Armor | Artifacts | Cursed Items | Intelligent Items | Potions/Oils | Rings | Rods | Staves | Weapons | Wondrous Items | Other


Minor Artifacts | Major Artifacts | Metagame Artifacts | Transcendent Artifacts


Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga

Source Pathfinder #68: The Shackled Hut pg. 61, Artifacts and Legends pg. 21
Aura overwhelming conjuration and transmutation CL 30th
Slot none; Price —; Weight 3,500 lbs.

Description

Approximately 15 feet tall and 15 feet square, this crude hut sits atop a pair of gigantic chicken legs that, when not tucked beneath the structure at rest, endlessly pick and scratch at the hut’s surroundings. The life-like legs aren’t the only thing that make the hut remarkable, however. The small building’s only door opens into a room that can be significantly larger than what the structure can naturally contain, for the hut possesses countless configurations of extradimensional rooms that change depending on the hut’s physical location. Nothing that transpires outside the hut has any effect on those inside. The properties and abilities of the Dancing Hut are divided into two categories: the defensive and the transportive.

Defensive: At its most basic level, the Dancing Hut is a unique CR 17 construct. The statistics and abilities of this remarkable creation are detailed below. A creature inside the hut can command the structure to move, attack, use its special abilities, or immediately perform any other function it is capable of by employing the Dancing Hut’s unusual controls, which consist of a brown hen’s egg inside a simple, cracked clay bowl sitting upon a table inside the hut. Both the bowl and egg can easily be removed or destroyed, but both reappear 1 hour later and only function within the confines of the hut. Breaking the egg reveals the head of live and very irate rooster that dies a long, squawking death—and disappears an hour later when the controls reform. Any creature that makes a successful DC 30 Use Magic Device check can use these innocuous controls to command the Dancing Hut. Failing this check causes the hut to dance erratically, potentially trampling creatures nearby, but has no effect on creatures inside the hut. A creature must succeed at a new Use Magic Device check every round to directly control the hut’s actions. The hut can be assigned simple, standing commands to follow, such as to attack any humanoid that approaches, to patrol an area, to head in a direction for a set period, or to flee if damaged, but cannot be assigned commands that require it to follow multipart instructions, recognize specific individuals, or seek a specific place.

Transportive: As a construct, the Dancing Hut can physically move on its own, but it also possesses the ability to slip between planes and even travel to other planets, carrying any inside the hut with it. This remarkable ability is activated using the cauldron within the hut, which links the hut to countless—if not infinite—locations across the planes. To use these transportive abilities, a creature must stand before the hut’s cauldron, place two ingredients inside, and stir the ever-bubbling stew within—a process requiring a full-round action, though finding the desired ingredients might take longer. The two ingredients act as “keys” to a specific destination. Each destination the hut can travel to has a specific combination, or “recipe,” of two keys, which appear to be relatively normal items stored throughout the hut itself. Although the keys appear to be absolutely mundane, only those specific items within the hut function as keys. So while a red apple might be one key, it must be the red apple found inside the Dancing Hut, not just any apple. Like the hut’s controls, keys can easily be destroyed or removed from the hut, but they reappear 1 hour later. In the Reign of Winter Adventure Path, Queen Elvanna has deactivated the keys within the hut to keep anyone from stealing the hut and taking it away from Golarion. Throughout the campaign, the PCs seek out additional keys hidden by Baba Yaga that enable them to control the hut. Since these additional keys were not present in the hut when Elvanna deactivated them, once brought into the hut, these new keys function exactly as would the keys normally found in the hut, in all cases. At no point during the campaign do any of the deactivated keys function; if placed within the hut’s cauldron, they simply disappear and reappear, still deactivated, 1 hour later. Until the PCs rescue Baba Yaga, who can reactivate the keys within the hut, the only way to use the Dancing Hut’s transportive abilities is with the extra keys left behind by Baba Yaga.

Once the proper keys have been placed in the cauldron, the Dancing Hut immediately appears at its new destination, as if it had traveled there via plane shift or interplanetary teleport (Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Magic 225). The hut always appears in the same location at a given destination—the keys are tied to that specific location. Once at a destination, the Dancing Hut can move (or be moved) normally to any other location on that world or plane. Once the hut arrives at its new destination, the keys immediately disappear from the cauldron, reforming elsewhere in the hut.

Each time a new combination of keys is used to transport the Dancing Hut to a new location, the interior layout of the hut changes, as each location to which the hut can travel has its own corresponding layout of the hut’s interior. As the hut travels, these layouts can change dramatically, though every layout contains one room with a cauldron and the hut’s controls, regardless of how many other rooms are present in that layout. Starting with Pathfinder Adventure Path #68, each adventure in the Reign of Winter Adventure Path presents a new layout of the hut, based on the physical location of the hut in that adventure.

When the Dancing Hut’s layout changes, the other layouts still exist, but are inaccessible from within the hut itself. Magic such as plane shift can still be used to visit these otherwise inaccessible layouts, and Baba Yaga herself (as well as certain other residents of the hut) can freely travel throughout all of the rooms of the hut, regardless of the hut’s physical location.

Properties of the Dancing Hut

As a construct, the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga is also considered a CR 17 creature, with its own creature statistics. These statistics are detailed here.

Destruction

If the cauldron inside the Dancing Hut is used to open a gate within the cauldron itself, a rift in reality opens, destroying the hut’s extradimensional interior and sucking in the exterior frame—likely destroying whoever activated the cauldron, and some posit much more than that. Only Baba Yaga knows the recipe to open this self-destruct portal, one ingredient of which is her own left eye.