The Dancing Hut

During the boom days of 3e, I bought a lot of third party d20 products, many of which saw heavy use in my games. I haven’t bought nearly as many third party books for 5e, but a few months ago I did pick up the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga from the Dungeon Master’s Guild. We started this adventure back at the end of March and just wrapped up, having played for about a dozen weekly Roll20 sessions. While not a shot-for-shot recreation of Roger Moore’s classic AD&D treatment from Dragon magazine, the new Dancing Hut certainly captures the wild and wacky feel of the original.

This was a fun adventure and I was reminded again and again how satisfying a weekly game can be: the players quickly got into a groove and the sessions ran more smoothly with each subsequent session. Dave Coulson did a nice job of reworking the material from Roger Moore’s original into a new and entertaining 5e adventure.

In many ways the Dancing Hut is the ultimate funhouse dungeon, an interdimensional space that does not obey normal laws of geometry or logic. And Baba Yaga herself is an exceedingly powerful figure, nearly on par with a deity, and has spent millenia wandering throughout the multiverse and across several alternate realities. As such, her Hut is filled with all sorts of wonders and marvelous creatures.

My players quickly understood the terrible threat posed by Baba Yaga, and as such they took great care venturing through her Hut. They used their very best manners when interacting with the Hut’s often bizarre inhabitants, an approach that served them well as they navigated through the outer rooms.

Much of the fun in playing through this adventure is watching the players try to figure out the rules connecting different rooms. The non-linear layout can be disorienting and strange, but because the relationships between rooms are consistent, the experience isn’t quite as frustrating as might be expected.

Each of the outer rooms has some sort of interesting inhabitant and set piece. Although a few of the creatures are actively hostile to explorers, most are indifferent and some are even helpful—but all are fairly memorable. Coulson does a nice job of sketching out these personalities and providing brief roleplaying notes.

Coulson also suggests a handful of adventure hooks that can be used to provide motivation and direction to the PCs. While I would highly recommend that DMs use at least one of these hooks, I would give the players plenty of opportunity to explore the Hut before starting to tug at those hooks.

The Palace in the Forest, a site I created for the adventure. The image was generated using Dall-E.

I have only a few quibbles about the adventure. There are several stray references to monsters and items not in the core rules, but no indication which book they appear in. (This may be a restriction of publishing through the Dungeon Master’s Guild.) 

I would have liked to have had a little bit more direction as to what each inhabitant knows about other rooms in the Hut. And while Coulson provides great guidance for the initial encounter, there’s little direction for what might happen on repeat visits to the same room—something that can happen a lot given the non-linear structure of the Hut. A simple random table might help mix things up and create a sense of dynamism. For example, on 1d6: 1 - Inhabitant is gone, 2-3 - Inhabitat is still engaged in initial activity, 4 - Inhabitant is irritated by the return of the PCs, 5 - Inhabitant welcomes the returning PCs, 6 - Inhabitant is engaged in a discussion with 1d4 Chickenfoot Ogres.

But all-in-all, this is a solid and enjoyable adventure, well written and professionally laid out. The quality is easily on par with the top-level third party publishers from the d20 era. One of my players evidently enjoyed the Hut so much that his character, the Bold Salamander, elected to stay behind and serve Baba Yaga in her gladiator pits (!). While I never saw this turn coming, it made total sense for the Salamander and was a fitting end to the adventure.