GM Breakdown, episode 21 - Longnight

Hello again!

Time for another GM Breakdown, this time regarding Episode 21 and the Longnight festival. It turned into a breather episode for the students, focusing on the celebration instead of studying, a break that was most welcome, and very fun for us to record.

Some of you might know that Longnight is a week-long festival, culminating at the full moon of the first month of the Golarion year, Abadius. It is celebrated all throughout Golarion, even in Irrisen, where there are no natural seasons. There are several variations and customs depending on where you're celebrating. For instance, in Clan Dukembe they all wear plaid through the night, as mentioned in the episode. The one common thing through most variations, though, is to stay up all through the night in defiance of the long, dark winter months.

We took this as an opportunity to prepare and give some gifts to each other. Obviously we didn't tell each other what we were planning, resulting in the double chess set. That's the risk when you only have 20 episodes to try and find memorable moments, there's a pretty high probability of overlap. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of meaningful moments. It may be just because I'm the one playing Wully, but I really enjoy the moment from episode 17 when Rikdahn finds a sleeping Wully and just expresses how anyone who tries to mess with Wully will get a fist to the face. Expressing this in a gift is difficult though, so a chess set is a nice way of manifesting a callback.

Teh'Rull, or should I say Greg, continues to impress me as well, with his very characteristic essays for the other students. Each of them was very tailored to the interest we had expressed so far, which was very insightful. To give someone information they were not aware of about a subject they are interested in is an extremely fitting gift. Just imagine someone telling you about their favourite author and you finding basically an unknown book by them, Can you do anything other than give them the greatest gift ever?

And then I imagine that Yshkol's warren did not have the tradition of gift-giving, so he has not experienced this part of the festival and wasn't prepared for it, but I imagined Wully enjoyed very much to share this tradition with his new Ysoki friend.

Next week we will get into some new bug trouble as we serve Teh'Rulls detention.

See you then!

Ejnar