Last month I wrote up 20 festivals suitable for dazzling your characters on their visit to the big city. Of course, city folk and country folk celebrate very differently, so I’ve also written up 12 country fairs, some of which are stranger and more dangerous than their urban counterparts.

Country Fairs (roll d12):

1. Pumpkin festival: This pastoral fair features pumpkin-eating, -tossing, and -growing contests, as well as prizes for the best pumpkin-related songs or plays. At dusk, everyone locks themselves inside their houses. This festival is also celebrated by goblins, who put pumpkins on their heads and invade human villages after dark, committing vandalism and mischief and trying to lure people out of their homes and carry them away. Possible encounters with entertainers, halfling scouts, pumpkin-tossing champions, and goblins with pumpkins on their heads.
2. Flower fair: a less watered-down version of the city Flower Festival: it’s usually, but not always, held in the spring. It features dancing, feasting, ancient traditions and songs that no one understands anymore. Bizarre, ancient activities include “Tie a Pig to a Goose” and “Wear as Many Lit Candles as Possible”. Druids choose two monarchs of beauty, who perform a secret rite to renew the seasons. Possible encounters with druids, green knights, village leader cult fanatics, and entertainers.
3. Bridal festival: It’s considered lucky to get married on this day: there are usually more prospective brides and grooms than officiants to perform the weddings. Any visiting cleric, druid, or paladin will be begged to perform at least one wedding. Other visitors may be proposed to.
4. Monster night festival: Soft city folk celebrate a jolly and toothless version of this festival, but in the countryside it’s the real deal. It’s taboo to hurt a monster on this day. Instead, villagers ritually praise monsters and leave sacrifices of food and coins near known lairs. In particularly bad years, a youth or two may be left for the monsters as well. Possible encounters: minstrel entertainers, priests, cult fanatics, and monsters of all types: particularly common are ogres, perytons, and hags.
5. Pie fair: Prizes for pie eating, throwing, and baking. People will do anything to get their hands on each others’ closely guarded baking secrets. Possible encounters: halflings, champion pie throwers, hags with a sweet tooth.
6. Mistletoe festival. Worshipers partake in druidic rituals, dances, and hunts, and, in secret, older and darker rites. Possible encounters: elves, druids, scouts, cultists.
7. Goblin market: a traveling fair run by elf and fairy folk of dubious morality. For sale are beautiful but inexpensive things and minor magic items. Items can be bought for gold or favors. Attracts elves, pixies, entertainers, alchemists, merchants, goblins, green hags in disguise, and wicked fairies.
8. The bastards’ fair: Uninvited and unannounced thugs, thieves, assassins, and other rogues descend on a community for a few days, expecting to be fed. Criminals use the fair to make underworld contacts, fence goods, and hire assassins.
9. The village games: Village champions are crowned in wrestling, racing, dagger throwing, wild horse riding, poetry, singing, and other contests. Usually features rivalries between local champions and itinerant adventurers.
10. Devil’s dance: People dress like devils and commit innocent mischief, acting rude and committing minor pranks. At dusk there is a country dance. In troubled villages which harbor actual cultists, green hags or evil warlocks, mischief can be anything but innocent and may claim lives.
11. Picklefest: Who can make or eat the sourest pickle? Who can best extol the virtues of the pickle in story and song? Pickles are hung from trees, given as gifts, and gathered in straw baskets by children. Possible encounters: hungry halflings, dwarves, and local champions with cast-iron stomachs, all eager to test their mettle in the pickle-eating championships; gamblers filling out their brackets.
12. The great hunt: On this day, sacred to a nature god, foresters hunt game such as deer, farmers hunt pests such as foxes and crows, and soldiers and nobles hunt monsters. Vengeful folk sometimes choose this day to hunt their enemies. The vengeful dead sometimes return as revenants. Possible encounters: scouts, nobles, assassins, revenants.

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