Realistic Fictional Holidays || D&D Worldbuilding

hello humans my name is dale kingsmill got a got a bit of a d video for you is it maybe it's just world building i am associating it with with d d but uh but maybe it'll be useful for other things too basically quite recently i put up a poll on twitter asking you know what's your favorite part of a classic fantasy adventure the holiday episode came in last that did surprise me a little bit so even though i didn't intend that poll to be one of my trixie when i was like giants or kraken um everyone voted for the kraken so i made a video about giants that was deliberate this one i didn't intend that when i made the poll but i'm doing it anyway i'm making a video about holidays specifically um making up holidays that feel culturally rich so that way you can sprinkle them in throughout a d d game or a story or whatever thing you're doing and the world will just feel that little bit more lived in this is something i've actually wanted to talk about for ages look at it it's totally the wrong time of year to be releasing this video i should be templing i should be saving this for like october or december or something but i want to talk about it now i'm excited to talk about it so suck it up so i'm going to start by doing an a little breakdown a little examination a little research into um why humans celebrate and the things that we what do we celebrate and that'll give you kind of a grounding and understanding of where it is that i'm coming from a lot of interesting stuff to talk about there and then we'll get to the sort of um shortcut toolkit for making up your own holidays i should say up top um disclaimer i'm gonna be talking about the experience of holidays in a very general sense very mainstream because if i tried to cover like every individual possible experience of what holidays are like we'd never get anywhere so what do we celebrate well according to mihai rusu and uh ismo cantala celebrations are ritual means of socially patterning time so we have our sort of small our micro cycle of time you know we've got our minutes hours days cycle that goes over and over again and then we've got these rituals that take place sort of throughout that that define time in a bigger way the easiest way to think of that is like a birthday that's a really easy way to separate a life into years rather than weeks or days or minutes celebration they say entails an experiential shift from the temporal realm made up of mundane durations to a very different regime where people release themselves from the mechanical dominion of the clock into the flow of festival time oh i love that isn't that a little bit of magic in it ah it's good stuff through celebrations kronos turns into kairos kronos and kairos both mean time but they mean it in different ways kronos being the strict progression of linear time hours and a day days in a week months in a year it's the understanding of time that we all adhere to but we all experience separately we we each have our own lives to live in accordance with the hours available to us kronos is quantitative whereas kairos is qualitative kairos means time in the sense of it has to be now this is the moment the right time for something conceptually it is inherently ephemeral liminal in the process of passing during a holiday we suspend our usual comprehension of time for a construction of time that is understood only in terms of co-joint experiences of connectedness in time and space so festival time only exists because it is a shared experience because we agree on mass that it's different from the everyday there's a concept that i refer to a lot and it's called whizzinger's magic circle i'm sort of skipping to the end a little bit here with this concept but um it can be employed in order to talk about how society is basically made up of a bunch of games when we get down to it really we make up rules and we stick to them we we willingly abide by the rules of the game so take a courtroom for example great example the the one the person at the front in the tall chair with the snazzy wagon they get to tell the people at the two tables what they have to do and those two people mostly they do it because if they didn't there would be socially condoned consequences for that all money in in my country at least is made of plastic and yet monopoly money can't be traded for goods and or services but the plastic stuff printed at the mint can if someone in a park was tackled while wearing a suit we would be shocked or worried or maybe we'd try to break it up but if they're wearing a rugby uniform and holding a football we aren't worried we don't try to break it up these are all arbitrary distinctions that make up our reality just because they're arbitrary that doesn't mean i'm saying that they are silly distinctions or that they are unnecessary or that they are fake even they're real because we believe in them because we agree to abide by those rules society only really functions because of these games so that construction that's the typical order of things where kronos as a construction of time adheres to that order right it's one of those rule sets that we agree to while playing the game that is society kairos as a construction of time allows us to change the rules just for a little bit during a holiday time is out of joint and we lean into that we reinforce it we encourage it in a number of different ways we decorate spaces to physically reflect the shared altered perception of time you know uh it's christmas so let's put lights on all the on all the buildings