Campaign Holidays - Rest of the Hammerhand

When you look at a society, a huge number of people living in towns and countries, there's one thing that ties them together far better than the flags they live under. It's the traditions they keep. When a game master builds a world, it's easy to plot a map of a city, and fill in the names of streets and buildings around all the important spots for players to go to. Making that city, or country, or world feel compelling and lived in is another matter.

In past looks at settings for Roleplaying Games, we've looked at individual places, stores, fight clubs, and landmarks. A public holiday is a much more broad thing to bring into game, but something that can give just as much context, a great slice of realism, and weight to your world. With all that said, we can consider one such holiday I've had in my homebrew Dungeons and Dragons setting for almost as long as I had it.

Rest of the Hammerhand

All craftsmen put down their tools on this one day a year - photograph by Paul Sellers

The Rest of the Hammerhand, or often called Low Hammerhand, is celebrated on the twenty fifth day, on the year's last month.

There are many cultures that worship the gods of craft, invention, and construction. They honour their gods by working tirelessly in their great furnaces under the mountain and magical workshops deep in enchanted forests.

Those gods of building love all that their stout children make, but they can't always be working. One day, each year, it's religious law that all craftsmen in all crafts put down their tools and close up shops. Just for one day.

In the millennia since this holiday was started, things have become all the more serious. All professions and anyone working now closes their doors on Low Hammerhand. If you're a home-maker, nothing can be done around the house. The feast to celebrate the season is always cooked the night before, on Low Hammerhand's Eve, and cut up into bite sized pieces. Chewing can be considered tough sometimes.

No Rest for the Wicked

There's an entire day, where a relatively gung-ho society of people just slow down and chill. Though the most important characters in your game rarely get that luxury.

The player characters may be baffled to see this holiday being celebrated. Maybe some members of the party are of that religion or race of practitioners. The game may become more relaxed as characters might deserve the well earned rest themselves.

I think it's more interesting to get the players active. If anyone's ever walked through a big town during Christmas Day, the eerie quiet is always a fun environment to describe.

Dark cultists could be working on the deepest occult, without anyone in the restful town knowing - ‘Cabal Ritual’ by by Kieran Yanner

The party may have been asked to maintain the peace while the country is closed for it's holy vigil. Maybe an insidious force has moved in to invade the township or perform illicit magical experiments while the city turns a blind eye. A more ambiguous or villainous party could be up to the heist of the century, when the security in high value targets is at its all time low.

The world is closed for the many NPCs celebrating the holiday, but knowing how players can use that quiet time is crucial to making it work for your setting.

Resting After Work

I came up with this holiday during the festive season around three years ago. It's normal, and a good idea, to have things in your setting mirror the real world, so the players have an easy thing to catch onto. It's been a holiday, alongside the exact opposite in the summer, that I've refined and used in my games many times.

Now we want to hear from you, are there any interesting holidays you use in the games you GM? Are there customs you would like to see translated to your tabletop RPG? Let us know on our Discord server and in the comments below.

With the strange times away from our gaming tables, it can all seem strange, so from all of us here at Apotheosis Studios, we'd like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2021.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.