Toward a Dolmenwood Book of Hours
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.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@blog.hilltown.studio or via RSS at https://blog.hilltown.studio/feed