resources — HillTown Studio Longform Content

A Completed Book of Hours for Dolmenwood

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 19:51:33 +0000

By way of wrapping up the previous post series, I am releasing my Dolmenwood Book of Hours as a provisionally finished product, with its own place on the web. Will I revisit it later? Probably. For now, what it contains is my own interpretation of the major saints' feast day observances around the Wood, as well as some syncretic folk observances for things that are traditionally observed, like solstices and equinoxes. I had originally written some text establishing one of the solstices as the “old new year”, but that hasn't made it into this version. Perhaps it will.

Anyway, it's all unofficial and unsanctioned, of course. Have fun with it if you're running Dolmenwood and that's your kind of thing. And if you do use it, I'd be happy to hear about it, especially if you have feedback.

Dolmenwood Book of Hours: https://www.hilltown.studio/gdw/hours.html

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Dolmenwood Book of Hours: Haggryme

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:20:47 +0000

#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.

Dolmenwood Book of Hours: Lymewald

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 14:14:58 +0000

#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.

Toward a Dolmenwood Book of Hours

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 23:09:28 +0000

#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:

Determine if the saint is the patron saint of anything in particular. If so, build an observance around that patronage. If not...
Try to find the blessing associated with the saint, then see if it makes sense to build an observance around that. And if not...
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.