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Midwinter - Erastide - (the world's (pirthday). Feasting, jollit3'
parties, gifts i
Midsummer - The Festival of Nedra. Prayers, religious observances
Various - The current Emperor's birthday
Early Fall - Ran Horb's Day. Celebration of the birthday of the
greatest emperor. Military parades; patriotic speeches
Late Fall - Mara's Day. A day of guilt. offerings to Mara. Pay all
debts. Processions of penitents
RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES
The priesthood is comfortable and not very devout. Religion is formal
and perfunctory. Prayers are largely for luck and profit.
The Monastery at Mar-Terin - cloistered
Mendicant Monks - beggars
Most Tolnedrans aren't very religious
Appendix on Maragor
The kingdom of the Marags which once lay in that pleasant vale in
the southeast quarter of what is now Tolnedra is, as all men know, no
longer in existence. The destruction of Maragor is. of course, our
national shame. This is not stated out of some desperate need for
guilt which we observe among some of our less stable colleagues,
but is, rather, a cold and incontrovertible fact. The Marags were not
by any means an admirable people, but their annihilation, as we
now know, was an unnecessarily extreme response to a cultural
aberration which might have rather easily been rechanneled.
GEOGRAPHY
The vale which was once Maragor is a mountain-surrounded and
fertile valley at the headwaters of the River of the Woods measuring
one hundred leagues by twenty-five leagues. It is dotted with
lakes and watered by the sparkling rivers which form the upper
tributaries of the River of the Woods. Those hardy souls who have
traversed it report that it is truly one of the loveliest spots in the
known world. The horror which dwells there, of course, makes
Maragor totally uninhabitable. It is also, unfortunately, non-exploitable
for precisely the same reason. The free gold still glitters on the
bottoms of the streams, but none dare risk their sanity to claim it.
THE PEOPLE
The Marags were a short, ohve-skinned people of the same racial
stock as Tolnedrans, Nyissans and Arends. The single characteristic
which all the world thinks of when the Marags are mentioned is, of
course, the fact that they were cannibals. How extensive this practice
was is the subject of much debate among scholars. The savagery
with which the Tolnedran legions extirpated the Marag culture left
little in the way of documentary evidence behind; and one may be
certain that if no Tolnedran willingly would now enter Maragor for
gold, he would be much less likely to go there in search of records or
fragments of parchment.
The archives in the monastery at Mar-Terin, however, do contain
some few fragments which provide a sketch outline of the Marag
culture.