Oct 4

Oct 4 Homebrew - Festival Games

Header Art: Atlantis in the Festival by MaoYong Liu

It’s that time of year. Pumpkin spice drifting through the breeze, the crunch of leaves beneath boots, and GMs setting up festivals in their campaigns to mimic the season we are in! Fall is probably my favorite season, though with the number of allergy attacks I’ve been having, starting to wish for winter to hurry up and get here, but we aren’t here for my gripes.

For those, like me, who love mini-games at the table and having at least one festival each campaign for my players to participate in, I’ve created several mini-games that can take place during a fall festival, a circus, at a fair, and more!

In addition, you can find even more Festival Games in Part 2 - these games are for the cleverer adventurer!

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Festival Games

The purpose of this set of mini-games is to create several simple skill-based games that can be handled within a couple of minutes and allows characters to show off their skills. These games are focused on physical games of skill with displays of agility and strength; in exchange, wonderful prizes are handed out to those who outshine the rest!

These mini-games all use the basics of D&D with rolling skill checks and attack rolls, nothing crazy that players aren’t already used to here. The goal for each of these festival games was to create something that provides the feel of competing while sticking with the established rules so that players and GMs can quickly play through them without being confused or stumbling across random rules that go against the basics and foundations of Dungeons & Dragons.

Character Games

There are eight festival games provided here, that can be easily added to the ones found in the newest adventure The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021). While those games are typically much simpler, only requiring a single dice roll in many cases, these games provide a bit more competition and character skill to succeed. With that said, the more times you must roll a dice, the more times you have a chance to fail - if you want your players to win more often, you can always reduce the total number of checks required or lower the DCs.

The eight mini-games provided here are Apple Bobbing, Bottle Throw, Catch the Greased Pig, Coin Flip, Dagger Competition, Pie Eating Competition, Spin the Wheel, and Three-Legged Race (Sack Race). Beyond the Spin the Wheel guessing game, each one will call on specific skills to be used by the players to succeed, with different degrees of success determining what type of prize they can earn from each game.

Each game was built with DCs to give appropriate challenges for low-level players, though they aren’t likely to get the best prizes unless they get very lucky. For higher-level players, their chances of getting prizes are rather high, and their main ‘challenge’ will be getting the best prizes from each game - perhaps only competing within their own adventuring party as they quickly leave behind the commoners in terms of skill.

Which has to make you wonder how do regular commoners feel when a bunch of adventurers strolls up during their festival? Are they excited that they are about to see some amazing feats of strength and dexterity? Or do they get annoyed that all of their records for the festival are about to be obliterated by a group of strangers that are so drunk, they have no idea what the festival is even about and yet can somehow nail a hay bale from over 150 feet away without even trying or hold on to a greased pig that had no chance of escape?

I suppose it all comes down to the reputation of the adventurers and just how nice the cultists-disguised-as-commoners feel like being with the new sacrifices contestants.

Player Games

Of course, what if you feel like there is no challenge for your players because they are level 30 with mythic levels of magic items and skills that mean they can’t roll below a 20 even if they were dead? How do you challenge them at a festival with commoners? Well, why not remove the character sheets and instead focus on having the players take part in the festival with small games featuring dice manipulation. This piece of homebrew also features three games to play with the players, not their characters.

The three games are Mini-Golf, Shooting d4, and Toppling Towers; simple mini-games that the players probably already play a version of when they are waiting for their turn in combat. Toppling Towers just requires the player to stack dice on top of each other in a specific order, while Shooting d4 is all about flicking a d4 into towers of d6 to earn prizes, with Mini-Golf just a chance to fight against each other and try to get their dice the closest to the target goal without touching it or ending up off the table.

If someone at your table has physical disabilities that make dice manipulation a problem, or harder for them than other players, I’d recommend finding some other games to try out if you are looking for dice manipulation games or sticking solely with in-game minigames of skill.

Prizes!

Everyone loves prizes, even the awful prizes you get at fairs where the fabric is falling apart in your hands or the goldfish you just won looks rather pitiful. I’ve won more than a few prizes, from stuffed animals to candy and game tickets. My favorite thing I won was some pokemon figurines I won after turning in hundreds of tickets for it… of course, in hindsight, it would’ve just been cheaper to buy the figurine than play the games but… we try to ignore that when it comes to the fair and festival games.

I provide three different levels of prizes that you might find in a fair, with the lowest quality prizes known as Minor Prizes, and going up in quality to Moderate Prizes, and the best prizes being Great Prizes. These are only examples you could find at a fair, and they may not fit your world if you have almost no magic or a huge amount of magic available to everyone.

The basic idea of a Minor Prize is that it has to be worth about 5 cp to 1 sp as it is the most common prize and even children are likely to earn this a few times throughout the festival. Moderate Prizes have a higher baseline cost at about 1 sp to 5 sp, and are built around the idea that these prizes can be earned by a commoner once during a festival. Great Prizes are the best prizes and don’t really have a cost limit, unless the people putting it on are really cheap and sleazy, in which case you could just use the Moderate Prizes for this as well. The idea behind these is that they cost about 1 to 10 gp and are what everyone hopes they get but only two or three of these prizes, if that, will be relinquished during a single festival. Of course, the presenters of the festival probably weren’t expecting adventurers to show up and take home all of their best prizes that no one has been able to win for years.

Adventurers are likely to always earn at least a Minor Prize in competitions and typically get a Moderate Prize if they win against the other players. Those with the highest skills are likely to get a Great Prize if they can consistently roll decent on their d20 during their games.

The Fun Must Go On

These are just a few mini-games that you can bring to your table to liven up a festival! I hope you enjoy these events and find an excuse this spooky season to include them in your one-shots, your campaigns, and more! If you have a favorite festival game you’ve created or played in, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

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