Celebrate holidays in your games for the same reason we celebrate them in real life: when you just need a break from all the action.
Special celebrations can be a great addition to your games. You can use them to flesh out and ground your cultures. You can use them to add to the backstory of a character. You can use them to insert some truly bizarre events that wouldn't otherwise fit. Weirdly, you can even create traditions in your games that your players are excited to come back to! The possibilities are many, and this is why we wanted to cover how to create great holidays quickly.
In The Strategy Stateroom we cover four steps that lead to consistently good holidays:
1. Know the Culture
We've gone into depth on how to create a culture, and every meaningful holiday is deeply rooted in the culture that created it. You can download our one-page culture creator and start from there, but at the very least, think of a couple of values that define the culture you've got in your game to work from.
2. Create the Origin Story
Every holiday has the legend of how it began. It's hard to talk about them without their origin stories.
3. Create a Behavioral Shift
In what way does the entire attitude of those within the culture change leading up to the holiday? In most of Canada, we encourage goodwill leading up to Christmas, and spookiness leading up to Halloween.
4. Create Interactive Traditions
This is what the party can actually do. We cover all kinds of real-world inspirations in the episode, but this is a great opportunity to play through some fun competitions with unique prizes.
Then, in The Temple of Inspired Hands we talk about what we've done with this podcast, and what you can expect in the near future. We're super grateful to be a part of the discord community that has formed around this podcast, and it's a blast to see the ideas that come up in that group. We are taking December off, partly to plan for the next year of this podcast, partly to do real-world holiday stuff, but in the meantime patrons can find a bonus episode of all of our screw-ups over the last year on our Patreon. An outtakes episode. And barring any bad news, we'll be planning to attend Winter Fantasy in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, so if you find yourselves there, come by and say hi!
As always, huge thanks to the support of our patrons for making this episode a reality.
Zach G., Greg Greg, Michelle T., Hentenius, Alan E., Matthew T., Felix R., Chris F., The Senate, Lucas D., Lyla G., The GM Tim, Nevermour, Thomas W., Tyler G., Ty N., Heavyarms, Erik R, Aldrost, Leprecan, and Will H-P.