Niti’s Parade & Other Entertainments aka All About Carnivals and Faires by John Josten is a role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is a generic supplement and is part of the Small Bites series. This is the “World Walker” abbreviated version of the supplement; the full version, which is only available to Patreon supporters, is more than four times as long, although a chunk of that is probably taken up by tables.
This is a 17 page PDF that is available for free from RPGNow. One page is the front cover and around a page is various links and an ad for the Patreon campaign.
It starts with the Introduction which explains why carnivals, circuses and festivals are great for a role playing game, due to the various NPCs, adventure hooks, fighting styles and magic that can be found at them. This is followed by the Table of Contents.
This is followed by a number of articles from the Fletnern Wiki. This covers legends, individuals, animals, events, groups, regions and cultures, all of which are supposedly connected to carnivals and faires, but in some cases this connection seems nonexistent.
The Sounding Board is a selection of articles reproduced from the blog.
Plagiarism, and when it’s not considers plagiarism and why, although plagiarism is bad, sometimes – perhaps all the time – ideas are not unique, so just because something is not unique does not mean it’s bad or plagiarised.
Summer Time Fun considers just what people would have done in the summer; rather than go to the country, as is done now, in a setting like a typical FRPG they would have gone to the city.
Does Your Game Need a Circus? considers a number of reasons why these can be beneficial to an RPG.
The Champagne Trade Fairs has an overview of the actual medieval trade fairs in the region, and what effect they had.
Lifestyles of the Magical and Mundane covers the lives of those who work at the travelling fairs, using the titular Niti’s Parade as an example and also referencing The Yugsalanti Fortune Tellers of theRoads aka All About Fortune Tellers, as they also travel the roads a lot.
News of Fletnern starts with The Timing of the Honsdeck Rodeo and how the upcoming rodeo will be a big event as matters conspired to stop many people from attending the previous two. Niti’s Surprise is about an attraction – a fight in a water tank between a shark and an octopus – that Niti designed; the story of this is covered in Fairy Tales & Other Short Stories.
The Good Life: The Advertisements considers how carnival adverts are often eye-catching and how they straddle the balance between honesty about the act and attracting customers to the act.
Fairy Tales & Other Short Stories is a piece of fiction about how Niti came to have the octopus/shark attraction mentioned in News of Fletnern.
What’s Missing is about a page and a half and lists all the material that is in the full version.
The PDF is bookmarked but it only covers the major sections, not the subsections. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of detail. Navigation could be better. The text follows a two column format and appears free of errors. There are a number of presumably public domain black and white illustrations that are generally appropriate to what they are illustrating. Presentation is okay.
As is typical for these supplements, this one is a collection of generally related articles rather than something that is a coherent whole. The articles show the author’s tendency to go into great detail into how and why things work; although not every GM will want to go into quite this level of detail, it’s still interesting to read and some useful information can still be gained. It is a bit of a shame this edition is so much more abbreviated than normal; perhaps that’s more because the full version is noticeably longer than normal. Niti’s Parade & Other Entertainments aka All About Carnivals and Faires is another interesting supplement in the series and it can be downloaded for free by clicking here.
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