is more than a house. It walks through the forest, blocks paths and hides secrets, and it fights at her side, so Ivan has to face the two of them together. In the forest of the game, the hut on hen's legs is already watching him through the trees.
The hut among the trees, from the current build.
What she carries
Our sculpt gives her sea-green hair under a red scarf, a gold hoop earring and a jade amulet. A rope is wound round her mortar, a ram's skull hangs off her broom, two keys hang from a chain, and fly agaric mushrooms grow out of her driftwood staff. Under the mortar there is a hen's leg.
The hut's concept sheet, drawn before it was modelled.
The hut is also the first piece of Forgotten Eras you can take home. A printable model of Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs goes on Kickstarter from 30 October to 9 November 2026, pay what you want from one euro.
Sources: "Forgotten Eras Weekly Update #5", Forgotten Eras on Steam, 9 October 2026. A. N. Afanasyev, Russian Folk Tales, No. 104. V. Ya. Propp, The Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale, Leningrad, 1946.
