# Experience Point:  What are you celebrating?



## Fiddleback (May 15, 2013)

I recently had reason to include a Cheese Roll in a Harvest Festival for a module I worked on.  Generally the most successful one's tend to be those that focus on some obscure aspect of the campaign setting.  Like the traditional dwarven Festival of Stone in which dwarves pay homage to the rocks they must work in order to secure safe digging for the next year.


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## ExploderWizard (May 15, 2013)

ANY excuse to serve some pie will do. More pie based holidays please!!!! 

I have included holidays and festivals, religious and other types, in my campaigns. They can serve as a fun break from serious adventuring concerns or play an important part in them. Friendly competitions and tournaments are a great place to introduce new NPCs, some of whom may become allies or enemies later. 

Holidays can also serve as a major focal point for campaign events. They serve as great cover for covert operations and assassinations. Its very important that players have access to the campaign calendar so they are aware of what events are coming up. They may even want to pull off schemes of thier own using a certain holiday as cover.


Also, nothing is better for player investment in the game world than getting to have thier characters become a real part of it. In addition to the fine idea of having players contribute holiday ideas at the campaign's formation, don't forget that actual campaign events can create new holidays or change existing ones. If the PCs save an entire kingdom from disaster, why not declare a new holiday named in the groups' honor.


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## Umbran (May 15, 2013)

Um, the last town-sized celebration in my game was a wedding between two PCs.  

One of the wedding "gifts" was a jumbo-sized, undead-fossil, fire-breathing Utahraptor.  That PC's family are... kind of jerks, you know?


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## Nytmare (May 15, 2013)

The Scarred Lands came prepackaged with a handful of holidays, along with where they were celebrated, why, how, and by who.  In addition, all of the holidays linked to cosmological events are also tangentially tied to the magic of the world and an assortment of various world saving and ending rituals.

It was really interesting to see how easily my players' brains adopted the whole "8 year olds before Christmas" mentality weeks ahead of time when they knew that there was an in-game party on the horizon.


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## Radiating Gnome (May 15, 2013)

I had a DM who's most important record-keeping and campaign tracking tool was a calendar -- I found that really interesting, and while I don't do it myself, usually, I like the idea that it kept the game grounded in the game world in an interesting way. Seasons mattered. Holidays happened. Travel between locations took a specific amount of time, and that mattered.  

At the same time, he didn't always communicate about the calendar very well -- as players we didn't always think about the days that were passing, etc. That was more than 10 years ago, and technology has moved along quite a lot since -- it might be interesting to see calendar tools for campaign management tools like Obsidian portal.  

-rg


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## Fiddleback (May 15, 2013)

Kingdoms of Kalamar (3.5 ed.) had extensive calendars and holidays and a variety of other things in their supplements.  Amazing details just waiting to be exploited.


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## Nytmare (May 15, 2013)

Radiating Gnome said:


> I had a DM who's most important record-keeping and campaign tracking tool was a calendar




Yeah, it was nice, we used to have our campaign calendar up on the wall of our game room, and we'd kinda use it as a diary and write little notes as to what happened when.  When the month was done, I'd type it up, swap in the cleaned up version, and put up a new blank month at the end of the line.


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## diaglo (May 16, 2013)

i think i take for granted that everyone does what we do...

when running the Keep on the borderlands. i had the owlbear with eggs. some of the eggs were infertile and small. some of them not. so the PCs saved those and cooked the other nonfertile ones.

i served omelets for the session.

in other sessions: i had Claudio Pozas draw a wedding scene for the group. i also contracted Claudio for a dryad in heat pic.

drinks, snacks, birthdays for the PCs we do them all.

and yes, there is a calendar in the campaign. updated on our website.


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## Umbran (May 16, 2013)

diaglo said:


> i think i take for granted that everyone does what we do...




Well, no. And for good reason.

Back when we were all in college, running 8+ hour sessions each and every week, we could use that kind of color.  Doing a Deadlands mini-campaign?  Sure, we'll research period foods, and cook a real meal for in-character eating, and so on.

But now I'm running weeknights, twice a month.  I have the players at the table for much less time than I used to, and have less free time day-of-game than I used to have, what with that being-at-work beforehand.  So, our ability to pull off such stuff is significantly limited.

If follows into the session design as well.  I've got only a few hours with these people, I have to make them count.  There's no time for color that doesn't have much to do with the actions they're pursuing.  They're adventurers - they don't get holidays off!


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## Rel (May 16, 2013)

That's an interesting point, Umbran.  I wonder if the scope and length of the campaign factor into how much time folks are willing to invest in this kind of flavoring.

Again part of my input on this was from Piratecat who is well known for planning his campaigns to run half a decade minimum.  I almost never run anything planned to go longer than a year.

I still think it is worth doing but more as a seasoning added to the entree of the adventuring rather than a dish all by itself.


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## aco175 (May 19, 2013)

The AP for Isle of Dread a couple years ago had a holiday called Wormday, to celebrate the destruction of Kryuss the past year.  Presumably the players had characters in that AP and are now getting kudos for this with new characters.  I wish I had taken some of these past events to make new holidays, even if they are more local in nature, like when the town was saves from the goblin invasion 10 years prior.


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 19, 2013)

The last in-campaign celebration we had was the Feast of Blood.

It was the celebration of how the PCs saved a village from a pair of night predators- based on the Tsavo lions- by draining a little blood from each villager and covering the wizard in it as bait in our trap.  Worked like a charm.


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