Campaign Toybox
The Story: You know how it goes: the metaphysical universe is psychoreactive, which means the bigger the memetic footprint, the bigger the god/entity/spirit of it. The more you ritually enshrine something, the more that things becomes real, and powerful, and conceived. Eventually, you end up with an Anthropomorphic Personification. Over time, there’s nothing humans have liked more than a day off, which is why those events and concepts which were ritually celebrated with holy days became the most powerful spirits of all. As time went on, even the things themselves faded and the personifications became the days themselves. The pantheon was one big calendar.
For a while, everything was great. But we humans have a strange relationship with ritual, always seeing the shell and not the spirit, and as 19th century orthodoxy turned to 20th century consumerism set everything wrong in the spirit realm. Now it’s a madhouse dictatorship, with the plutocrat Christmas owning everything in sight, eternal beast-child Easter on his knee, his face a swamp of chocolate while at his feet stuffed turkey Thanksgiving rolls in his own corpulence and mad, drunk, adrenalin-junkie New Years laughing in the background as he stares into the fire with cold dead eyes. Where are the heroes of old? Patrick is the last anyone can remember, but he just drinks. President sold his soul to a car dealership. Valentine turns tricks for stuffed toys. Anyone who still tries to believe and do some good gets put down by Christmas’ goons: it’s sell your soul or get stomped out under his rule.
But all is not lost: there are a few holidays left who are willing to fight to turn the tide. This is their story.
Style and Structure: Superhero games have a few standard ways to mess with the formula – in fact, if you’ve read Wild Talents you’ll know there are four different dials you can set to determine grittiness, consequences and genre tropes. One way to mix all four up to start with is with an unusual superpower point source. And having all your supers being incarnate holidays will do just that. This isn’t a bad idea in any superhero game, and not without precedent: Batman has teamed up with Santa, and between the Endless and the Exemplars, the incarnation of a holiday is far from the weirdest thing you’ll encounter in a comics universe.
Sure, it’s wacky, even cartoony, but if you use a straight hero system, you can play it (mostly) straight and bring some serious punch to it. It’ll still be a bit silly, so you’ll want to keep it in the four-colour end of the spectrum, with plenty of high-fantasy, high-weirdness around, but the point is that just because it involves Santa doesn’t mean there can’t be a lot of punch-ups and explosions. Maybe people learn the true meaning of Christmas, or maybe Arbor Day (plant control) and Groundhog Day (weather control) simply go off and fight crime.
PCs and NPCs: The main trick is building powersets that are actually interesting and useful yet still strongly linked to the concept. Nobody wants to be Secretaries Day and be really good at filing or making coffee. Columbus Day could have a the power of discovering things, making him a superscientist, but then again, that might be better as Edison’s Birthday, Inventor’s Day or Science Week. Being Lincoln’s Birthday might just end up making you tall, bearded and likely to be shot in the head. Meanwhile, you also want to avoid religious holidays lest you touch sensitive areas (which may mean even Shrove Tuesday is out) and turning a recognition day of a country, race, people or struggle into a stereotype could be offensive. Nobody wants to turn Martin Luther King Day into a cheap joke.
Is it worth it, then? Yes, because if you do find a decent day, the expansive nature of what a day might mean allows you to be playful and exploratory with your powers. Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day, Presidents’ Day, Veterans/Remembrance Day, Labor Day and Independence Day all have interesting metaphorical and cultural resonances to explore, which is one of the great things about playing an incarnate concept. On the other hand, if you need things more straightforward for power choice, you have April Fool’s Day (trickster powers), DNA Day (shapechanging), Walpurgis Night or Bonfire Night (fire powers), Earth Day (earth control), Yule (cold), Midsummer’s Day (heat), or Friday the 13th (bad luck). Don’t be afraid to also raid recent, trivial, commercial or long-forgotten holidays, no matter how tenuous or flash in the pan, as these represent your low-powered types who have just joined the fold, and thus are perfect for player characters! Towel Day (always has one), Darwin Day (turns into a gorilla), Black Friday (always gets a good deal) and Super Tuesday (???) are all good places to start. If they aren’t too religious, Saints Days come with their own iconography and power set. And for super teams, anniversaries are golden – silver and gold and diamond are not far from supers (Silver Surfer, Booster Gold, Emma Frost) but you’ve also got things like leather, wood, flowers, paper, iron, sugar and salt. Wikipedia, as always, is your friend.
