Realistic Fictional Holidays || D&D Worldbuilding
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- This time on MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill (gotta talk about myself in the 3rd person for the algorithm to be friendly) talks about creating your own holidays and celebrations from scratch for your fictional setting.
Here are those festive worksheets I mentioned: drive.google.c...
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Her: "What's the number one thing humans tend to do when they are celebrating?"
Me: "Drink."
Her: "We tend to sing!"
Me: "Right yes, we sing, yeah that. Singing. Mhm"
Her: "What's the number one thing humans tend to do..."
Me: "Drink."
Her: "...when they are celebrating?"
Me: "Oh, specifically, uh..."
And the more we drink, the better we sing, right?
Made a festival to go along with my Dwarven city that was the product of a PC seeking out a new mountain for his clan to move to. It’s a 3 day celebration that begins with “new homes day” and ends with “new friends day” originally it was just the dwarves holiday and it was obviously a day to remember the bravery of that PC who founded the city, and traditionally its a day you announce big decisions like professing love, breaking up, leaving a job for another, or literally moving homes. The new friends day came later because despite the leadership of the city and the local tribe that had existed in the mountains before were on good terms, the peoples were not as quick to accept they’re neighbors as friends, so the more tribal leader encouraged a day where the two would get together and share a meal where you’re encouraged to sit with someone you’ve never met before (I get that it’s hokey, but it fits the personality of the leader to a T). A century or two later and they still get together to race goats, eat quiche, and drink way too much.
Don't worry, Dael! I didn't see this video until late October, so you're right on time!
Yaaaas! A new Kingsmill D&D video! Just what I needed to combat the stress of returning to work this week. :-p
This is the video I didn't know I needed
Festival episode pls
Now I'm hungry for holiday food XD
Came here for a D&D video, left with a degree in sociology and anthropology. Loved every minute of it!
+
Lmao
Real talk, I need to listen to these videos twice to absorb but it's worth it
The lesson I feel Dael is trying to teach: Celebrations exist as a separate set of differing social customs we abide by that contradict or stand away from the mundane procedural social customs we perform in daily life. Neither sets are cosmically dictated or forced upon as as the laws of societies and celebrations are only put upon by each other. Ultimately we are playing two different games, the game of society, and the game of celebrations, and we perceive time differently in each.
What I'm hearing: Nothing you do actually MATTERS, go commit crimes! Jog around the mall! Go in restricted sections! Mulled wine...whenever!
Nothing is real! Everything is permitted!
Ah! Daely life, it was right there!
Chronos is a strict progression of cause to effect, and kairos is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff
Broke: I’m always late because I’m irresponsible
Woke: Keeping track of the linear flow of time is difficult for me because my ADHD-PI causes time blindness and memory issues
BESPOKE: I AM A CONDUIT FOR THE WILL OF KAIROS
Totally stealing
I love the way you enunciate your name, as though to differentiate yourself from that annoying Dael Emperorsbakery people are always confusing you with.
Andre Goran or Dael Lordcobbler, gotta set yourself apart!
I always have to continue to remind myself to distinguish our Dael from that Shahworks gal
if i had that cool of a name, i would do that too :D
HOW AM I JUST NOW REALIZING THAT THE CHANNEL'S NAME IS ALREADY A PLAY-ON-WORDS OF HER NAME?
@@oldmanhiver3766 Holy cow! I only just realized it as well
Midsummer usually is a happy celebration, but what if we use the opposite of Xmas & Hanukkah & make it a pseudo-Halloween?
if, at the shortest day of the year, the celebration of light happens; at the longest day, the decay of light is mourned, so it becomes a long family day where dinners are served very late, for every hour of sun must be enjoyed with the people that they love.
because of that, the idea of having already achieved one's life summit, and one can only go down can be expressed with "this was my life's midsummer".
That is absolutely fantastic
yes, I'm trash for this!
I'm about to use this, thank you!
It's wild that holiday episodes came in last. My absolute favorite thing to run in D&D is a _stealth holiday episode_ where the players don't figure out it's a holiday episode until the end. My players know this now, but it only makes it more challenging. I've gotten away with it more times than you'd think.
Thanksgiving Roc, finding a colony after killing the big bad elephant stealing bird, starving on the slope of the peaks, & figuring out that their dead god is now feeding them?
@@FlyingAxblade_D20 I think the first one was an Easter weekend. They were in the Underdark, and had found a magical library(Gravenhollow, if you know _Out of the Abyss_ ) so I had their xorn guide(whose odd _hopping_ gait I went out of the way to describe) bribe them with prizes for finding colorful bismuth-like geodes around the library and feeding them to him. Basically a library-sponsored Easter Egg hunt. The grand prize was a long-eared golden mask, a magic item with abilities based on dying and coming back from dying.
Later, on the game closest to X-mas, a mafia boss with a striking resemblance to Santa had them break into a police station and steal a document containing the names of members of the mafia who had turned informant(a 'Naughty List'), and enter an asylum through the aquifer "chimney" to stage a breakout. He rewarded them with common magic items that _reeaally_ resembled kids toys if you paid attention. They didn't pay attention, and at the end when I gave it away I got a "Aw, *motherfucker*, you *did it again!*" The finest praise I could ask for...
Oh my gods this is the best idea ever. I need to put this sort of thing off in my campaign. Thank you for the inspiration!!!
