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Maxymiuk
2007-02-05, 11:35 AM
I'm currently busy designing a calendar for my homebrew campaign, and while it's by and large ready, I've hit a snag concerning its social aspect.

Namely, what would be the typical holidays of celebrations of a pseudo-medieval setting that is D&D? I thought up a few, but I think it's way too few. What I have so far is...

Celebrations recognized throughout the continent:
Midwinter Feast, a.k.a. New Year's Eve.
Harvest Festival in the Fall
Empire Day - the setting is a former continent-spanning empire and this is a mythical "founding day" still celebrated here and there.
Lovers' Meet - a lunar holiday that happens every 64 years when the two moons align in the sky with the bigger "behind" the smaller. *cough* It's a fertility thing, alright? *glare*

Regional/local celebrations:
Emperor's Birthday - celebrated in the capitol. Since the empire fell apart and the last emperor was assasinated, it pretty much became synonymous with Empire's Day
First Bounty - the port of Verga throws an all-city feast after the fishing fleet returns with their first catch after the winter storms.

Aaaand at this point my inventiveness pretty much ran out. So I'm asking for help. I also need possible holidays for various cults of the PHB deities, though those are a secondary concern.

Thank you in advance. :smallsmile:

Telonius
2007-02-05, 11:38 AM
I'd go with seasonal and religious themed holidays. Spring festival, right before they go out and plant crops. Some sort of games competition in the summer. Depending on the dominant religion of the area, various saint, prophet, high muckity-muck days to mark significant events in the religion or kingdom's history.

headwarpage
2007-02-05, 11:44 AM
What you've got is pretty much the sort of thing I use. If you want more detail, invent a history and have celebrations to commemmorate various things.

Alternately, with so many gods, just about every other day is the festival of Saint So-and-so. Naturally, not everybody observes all of these, but there's almost always somebody celebrating something. The ones of the religion the king likes get more legitimacy, but every time you turn around, there's a bunch of people dancing around throwing streamers at each other.

Yakk
2007-02-05, 12:26 PM
Most reasonably high-tech societies are built up from farming societies.

So, last harvest, last planting. First harvest and First planting also sometimes work.

Next, time-keeping festivals. These have use -- by making sure that everyone knows when the time-keeping festivals are, you also know when it is time to do the harvest/planting/etc:
Celestial events that mark time -- 2 equinox, 2 solstice. Sometimes these align with the changing of the seasons.

Days based off lunar cycles since those Celestial events.

A "new year" festival is also useful, and it doesn't have to be aligned.

Weather-based festivals -- first snow, first thaw, first rain. These can also be ritualized (ie, it doesn't really snow unless it snows this much).

Large traditional festivals need to be aligned with times that people can efficiently take a break from working.

Once you have a festival, you need to name it -- simply because an unclaimed festival will be picked up by a god-meme or the like.

Then there are the less-traditional festivals -- ones that started after civilization really got going.

Victory celebrations, holy day of a revered emperor, founding of an empire (picked arbitrarially), etc.

Olethros
2007-02-05, 12:42 PM
Keep in mind how hard it is to stay alive in your world. Before the advent of modern "supermarket" societies there was almost always a correlation between the difficulty of surviving in an environment and the number of holiday's a society in that environment would have. Mediterranean societies tended to have more frequent festivals, while Scandinavian tribes had fewer.

Also, bear in mind that in most medieval societies the concept of a workweek, was essentially absent. Festivals were the only "time-off" the majority of the population ever got, and so even in difficult climates, holidays were often more prevalent than they are in modern society.

Thomas
2007-02-05, 12:45 PM
Lovers' Meet - a lunar holiday that happens every 64 years when the two moons align in the sky with the bigger "behind" the smaller. *cough* It's a fertility thing, alright? *glare*

All that furtiveness makes me think this is some sort of insinuation of lunar buggery.


Good job, sir. Goob job.

daggaz
2007-02-05, 02:00 PM
The Day of Fire.

Once every ten years, there is a large meteor shower, visible even in daylight. It lasts for some 4-5 hours, usually starting in the evening and lasting until just after solid nightfall. It is rare, but on occasion a meteor will actually strike the countryside, (see meteor-shower spell for effects).

On this day, peasants everywhere make offerings to their respective gods, and busy themselves with setting various 'wards' against evil and destruction. Everybody is scared to death, and there are strict rules about allowed activities, breaking any of which is sure to bring the wrath of the heavens down upon the entire village. Basically an old-school halloween.

