All About Carnivals

For our Patreon patrons, we just sent out the monthly reward:  All About Carnivals.  Please check to see that you received it.  If not, please let us know and we’ll fix it.

For those of you who aren’t patrons yet, what is it that you’re missing?  Well, a couple of things went wrong with this month’s edition.  Like?  Well, it ran a little long.  Our target is 40 pages for the GM’s edition.  This one ran 74 pages plus the cover.  Only our patrons-only double sized edition has been longer.

Why is it that long?  Well it contains:  21 well described circuses, carnivals, and other shows; 30 quickly described circuses, carnivals, and other shows; 153 attractions, including freaks, animal acts, circus performances, rides, games, contests, and more side show weirdness than any book has the right to contain!  That’s just “one article”.  The rest of the book has prices at a carnival, GM (and player too) advice, setting ideas, and over a dozen missions and encounter sparks to get you brain fully into the idea of how carnivals can add to your game world.

In case you’re missing what we mean by “carnival”, please understand that within those well described carnivals are:  a side show/menagerie combination, a full circus, a weird “hard-R” side show, a puppet show, a religious revival, an opera company, a trade show, a patriotic festival, and a whole ton more.

So what’s the point?  Have you as a GM or world builder thought through how circuses, carnivals and other traveling shows work in your world?  Probably not.  As world builders, most of us have enough trouble filling in all the permanent parts of the landscape - we don’t have time to worry about the temporary parts.  So here, we did it for you.  Not just did it, but then laced the entire 74 pages with ideas you can use to expand what we have here if that particular item works for you and your world.  Not every idea works for every person, so this is definitely a pick and choose thing, but there are more sparks of creativity to pick from than you can imagine.

What’s wrong?  Well, honestly, the artwork.  Do you know how tough it is to find historic artwork about circuses?  So, yeah, as per usual, not the most stunning piece of art.  Then again, that shows just how much content is in this thing!


The World Walker verison of All About Carnivals can now be downloaded for free at:

https://www.rpgnow.com/product/250178/Nitis-Parade--Other-Entertainments-aka-All-About-Carnivals-and-Faires

The Champagne Trade Fairs

During the 12th and 13th centuries, a series of six trade fairs spread throughout the calendar were held in four cities in the Champagne region of what is now France.  In many ways, trade fairs in Fletnern as we see them are based on these fairs.  Though not completely and we’ll get into some of the similarities and differences. 

But first off, how important are these and do you really care about a history lesson right now?  Well, assuming we haven’t lost you already, these really are that important.  How important to the modern world?  Well, one of the cities hosting the trade fairs was Troyes.  Did you think the “Troy ounce” when weighing gold came from the Troy with the Greek heroes?  Nope - The Troyes fair was so important that its currency became the global standard and is still the standard today.

In many ways these fairs also began practices we take for granted today, practices like checks (OK, maybe not any more) and short term international loans.  They also changed the job of a merchant from being the guy who has to travel great distances to buy and sell goods, to being the guy who can send his underlings to go and pick up stuff he has already bought sight unseen by contract.  These might seem unimportant, but they were huge in establishing the economy of the Middle Ages.

These fairs served in many ways as the exchange point between France and Italy, but also England and Germany.  Merchants would show up to buy English fleece, and bring it back to their shops to return the next year with high end woolen fabrics.  Other merchants might buy those high end woolen fabrics only to return the next year with the same fabrics now dyed to the most vibrant colors.

OK, so what were they exactly?  They were trade fairs - huge markets where goods from far away could be purchased.  The host would offer the land for the market to take place as well as a reasonable guard to prevent chaos and theft.  They might also offer warehouse space so the merchants could store their goods before or after sales.  The Champagne fairs usually lasted about six weeks in order to make it worthwhile for merchants to travel there.  Travel from Italy to these fairs was probably three to four weeks, so they needed to be long enough to make these trips worthwhile.

Where did they take place?  They took place at crossroads, commonly where river travel met road travel.  These were typically the old Roman roads, but bridges and mountain passes were extremely important in establishing the best spots to hold the fairs.  Early on, they were also held near the mints where coins were minted.  This helped facilitate the earliest fairs, before the high end banking began.

In a lot of ways, these fairs were focused on fabrics, especially woolen fabrics.  While that seems to be the key product, obviously there had to be other products.  We don’t always think of it as a product, but the Germans were showing up to the fairs with newly cast silver bars.  Definitely a nice “product” to sell.

Our only point is that for many products, especially products that rely on agriculture and therefore are seasonal, having a store year round may not be an intelligent way to sell your goods.  If a weaver could sell all his goods in a couple of weeks at a major fair, then he could spend all of the rest of his time actually working instead of wasting time trying to sell cloth from a store.  The other side to this is that international trade can be cool.  How often do you get to have a huge party where you also make some decent money?

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Does Your Game World Need a Circus?

Why?  Why put carnivals or any other part of our upcoming All About Carnivals into your game?  We always feel we need to answer that rather important question, especially in times like this when the answer might not be as obvious.

First - Your fantasy era commoner doesn’t travel far from home and typically has no entertainment outside of some traveling bard singing in a bar.  Whether you consider it realistic or hope to capture some of the true importance of the historic fairs, these things are incredibly important in the lives of the people.  Admittedly, this may be the “unimportant” people as far as your campaign is concerned, but the rulers will see the vast wealth (taxes) and morale boost provided by faires, carnivals and circuses.