@@RaggedVentures DMs like you are truly a treasure bestowed onto the material plane for us mortals
Ah yes, the three worst things that can happen to someone: birth, death, and marriage.
A few months ago I was working on an Arctic setting for D&D and had a couple of holidays called First Light and Last Light. Just thinking about the whole idea of months of daylight and darkness thing. Last Light was a mixture of Mardi Gras, Halloween and Krampusnacht that was celebrated the last week before Winter with the hopes of both preparing everyone for the dangers of winter mentally and emotionally (big fun party with pranks and boasts and wild behavior) as well as trying to scare off the evil spirits that haunt the darkness during the next few months.
This will certainly improve my afternoon. Also, I love the idea of liminal time. A lot of my worlds have a day or a few days that are non-days. Days that exist between calendar days, etc. They are a non-time.
That reminds me of the proposed International Standard Calendar, which breaks the year up into 13 28-day months and 1 (2?) non-days that are special holidays.
Linimal days are interesting. The Zoroastrians had special intercalary days (Gatha days) between the end of one year and the start of another which were part of a long holiday. I think I have seen it referred to as an intercalary month (of 5 days) in some sources.
born before the first freeze? all those people celebrate their birthday at first harvest. born before the first flower? all them celebrate midwinter. after first flower? celebrate first flower. born during the heat? you celebrate on traditional hottest day...as calculated by wizards with their Hg thermometers. So everyone has the same ageday. Also, helpful for figuring out your characters aging. What if half elves grew up as quickly as humans (the human curse) but stayed elderly for an extra century? They'd have a ton of ways, not to cheat death, but to make old as fun!
I was also thinking about births being marked by the season, not the exact date. I feel like it would fit best with long-lived races, where the couple extra days mean even less. Perhaps for the community-oriented dwarves, a less individualistic marker makes sense.
@@MGDrzyzga yer an old man too =) more zz top in your playlist, LOL
I know that in certain cultures (here in the real world) birthdays are celebrated at New Year. So someone 51 weeks old and 1 week old can both be the same age if their births fell between the same two changes of year.
I also know that ... some of the debate about how literal the bible is surrounds the word(s) that got translated as "year", with some people suggesting it meant "turn of the seasons" and thus all the elapsed times given should be divided by 4.
What I'm saying is, maybe it isn't just that all people born during growing season celebrate their birthday at harvest, maybe everyone keeps count of how many seasons thay've lived more than how many years.
Did anyone else find the phrase, “freshly minted fictional festival” strangely satisfying? I don’t know...maybe I’m just a maniac for alliteration masterfully managed.
It's iambic pentameter i'm p sure, and english-speakers usually find that nice to listen to (hence Shakespeare writing a tonne of it)
Re: winter solstice and other seasonal holidays - the DragonMech setting is interesting there, because its seasons aren't based on "hot months, cold months, and transitional months" like that, but "high water on the flood planes, low water, and the transitional seasons." Which also makes me ask: IRL, what are the seasonal holidays from cultures that divide it into, say, monsoon season or dry season? Or any near-equatorial.
DragonMech I was able to wrap my head around the seasonal differences because high water and low water correlate with the nomadic traders. Which makes them holidays of plenty (harvest festival?) and holidays of want - a solemn time awaiting the next haul. You did help me consider how to better flesh out the Highwater Festival:
- Since it's different nomadic merchants crossing paths again for the first time it years, this could be a story swap time. Games of telling tall tales are traditional. Maybe even improv games, where each teller has several random prompts to incorporate. Heck, if the prompts are generated by literally throwing darts at a board full of ideas. Maybe your dart-throwing/archery skills pick your opponent's prompt, so you can try to screw them over with a hard prompt. But only if you're skilled enough at darts.
- Since it's various nomads, fusion cuisine is typical. A dwarvish spin on a halfling dish. Lembas bread piled high with orcish BBQ.
Given fish people (slathem) are in the setting, maybe another oddball fusion could be sushi confit? And maybe another ritual could evoke the dust on all these travelers as they come into town? Oh! I know! One of the traditions could literally be one from my family - the morning before, scrub your hands and face with coins in water. I grew up being told this was a Polish tradition for the morning of Christmas Eve. Every Polish person I've met who isn't immediate family has been like "WTF are you talking about?"
Off to go write an esoteric holiday celebrating the liminal transition of when a hill becomes a mountain!
On celebrating funerals... Some cultures that is a more intuative association than others: e.g. wakes in Ireland or the Southern US...
I love this and was working on one the other day. My concept is for a secondary location that is meant to feel much more old-fashioned to my players. The holiday is a hunting festival that doubles as a time of courtship. In a very sex-segregated society, this festival is a time for the young people to work closely together in processing the pelts/ curing the meat. The young men string necklaces from the teeth of their prey and present these necklaces to the girls they fancy. It is a way of flattering the young ladies but also of demonstrating what sort of resources they possess. At the close of the festival, there is a feast where the whole community gathers together to eat the meat and have a mass wedding for all of the young couples.
Just a note on "solstice" holidays: They are usually celebrated some number of days after the actual solstice or equinox is seen to happen. This is due in part to the fact that how we measure time, and when the solstice/equinox happen, are not always in sync.
Jeff Eppenbach Isn’t it much more of a historical thing, than a sync-thing? It wouldn’t be difficult to place ChristmasYule on the 21st or 22nd; then we’d never be far off the actual solstice.
