A downloadable game

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The Festival of Deep Winter is storytelling game about collaboratively creating a winter festival, and exploring it through shared vignettes. This is a GM-less game for 2 to 6 people, and plays in about 45 minutes.

Celebrations grow out of culture and community. In The Festival of Deep Winter, you create those cultural keystones and watch a festival emerge from it. Your festival may be grounded in reality - it could be the kind of festival you might find in our world. Or your festival may be full of the fantastic and have a home in a world completely unlike our own.

Whatever your festival, may it bring you closer to the people at your table.

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The Festival of Deep Winter comes at the coldest time of year when the nights are long and the snow piled high. We come together to share warmth and connection. When winter bears down on us, we have friends and family to keep us warm.

StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars
(7 total ratings)
AuthorThe One True Ryan Khan
GenreRole Playing
Tagsstorytelling, Tabletop role-playing game

Purchase

Buy Now$5.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Deep Winter Trifold.pdf 135 kB

Development log

Comments

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I got this game a while back in the Racial Justice and Equality bundle, and I just liked everything about it. Like kumada, I plan to use it to start new holiday traditions with my people and figured I would want a copy around and accessible (because also, this is totally a cosy-up-and-chat game that I would like to form part of my holiday trad.s

What with one thing and another (and the pages being so delightfully formatted for print-at-home bookletting), this may have become my first bookbinding project.

Really glad you enjoyed the game! And great choice on cover of your copy.

Happy gaming!

(1 edit) (+1)

This is a neat little game in which you homebrew a winter solstice holiday. It's got a bit of a ritual feel to it, like something out of Playing Nature's Year, but it's definitely not crunchy in any way.

I think I would either use this to to create a holiday with a close-knit friend group, one that we're at least sort of planning to observe, or as sort of a session zero for a fantasy campaign that starts during the winter. Honestly, I think a dnd game would get some significant mileage out of inventing a small town's festivities (complete with food and drinks,) and then the next session the place gets attacked by midwinter leprechauns or whatever, and now there's suddenly a kind of automatic emotional attachment to the campaign hook.

To be clear, I don't think that's what Festival Of Deep Winter was written for, but it's also not something I think I'd play just to play. It feels a bit more like it's a toolkit, and like it should be used for a purpose.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who wants a calm, extremely seasonal game.

With a few minor modifications, I suspect it'd work for fall, winter, or spring too.

(+1)

Wow, thanks for writing such a thorough rundown of the game!

You're right that I designed this to be played as a standalone game. Something a bit shorter that can still create a certain kind of emotional buy-in. But it can work as a part of a larger campaign for all the reasons you outlined.

For both uses, the game hinges on creating those cultural keystones. Those things anchor the festival and give the feeling of a complex culture.

However you use it, I hope you enjoy it!