MORANA: The Open Grave / The Bright Thaw
The radiant half of the First Turning
Set 1 is the dark half of the Turning: the open grave, and the dead walking back. The Bright Thaw is the same broken wheel's radiant half. The crack that let the dead out also let the wonder through, and the goddess rises green with the light. This is the luminous world of the Slavic wonder-tales, the Firebird and the Sea-Tsar and the fern-flower, drawn in gold-leaf. A 24-card first look, not the launch set. The launch game is Set 1, which you can play free in your browser now.
The first cards, illustrated
Prince Ivan reaches up to seize a single glowing feather as the Firebird blazes among the golden apples of the tsar's moonlit garden.
Sadko the merchant-bard plays his golden gusli, and the Sea-Tsar's jewel-bright court of coral and pearl dances on beneath the green water.
A young woman cups the single emerald-and-gold fern-flower that blooms for one breath at Kupala midnight, fireflies over the moonlit river beyond.
In MORANA's cosmology (see the Ten Worlds), the wheel of the year has cracked and the dead walk back. Set 1, the Slavic First Turning, is the dark half of that break: the grave, the drowned girls, the household dead returning cold. The Bright Thaw is its radiant half. The same wound that let the dead out tore the sky and the deep wonder-realms open too, and their light is pouring up into the living world. Morana herself is drowned in effigy each winter and rises green with every thaw. She is not the frost. She is the turning that outlives it, and this is the world of her rising.
Sky is the radiant above: the sun-gods and dawn-sisters, the Firebird and the jewel-plumed prophecy-birds, the horse that leaps to the tower window. Warm gold, dawn-rose, blazing light. Hollow is the jewel-bright below: the Sea-Tsar's undersea tsardom, the copper and silver and golden underground kingdoms, the crystal mountain, treasure that is alive. Turquoise, emerald, amethyst, pearl. Between them runs the Turning itself, the thaw at Kupala midnight where the fern-flower blooms and the snow-maiden melts into light, the bridge that leads straight back to Morana's open grave. It is not a gentle world. Wonder in these tales is dangerous and enchanting at once: the Firebird's feather curses as it gifts, the Sea-Tsar drowns as he dances.
Set 1 is muted, dark, woodcut folk-horror. The Bright Thaw keeps that same illustrated hand, the engraved Bilibin line and the folklore soul, and turns the lights on: Ivan Bilibin meets Alphonse Mucha, radiant jewel-bright color and glowing gold-leaf ornament. Every card is built around a designed foil surface, a blaze of gold plumage, a coral palace, a golden apple, a glowing bloom, so the printed foil actually sings. And every card is a scene, never a lone portrait: a character doing something, with someone or something, somewhere. A story you can read at a glance.
Where Set 1 turns on the Open Grave and Set II on the Retell, the Bright Thaw is built around the Boon: the wonder-tale gift that pays a great reward but carries a printed price, right there in the open for both players to see. The feather that lights the way and calls the debt. The water that raises the dead but must be poured in the right order. It keeps MORANA's promise that nothing is hidden in the rules, only in the bluff. (Design note: the Boon is in development, shown here as a first look.)
Every game of the Bright Thaw is told by a Warden who sits face-up all game and sets your school of play: a herald of the Sky or a sovereign of the Hollow.
Prince Ivan reaching up on tiptoe to seize one glowing feather as the Firebird blazes among a tree of golden apples in the tsar's moonlit garden.
Take the feather and you take the debt. Every wonder in these lands has a price at the back of it.
A golden-armored warrior-queen on a white horse at dawn, banner streaming, the chained shadow of a deathless king at her stirrup.
She is the only one who ever kept Koschei on a chain. She did not do it by being gentle.
The crowned, sea-green Sea-Tsar laughing on a throne of coral, spinning a storm above with one raised hand as fish and pearls whirl through his hall.
He dances when the music pleases him. Up above, that is what they call a wreck.
The sea-king's swan-daughter half-turned from swan to woman on a moonlit shore, one arm still white feathers, casting a lake and a flock of swans from her sleeve.
Every task her father set, she finished before dawn, and never once let him see her weep.
The Bright Thaw is fought over three Sites drawn from these: a night garden of gold, an undersea court, a mountain of glass, a river where the worlds stand open. Learn the ground and you know the wonder before the first card falls.
A walled night garden, a single tree hung with glowing golden apples, one feather of fire caught on a branch, the gilded gate ajar.
Something has been taking one apple a night. The tsar has stopped counting and started watching.
Sadko the merchant-bard playing golden gusli as the Sea-Tsar's jewel-bright court of coral towers and pearl arches dances around him under green water.
The music never stopped, so the sea never stilled, so the sailors never came home.