...hold up Dael, Australian Monopoly money is made of plastic‽
Jokes aside I am running a very holiday heavy campaign so I am watching this twice and it is really helpful.
In my world I have two unique holidays fleshed out so far.
An island culture celebrates the “blood tide” once a year. During the beginning of spring, there are massive blooms of red algae. This algae works its way up the food chain and is toxic to humans. These people fast for a few weeks, eating only from their food stores and the few edible plants in the ecosystem. They see this time as a period of reflection and punishment.
Another culture, significantly more inland, celebrates the one time a year that a specific mushroom sprouts amoung the forests. These medicinal fungi are harvested on a single day before they wither and die. The coming of this curative mushroom is seen as a blessing from nature and a reward from their praise
Woah for a minute there I thought you were describing something in the real world. Cool!
In my world, there’s like, two main holidays that most folks celebrate, revolving around the exploration of the world and the processes necessary: in summer, it’s a time for traveling and meeting new people and exchanging ideas and celebrating the new, while in winter they return home with their spoils from adventures and give them as gifts and celebrate being back home and the familiar. I did this both to make the vastness of the world historically and culturally relevant to the people involved and also because I’m a sucker for Christmas and any analogue I can fit into my world so my characters can celebrate it is a winner for me lol
This is really good timing. I have been working on a homebrews pantheon, thanks to your video on the subject and others, and holidays are something I was just about to work on.
Same! I've been world building with a creation story and a pantheon and I've vaguely decided how the calendar works and this video is such good timing!!!!!! Thanks Dael!
big brain time boils down to this: Hollidays be special. we like. Christmas time is magic time.
atla's fried dough festival added so much depth to the worldbuilding so I agree wholeheartedly with how important festivals are
When you said we let holidays colonize spaces, I was immediately reminded of the speech by comedian David Mitchell about how every December, Britain undergoes occupation by the nation of Christmasland.
I have that sweater too!! It’s my favorite Christmas sweater, I agree it’s super hot but worth it!
Dael I know this is a D&D channel, but I watched this video back when it first came out and I regularly think about, and appreciate it. I’ve gotten pretty jaded about holidays in general - seeing them as mostly a waste of time and money. But this video really made me appreciate them again for what they are and get excited about celebrating again. Thanks for all your energy and life and excitement.
Im a bit late to the party but I wanna share :D
I always run the Feywild as a place closely aligned with seasons and times of the day (like dawn for spring), so you have for example your spring court who is in charge of renewing life after winter or the Autumn court holding somber processions through the forest putting all the hibernating animals to sleep. I also love the concept of Gods being created and formed by worship and beliefs.
So about Seasonal Holidays in a Fantasy world: I really enjoy the Idea of them being old rituals whose initial purpose are mostly forgotten by the majority of people.
So what if Seasonal Holidays are ancient Rituals to appease/help the Fae through gifts and worship and are tonally aligned with the seasonal Courts? You might have some old Druids getting angry with common folk for not keeping up the spirit of the Holiday, angering the related Fey or even alter their nature by a change of worship.
One Holiday I came up with would be the Last Reap's Dusk Festival in the Autumn in which people would hang leftover bundles of wheat on their doors and put bowls of berries in front. So those that are brave may put on animal masks, collect the offerings at dusk and stray them around in the nearby woods. Basically mimicking or assisting the processions of the Autumn Fey.
Which is kinda similar to Halloween after thinking about it again, maybe some less traditional villages trend towards it being more and more like Halloween, while noticing an alarming amount of angry animals in the winter and late Fall.
I hope you like it!
19:20 this awkwardly reminded me of how people criticize Tolkien for presenting too much alien information and describing them too thoroughly and, on the other hand, critize Sapkowski for example, for stealing too many ideas from the real world and saying his writing is "cliche". I guess my train of thought shows too things: being a fictional writer is f*n hard and people are never satisfied anyway.
You tackled a big one there. Good job. The theory you explained here was part of the "religion and phylosophy in early childhood education" course i had in school and it surely wasn't easy to grasp for a lot of my fellow students.
On another note: One of my favourite fictional holidays is from the first pen and paper game I played. In this one (DSA, a german system), the year is divided amongst The Twelve, each getting the domain over 30 days, starting at the equivalent of July is the leader of the pantheon, the sun god. And then it goes on and on through the whole pantheon. But! But there are 5 days left, 5 days after the twelfth god had her turn and before the new year starts again. 5 days without a patron, 5 days without a name. How fitting that the big bad amongst all the gods, The Nameless One, claims these 5 days. Tradition amongst most cultures demands that you will offer shelter to any traveller who otherwise would face these five nameless days on the road. Only a fool would plan a journey, by foot, horse or ship, over the course of these days without a secure plan to spend these days indoors. The weather will get unpredictable, freak storms plague the seas, it might be unseasonably cold for summer, the sun might not be seen at all. It is the time for all evil does to do their rituals and offerings, unsuspecting folks might find themselves at the wrong end of a ritual dagger. But it's also the time for community to band together, share food and shelter and tell stories of better times or for the more daring ones, creepy scary stories of curses and ghosts.
No surprise that on the first day of the sun god's month the biggest gaudiest shinding is thrown all over the continent. Because, whew we made it again to another year.