But for your players and player characters, in many ways you can see the carnivals as sort of a “mini-game” within the overall campaign.  Just as mini-games can be fun in the video games you play, sometimes it can be fun to have your overly serious heroes of the realm trying to knock down milk bottles with a baseball (that might be intentionally off balance).

When something like a carnival breaks up the action of the campaign, it serves several purposes.  It can be great for role-playing, as it might force your players to interact with people they do not intend to kill.  Chances are if only one or two of them win prizes at the carnival games, those prizes will be listed on their character sheets forever, even if just to rub it in that they won and someone else did not.  But it can also serve as a sort of time gauge.  If the same carnival comes to town every year about the same time, then your players may have a better understanding of the passage of time in your campaign world.  Maybe that’s not important, but as they become more powerful and in some sense pillars of the community, knowing how much time has passed since they did one mission or the other should be of value.

Our last argument for why you want to know all about carnivals in the fantasy world is because you don’t have to use them as carnivals.  OK, that seems pretty backwards, huh?  Our next Small Bites edition contains descriptions of a large number of acts.  Any one or more of these could be taken out of the carnival sense and dropped into a theater, street corner, or tavern in your world as the night’s entertainment.  So can any of the treats, candies and foods.  Maybe you just don’t want to spend the time (gaming night time) actually having a carnival in town, but as source material for your fantasy world, there is a lot to mine here!

Oh, and you read that stuff about carnivals leading to adventure, right?  These encounters are stuffed to the margins with quest ideas.

An Old OLD Board Enterprises Ad

Just saving a bit of fun - cleaning up some old boxes and found an old advertisement.  We used the brightest red paper we could find so that folks at GENCON would pay attention to it after they got home with all their "treasures".

We are considering reissuing the Endless Dungeon adventures.

Plagiarism, and when it’s not

OK - I have been a victim of plagiarism, so you will never see me defending it!  A now dead but at the time vastly larger company than ours took ideas I had discussed with one of their authors and printed them.  I honestly don’t blame the company; I blame the author who apparently is now some college professor.  Well, those who can’t, teach.

But!  Even in our name (Legend Quest), we have been “plagiarized”. But we weren’t; at least I don’t think we’ve been.  At one time there was a “VR” game in the UK called Legend Quest where you shot cardboard cut-outs with a laser tag style gun (at least that’s how it was explained to me).  These cut-outs were goblins and dwarves, so we don’t think they stole our name, but it certainly possible they didn’t.  Then there was that crappy TV show - thank God they cancelled it!

But this is the point.  Can anything truly be original?  If we’re talking about a mission in a RPG, I don’t think so.  Even if you had a unique setting, some of the NPCs are going to resemble something else.  Even if you had a legitimately original plot (which many argue you can’t), are the treasure and the puzzles and the traps and the other challenges all new and unique?  Can’t be.

So why discuss this now?  Well, All About Carnivals has suggested mission plots that are not original.  It’s not like I looked somewhere else and transported their plot lines into the book, but I know some of them are reminiscent of movies I’ve seen, books I read, and honestly comic books.  For some crazy reason, Thor fighting the Circus of Crime and stealing some golden bull has been stuck in my mind my entire life.

Why am I willing to accept that not every similar idea is plagiarism?  A VERY long time ago - prior to August of 1992 - I was watching bad TV on a Saturday morning.  I watched the movie Valley of the Gwangi in the morning (like 9:00-11:00) and then, as I recall it, wrote the game The Forgotten Hunt in the afternoon.  I remember having the plot lines and whole bunch of stuff figured out, and only spending about an hour after dinner on it before I felt it was basically written.  Now I spent another year researching all the dinosaurs for it, but that’s a different blog post.

Oh, what’s The Forgotten Hunt you ask?  Well, it’s dinosaurs in the modern world RPG.  Then in August of 1992, I was at GENCON selling the bound edition of Legend Quest for the first time and someone started talking to me about Jurassic Park (the novel because the movie wasn’t out yet).  Part of me was crushed.  I knew I would be accused of plagiarizing the book.  I mean if you were going to plagiarize someone, you may as well go for the top of the spectrum with Crichton, but that’s not the point.

I did get the book and I read it only to find out that he was using cloning methods.  I had three alternatives, and suggested using all three:  aliens with a “return everything as it was” prime directive had removed dinos for study and were only now able to return them to Earth; some scientists were regressing birds along their evolutionary path and thus recreating dinos (which I still don’t think is similar to the novel!) in an effort to learn all he could about the genetics of long lived creatures; and another scientist had used drugs and some gene manipulation to increase the intelligence of reptiles - in so doing he created a new species of animals that closely resembled ornithopod.  Maybe they were ornithopods.

Anyway - Did I plagiarize Jurassic Park?  No.  There have been decades of modern dinosaur stories, including Journey to the Center of the World and The Lost World - which clearly had affected Crichton because he named Jurassic Park’s sequel after it.

Brass tacks - Hey, don’t plagiarize people.  Show more class.  But don’t think everything you do has to be completely unique.  There may not be any new plot lines out there.  Take something you like and put your own twists on it.  Make it your own - as we so often say!  But be calm when your see stuff that you may think you’ve seen before.  At least see if it has that original twist to it.  Oh, and check the copyrights!  Sometimes the person you thought was original is the copier.