that habit of decoration is particularly interesting to me where usually time and space occupy different zones of experience festivity disconnects the flow of time and we let time sort of colonize space the spatial experience in a way the two merge for a short time they fuse together allowing the ordinary limitations of space to be suspended just like time so what's an example of this um in australia christmas falls in the middle of summertime and yet we straddle the space of sunny beaches in the southern hemisphere and winter wonderlands in the northern hemisphere and we do it through mix and matched decorations and advertisements and behaviors this jump i i wear this jumper every christmas even though it's hot and why do i do it because i i think of it as being christmassy and because so much of behavior the way that we behave is tied in with how we structure time and space you know on on weekdays you work when you're at the mall you shop you don't go to the mall to go jogging even though you could jog at the mall our behavior is kind of tied to those constructions so when we change the way that we're perceiving time and space our social behavior changes with it we behave in ways that we ordinarily probably wouldn't there's a term victor turner uses which i like it's called communitas communitas suggests that not only do holidays push time and space into liminality but the communities who engage in those holidays as well turner describes those communities as being caught between and betwixt conventional states of social order they are temporary communities of collective joy communities implies the abandoning of regular social hierarchies for a short time we're all in this together we're all experiencing the same thing together so again think about the active community that is putting up christmas lights none of us have to talk to one another in order to organize it we probably will continue not to talk to each other once we've done it even as we travel around and enjoy the results but the individual act putting lights up on your own house becomes an active community someone could be out alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean but if they draped tinsel around on the 25th they too are taking part in this altered perception of time they're kind of transcending space in order to still be part of the community even while separate they would become enveloped in that same communitas they're part of it too in 1914 the first year of the great war in the week leading up to the 25th around 100 thousand soldiers on the western front from all sides climbed out of the trenches they began singing christmas carols they played soccer they exchanged gifts they just collectively decided it isn't wartime right now it's christmas so holidays days of celebration enable us an ephemeral escape from the constraints of both time and space into this other liminal experiential reality a reality that we all implicitly participate into existence with all of that in mind that luminality let's take a look at the things that we do celebrate let's look at some of the big ones the sort of major holiday concepts tend to get grouped into um public holidays or private holidays so let's take a look at some of the biggens at least for my context there tends to be a holiday celebrating the new year we may have different concepts of when the new year begins or how long a year is but we tend to celebrate it when we reach the next one we tend to celebrate spring renewal mid-summer high summer the middle of summer we celebrate the harvest and we celebrate mid-winter we might call them different things the spring renewal might become easter the winter solstice might become christmas or winter's crest or the crystal feast but i would argue that part of the reason that we see these patterns of celebrating the same sort of times of year as big sort of group celebrations is because these are already liminal times look at that you're changing to the new year janus was the god of the new year in rome that's where we get the name of january from it's the transition from past to future you're in a liminal point in time spring renewal we're celebrating the change from death into life the harvest is the change from life and to death mid-winter and mid-summer are these celestial liminal points it's the point where the sun has reached its center whether we're changing from days getting longer today's getting shorter or whether we're changing from days getting shorter today is getting longer they're all liminal times those of you who liked my uh fee acre my my fairy what what's what's the fairy place in d d actually called feywild you'll be psyched to see how this already fits in i talked in that video about how we associate magic with the thinning of barriers between worlds and that tends to happen in liminal spaces and liminal times doorways are a big thing ruins because they're both inside and outside and times of year it's like halloween it's sarwin it's the solstice those are the things that we celebrate it's festival time it's a perfect match so the big public holidays tend to be transitional liminal times but the private holidays are no different they're just a personal limit all time what are the things that we celebrate we celebrate births deaths and marriages i know that that's funny but also it's a great way to remember it and it's true you can kind of chuck in um coming of age in there as well but i kind of grouped that under marriages because for a long time that was the association of course now we we separate marriage and