I don't actually play D&D but I just really wanted to watch something so on a whim, I put on this video because I watch your myth videos and I'm really glad I did! I had no clue I would get to watch a super interesting discussion of the liminal and abstract concepts of time. :D
Dael was always obviously very knowledgeable, but in this she shifted gears from "here are some neat facts about mythology" to "here are some sociological, academic insights into the human experience of time" and I'm not ashamed to admit I was a little intimidated. I understood, don't get me wrong, but I haven't had to access those parts of my brain since college ended.
Dale the editor, thank you for your eloquent summary of what you were trying describe take 1. I feel that the focus on player investment rarely even addresses the topic of intuitively associative authenticly within shared imagined environments. Collective player investment through shared intuition in worlds only imagined is more easily built than actively maintained. It appears to me that cohesion often correlates to the personal depth each player's life experiences and expectaions with unconscious and recognized associations spanning all strata of human activities.
Doing One's best to create a collective narrative with other people through means of only words can often be very difficult. I as a GM now only notice that my festivals and other rp cultural events have been difficult to describe in games while maintaining active, immersivive, and collective imaginative experiences.
Love the shoutout to the shorthand. Lore written out is always a very different thing than the experience of of its subject.
I love this video, especially your checklist for determining the flavor of the holiday. I think i'll use this to improve some of my own work :D
Also, sweet potatoes and yams are actually two different plants, but they are often used interchangeably. Yams are the "poor man's sweet potatoes", but they're plenty good in my opinion.
Great video! As it applies to tabletop RPG'ing - a good immersion tool might be the inclusion of a commodity (wheat let's say) as the driving force behind the celebration. The players can then collect or compete to acquire it for bakers or brewers to kickstart the holiday while feeling included in the purpose behind it. Before the orcs attack, of course
Thank you for making this video! I loved your deep elaboration into the aspects and patterns between holidays. I'd been rolling ideas about time, seasons, and holidays in my head for a while - especially when we're talking about D&D races who probably have different senses of time and have vastly differing lifespans (e.g. elves, dwarves, etc.).
Sat down for a D&D video. Got a graduate level lecture in anthropology. Well played.
OMG so happy you're back and healthy! This is so appropriate since I've been building the two calendars the world uses and did the holidays in a vague way to build around. My players are rolling for their birthdays too. So this is cool :D
I'm watching this at 11 at night. The talk about time made me very confused. I'll watch again tomorrow morning when I'm less tired.
It makes more sense now.
Anyone else hear that KSP in the background?
Amazingly timed, I also love holidays in my setting and as I am doing prep for the session next Saturday we have stumbled on a convergence of such times. The city they have been in for a while celebrates an event called The Halcyon Days Festival, which is a big party honoring when the cities initial construction was completed despite a massive storm threatening it at the time. The Festival itself takes place over 4 days concluding on the full moon. The final day also happens to be the summer solstice. So there is a lot of opportunity.
(The city is called The Drift and was built on the open sea. First from salvaged ship parts and donated functioning ships, then bonded two a massive coral reef that was grown by druids and raised to near the surface. The two sections anchor each other and the city serves both continental surface races and "merid" aquatic races with various levels of the city both above and below the surface. Its been expanded and built upon since)
Soldiers of The Hierarchy in my setting celebrate the Long Feast during the summer solstice and the Long Fast during the winter solstice, marking the turning points in the war between the twin (dnd) gods of Heironeus and Hextor. I maintain that as Heironeus (who is good) gains ground the days get longer, but as Hextor (who is evil) begins to win the days get shorter.
Another odd one is with the Kingdom of Terras, a human nation, they are extremely lawful culturally, to appease their primary (dnd) deities of Wee Jas and St Cuthbert, they use the summer solstice as a Day of Judgement, executing those guilty of heresy by burning them on pyres. The common folk also honor another deity with the Right of Yielding , which encourages forgiveness and empathy. This was adopted by the government to appease the public by issuing 1 pardon for each hour of sunlight, as long as the offended invokes the Right of Yielding on the inmates behalf.
I just discovered you today and have been binging your channel since. I didn't think I'd care about creating fictional holidays when I started this video, but man you were just so psyched about it! You completely sold me on it and now I want to start my campaign with holiday preparations. This was awesome to watch haha (also I'm now subscribed because of this video)
I love this stuff , definitely going to toy around with the ideas in this video!
In my own sorry excuse for a home campaign I introduced one of the "big themes" through a holiday of sorts: one of the PCs looks sort-of like a "father christmas" kind of figure. Which leads to confused but overjoyed reactions in every village they visit: children start singing songs and softly implied that they are hoping for presents, even though it is "out of season", but regardless, the welcome is always warm, and the PCs are treated like heroes by default. And, of course, there is going to be a plot twist, because there always is, but so far it's made for a couple of really amusing social encounters :-)
So, the hardest part of this video is that I (as an American) didn’t know what a bunch of the less world-wide holidays she mentioned were
The only one she really mentioned was ANZAC day, which to an American is basically Memorial Day. She also mentioned Samhain in passing, which is a Celtic festival celebrating winter's coming and the start of the new year. Oh, she also mentioned a Buck's Night which Americans would call a Bachelor Party.
Swystem Ah, I guess I just haven’t looked into holidays much and don’t really know that many at all. Which does not surprise me about me
Honestly this is the first I've heard of either Invasion Day or Australia Day, and quite honestly even as a non-indigenous person, I'd still look at Australia Day in a sad light. Partly due to empathy, and partly due to Colonization having a nasty habit of destroying local customs and culture, which I've been interested in since I was little (especially when I decided to research my roots and found that a solid of Celtic folklore was destroyed).
