Pen N Popper's thread about spicing things up [thread=116347]over here[/thread] got me thinking about something.
What did nobility in the real Middle Ages do when they got bored?
Declared a holiday!
The Handbook is full of holidays for races and deities. Goran's "Day of Fixing," Lucinda's "Hosting of the Weave" (though maybe not the Night of Flesh and Magic, ahem.), Prunilla's Planting and Harvest Days, and many more. The new Handbook probably has an even more extensive list.
So let's declare some of these in a way that players know when they occur and watch what happens.
There are time dialation problems, of course, since the "annual" holiday would come around just about every RL month or so and last just a few RL hours. It probably wouldn't line up with the Layo calendar for the holiday, either. But let's just ignore that and have a given festival last a real life week and only celebrate any given holiday once a real life year or whatever makes sense.
It would give people something new to discuss. It would give followers of certain deities, home towns, races, etc a change to role play something different. It would give people a reason to go buy new clothes or to stock up on pie. If something went wrong, you could explain it on account of it being the Black Sun's Day of Darkness (as an cheesy example-- not a real thing as far as I know). All kinds of superstitions could be roleplayed.
I think if we got organized and calendared some of these holidays, people would respond with player run events around the themes (a pilgrimage, a party, a Voraxian axe sharpening festival, ...) to flesh out the events.
Is there a list of holidays already compiled somewhere by the Writing Team? Is there some reason we can't just take the forum calendar and throw some of these existing feast days onto it and watch what ensues?
