MorlockGibbering

I had a lot of worldbuilding ideas floating around from when I ran D&D more often, this is going to be the first of me purging that file so I can do other stuff.

The standard Gnome calendar has 365.25 days, separated into 12 months composed of three ten-day weeks. The remaining 5 days are independent holidays and are not part of a month. Every 4 years, a special leap year holiday, Confluence, is celebrated.

Each season in the Gnomish calendar is associated with one of the classical elements: spring is air, summer is fire, fall is earth, and winter is water. The days of the week are named for D&D's dragons and are as follows: Golday, Stormdusk, Bronzedawn, Jadenight, Copperdawn, Cottondusk, SIlvermorn, Coalnight, Fireday, Redusk

The 6 special holidays are as follows:

Firstday: Gnomish new years, celebrated at the end of winter and beginning of the spring season.

Whistlepig: A festival to celebrate spring, Whistlepig festivities include a council of elders convincing the titular whistlepig to leave its burrow. Methods vary from coercion, intimidation, brute force, or trickery. Most Gnomish communities keep a family of whistlepigs around for this holiday. Killing a whistlepig at any time is said to bring misfortune to entire towns.

Glittergold: a summer solstice holiday celebrating the sun aspect of the high lord of the Gnome pantheon, Garl Glittergold

Wintertide: A fall harvest festival where gifts are exchanged before the coming of winter. Also celebrated is the Feast of Wintertide, a community-wide potluck that cannot be eaten at a table.

The Light Festival: a more personal midwinter holiday, the Light Festival is a family celebration in which the home is lit brightly to banish winter darkness and summon Garl Glittergold back to the sky. Bad children are warned that kobolds will come the night of the Light Festival and steal their shoes while they sleep.

So I saw this tweet about making your moons weird in your worldbuilding, and I agree with the sentiment But!

TLDR: The Moon is magic and you don't notice because you live on Earth. If you designed the moon for a story without it being the familiar moon, you would get called a hack.

Earth's moon (henceforth referred to as Luna) is royally fucked up from a top-down view. It's the over-designed OC of celestial bodies. Compared to most every other moon that we can observe, it's completely improbable, but because it's the moon that our planet has, it's the basis for every fantasy moon in skies with only one moon.

First, Luna is massive. While it may have a smaller radius than Mars or Mercury, it has more mass than either of them, meaning Luna is the size of a small planet. As compared to other moons, Luna is the fifth largest moon in our solar system. Not impressive, you may say, until you realize that every other moon comparable to Luna orbits massive gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, which have masses equivalent to 318 Earths and 95 Earths, respectively. Luna is so huge that it creates readily noticeable effects on the Earth's surface.

Which leads to my second point: Luna creates noticeable tides on Earth's oceans. Every moon orbiting a planet should have some gravitational effect on it's planet's surface, but the moon's impact is so huge that it makes regular and predictable effects that sea life like turtles base their breeding seasons and behaviors off of tides, which, as a reminder, wouldn't happen if Luna wasn't disproportionately large for a satellite.

Thirdly, Luna is tidally locked, which wouldn't be all that strange if it weren't for the face on its surface that stares down at the Earth. It may be just a trick of pattern recognition, but if you were designing a moon for your setting and it had a face on it, your audience would rightly wonder what that was all about. "Why does that moon have a face on it? It must mean something and not be a coincidence" they would say. But no, that's just how our most familiar satellite looks.

Fourth, Luna is the same size in the sky from the perspective of the Earth as the Sun, which leads to the most striking event that Luna is regularly a part of, the full solar eclipse. Because of a quirk of how Luna appears in the sky, it can fully block out the Sun and create an artificial night on parts of the Earth, not to mention the halo of light that surrounds Luna when it does so. Most ancient cultures thought that full solar eclipses were the Sun being eaten by a monster, which, on most planets that support life with a more appropriately sized moon, would never be a part of the culture of your world's cultures.

Compare this solar eclipse on Mars...

To this full solar eclipse on Earth