I like to do one of two things for shorthand holidays is either keep the moral change the season, or tweak the moral, keep the season. An example could be, you might have a Autumn Festival that is about Gift Giving and Togetherness, as that's when you have the most resources to go out with. Or you might have a Winter Holiday that's about Community and The Home. They both tap into a similar Christmas spirit, but also don't feel like exact copies, especially if you tie in extra cultural aspects, such as me having a City of people who predominately wear masks, so they may switch their mask to a particular Patron Saint, or they may hang ornaments on their masks like Mistletoe or Bells, stuff like that. Think about your Region's Religious/Cultural Identity then softly weave that in, a lot if they are hyper religious or if it's a particular religious holiday, or only a little if it's a secular society or a more secular holiday.
I may have a topic only you could give the ammount of flavor I need fot my game.
HOW DO GOLEMS GET FORMED? Are they all made? Or do they happen?
Btw I'm narrating Curse of Strahd for 5e and I included your mechanics for ghosts when my characters get to Death house (Mission 0 basically). They got SO into it! Can't wait to bring your wretched Redcaps into the fold
I ran PF2E adventure during the final day of the setting's "Burning Blades" festival, a devotion to Sarenrae. I had flaming-sword dance exhibitions (canonical) and evening feasting (inspired by Ramadan, since Sarenites are kinda Golarion's not-Muslims), but I totally didn't think about *decorations.* (And the Burning Blades feast was, in fact, a nice break-point from the adventure clock, just as Editing-Dale said.) Nice video, Dale!
I always get like 2 seconds of immense confusion when people talk about Christmas being on the 25th. In Scandinavia (I think that's the only place at least) Christmas is celebrated on the 24th. In the evening. My understanding (and I could very well be wrong) is that around Christmas time, the vikings already had a celebration. They called it jul or yule (Christmas is still called jul in Denmark, and I believe the rest of Scandinavia), referring to the wheel of the year, that was now turning from darkness to light. We were celebrating that light was coming back to the world. Then missionaries came and converted us to christians and was like "sure, no problem, just celebrate the light of the world instead (AKA Jesus) and it's cool, you can keep your party". That's why we celebrate Christmas in December even though Jesus was born in spring. And That's why we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, because the lights are so much clearer in the dark.
Excellent video, Dael! I love these 'Cliff Notes Anthropology' episodes.
Another aspect to consider when designing a festival might be "what did this used to be?". Festivals often change significance or meaning over time while maintaining the older forms- the obvious example is how Christmas as it is celebrated is in many ways a Christian paint job over various pagan holidays. Was your festival always religious/secular? Was this or that custom always the case? Are there people who don't like the way it has changed (or how they think it has changed). To draw an example from my own experience, my parents dislike Halloween, trick-or-treating etc because "we never had it when I was young, we just had Guy Fawkes Night" (I'm British) and "Its an American thing."
Another fun thing to think about is how the same holiday can be celebrated or contextualised differently in different societies. For example here in the UK most major Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are public holidays, but holidays of other faiths like Ramadan, Divali etc are not; exported from their home culture, these holidays then gain an additional context as expressions of solidarity among a minority group, as Christmas and Easter are of the majority group, which is a reverse of their 'home' contexts as expressions of majority-group communitas. Maybe this festival is of a culture that is not the majority in this city or kingdom- how does this affect its celebration compared to in its home context? How do the majority group feel?
Revisiting this video* with a specific goal in mind:
A post-post apocalyptic setting. Pondering what holidays might evolve from people thoroughly immersed in nerd culture trying to keep alive old our touchstones after we lose any ability to rewatch classic movies/anime/etc. I am *totally* inspired by Reign of Fire, the kindergarten play recreation of Empire Strikes Back, the only way we're keeping Star Wars alive.
*I said rewatching, but really, I'm adding to my queue, the opening the video solely to post this comment.
For a lot of Irish American people we eat Corned Beef and Cabbage on St. Patrick's Day (in addition to beer). Apparently, if you ask people in Ireland about this they have no idea what this is about. My understanding is that corned beef is actually a Jewish food, and it's just what poor Irish immigrants could afford for St. Patrick's Day.
Anyway, I was thinking about this as an example of how different places in a setting could celebrate the same holiday differently. The same way Easter looks extremely different for devout catholics than it does for families that decorate with Easter Eggs and Bunnies.
I like to incorporate fantasy holidays in my world.
Some are holidays like Summer Solstice, Winter Solstice which are to do with the planting and harvesting of crops and some are traditions like Children's Day, Old Folk's Day and Memorial Day.
Individual races have unique holidays such as Forge Day for the Dwarves which is sometimes celebrated by other races (Dwarven holidays are the most popular as an excuse for drinking 😜)
OMG dm to dm THANK you to talk about something else than the coolest way to kill your players Christmas style!!!!! Thank you for being an example of being a mature and smart DM focused on the big picture, the little things, monsters and players. Thank you for putting yourself out here !
