The Festival of Harvests

The Harrowlands are a dark, cold, grim and haunted place. A body length into the ground the soil is frozen solid the whole year long. The winter nights are long, snow piles up deep across the land, the rivers covered in ice and only a small number of small creatures or extremely paranoid ones, still survive in the abandoned wildlands made largely of bog, marsh and soggy muskeg. There are forests, glaciers and a multitude of hotsprings, boiling pools, geysers and fumaroles. The blue fire lava in places. And the ever hungry Risen undead. Packs of ghouls. Feral Vampires. Restless hungry ghosts and life draining wraiths. Human life is lived behind secure walls surrounding fields and grazing land and fortified villages and towns, ruled over and protected by, and feeding the Vampire Lords. Few would dare to try to live "free" in the wilds, though there are some, scraping by on berries, fish and fowl and hiding in walled in caves with volcanic heat. The long days give opportunity for planting and crops in drained or managed fields. One of the few points of joy is the Harvest.

Summers are nice when you can get out. Maybe for field tending, berry picking, gathering nuts in the autumn, or water-oats checks. Run the sweet sap buckets. Fishing. Always fish. Nice to get some ducks or geese, a fat beaver or seal for real meat. Gotta wear the smelly grease to keep off the biting flies and blood sucking midges and mosquitos. Best if you can do things from canoe, cause the Risen and Ghouls sink rather than swim. But the best is end of summer when the Harvest festival comes! So much food!

A Harrowlander 's observations

History

The Harrower has no holidays or festivals, not even the day of the Dead. The Lords see such things as inconsequential but simultaneously partake of many human celebrations and events. The Harrowlander life is in the tight confines of their village or city with healthy fear outside of them unless accompanied by one of the Minions of the Lords. The summers are hot and bug filled. The winters long, dark and cold. The Nobles will frequently have better rooms at the higher levels, with fresher air and breezes. Sometimes, they have another smaller ring or rings, attached to the village or town by passageways or tunnels. They have their revels and galas with music and light, food and fancy dress and special guests of the Lords that they feed from their own veins.
Downbelow get to hear the music and merriment. To smell the fancy foods and rare treats, which they might sample as gifts the next morning. Most have their crowded rooms. In some towns and villages there are too many and people live in the walkways, in others they can't pay the commons or do the work and they too live in the walkways.
So the Downbelow, the commoners, take what joys they can. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Funeral fires. The Day of the Dead when the passed and gone are remembered. Midwinter's night. And the Harvest Festival.

Harvest Festival is when most of the summer's work is done and it is down to collecting, drying, pickling, storing and preparing. Old jars are emptied of the ends of last year in preparation for the new.

Participants

Typically the food and drink gets set up on the day of the Harvest Festival, but it doesn't start until sundown. Like with all celebrations, thanks are given to the Lords for their protection and they are toasted and cheered. Then the party starts as musicians play, or those who own or can play instruments. Drum. Flute or pipes. The long neck Sian of three or four strings, strummed or plucked, or picked by the spade while fingers change the sound by damping down the strings over frets.

Preparation for the Feast.

by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The village elders, along with the Nobles agree to the day. Then there is the getting ready for a few days. Mixing the last of the old with the new, baking pies and cakes, soaking the dried fruit in the water-oat alcohol or mashing and wetting the fruit into paste with sweet sap or honey. So good on warm bread with butter! Fresh meat and not just fish, cooked and passed around. We play the Mole-in-Hole. We throw axes at targets. There is wrestling. We sing and play music and dance and try to sneak a kiss from the cute ones. Kids make shadow puppet plays imitating the masters. The lesser lords, the halfers, mix in and hand out coin and trinkets, drink and get wild with dance. Sometimes there are Mages who might make you do things like dance as their shadow puppet or kiss an old granny or grampy like they was your secret love, but only the lowest need really worry cause the Lords don't like others damaging their herd. And the Lord's family is there watching. Pick up and put away the drunk and passed out and take a bite they do. Heard one say they like the memory of the blood at festival, it makes them feel things.

- Harrowlander discussing Harvest Festival

Related Ethnicities

• Sangir