Harvest Luminary Festival Traditions

Harvest Luminary Festival Traditions is an Official GemStone IV Document, and it is protected from editing.

The Harvest Luminary Festival: A Naidem Tradition

As told by an unnamed harvest elder to a newly arrived denizen of Naidem. It is believed that those disguised as (un)deathly visitors may yet earn the trust of actual Naidem residents to see the splendors of the festival with their own eyes.

As every culture has traditions surrounding death and the afterlife (or lack thereof), so too do they have practices, customs, and ceremonies devoted solely to the harvest season. Whether primarily agrarian in nature or not, all peoples must eat, and therefore, the societies which they comprise have ways of honoring that process: the land that nurtures, the farmers that cultivate, the gods that bless to help assure another year of survival (if not prosperity). What these practices and customs look like vary from culture to culture, of course, with some involving solemn gifts to the land (both from the harvest itself and otherwise), merry festivals that celebrate life and the sustenance-giving harvest, and others that honor the death of life that provides meat and grain to weather the coming winter.

Like all else in Naidem, a place of shared consciousness and memory, a dimension where reality and what underpins and overlays it blur together, the harvest celebration is a conglomeration of many cultures and belief systems, all distilled into one festival that encompasses all imaginable facsimiles of life and some that just may defy imagination. With that, welcome to Naidem's Harvest Luminary Festival.

The festival is celebrated yearly, though you must pardon Naidem's inhabitants for being shy about sharing one of their most treasured traditions with you upon your initial arrival. Trust takes time, and time, as you know, moves differently here. Perhaps this year, you'll be allowed to find your way through the gates and into the festivities beyond. While year-to-year activities vary and are decided by a council of the harvest elders, they always include dancing, games, and a luminary release. And, what is this luminary release? Well, if you were topside (for those that find themselves on the right side of the dirt, as it were), I imagine you're picturing pretty paper and fabric lanterns lit and released to fill the sky with golden starlight. Or, perhaps you're imagining floating candles, lit and set adrift across a still pond, their tiny flames waving to the reflections of their starry counterparts on the water's surface. You wouldn't be wrong, not wholly. There's some of that. But the magic of the luminary festival hangs in the trees throughout the festival, sways under the wind's caress in the underbrush, and is released on the final night of the festival from the raised hands of attendants, sending wishes of wellness, of memory, of love to those they've left behind in the waking world. In Naidem, we use wisp lanterns.

Perhaps when you've been walking at night through a dim forest, you've seen orbs of light dancing beneath low-hanging tree limbs and verdant canopies. Or on an evening stroll through magnificent gardens, you've seen tiny motes of light at the corner of your vision, colorful dancers that wink along amongst the petals of open flowers and then are gone 'ere you're sure you've seen them. Someone was thinking of you just then, you see. Raising a wisp lantern in your honor, sending you wishes of life and love. Sent by someone you can no longer see but, just perhaps, can feel from time to time.

And, wisp lanterns? Oh. They're these little lantern-shaped flowers that grow in clusters around and about in Naidem, on long stalks that sway and dance in the wind. They never really open, per se, but mostly look like papery, bulbous lanterns that taper to a point and glow from within. If you pick one and give it a good shake, it casts off motes of light that dance off into the air. The most common colors are off-white, beige, and tan, while they can also be found in more exotic hues like turquoise, violet, magenta, and soot grey. When they die, the papery husk turns thin and skeletal, and drops a ripe berry before completely withering.

That is our Harvest Luminary Festival: a time when the denizens of Naidem can recall the simple joys of the harvest celebrations from their living days and send tiny, luminous well-wishes across the ether from our world to the living. We hope you'll join us.

Additional Information

Wisp Lanterns & Lanternberries

The entire wisp lantern plant is edible, but all components, save the lanternberry itself, have a distinctly acrid taste no matter how cooked, and people are known to break out in hives when consuming them. Given that, eating and cooking wisp lanterns is rarely undertaken.

The raw lanternberry is extremely sour but drying them under the right conditions develops their inherent sugars; one can cook with raw lanternberries, but it requires extra sugar and other ingredients to counterbalance the strength of its natural flavor. Dried lanternberries have a pleasantly sweet-sour berry taste with unusual hints of cinnamon-spiked citrus. Properly prepared dried lanternberries are popular in tisanes, especially amongst the wisp-seers who frequently drink it while performing their divinations.

Wisp lanterns smell slightly musty, albeit in a surprisingly pleasant moss-like manner that is reminiscent of a damp and dark forest floor. The scent combines well with stronger florals and coveted for use in perfumes, incense, and candles.

Wispstones & the Wisp-seers

Named after the lantern wisps, wispstones are rare gems found in Naidem. They come in similar colors as the flower, and they possess a faint inner luminescence. It is considered quite fortuitous to find a wispstone during the Harvest Luminary festival, especially amongst the more superstitious of the cailleach.

Indeed, some cailleach (and occasionally the bodach) have created divination rituals around wispstones and are often found doing wispstone readings during the festival. These wisp-seers tend to wear simple clothing in shades that match their chosen wispstone. They wear this chosen gem at either the throat or forehead. Their divination is complex and not fully explained, but as seen at the festival, the wisp-seers each possess a small pouch filled with small wispstones of various shapes and colors. They perform their readings at a low, symbol-covered table set amongst the lantern wisps, blindly selecting stones from their pouch and rolling them across their table. It is believed they interpret their readings based on the symbols that adorn the table, the position of the stone relative to the symbol, and the color of the stone. Some believe that the types of lantern wisps in proximity to the divination affect the outcome of the reading as well, and still others have seen readings that also involve tea leaves, tarot cards, and other standard divination fair.

Regardless of their efficacy in divination, wispstones are quite beautiful gems and coveted by many.

OOC Information/Notes

• Created by GM Xayle, with additions by GM Xynwen, 2024
• Item Restrictions:
  • Wisp Lanterns are special and cannot be altered. They are different in Naidem than outside Naidem. Because of this, you cannot have forage item props made with them. Other items should not be altered into a living wisp lantern (obviously alterations that are just designs of a wisp lantern would be permissible).
  • Lanternberries are edible foraged items, and therefore, they cannot be altered either typically
  • Wispstones fall under normal gem alteration and rarity rules