Review: Festivals, Feasts & Fairs (5e Supplement)
/I’ve run a festival for my players before. They were in a village, managed to defeat a baddie, and the influx of well-wishers, news hounds, gossips, and opportunists soon turned the town into an impromptu two-day party. The heroes got an award from the mayor, there was dancing, and jugglers threw things about.
Mostly I ran it narratively. Trying to figure out a bunch of guess-my-weight and dunk-the-halfling mechanics on the fly seemed like a bit much.
That’s precisely what Festivals, Feasts & Fairs is meant to address. It provides a bunch of background, color, and mechanics for the kinds of activities our adventurers would find at a festival. Feats of strength, carnival games, fortune telling. It’s basically a set of mini-games that allow your players to use their skills to try their luck on the carnival fairway.
I’ll reproduce some of the ToC here to give you an idea of the breadth of content:
Denizens Of The Circus
Attractions
Competitions
Carnival Games
Visiting The Fortune Teller
Vendors
Items Around The Carnival
Backgrounds
Designing Custom
The PDF is well laid out in a familiar style, and contains internal links to all sections. My only quibble is that I’d love to see a more comprehensive link list as I would likely run this on my laptop during a session.
I think if you generated a few memorable NPCs and had this supplement at the ready, you could fill an entire session with your PCs just wandering around shooting arrows at targets and eating fried foods. If this sounds like something you could use, I recommend it.