Random idea: 1) Is it a racial, class, or alignment holiday? During that day those of the appropriate race, class, alignment are 1 level higher for the day. 2) Clerics would abound that day and be casting spells en masse for the celebrators. Appropriate Clerics can refill all spell slots once, in essence doubling their number of spells for the day. 3) Creatures of the appropriate race, class, alignment would also be out en masse that day. Perhaps St.Cuthberts Day is a Paladin day, and pegasi abound that day, the Clerics at the local church cast Shield of Faith on all Paladins for the day. Hallow’s Eve is a chaotic evil holiday, and the undead rise from all graveyards and ghosts abound to haunt the living. Danddeaster is a druid holiday, clerics cast purify food and drink all day, during that day feywild creatures abound. 4) For individual holidays like birthdays and weddings: For birthdays it is a tradition to cast a wish spell, perhaps activated by blowing out a candle. For weddings, if the bride wears something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue she can cast Protection from Evil. Stuff like that.
RE your point around 8:00 - Look at the movie Christmas With The Kranks. It does show how those unspoken rules of festival time function by showing it being broken.
⚠️ SPOILER ⚠️
An entire community neighborhood has a long list of rituals that, while agreed upon in the beginning, become individual actions of community. When the Kranks decide to skip Christmas and plan on a cruise vacation instead, it is seen as strange and an attack on the community. But once the plans change and the Kranks have to put on their holiday party on short notice, the community not only bands together, but they switch into an unspoken agreement on what needs to be done. Jaime Lee Curtis’ character hears their daughter is coming home, and her first reaction is to put on a sweater she wears every year. They get the Hickory Honey Ham they were missing, the Frosty on the roof goes up, and the only coordinated activity they need to discuss are the things that AREN’T normal, like delaying Blair and her fiancé from arriving.
Public holidays are by and large about fostering community identity and reenforcing the larger society to which t's members belong. Every culture on the planet will always have a communal celebration on or near the solstices and equinoxes, even if there is no sacred holiday associated with the date/season there will be a secular festival (that's why New Year is such a huge deal in the former USSR where Christmas was not politic to celebrate under the soviet regime) and the nature of the holiday/how it is celebrated will reflect an aspect of the culture (Halloween is an Angry Ghost holiday whose traditions are about banishing spirits and reenforcing boundaries between the living and the dead, The Day Of The Dead is an Honored Ancestor holiday and reenforces the connection between living family and the family waiting for us beyond the veil). The planting and harvest of the local staple crop will turn into a public festival, the date/season has a practical purpose (get everyone together for work) but it becomes an excuse/opportunity to reenforce local social identity.
Also, the subversion/inversion of social norms on holidays is used to reenforce them the rest of the year (Boxing Day and The Feast of Fools give ceremonial power to the lower classes/servants on the holiday).
Now, Holidays are tricky for an literally underground culture. However, in the world I am building, the Drow celebrate the Ablation ritual, which consist of cutting and ripping the newly formed wings of the young Drow. The apparition of wings appear between the ages of 17 to 22, with an average of 20 (biological equivalent of 10 in humans). The reason of this ritual is because Elves need moonlight for their wings to become functional and healthy, otherwise they rot. Since Drows lost that access due to a past genocide, they perform the Ablation.
It is culturally sanctioned and performed at the Temple of their spider-goddess of Healing. The wings are fed to the sacred weaving spiders. It is performed in public. After this, the youth is taking back to any family or friends they might have and is given their first taste of alcohol, mostly to help them relax after this stressful event, as well as lots of clean water to drink and to wash off the blood and other fluids from their backs, with cold-dried mushrooms as a snack. They are also bandaged with spider-silk, pieces of fabric they will treasure for there entire lives and wear on the anniversary of this ritual. This ceremony marks their way out of childhood and into adolescence, where they have almost all the legal rights and responsibilities as adults, except the right to vote and the right to sign state contacts, which is reserved for heads of house, (the Drow practice suffrage by household rather than individual voting).
The ceremony of Ablation is mostly solemn, state-sanctioned, religious and traditional. It is rather aspirational but also memorial. It is singular and integrative. It is both public and private, as it is a personnel matter, but the ceremony itself is done in public, in a highly crowded area.
Brilliant video. May I add a dimension? As indicated by the etymology of the word holiday, before our modern, secular era, religion was an important dimension for holidays (and everything else). For those of us trying to create an enchanted world from the vantage point of our own disenchanted world, this is easy to overlook, but also a key to creating verisimilitude and integrating your world's religion into its cultural events. Under the heading of gifts, what about gifts to the gods (sacrifice)? What prayer or religious observance is associated with the holiday? And to really integrate it into your lore, is there a myth from your pantheon that gave rise to the celebration? For example in my world, the goddess of winter and air, with her husband the sky god, held a Festival of Winds consisting of one day of martial contests, one day of artistic contests, then a feast. The event was a seminal moment for several other gods' stories (too much to describe here), culminating in a marriage of the god of martial discipline and the goddess of marriage and agriculture (hearth) at the feast day. So now communities hold their own three-day Festival of Winds every winter solstice. It's common for marriages to take place at the feast day.
I wanted to also say that I was in a bit of a creative drought creating my pantheon until your video on pantheons kick-started me. Now I've been stuck creating holidays beyond that first one and I think this video is exactly what I needed. So thanks!
I like the inclusion of funerals here as a form of holiday because when we think about it most of the celebratory aspects you mention as the second half of the worksheet apply too. Decorations can be flower wreaths and religious symbols, clothing can be wearing black (or another colour), artistic can be traditional hymns or something like the New Orleans marching bands, generosity can be making donations in someone's name to a charity they cared about, and of course also through food in that many cultures have a tradition of bringing food to people in mourning (where I'm from it's baked casseroles and other easily-reheated simple meals).