coming of age typically usually but it's just easier to save births deaths and marriages than it is but coming of age marriage and death you're transitioning into life at birth and when we celebrate the anniversary of that birth every year you're still on a liminal time you're you're between two ages when you're getting married or coming of age you're transitioning from uh being a youth to being a mature adult you're transitioning from being um single to being part of a pair traditionally speaking and of course when you die you're transitioning from life into death so these are some good places to start thinking about um holidays and how to construct a holiday of your own you you definitely want to pick something that is liminal that is transitional to be the thing that is celebrated because those are most often the biggest things that we celebrate so some helpful stuff for you here's where we're getting into the shortcuts russo and cantala also propose um a number of different scales upon which any holiday falls they're very careful to clarify that these aren't uh dichotomies it's not you are this or you are that you can be you know halfway between you can be both to some degree but these are scales that should be considered for any holiday those scales are public or private which we talked about is it something that everyone is celebrating at the same time or is it something that you are celebrating kind of uh just with your personal circle birthdays graduations weddings funerals those are things that we um celebrate on our own even if they are kind of almost a universal experience which ps i understand it might be a little odd that i'm saying we celebrate funerals but uh we do we do that's a we have like a formal ritual involved it's a whole thing is it official or folk so is it something sanctioned and kind of put on by the governing body or is it something that people just kind of do on their own you know a national holiday july 4th would be uh an official holiday or is it like a reunion something that people just spontaneously put together themselves now these aren't the words they chose but i i felt like there was some confusion in word choice so i've i've tweaked the wording on the next couple and split it up into two is it religious or secular so a holiday like easter tends to be more religiously associated there isn't necessarily a full-on participation by people who aren't religious whereas a secular holiday here's an example of something that can be split between them christmas can be very religious it can be you know putting the christ in christmas but a lot of people who aren't religious still celebrate the holiday you know the xmas of it they still give gifts they still put up a tree is it solemn or is it frivolous is it anzac day where you go and you listen to the bugle and you have your minute of silence ode of remembrance or is it saint patrick's day where everyone just goes out and gets smashed and remember all these are falling along the scale they're not you know strictly at this end or strictly at that end is the holiday traditional or innovative i thought that was hilarious because uh tradition versus innovation is my central tension in my dnd setting but i actually think that that um name for it is a little uh confusing so i changed that to is it memorial or is it aspirational by which i mean is it looking back or is it looking forward so the example i like for this is um a but night is memorial it has connotations of oh you're not going to get to be a bachelor anymore this is the last night we're mourning the loss of your single status oh boy whereas a wedding is aspirational it's looking to the future it's hopeful for a happy outcome for you you know a lot of the stuff we talk about with weddings comes down to luck it's bad luck to see the bride in her wedding dress or whatever you gotta have your some of the old something blue you know we've got all these things that are about looking to the future when it's a wedding versus a bucks night which is oh isn't it sad you can't sleep with whoever you want anymore is it serial or singular as in does it happen over and over again like annually it doesn't have to be annual it could be something that happens every six months it could be out something that happens every month but it's something that happens again versus singular something that will only happen one time traditionally a marriage would fit here uh a graduation turning 18. and finally is it integrative or subversive meaning um does it sort of reinforce the status quo as it exists like australia day or is it against the status quo is it pushing for something new kind of like in some ways invasion day which uh for people who aren't australian and maybe don't know um a lot of indigenous people are very unhappy that we celebrate australia day on the day that captain cook landed here and um the death of a lot of indigenous people began and the colonization of traditional lands and so people have started pushing back against australia day by having invasion day sort of protests and marches on the same date hopefully by the time this video has gone up i will have made you a worksheet with all the different options on a scale and as you're creating your holiday you can mark off where you think it fits on each of those things or you can number points on the scale one two three four five six and roll dice to randomize a holiday and then you've got to create a holiday that fits i will say the tricky thing about this this is just the inspirational phase of creating your own holidays for