Piccamo
2007-02-05, 02:06 PM
Lunar Eclipses, funerals, and birthdays may be have festivals associated with them. Also, the day heroes performed certain deeds in whatever region may give cause to celebrate.

codexgigas
2007-02-05, 02:22 PM
First of all, the more agriculturally advanced a society is, the more holidays they can afford to have (since they don't need to spend the time growing food). In less advanced societies, what holidays they do have will be religious in nature, since they need the gods on their side to make sure food grows (so in a way, their holidays aren't breaks from work but a different kind of work). Primitive holidays tend to develop around seasonal cycles and in response to natural phenomena. For example, the Caananites celebrated the yearly cylce of death/rebirth that Baal, the sun and fertility god, went through. Also, in agrarian societies, a new year's celebration is more likely to align with a spring planting than midwinter; the year is, after all, structured around a growing cycle.

In more advanced societies, some social force, usually religion, takes the center stage in structuring the year, though many of the old, argicultural holidays are left in place or redefined (esp. the latter if a new religion has taken the place of the old). Religious holidays tend to give structure to community life either through a series of vicarious reenactments of the religion's central story or through a series of religious readings (you can see the former in the Christian liturgical calendar and the latter in the Jewish). Furthermore, in addition to the major religious festivals, you end up with additional minor ones (such as Chanukah). In mideival Europe, just about every day was the feast day of some saint, although these weren't all celebrated in every region.

One more thing. While these are still "holidays" per se, you should also include days of fasting/mourning. You could have the winter solstice celebration actually be a fast mourning the death of the sun. Additionally, there are days, such as Halloween, when members of socities believed that evil spirits were unleashed upon the earth and it was dangerous to go outside.

Matthew
2007-02-05, 03:12 PM
Standard Grey Hawk (and real life) set up is 12 Weeks followed by a 1 week long holiday [i.e. 13 + 13 + 13 + 13 = 52] with one day out of every seven off. Other Holidays should be related to specific historical and religious events, probably interspersed between the week long main festivals.

SpiderBrigade
2007-02-05, 03:54 PM
Also, you need to think about how homogenous your world is. In times before mass media or even regular long-distance travel, there's no guarantee that you'd have the same festivals in every village. Hell, even in medieval or Renaissance times, you had a lot of variation. Sure, every little town in Italy would be celebrating a lot of the same holidays, but the traditions for them would be very different. And there would be a lot of unique celebrations as well, based on local legends or what-have you. You'd also have different Saint's-day feasts being more or less important, based on a lot of factors.

random11
2007-02-05, 04:09 PM
Two holidays I used on my campain:

1) Religous holiday when every man must make a pilgrimage to a holy city at least once in his life.
In this day, every man must bring a small stone that is somehow related to his work (peasents will bring stones from the field, fishermen will bring small pebbles from the shore...). These stones are somehow glued togather to create a huge colorful pyramid.

2) Something that started as a local tradition and ended up as a special day is "the day of insults". The only day when you ae allowed and even encouraged to insult whoever you want without fear of punishment or anger.
The tradition also created local insult compatitions.
(believe it or not, but there was actually a good reason for this weird day in my campain)

other more general ideas are related to miracles, major events like wars and great heroes.

daggaz
2007-02-05, 04:18 PM
Viking kings used a similiar pilgrimage thing to mark the death of a king. Peasants from all over the realms were required to show up, baring stones to be used in his burial mound. The more stones you could bring, the more prestige and respect you showed. While primitive in nature, and only reaching heights of a few meters, the mounds are none-the-less impressive, with diameters of 50 meters or more, and they are still surviving today. When you think about the fact that most of the stones were carried by hand, it is even more impressive.

Stormcrow
2007-02-05, 06:15 PM
I'd take a peek at the Celtic Pagan hollidays, they are spaced with the reasons and they tend to co-incide with special days.

Beltane for example.

goat
2007-02-05, 08:06 PM
Sacrifices!

Got to be a few of the dieties who like a bit of a sacrifice every so often. Give some of the "less honorable" ones special days, when those who are desperate or just generally evil will carry out twisted rituals for favours...

Jade_Tarem
2007-02-06, 12:50 AM
*heh* you can even hijack that one story; "Day of the Sepulchral Night" as long as you have a lunar conjunction holiday, and turn it into a quest - possibly a recurring quest. You see, with all the moons on one side of the planet, that messes with the tides, which hit unprecedentedly low levels around, I dunno, the great dragon-islands or whatever, where a fleeing prince stowed the riches of the entire kingdom when on the run from his enemies at the time of the first conjunction. So he got away with his life but was unable to retrieve the treasure for 64 years, and when that time elapsed his attendants still couldn't find the cave he stored the goods in. Others have gone in search, but some haven't returned - after all, the lunar conjunction and the low tides only last so long...

HealthKit
2007-02-06, 01:55 AM
Mask Festivals seem to be popular for the roleplayers. Think a Medieval Mardi Gras where everyone can party anonymously.