A sheer mountain of glass blazing under the sun, a tsarevna small and golden at its far summit, a rider on a leaping horse a third of the way up the shining slope.
Halfway is nothing here. The glass gives back everyone who could not reach the top.
A moonlit river, candlelit flower-wreaths drifting downstream, bonfire sparks on the far bank, one green-gold bloom glowing among the reeds.
One night a year the door between the worlds stands open. Bring a wreath. Do not bring a name you cannot lose.
The wonder-tale cast of the rising: falcon-princes and dawn-sisters of the Sky, the frog-tsarevna and the golden kingdoms of the Hollow, and the two who stand on the Turning itself.
A falcon-prince alighting at a maiden's lit window in a shower of light, half falcon and half young man, feathers turning to a gold-embroidered coat.
She wore out three pairs of iron shoes to find the window he flew from.
Two radiant sisters at the sky-gate, one drawing back the curtain of night, one lifting a lantern of the coming sun, the morning star between them.
The Morning one opens the gate; the Evening one bars it. Between them, the sun is only a guest.
A golden-maned horse leaping impossibly high toward a tsarevna at a tower window, sparks and gold light streaming off its mane, a plain young rider clinging on.
Stand before me like a leaf before the grass. Then hold on, and do not look down.
Vasilisa the Beautiful walking a black midnight forest, carrying a skull on a stick whose eye-sockets blaze with golden fire, lighting the path ahead.
The witch's gift lit her whole way home, and burned her cruel stepmother to a cinder at the door.
The paradise bird-woman with a crowned human face and jewel-bright wings, singing on a branch of the golden world-tree at dawn, listeners below frozen in wonder.
Whoever hears her forgets the whole world, and counts it a fair trade.
A tsarevna mid-transformation casting off a frog-skin to dance in the tsar's hall, one sweep of her sleeve scattering a lake, the other a flight of white swans.
Dance first, they said. So she made a lake of one sleeve and a spring of the other, and let them wonder.
A princess in a vast hall of living copper, walls veined and glowing warm, holding out a copper ring to a hero climbing down a rope of light.
The first of the three underground kingdoms. She has waited so long she has learned to like the dark.
The deepest tsarevna in a hall entirely of gold, rolling a single golden egg across the floor toward the traveler, her whole kingdom folding into it.
Copper, then silver, then this. She can roll a gold kingdom into an egg and carry it home in your pocket.
A tiny bright-eyed humpbacked pony with long gold ears carrying plain Ivan low over a moonlit sea toward a distant glow, the two of them conspiring.
Two arshins tall with ears a yard long, and worth more than the tsar's whole stable.
A white deer with gilded antlers and gold-shod hooves bounding through a birch wood at first light, striking sparks of gold where each hoof lands.
Every hoofbeat leaves a coin. That is exactly how they catch the greedy ones.
A flock of enchanted white swan-geese carrying a small boy across a golden sky, a girl racing below past a milk-river and a laden apple-tree.
They serve the witch by carrying off what is left alone. Do not leave a little brother on the grass.
Bright laughing water-maidens rising in a ring of spray where the ice has just broken, garlands in their loosed hair, the spring sun caught in every droplet.
In the dark half they drown you. In the thaw they only want to dance. Only.
The snow-girl at the Kupala fire, leaping the flames the instant she begins to melt into a rising rainbow of light and mist, her friends reaching after her.
She was warned to keep from fire. She wanted, just once, to be warm with the rest of them.
A maiden rising waist-deep from a still river at dawn, crowned and robed in new green wheat and river-flowers, the winter ice melting off the banks behind her.
Drowned in effigy at winter's end, she comes back green at the edges. She is the turning that outlives the frost.
The one-night wonders: the bloom that opens the earth, and the two waters that raise the dead. Great Boons, each with its printed price.
A young woman kneeling to cup the single emerald-and-gold fern-flower that blooms only at Kupala midnight, a radiant halo of gold light behind her, fireflies over the moonlit water.
It blooms for one breath at midnight. Hold it, and every buried thing in the earth will call out to you at once.
A raven tipping two small glowing vials over a fallen hero in a bright glade, one water closing the wound, the other kindling the breath, gold light spreading through the grass.
Death-water to make him whole, life-water to make him rise. In that order, or you have only a very tidy corpse.
The Bright Thaw is an early look at the bright half of the world, its story and its art. It is not the game you buy first, and MORANA publishes at walking pace: no set enters production before it passes its playtest gates, and none is sold before the one before it is delivered. The launch game is Set 1, the Slavic First Turning, the complete box and the free browser duel. The Bright Thaw is here so you can see how bright the world gets, a look ahead, never something the launch set is missing.
More of the world: The founding myth · The Ten Worlds · The Old Tales (Set II) · Play free