Every spring, in villages and towns across the Slavic world, people still build a straw woman, dress her in ribbons, carry her out singing, and drown her in the river. Every winter she comes back anyway. This is her story, from the sources, and the reason a card game about death and return carries her name.
The name family is old, and it keeps dark company: it shares a root with old Slavic words for death and pestilence. She is the personification of winter as the death of the year, the season that starves the field and stops the water. To call her a villain, though, is to misread the whole tradition. The folk did not fight Morana. They saw her off, formally, respectfully, once a year, in one of the most remarkable rituals to survive from the pre-Christian Slavic world.
The rite is documented since the Middle Ages and alive today. As winter ends, a straw effigy of the goddess is built and often dressed in real cloth, sometimes in bridal white or in ribbons and beads. She is carried out of the village in procession, with songs, sometimes dunked at every puddle on the way. At the water she is undressed, and drowned; in some regions she is set alight first and burns as she floats. In many places the procession returns carrying a decorated green branch: winter carried out, spring carried in, both halves of one gesture.
The medieval church tried to stop it. A fifteenth-century synod instructed clergy not to permit the custom of carrying around the figure "they call Death" and drowning it, an instruction remembered chiefly because it did not work. A rite that survives its own prohibition by six centuries is not a superstition; it is a load-bearing part of how a culture thinks about the year. The fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Długosz, listing the old Polish deities, recorded Marzanna among them, matching her to a Roman goddess as chroniclers of his era did; scholars debate his equations to this day, but nobody debates the ritual, because you can go and watch it this coming spring.
MORANA: The Open Grave is built on the same wheel her ritual turns. When a Spirit is defeated in the game it is not removed: it crosses face up to the Nav, the open underworld row, and returns changed, for one less Ember. Death is a crossing, the grave is public, and the wheel always turns: once per turn you may even freely offer one of your own Spirits to it. Her card, Morana Death-Bringer, waits in the Grimoire with the rest of the First Turning, and the tale behind every card in the set lives in the folklore library.
She also gave the game its calendar. The saga's festival sets, the Rests of the Ten Worlds atlas, are named for the turning-points of the folk year, and one of them is hers: the Rest of Maslenitsa, the season when winter's effigy goes into the water. A game about her could hardly skip the one day a year she makes the news.
The folklore on this page summarizes traditional and public-domain sources on Morana, Marzanna, and Morena and the spring effigy ritual; regional details vary, and the medieval references are summarized from the chronicle and synod records as they are commonly cited in scholarship. Game details describe the planned First Turning set at campaign stage.