The best bit is, even if you can’t come up with a decent, useful power set, the other days give you your NPCs. Yes, everyone dated May Day, and Pi Day just keeps going on and on. Astronomy Day and Astrology Day have a ongoing feud, Geek Pride Day and Sys Admins Day spend all their time in the computer labs and Nevada Day confesses to Yom Kippur about his gambling addiction - while Parents’ Day chases Children’s Day down to take them to Honesty Day so they can admit they took a bite out of International Donut Day…
Plots and Villains: Without something to do, all these characters running around will just be scene-filling with god-awful jokes and will get extremely tiring. So just as a general rule, remember to leave the godly realms on a regular basis – incarnate beings tend to be more interesting when they are contrasted with the mere mortals who dally in their realms. In other words, like all supers games, we want to see Guy Fawkes’ Day and Washington’s Birthday beating up some bank robbers at least as much as we see St Stephen’s Day dealing with being bullied by Boxing Day, Christmas’ right-hand man.
Meanwhile your big plot vectors are obvious: not only has Christmas gone mad with commercialism, it’s become deeply paranoid about some imaginary war. It runs pogroms against innocent holidays both religious (Diwali, Hannukah) and secular (Festivus, Saturnalia) and banned discussion of his negative aspects like Krampus and Zwarte Piet. In the face of these horrible deeds, can our young holidays protect human lives, escape destruction, join the resistance and try to set things right again – all while ensuring nobody forgets to celebrate their particular days? The latter is of course what sets incarnates and gods apart from simple superheroes: they come with an implicit and inescapable domain that must be tended like a garden on top of everything else. Don’t skimp on that part or it may end up feeling like just wackier superheroes.
Sources: Gigantic lists of world holidays are but a click away thanks to Wikipedia. The concept of anthropomorphic personifications walking the world usually focuses on Death, whether in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld or Albert Casella’s Death Takes a Holiday or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Death isn’t a holiday but he is a great example of what you can do with personifications, and in many such sources he runs into various other personifications too (such as the oh god of Hangovers in Pratchett’s excellent Hogmanay). Dickens’ Christmas Carol takes lengths to describe the personification of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and borrows from the tradition of allegorical novels like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Several fantasy pantheons have excellent looks at incarnate gods – Weis and Hickman’s old Rose of the Prophet series being a fun example, with gods growing and shrinking as their followers’ faith does. One of the funniest episodes of the MTV cartoon Daria features St Patrick’s Day and St Valentine’s Day teaming up with Daria to drag Halloween, Christmas and Guy Fawkes back to Holiday Island. Animation is generally more extemporizing than live action, so other animated shows have done the same, as indeed, as mentioned, have comics, both superhero and otherwise – Gaiman’s Sandman features more than its fair share of concepts, particularly in Seasons of Mists, and he walked a similar path in his novel American Gods. Political comics meanwhile thrive on anthropomorphic representations of concepts and nations, and while often ham-fisted, are a good source for getting into the mindset of everything having a face.
RPGs: The godfather of roleplaying concepts is of course Nobilis, newly arrived in its 3rd incredible edition just in time for this idea and your yuletide ceremony of choice. Amber is also on topic, and has an impressive free-form chargen system that would suit this perfectly. Gods and concepts are much the same things, and Part-Time Gods got kickstarted this year, and then there's Scion from White Wolf as well. Godsend Agenda has superheroes being actual gods, literally as opposed to just metaphorically. Plenty of free-form superhero games will let you do this, and I won’t insult you by trying to list them all (Mutants and Masterminds even published a scenario about saving Christmas, Crisis On Christmas). The same goes for several modern day occult settings too (ask me if you want stats for Santa and the Easter Bunny for Unisystem). The only Christmas RPG I know of is Santa’s Soldiers but you’re better off choosing by the kind of stories you want to tell. Is it a dark world of shadowy allegiances? Then use a Dirty World, say. Is everyone Christmas’ bitch? Try My Life With Master. Want a HBO drama series? Go Smallville. And so on. Like Christmas, RPGs are what you make of them.
