Harvest Festival (Promptober 2025 #30)

Many cultures celebrate the end of the harvest season with festivals. Ionians have Meditrinalia, a wine-soaked party and feast dedicated to Meditrina, the recently-named goddess of wine and longevity. Dunhill still celebrates Samhain, a more sober festival featuring spirits walking the waking world and ushering in the darker half of the year. The Cappadocia region in Okular boasts many varieties of grapes, so their Üzüm Hasadı Festivali lasts for a week slightly earlier in the fall. The Alfinwald holds their Amaro Emel'glir, literally the Festival of Singing Hearts, raising their voices to thank nature for providing for the elves' needs, and as a promise to protect and nurture plant life, especially as the plants slumber the winter away.

But what about Fellport?

The city proper has some green space, primarily Highgarden, the meditation gardens and labyrinths surrounding the Divinity Sanctum, the quad at the heart of the College, the gardens in the public square near the Council House, the Penny Chestnut, and the smaller Brinemist Preserve closer to the harbor. Some homes have smaller gardens growing in containers or in their tiny yards, and a few abandoned houses in Talltown have been overrun with weeds. But you need to leave the city proper to find any large-scale agriculture.

Fey Flowers (Promptober 2025 #29)

Foxglove in the wild.

Foxglove's purple, bell-shaped flowers remind people of tiny hats worn by fey creatures. Some think they denote where fairies have rested, doffing their hats and flying off in the morning without them. Wizards have taken this folklore to heart and enchanted foxglove flowers to step between the worlds for a moment.

Fey Flower

Wondrous Item, uncommon

Commonly found in groups of 2-12 in a cloth pouch, these still-fresh purple flowers prove surprisingly resistant to jostling. When held between a finger and thumb and snapped as a bonus action, they briefly tear the fabric of reality into the Fey Realm, allowing the snapper to misty step to a location they can see within 30 feet. The flower explodes in a puff of purple mist when used.

Gods (Promptober 2025 #28)

Detail of the Divinty Sanctum

An outside observer's view of Fellport's attitude toward the gods. Excerpted from the merchant wizard Katelyn Durgin's expansive letter to Lord Gavin Stewart, the 37th Secretary of the Runlorg Society at the Bochord in Occam, the southernmost city in Dunhill, written during her extended stay in Fellport in the spring of 793 AUC.

You bemoan the Bochord's haphazard organization scheme? Try cataloguing entire faiths the same way. I don't know how the people of Fellport don't go mad deciding which gods to worship, as they seem to worship every god that's ever shone the very hint of a divine face over land or sea.

Dunhill's got the Tuatha for everyone, and that runs like a chaotic fief with cousins fighting everywhere you look, plus a local god for every house. Ionia does the same thing, though their list of gods is shorter than ours. Fellport seemed to open up the Divinity Sanctum and let servants of every last one of the gods set up a stall to proselytize anyone who comes in. Tiny island gods of deep waters rub shoulders with Tengri, the Okulari Sky Father. The Goddess of Spiders spins calmly next to Surtur's fiery chosen. It's madness.

Designing a Settlement System

Welcome to Worcester

I wanted to make something to model the growth of the settlement the party leaves behind when going out on adventures. It started as a random event table, but then it sort of inflated into a mini domain game. I was planning on developing this system sometime in December for the next Bolthaven Folio, but my brain started early.

So let's talk about where this came from and how it's going.

I wanted something that could handle random events in a frontier village serving as a base of operations for an adventuring party. I then thought about the PCs actually settling and growing a settlement on their own, as Name Level used to imply back in AD&D. And then the idea for Motewright flew across my Bluesky feed, so I started developing this system that I could flesh out for that particular RPG project.

Dreams/Nightmares (Promptober 2025 #27)

Everlight City

He last worked at the job he loved seven months and ten days ago. Fat, dumb, and happy pushing research data around the institution, he had plans of retiring from there in another decade or so. The new administration decided to throw a wrench into human health research, and he was one of several casualties that fateful Monday in April. The institution furloughed him for six months, as if continuing to have a job that he could not legally work on and would not get paid for was anything other than a cruel joke meant to crush hope.

The weeks since then stretched long with application after application sent to an uncaring employment shredder whose output got piped to /dev/null. His long career of figuring out how to move sensitive data efficiently to where it would do the most good apparently doesn't matter when he thinks he's near the end of his usefulness. The pandemic that kept coming back and kept carving away pieces focus from him every time it infected him didn't help matters.