‎tech manuals, commands, and tactics

Double Trouble

The Dance of Celestine Begins

Ah, the Dance of Celestine! A festival in reverence of the Mother of Autumn and Sky, where everyone is asked to climb to the highest available point and spend a day outdoors cooking, dancing, singing, and enjoying the fall weather. The third one since offworlders began to come to the island, and what is hopefully a much-needed reprieve after the troubled end to October. The time around All Hallow’s Eve is always difficult, but the invasion of the Dread Powers of Fear was a particularly intense and difficult time. Many more people are staying home from the event than usual.

On the other hand, it was Celestine who called many to safety on the top of Crane’s Ridge, and others still feel particularly motivated to pay her gratitude.

So as Mother Autumn’s season makes its final descent, enjoy the last few weeks of trees bursting with vivid color, catch one more good crisp autumn breeze, and chase the sky with your neighbors. Ascend Crane’s Ridge on foot or by train to embrace the great wild blue. It’s going to be a beautiful day.

Led through the mist by the milk-light of moon, all that was lost is revealed

As you approach the main gathering area for the Dance of Celestine, you’ll notice that there are many mushrooms around this year. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who was in the safe zone that was here last month, as it quickly became apparent that mushrooms would sprout wherever the goddess spent any significant amount of time. Since greeting people as they arrived was very much at the top of her priorities, the areas where people might arrive are naturally covered in the things. Chanterelles and morels, boletes and oyster mushrooms, even chicken of the woods on nearby trees, a delicious selection of edible mushrooms can be found all over.

Among them, however, are little red-capped toadstools with white flecks. Adorable, but well-known for being toxic, and thus meant to be left alone. Some of them curiously grow in extremely obvious rings, and the superstitious among the town will surely know better than to step within. However, there are many “rings” that are not so obvious--- sparse, misshapen, or just too large to realize they’re growing in a circular pattern.

Many will be perfectly capable of avoiding the rings, either by complete chance and without even realizing they were there in the first place, or with a bit of care. But others, whether they fall for the obvious trap or happen upon a more deceptive one, will find themselves temporarily transported. Not to a pocket dimension of unimaginable horror created by Nyarlathotep or a shard of Hell devised by a demon, but to a place of wonder, filled with pink puffy clouds and soft amber skies, waving purple grass or pastel colored sands, vibrant neon jungles or forests of alabaster trees with glass leaves. This beautiful place made of magic and dreamstuff is a slice of the Feywilds. Dangerous? Maybe. But certainly not in the same way as any place you’ve been before. Before you, a ruin. An ancient temple or castle. And apparently the only way forward is through. But you are not alone---- you were brought here with one other. And only together can you find your way back to Marrow Isle.

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For this event, all participating characters must be paired up with one other character, and inside the temple will be a magical puzzle for them to solve in order to advance. It can be any sort of puzzle, something simple or complicated, and the details of what physical actions are being taken to solve it can be sort of handwaved if you are having trouble designing something. The puzzle in and of itself isn’t important. The key gameplay element will be that you need to have an important discussion in order to complete the puzzle and escape the Feywilds. The primary concept for this was that it'd be between two characters who have existing CR and something long overdue to discuss--- repressed feelings, unresolved conflicts, long kept secrets. But it can also be used to create CR by pairing off characters who have something meaningful in common to discuss, closely guarded secrets that they need a neutral party to talk to, or might have valuable advice for the other. Feel free to do whatever you like with it, as long as it's two characters who have something of value to discuss that would further their character development.

The intention here is that each character will only have ONE partner puzzle thread, in the interest of keeping thread loads light as we enter a season of heavy travel and continue to backtag meatier events. It’s technically fine to have multiples if you have a reason for a character to go back a second time, but we strongly encourage you to keep things light--- you can always have more threads at the party itself! Be nice to yourself and to your inbox, you’ve worked hard!

Once you reach some sort of conclusion or catharsis (which doesn’t necessarily have to be positive), the characters will be deposited back on the mountainside with very little real time lost, and can enjoy the festival itself in peace. Feel free to come away from the Feywilds with some innocuous souvenir, though it should not be something large or that provides any sort of power-up. Just some silly trinket or weird food, please, and do not kidnap or bottle any gnomes or pixies. You also do not have to participate in this part of the event at all, if you’d like to bypass it. Thank you! Have fun, or don’t!

Our long bygone burdens, mere echoes of the spring, but where have we come, and where shall we end?

Once you arrive at the party on the peak of Crane’s Ridge, you find that the short, step-like layers of the mountaintop are dotted with tents, left up here in a large storage area specifically for this festival. It’s fairly commonplace for people to spend the night here, as the festival runs late into the night so as to honor Mother Celestine under the light of her immense cosmos. There are also booths all around, cooking and serving food, preparing drinks, handing out handmade flower crowns and long ribbons on dowel rods for dancing with. And in the center of it all, a massive bonfire. Celestine, after all, is the goddess of the hearth among other things, and so the fire roars throughout the night. Musicians play and sing folk music, and people dance. All is well.

For the past few years, the Dance has been met with clear skies, but this year it gets a bit more overcast towards mid-afternoon. By the time evening draws near, a light rain dances over the festival, but no one seems disappointed. It’s not even raining hard enough to put out the bonfire, and the food booths are covered. So while some people retreat to their tents to wait out the mild rain, others dance beneath it, soaking their festival clothes and flinging raindrops with their ribbons. Besides, who would the Mother of Sky be without a bit of weather?

If dreams can’t come true, then why not pretend?

The rain clears up just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset cutting rich orange slices through the remaining clouds. Towels are distributed, and festivities continue undisturbed under the starlight. The three pastel moons of Concorde can be seen playing peekaboo through whatever cloud cover lingers. Cadence is full, in all her rosy glory, and Endurance and Silence are both crescents at opposing ends. Two thin smiles of light in waxing blue and waning white. Stars glimmer passionately overhead, as if they are just as thrilled to be dancing with you as you are with them.

Among the partygoers, there is a woman. Last year, she lingered on the fringes, an outsider. This year, she seems to float on the moonbeams caught in leftover raindrops in the grass, the heart of the festival. Her gown is shimmering, as golden as the firelight, and her eyes are as silver as Silence. Starlight showers her dark skin in a thousand kisses, and the braids in her hair, once adorned with raindrop charms, have been traded out for a long, massive, fluffy ponytail that floats like cloudstuff behind her. Her coily bangs have been carefully styled to resemble swooping sideswept bangs, and a golden cuff cinches the ponytail upward.

If you want to greet Celestine, you can find her anywhere. Dancing on the grass, plucking and roasting mushrooms, or basking serenely in the glow of the fire. Would you like to ask her for a dance?