Just a bit from the real world on variant liminal times.
Or variant branding?
What I mean is, there is fairly widespread celebration of the longest day, the shortest day, and the two times each year where day and night are exactly the same length. But we disagree on what those days mean.
In England, the Winter Solstice is the middle of winter. In America it is the BEGINNING of winter. And the Summer Solstice is the middle of summer in England but the beginning of summer in America. And the Equinoxes similarly mark the middle or beginning of their respective seasons depending on where you are.
This means that England has space for a batch of transitional holidays that America doesn't, while America has space for a bunch of celebrations of the middle that would happen around those dates.
Just a guess here, but you said the bottom result in the poll was "holiday episodes" not the holidays themselves.
I've seen a number of cool fictional holidays in tabletop or online RPGs.
But I've also seen WAY too many lame adventures where "We're fighting zombies. Because it's Halloween." or "Would the fact that we have to deliver packages to all the children in the town in the middle of the night have anything to do with the fact that it's December?"
Playing sessions where the characters get swept up in the festivities of the holiday in the fictional world can be awesome. Adventures themed around the trappings of holidays from our world, especially those where the characters are supposed to mimic some of the mythology surrounding them, tend to suck.
Great video. I’ll definitely be re-watching this later. I’m really enjoying your channel. It’s superb.
At the end of the video something got me thinking: You talk about creating holidays with similar traits to real world ones, so players can cross the bridge between reality and the imaginary setting you're playing in. So hear me out: If you have an extra-weird concept you want to show to your players, do it with a holiday. This can also work with newcomers that are not familiar with the world of D&D (or any other game/setting).
So, my idea is to first introduce the holiday in a descriptive manner: "You reach a space station. When you land your vessel, you look through the big windows of the main hall and notice red and green adornments hanging inside the... ". Here, your players get it: This is (for example) space Christmas. They are sort of right, they got what you wanted them to get -but you never said "this is Christmas", because this is fiction, this is its own holiday.
Then you can show some customs and traditions that deviate from the ones that the player know, just a little at first, but more and more while the session progresses...
And then you can plot twist your players with a crew of space miners that worship a lovecraftian, spaghetti and meatballs deity from another dimension. By that, I mean that you can show the weirdest part of the holiday, that coincides with that extra-weird thing you wanted the players to get familiar with.
As for public vs private holidays, look at the medieval tradition of saints days. It was a public list of days in which Catholics celebrated the lives of specific saints with common celebrations, but you also chose your PERSONAL saint to celebrate as your namesake. So it was like a second birthday of sorts as well.
So I came here expecting some basic worldbuilding advice and hoping for a nice story or example Dael came up with. Instead, I was shown a conceptualisation of time in relation to holidays. Not only does this channel never disappoint, it regularly surpasses even my hopes for what it can be. Thank you very much, this is great!
Another thing to consider with regard to holidays and celebrations is the scale of the celebration itself. Is it just the village/city celebrating something which might expand to smaller villages if it's a bigger city and the surrounding area, is it national, regional, or what.
Having a founding day celebration for a village and a coronation day for a country are things that fit rather well and might have traditions there.
Hell, you could even have a play with things for a Coronation Day thing where the traditions might shift by the gender of the monarch...
I cant stop coming back to your videos!!! Along with the great info your personality is great! It feels like im listening to a friend talk about there passion! Also your smile is captivating seeing how much love and energy you ha e behind everything you say (sorry for bad spelling if any, dyslexic and atuo check has given up on me :') )
I am currently creating an underground metropolis and I quickly realised that many of the traditional holidays, which often concern harvest cycles or the phases of planets or stars, are very hard to relate to a subterranean culture. Any tips on how to create liminal holidays when mosty of the days in the year are more or less the same?
Hmm... Maybe events of significance would impact the way of life and thus culture of the underground-dwellers: The migration of herds of game, if society relies on hunting, tides of an enormous lake in terms of trading or consumption, or cyclic, devastating geological/magnetic phenomena? Plus, any eco-system large enough to sustain a humanoid population could have it's own seasons, of sorts, clouds of mushroom spores etc. Truely an interesting setting.
Have you looked into geology? I think seasons could be noticeable, particularly in terms of water supply. Consider where their sources start. The amount of snow and ice melting in springtime could make a difference. Consider relation to the ocean. Is the city directly beneath an ocean, a mountain, a lake, a desert, a volcano? What are their light sources? Maybe a bioluminescent bug or creature lays millions of glowing eggs or glowing larva appear or larva turn into glowing beetles at a certain time of year. (Not a holiday-idea, but if you haven’t already looked into it, pondering the effects of radiation could be a source of inspiration in general.)
The world I'm working on now - a sort of cross between Theros, Brothers Grimm, and the Otherverse by wildbow - has a holiday in the starting town at the end of harvest where all the women and kids get a break from reaping the crops to make, essentially, a giant pizza, which is cooked open-air, then consumed by everybody in the town for dinner. (also there's a local witch who emerges from her forest domain who takes the opportunity to paint luck spells and health spells and peace spells and perception filters into the pizza with a jar of sundried tomato paste which doesn't run out until she's done)
At around 6:30 you do a great job of synthesizing the bakhtinian Chronotope! I really want to do a video some day of how language and chronotope help establish genre/narratives and can be useful for verisimilitude in d&d and roleplay. You do a really good job of this already it would just be neat to tie in some literary theory and linguistic anthropology. Love your stuff!
