#Dolmenwood #resources #development

Haggryme

The Fading of Winter, 3rd Month of the Year

5	Frisk	The Feast of St. Clister.
6	Eggfast	The Feast of St. Ponch. Pluritine Observances: Release of stick, bark, and leaf boats down local waterways and making food offerings to feed the lost in hopes of guiding them home.
11	Moot	The Feast of St. Flatius.
12	Frisk	The Feast of St. Quister. Pluritine Observances: It is customary to bring your to the local priest at mass for a blessing of the animals. Clergy make rounds among the farmers bestowing such blessings on livestock.
13	Eggfast	The Feast of St. Aeynid.
18	Moot	The Feast of St. Visyg.
22	Colly	The Feast of St. Pannard.
23	Chime	The Feast of St. Simone.
25	Moot	The Feast of St. Sortia.
27	Eggfast	The Feast of St. Pastery. Pluritine Observances: Priests and clergy visit local wells and bestow blessings on them. People makes a feast from a winter calf. The largest such observances are in and around Lankshorn.
28	Sunning	The Feast of St. Bethany.
29	Yarl's Day	The Feast of St. Tumbel.
30	The Day of Virgins	The Feast of St. Lillibeth. Pluritine Observances: Folk fashion or buy folded paper doves on which they write their afflictions. These are offered in supplication in hope that St. Lillibeth will intervene to cure them. In Meagre's Reach, people construct a bonfire in the village square in which to offer their doves.

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#Dolmenwood #resources #development

Continuing from the last post, here's the Lymewald entry, with detail for the major saints' days. This is the target styling for the entire Book.

Lymewald

Deep Winter, 2nd Month of the Year

2	Chime	The Feast of St. Waylord.
3	Hayme	The Feast of St. Gondyw. Pluritine Observances: Blackeswell hosts the largest observance, where the people put on a pageant showing the old kings converting to the Pluritine faith and driving out the "snakes" of the old religions. Smaller pageants occur elsewhere.
9	Chime	The Feast of St. Calafredus.
15	Colly	The Feast of St. Wynne.
19	Frisk	The Feast of St. Albrith.
23	Chime	The Feast of St. Fredulus.
28	Sunning	The Feast of St. Eggort. Pluritine Observances: It is custom to keep a simple beeswax candle lit through the night, from sundown on the 28th of Lymewald to sunup on the 1st of Haggryme. This is said to help guide lingering souls to the afterlife.

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#Dolmenwood #resources #development

I started playing around with the Dolmenwood calendar recently, as I was gearing up for my upcoming campaign. Initially, I was just going to write down in an Obsidian page my own collection of folk and religious observances for the major feast days and pre-Pluritine holidays, but when I re-encountered Grisly Eye's vellum-doc project again, I decided to give that a whirl.

I started with House Rules but then decided to import some of my calendar entries to see how those looked in the same setup. I had already committed to using medieval illustrated manuscripts as imagery, and it wasn't long before I came across historical examples of Books of Hours, which, as luck would have it, usually include calendars of feast and saints' days. And thus was born the Dolmenwood Book of Hours.

Now, I have considerable work left to do on it, so what I will do in a series of posts here is detail each month's major feast days and whatever folk holidays I plan to include myself. Once the major saints and holidays are accounted for, I will go back and create smaller, less grandiose observances for the saints who merited only a mention in one table in the Dolmenwood Campaign Book.

The methodology for creating these observances for major saints is as follows:

1. Determine if the saint is the patron saint of anything in particular. If so, build an observance around that patronage. If not...
2. Try to find the blessing associated with the saint, then see if it makes sense to build an observance around that. And if not...
3. Use the epithet attached to the saint, on the assumption that the epithet says something useful about the saint where the lore itself does not.

Since there are 34 major saints, plus a smattering of other holidays (mostly folk stuff), the work is approachable if time consuming. There are 100 saints in all, however, and since the remaining saints may have only epithets attached to them, I'll have to basically invent lore for most of them. I will take the lack of lore for these as an invitation to brew my own, knowing full well that a later supplement may obviate this effort. In the meantime, the Book of Hours

In any case, here is the list for Grimvold, The Onset of Winter, 1st Month of the Year.

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#weardcynn #lore #development

The setting for Weardcynn is implied within the main rules text. That doesn't mean there isn't a more coherent setting present. I am building this new earth in the image of William Blake's already fallen/always falling Albion with his Zoas and Emanations. In this telling, the fourfold giant that comes to know itself as Albion stirs from within a great deep, void, or unknowing. This is perhaps akin to a Big Bang moment, from which all things proceed, representing the division of all things from the singularity that birthed them.

Physics likewise infuses other aspects of this process. For each action, as we know, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this remains so even in the stirring of Albion from the deep. Albion is the action that spawns the immediate reaction, and his equal and opposite, or his reflection or emanation, is known as Jerusalem. Here Blake is appropriating and reshaping Biblical concepts into something else, and I am preserving as much as makes sense for what I'm doing.

Now, the awakening of Albion and the casting of his reflection as Jerusalem represents the first Fall, because it results in immediate division of what was previously a unity. But Albion is not finished falling. In fact, he will continue to fragment into countless pieces, and some of those pieces claim dominion over the others or, in some cases, claim to have created them. The eight chief fragments of Albion are the four Zoas and their respective Emanations.

This continual falling or fragmentation is the ongoing Fall that is at the heart of what I call the Schismata (which is also the name for the set of mechanics that underlie this system). This is my own embellishment and has nothing directly to do with Blake. It represents the idea that everything is already fallen and always falling further from unity, and will continue to do so until the harvest after the Final Judgment reunites all of the fallen.

If this feels like a heady and abstract mythology (godlar), I agree. It is, however, the basis for what the Weardcynn believe about their own origins. In their godlar, the primary of which they call the Albiones Hweol (Albion Cycle), the Weardcynn believe that mankind (Manncynn) were the creation of the Zoa named Tharmas, and that they had been seduced away from (disunited) by the Zoa named Urizen. This culminated in the spoliation of the natural world, that aspect of Creation they inhabited, primarily through overuse and exploitation. In response, the Emanation named Vala beseeched her Zoa brethren to entrap Urizen and destroy his hold on the Manncynn. It was Luvah's fire and Urthona's hand that created the trap. Vala caused the earth to birth its own new champions, the Weardcynn, to hem in the Manncynn and watch over them until they could learn to aspire toward unity once more.

There is of course more than this, and I will work through how this looks in a concrete sense as I continue development and lay out the mechanical implications. For these, I will make use of Ed Buryn's William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. In the same vein as Invisible Sun (which has had a profound influence on the mechanics of this game), player characters will be able to use aspects of these tarot cards as mechanical touchpoints, not always to their benefit. The precise nature of these effects, however, are still percolating in my head. At the very least, I will have a spread of cards that makes sense for this game and use the positions of the cards to interpret how they influence the world at the moment they are laid out. Whether this can be done without vastly overcomplicating the system is still unclear.

I will undoubtedly return to this topic from time to time as I think about new lore and mythology pieces to slot in, but in no sense do I expect that players and GMs use the result of this work if they aren't interested. It is and will be a supplement to enrich their understanding of the implied setting.

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