your world and i will say while you're being inspired try to keep in mind that i think there is value and there is power in shorthand what i mean by that i mean that um things your players already know from their actual lives they um carry weight and they carry you a lot of the way to verism altitude to realism and it's when we deviate from those things a little bit that we we sort of gain a lot of bang for buck so we get our realism from grounding it in something that our players know deep within themselves viscerally this is true this is my experienced reality and then just shift in it a bit once you start going too far beyond our general experience then it becomes more difficult for your players to kind of grab a hold of so you know when you're picking your your liminal stuff what i'm saying is you don't have to have you know christmas or whatever uh christmas and halloween but with fantasy names but maybe think about um like i said mid-summer midwinter those are based on celestial things it's when the heavenly bodies when the sun was doing specific things or easter when the moon is doing specific things it's sort of looking upwards to the stars what if instead of that we were looking to seasonal changes what if we based our holidays on when the first of a specific type of flower blooms and then over time it might start blooming at a different time but we still celebrate the traditional point i wish that flower blooms because it means spring has started maybe that's the transition that we celebrate in in your particular world maybe we're celebrating oh it's the end of winter in the beginning of spring rather than the middle of winter because that's when you know the sun is doing x hello hi yes this is dale who is editing here um what i was about to say at this point but then didn't for some reason is that if you keep the base level of your freshly minted fictional festival grounded in something similar to what your players know like for example keeping it seasonal even if the exactitudes and expression of it are different then it makes it way easier for your audience to lean into the fiction fall into the kairos and the communitas of it all rather than it just becoming like a law dump of a bunch of alien information you know what i mean the power of shorthand and little deviations is that it lets you skip the awkward middle steps of introducing people to a new world okay but back back to the video even more of a shortcut here we go this is what i think is absolutely the most important thing for creating your fictional holidays we took a long time to get here i know but i like talking about this we know that the way that we celebrate holidays are there to reinforce this liminal experience so what are the aspects of expression being used in your holidays consider decorations do they decorate for this holiday or do they not that's step one do they decorate or do they not because we have holidays where we don't decorate so much and remember this is still a scale christmas there's a lot of decoration for christmas anzac day all the way off think lights think wreaths think colors for your holiday for what yourself let's go with this winter into easter thing what are we decorating with probably a lot of flowers we're probably hanging wreaths floral wreaths we're probably big on the flower petals clothing is there like a fun dress code that kind of comes with the holiday or is there not or is it somewhere in the middle think colors again christmas we tend to wear red and green there might be hats involved easter hat parades are a thing here at christmas again we wear santa hats we wear antlers what sort of things are people wearing so for our fictional winter interspring holiday let's make a flower crown let's say that let's say that all the all the young boys wear flower crowns that could be cute that could be fun artistic expression there is often an aspect of artistic expression involved in holidays not always this is another yes no one is there artistic expression involved or is there not but like what's what's the number one thing that humans tend to do when they're celebrating we tend to sing it's it's what we do christmas time we sing carols funerals too it's other forms of artistic expression as well on anzac day a trumpeter comes out and performs the last post at christmas a lot of places have pantomimes at halloween people might tell spooky campfire stories so what is that i think for our winter into spring holiday there's probably a dance generosity this one is a little bit of a weird one but if you think about it a lot of holidays that we celebrate have an aspect of generosity within them there are the obvious ones christmas we give gifts birthdays we give gifts to the person hobbit birthdays that person gives gifts to everyone else but even outside of that um you know trick-or-treating we we give out lollies to strangers to just kids who come to the door this one i don't think is a yes or no this is this is more a question of what is the type of generosity being performed on this holiday because i think that at the very least we tend to be sharing our homes our food there's there's a layer of hospitality that comes with communitas you know if you have a co-worker who's living far away from home they don't get to go back and see their family at christmas you're way more likely to invite them over for christmas dinner than you are any other dinner even though they don't have a family to go back to any other day of the year but on christmas you're like you shouldn't be alone that's a thing that comes