I can't tell you how many ideas I got for my campaign from this video, including for things that have nothing to do with holidays. You are a river to your people. Now I understand why December always seems to drag on forever to me. I thought it was just fatigue from listening to all those terrible Christmas songs or commercials.
I know this is gonna get buried but I just want to throw it in there that actual historical holidays are really wild. Roman's were known for having some celebrations like painting a generals face red during a triumph, or parading statues around to different locations, or having their senators strip naked and whip people with the entrails of a sacrificial animal for good luck. Greeks also has lots of festival/celebrations often involving the feasts of sacrificial animals or the sacrificing of animals for a good omen. Like this got to the point that the kings of Sparta had to do so many sacrifices they had to impose a tax on every litter of piglets (I think it was like thousands of pigs).
Although, on the point of public vs private holidays/festivals, different greek 'cults' had rules on who would attend. Some holidays were only for men or only women or certain initiates (the mystery cults). For instance the cult of Atrimis at Brauron was for chosen young girls to dance like bears and wear a saffron robe.
Now while these are real festivals they are also really strange to modern eyes. So when it comes to world building it would be easier to use these festivals as inspiration for cultures that are similarly very different from our own or to represent some form of culture shock.
Here in the USA, we celebrate Thanksgiving by eating turkey, potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, apple pie, and sweet potato pie. What are yams?
isn't monopoly money made of paper?
I liked the idea of the first bloom of a particular plant being a holiday, but instead as you suggested of it becoming a static date. The festival doesn't start til the bloom is found. So the party could come across a village where the children and adults with some free time are all scampering about looking through underbrush and around trees etc. The frantic chaos might have some fun campaign hijinks
Wait, do other people experience time itself differently during holidays and festivals?
Like, is that a thing?
I'm only 6 minutes into this video and yet she's speaking so authoritatively and confidently about the changing of the passage of time during a holiday that I am genuinely starting to believe her- or believe that she believes it to be true. That's not a thing for me. Is that a thing for y'all?
You could get complicated with it. For example you use Christmas a lot. Christmas started as a Pagan holiday but Christians adopted it. Because England was very Christian, it became a staple holiday. So now those who aren't Christian but are in a nation that was colonized by England celebrate it because it became a tradition. You could say that non-Christians adopted Christmas for their own holiday. They then take traditions that had reasons in Pagan traditions that were adapted to Christianity and use them. So one religion took another religions traditions. Adapted those traditions to itself. Then people with no connection to either religion used those traditions ignoring any religious context. Whilst creating their own traditions. Or you could keep it simple and have the people who celebrate that tradition be the first to start it. So you don't have to overcomplicate it.
As a side note, have you ever run Hags as the main baddie? (Finding your feywild video caused some inspiration, and now a couple are competing for a position on a coven. So they are causing problems on The Drift. I'd say a city that is just as much under the sea as it is above is a pretty transitional place.
A fantasy horror that takes place during a festival. Some newbies in town aren't familiar with the festival but hear it's a great time. They assume like any normal person would that the "Kairos" version of time is happening, that the time and space they are in are changed because everyone collectively agrees that it's a different experience.
However... It's actually the opposite. The festival is to worship an eldritch god that can literally manipulate time and space...
The visitors cannot leave no matter how hard they try, and the entire event is on an infinite loop.
8:40 The scene in A Christmas Carol (the one with Patrick Stewart) which is a montage of different groups all over Britain and beyond singing “silent night”
This couldnt have come at a better time. Im currently working on a murder mystery quest revolving around a fall festival. Thanks as always for the fun deep dive!
Another top marks tutorial for DM's doing world building - or simply enhancing packaged worlds (like I am wont to do).
In my world, I previously have not had many holiday events... so this video blew my mind and now my mind is churning out ideas! Thanks!
It took you to define "holiday" for me to realise that you didn't mean holiday as in "vacation".
I will say, though, I would love to take my D&D party on a beach trip
So I thought to myself "I want to create some fictional holidays but first I need to understand what makes a holiday a holiday. I should search for Dael's video about it, there ought to be one!"
Holy shit, I love this video! I could literally sit and listen to you talk all day Dael! love the way you explain things and delve deep into detail. You sound like an amazing person to play D&D with and I’d love to have a video of you sharing some of the adventures that you’ve made.
OwO this is the best thing i ever watched! i don't really like learning and stuff but when you explain it it's more like a conversation instead of those other things and you don't speak down to us either! your amazing and i love your persistence! have a nice day and stay safe (stafe UwU) i luv your vids and maybe we could be friends or even meet each over in the future!
Is the background music the space music from Kerbal Space Programme? That's awesome!
"You Don't go to the mall for jogging even though you can jog at the mall" fun fact: In america, people ride their bikes in the mall before the shops open.
Awesome episode, Dael! Going to be using this to figure out the specifics of my celtic-inspired festivals.
And if you're from a poor family christmas was a time when there would be more shouting and arguing among your parents and a lot of unhappy children come the present opening.
Not all festivities are necessarily good for everyone.
22:20 sorry to be annoying 2 years later but... But welcome people without family because of suicides!
It was hard to listen to this with KSP music in the background.. All I could think about was orbital mechanics and little green men!
now I understand why I love snacks during nightly entertainment. Its a celebration of conquering that day, ty!