Continuing with the prompts from d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About, today’s is, 04 – Are there any Interesting Holidays/Festivals in your World? I’m going to be splitting these sort of world building responses into two categories. One will reflect my Sunday 5e home game, and the other will be from the setting project I’m starting to work on, tentatively titled the Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King.

Holidays in Cambodia Ptolus. There are holidays, but man, I don’t keep good track of the date. I know, I know, “YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” I keep track of the passage of days, particularly as it relates to crafting and events and such, but I haven’t been reconciling it with the calendar. It’s a land of perpetual summer and one big religious festival early in the campaign. I guess I should, but I want it to be game-able. “The streets are crowded with revelers celebrating the Feast of the Axe” is colorful, but doesn’t engage the players directly. I should 👏🏼 do 👏🏼 better.

The Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King. Of course there are holidays under the hobgoblin king. They tend to feature military parades and long speeches espousing their right to rule the lands to the south, of their need for living space and for revenge upon the enemies that stole their land in some imagined past. It’s all incredibly distasteful, but it’s raw meat thrown to the ignorant. They are a people poised for war, and they must be kept in an excited state.

There are also secret holidays observed by the hobgoblin sorcerer cults. they meet in the dungeons below their towers and commune with their patrons in the chaos realm. While the sorcerers serve the king, they do so in further service to a greater cause. War will not bring order and subjugation without first bringing ruin, and within that void, chaos will be strong.

The southern empire’s calendar is stuffed to bursting with feasts and holidays to keep the rabble from growing restless and to impress the proper order of society upon the uneducated. While demigod worship is on the wane, the One True Way must be ever reinforced while avoiding the impression of oppression. Most folk will never run afoul of the empire’s paladins, even if they maintain a small hidden shrine to some old, decrepit demigod. The One True Way lives, and it will see the demigods dead, and the triumph of each death will become a new day to be celebrated.

The northern lands have holidays to mark the passage of the seasons, when the snows begin to recede and the ice breaks upon the lake, when the fields and forest grow rich with life, when the long days push back the shadows of the mountains, and when the unsettled dead beseech the living to help them rest.Some demigods inspire days of reverence and offering among their followers,, while others do not have such personal relations with anyone.