B: One of the strangest (and most interesting) things about holidays is how they take on lives of their own, separate from the events that inspire them. To some degree, this can be attributed to the simple passage of time: as yearly customs become annual traditions, there will be more and more people who weren’t around when the event being commemorated took place, but have celebrated the holiday regularly. And while some of this will be from folks simply being born too late, there will also be people who are newcomers to a region, and they’ll bring their own customs and traditions (yearly, annual, or otherwise) into the mix - and that, one could say, is when the party really gets started. While there are certainly a lot of misinformation and assumptions about how customs related to Christmas, just to name the highest profile example, came about, the fact is that we get a wonderful mish-mash of practices from around the world that people love to engage in… they’re all just “Christmas” at this point, and that’s wonderful. Even when celebrants don't know where something came from, they enjoy taking part, and look forward to doing it again.
A: There are two obvious places to put these types of celebrations in your game. You can make it the focus of the gaming session, putting your party square in the middle of one of these events. Alternately, you can put them in the background flavortext - an approach I think that tends to be forgotten. Unless it's a plot point, you don’t often see things like weddings, funerals, births, etc. going on in imaginary worlds. Certainly, as in our own world, these things must happen all the time, and likely many just as frequently. The problem you may run into, though, when including these as setting flavor descriptions, is that it may pique your players' interest. While this kind of engagement is certainly something to strive for, make sure you're prepared for the possibility. When deciding the celebration you're featuring in the background, jot down some of the names of the people involved in it. If the event is a funeral, the players are going to want to know who the deceased is, maybe something about their life. For a wedding, they’ll likely want to know about both the bride and groom, and possibly be interested in crashing the event. What adventurer isn’t interested in the possibility of free food? Flavor celebrations don’t have to be limited to more active “single day” events like birthdays, weddings, and funerals, either. One could imagine an Andorian Heritage month or the annual Neverwinter Cabbage Appreciation Month.
Having these celebrations in the foreground is something else to deal with entirely. You’ll need more than a few details to be ready. While we have spoken of holiday events once or twice, any of our real life events could potentially become the setting for your next adventure. Plenty of drama and mystery can happen at both weddings and funerals, and there is no reason you shouldn’t bring that to your tabletops. Just thinking about the things that happen in our real world month of November, the drama around Black Friday and Cyber Monday could certainly be the centerpiece for a tabletop session. Certainly, players are likely to want to get the best deals they can with their earnings. That puts them right in the middle of the action of Cuthulu enthralling shoppers, thieves performing a heist, or any sort of riot or other thing you might actually see in real world stores.
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B: As Americans, we grew up in a culture deeply rooted in puritan values that denounce idle fun and insist that, if a celebration must occur, it be linked to a specific life event or holiday and follow standardized guidelines - as a result, we don't tend to have festivities for their own sake the way other countries do with annual celebrations and festivals. We all know Mardis Gras, but that, of course, is an import from the Catholic French, and associated primarily with a specific region. New Year's Eve, while it can certainly be raucous, is also quite formalized and structured (with a set schedule even, how efficient). Thankfully, Halloween, it has been pointed out, is finally starting to fill the role of more free-form celebration where people of all ages can cut loose a bit and have fun simply for its own sake.
The reason I'm bringing this up is not (only) to point out a strange blind spot in American culture, but to suggest that we, as creators, try not to carry that over into our own imagined worlds. There's no way we can totally free the places and peoples we create from our own biases and experiences, but by being aware of them, we can push past the expected into something interesting, unexpected, and, well... fun!
A: So please, all of you, celebrate at your tables! Bring it into your flavor text (but be prepared to follow-up!). Make celebrations the focus of your next adventure, and give your players an occasional reward to bring real life celebratory joy into the game. In a way, these games we play are celebrations themselves, even without those added bonuses. They're a gathering of our friends to tell stories of the glories of long, long ago (or have yet to come). A chance to have fun together. At least, that's what it's like at the tables I enjoy the most. So, I hope it's beginning to look a lot like celebrations at your own tables. Until next week, enjoy your dice, your tables, and your friends. Celebrate good games. Come on. Its a celebration!
Send questions, comments, and invitations to bizarre and esoteric festivities that blur the line 'twixt revelry and ritual to neversaydice20@gmail.com or "X"-tinguish your concerns by reaching us at @neversaydice2.
