Fantasy Holidays, Vol. 1 is a short, generic fantasy PDF from Top Fashion Games designed to help GMs flesh out their worlds with holidays and festivals. The cover, by designer Dave Woodrum, depicts some red, green, orange, and, yellow flowers bordered by a muted plaid. I found the cover pleasant enough to look at but did not think it was particularly appropriate for an RPG product. Although I loosely connected the color scheme with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and autumn in general, I felt that it did not connect particularly well with the text. Top Fashion Games might want to consider taking a page from Ronin Arts and not having a cover on short products like this. Instead, a clean, professional looking first page would serve their aims fine. There was no interior art.
As I found in
Cargo Commodities, Vol. 1, the layout in general is on the right track. The margins are normal and there's not too much white space. One improvement on the previous product's layout is the consistent use of two columns throughout the PDF's main text. Unfortunately, there are other problems: ragged right margins, an orphan at the top of page 4 where the explanation of format ends and before the actual holidays, and, perhaps most damning, an entirely blank page at the end of the PDF. Smaller issues include the lack of identification for separate paragraphs -- either double spacing between paragraphs or indenting the first line of a new one would be fine, but running them together makes them very hard to read -- and some awkward choices in spacing words (why use "1copper" instead of "1 copper"?). Finally, the product reads as though it underwent little editing or revision. Take, for example, the following sentence: "In the manner that the time of the holiday is provided one can easily break down the likely occurrence of the holiday and assign a proper date for the holiday as based on their fantasy world’s dating system." The sentence is needlessly complex and uses too many words to say something that could be said in far fewer words -- for example, "I have provided the time of the holiday in the hopes that the reader can use this information to find an appropriate time to use it in his own campaign's calendar." It's still a rough sentence and far from a great sentence, but it's shorter and gets to the point faster.
As for content, there is some nice stuff here. I particularly liked the idea of Kingdom Expense, or how much a festival or holiday costs a government. It's a nice idea and one that could have been explored at length to good effect -- for instance, a description of what sorts of things a government would provide and where they get them would be a neat topic here. Some of the holidays could be quite neat, too -- Blood Feast (monstrous humanoids hunt the peaceful folks of the land, strip their bodies of meat, stew them, and eat them around a campfire -- gory enough to be almost silly, I still liked it), Dread Night (a winter ritual designed to ward off evil spirits), and Harpy Night (human males go off to hunt harpies) struck me as holidays that could be used to add flavor and depth to a campaign world or could even be used as adventure hooks themselves. Also, Woodrum's inclusion of information such as racial recognition, religious recognition, and holiday length were all helpful and appropriate.
Other holidays, particularly Founder's Days and Faire Pole Days, struck me as being too derivative of real world holidays to be of much use. The former reminded me of Labor Day, only more specific, and the latter was reminiscent of May Day as celebrated in "The Maypole of Merrymount" by Hawthorne. Witches' Harvest was Halloween under another name. This, ultimately, hindered the usefulness of the product, as if I'm looking to insert real world holidays into my game, I can do that myself -- nothing included here would make me want to use Witches' Harvest over my own version of Halloween. All in all, cleaning up the layout issues listed above and making the holidays more unique and exciting would go a long way towards increasing the utility of this product.
Score: 1.75 (rounded up to 2)