up all the time people say no one should be alone on christmas because that's just a thing that we feel we feel uh that we have to be a community during holidays and with that comes an aspect of generosity it's up to you to decide what that aspect of generosity is going to look like for our winter into spring holiday i'm going to say that it is traditional for neighbors to bring hampers of food to each other's houses simple that tick and finally food food is a must food is the easiest piece of shorthand to making something feel like a real holiday what do they eat during this christmas in australia we eat prawns and pavlova not together we tend to have big lunches rather than big dinners it's my understanding that at thanksgiving in the united states you eat sweet potatoes what do you call them yams and you eat pumpkin pies and you um you know you have a turkey i know this because that's the signature thing about a holiday is what you eat even the small ones tend to have something anzac day anzac biscuits st patrick's day you drink beer valentine's day chocolates this is where you get to the great thing about this is that just the experience of eating food on a holiday is such an understood experience for everybody that this is where you can really choose something weird and your players will believe it or your readers or whoever for this winter into spring festival the people of the town make rose water to drink and they um you know collect and save the eggs from chickens for the week leading up to it and then they make um you know egg tarts everyone goes and they collect berries and they eat them with cream and that sounds real because it's the experience of eating food while celebrating that sits as as true in our hearts in our heart places so you can see there talking about those things this is a there's another checklist for you and this one i think is actually more important the other one's helpful for understanding your own holidays i think but for actually delivering the holidays to your audience this is the chart that is more helpful more important you're considering decorations clothing artistic expression generosity and food and then you're working out what the ritual tied to those things is what is the specific thing within each of those fields if you choose to have them all what's what's the traditional ritual look like for that holiday and you get to it through those aspects is that everything i had to talk about i think it might be i should really name that festival that i invented let's call it um the sun's reach festival that sounds like winter's ending huzzah hello hi me again still editing the video um i wish that i had said here but i didn't say here that the reason i think fictionalized holidays are a fun inclusion to something like a tabletop rpg is that they take something that we do experience as linear time the micro cycle of encounters and sessions that's one way of experiencing time uh and it gives you that same reprieve even within a game world you can escape into that slipstream that is festival time simultaneously giving players a break from the mechanical dominion of the clock and giving a sense of true progression and time passing plus i just think it's sweet to give the party an extra excuse to have fun and be nice to each other okay that's it i'm i'm done interrupting now bye that was a lot that was a lot of information to get through i hope that you found it interesting to me that is just so fascinating i hope that it's helpful to you just in in bringing a little sort of cultural meat to your to your fictional world apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done email this to your grandma and i will see you some other time this one was not a sure one to film remember recently when i was like oh i got that filmed really quickly this was the opposite of that

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 43,545

Rating: 4.979579 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek & Sundry, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, australia, vlogger, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, homebrew, house rule, world building, worldbuilding, tips, writing tips, fantasy

Id: LHC8FiKn6HQ

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Servo270]

This is exactly what I needed to spark my imagination!

Another fantastic thing that Holidays and Festivals do for DnD games is provide an incredibly organic introduction to a culture. They're liminal experiences where past and present are blended, so you can use them to subtly loredump on your players. Celebrations of a king's coronation, memorials to battles lost and won, or just tell your players about a culture by showing how they party.

Street festivals in particular can provide an organic way to meet quest-givers ("you guys look like adventurers... My cousin has this problem..."), to introduce plot-relevant NPCs (a glimpse of the king or a conversation with a Noble's son), to have fun hijinks (a drunken challenge or a tournament), or just to sit back and let your players enjoy themselves.

[u/divedknow]

fictional holidays are the first step on the slippery slope of world building calendars. first you think, "a harvest festival would be good, maybe a midwinter celebration" next thing you know you're telling your players "its the 78th of brinktoburary, happy birthday to Jules the rogue!"

[u/TheRedstom]

How about holidays for races living underground? They don't really experience the shift in seasons as we surface-dwellers do. What celebratory occasions would they have?