Festivals make a great backdrop for adventures: they’re one of my most-used adventure elements. They’re a fun way to share your world-building with the players. There’s no better way to showcase a religion, city, or fantasy culture than through its bizarre celebrations.
Festivals often include contests, which give players a menu of optional things to do (what high-Con character can resist a pie-eating contest?). Contests are great because they’re one of the few ways you can introduce an NPC rival who doesn’t immediately die in combat.
Next time your characters head to the big city, have them wander into a festival. Here are 20 festivals, ranging from silly to sinister. I’ve tried to give each celebration a story hook, a contest or two, a threat, or something else for the characters to do.
City Festivals (roll d20):
- Bonfire festival: A traditional time for dancing, firelight, and the occasional arson. Rival adventuring groups run an anything-goes relay race through the city, with each party member carrying the torch through a neighborhood: the race is lost if the party’s torch goes out. Possible encounters with entertainers, apprentice mages, thieves, and racing adventurers.
- Festival of gift-giving: Everyone gives a present to a close friend. Merchants are everywhere. It’s easier than usual to find magic items and luxuries for sale, but they’re priced higher than usual.
- Fortune’s fool festival: (Might instead be named after your pantheon’s trickster god.) Everyone wears masks. A traditional time for romances, assassinations, and practical jokes, each of which are generally accompanied by the festival’s irritating catch-phrase (such as “Fortune’s fool!”). Possible encounters with spies, assassins, entertainers, and slumming nobles in masks.
- War festival: (Might be named after your pantheon’s war god.) Jousts and tournaments. Celebrants drape soldiers and adventurers with garlands. Anyone who defeats someone else in a joust, tournament, or duel may take the loser’s garlands. Possible encounters with knights, veterans, gladiators, and expert duelists.
- Magical festival: The city is lit with Dancing Lights, Faerie Fire, Pyrotechnics, and dangerous alchemical explosions. Spellcasters are expected to entertain the citizens with dazzling magic shows. Possible encounters with mages, alchemists, and crowds demanding entertainment.
- Flower festival: A traditional time for flowers and feasts. Each neighborhood chooses two Champions of Beauty to compete in a city-wide dance contest; the winners get money and their neighborhood gets glory. Possible encounters with entertainers, neighborhood leaders looking for contestants, and beautiful people of all walks of life.
- Midnight festival: It’s a somber festival with lots of chanting. On the plus side, if the midnight rites are not interrupted, the city is safe from undead plagues for another year! Possible encounters with priests, acolytes, holy knights, and the occasional disruptive undead.
- Festival of life: (Might be named after your pantheon’s life god.) Clerics are expected to cast healing spells for free on this day; people try to outdo each other in good deeds. Possible encounters with priests, holy knights, and sick and injured people looking for healing.
- Festival of shadows: Honest folk stay indoors while thieves, vampires, necromancer mages, and the like rule the streets for the day.
- Storm festival: (Might be named after your pantheon’s tempest god.) Rain or shine (preferably rain), there are war dances, feats of strength and drinking, music contests, and challenges to unarmed combat. Possible encounters with barbarian warriors, wrestlers, and skalds.
- Day of mourning: A gloomy holiday commemorating a tragic historical or mythological event. Donations are given to worthy causes. Guards impose small fines for laughing, celebrating, wearing bright clothes, and the like. Possible encounters: Nobles giving alms, guards imposing fines, paladins in grim parades.
- Victory festival: The city celebrates its founding or some historical success in battle. A day of parades, patriotism, and traffic. Parades sometimes turn into riots between rival groups celebrating different victories. Possible encounters: veterans, angry mobs, suspiciously well-armed parades.
- Brewer’s festival: Beer is free. Traditionally a day for merry-making, drinking contests, brawls, and being robbed while unconscious. Possible encounters: drunkards, human soldiers, dwarves, tavern brawlers, and opportunistic thieves.
- Topsy Turvy festival: Nobles wear rags and merchants provide feasts for the poor. A randomly-selected prisoner is pardoned, released from the dungeon, and made king or queen for a day, which is usually fine, but there have been occasions where it wasn’t fine. Possible encounters: nobles in rags, feasting crowds, kids bossing around parents, or the King for a Day: possibly a pardoned assassin, political prisoner, or an old enemy of the PCs.
- Faerie festival: People wear masks and glitter, play practical jokes, and give anonymous gifts. Possible encounters: entertainers, nobles, and visiting faerie folk (good and evil) who are serious about practical jokes and gifts.
- Hero’s feast: Veterans and adventurers are celebrated, feasted, serenaded, and showered with gifts by those they have helped in the past. Possible encounters: veterans and adventurers of all sorts, generous merchants and nobles, and archpriests who cast Hero’s Feast for worthy heroes.
- Monster night: People dress up as monsters and wander in torchlit parades. Every year, a few people are killed by real monsters wandering the street undetected. Possible encounters: commoners dressed in realistic monster costumes, werewolves, goblins, and grimalkins (demon cats who can change into panthers).
- Candle Night: After sundown, relatives who have passed away are remembered, ghosts walk, and death magic is at its greatest power. Carrying a candle is said to attract good spirits and ward against evil ones. The candles are by no means foolproof. Possible encounters: ghosts, zombies, shadows, necromancers
- All gods day: The city’s business is at a standstill as each religion organizes a procession or parade. There are frequent brawls between the processions of rival faiths. Temples compete to exhibit the most impressive displays of divine magic. Attracts: high priests, holy knights, and parades that frequently devolve into angry mobs.
- Country Fair: Roll on the Country Fairs table
