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.