Saintly Sunday: Theophany

Why do you hold back the waters, O Jordan? Why do you hinder your streams, and why proceed not on your natural course? I cannot bear, said he, the consuming Fire. I stand in awe and shudder before His extreme condescension. For I am not wont to wash Him that is clean: I have not learned to bathe Him that is without sin, but to purge defiled vessels. Christ, Who is baptized in me, teaches me to burn up the thorns of sin. John bears witness with me: the Voice of the Word does cry: Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world. Unto Him let us, the faithful, cry out: O God, Who has appeared for our salvation, glory be to You. — Doxasticon of the Sixth Royal Hour of Theophany

One of the reasons I haven’t been posting much at all in the last week is that Theophany (aka Epiphany — when Christ is baptized by John in the River Jordan) is today — on a Sunday. In the Orthodox tradition, this means a major shake-up in the order of services.

Even in a normal year, Theophany is a big deal. Historically it has always been more important than Christmas, which merely sets the stage for Theophany. The main reason is that this is a feast which explicitly discusses the nature of God as a Trinity:

As You were baptized in the Jordan, O Lord, then the worship of the Trinity became manifest, for the voice of the Father bore witness to You, naming You the Beloved Son; and the Spirit, in the form of a dove, confirmed the certainty of the word. O Christ God, who appeared and illumined the world, glory to You. — Apolytikion of Theophany

While Christmas nicely emphasizes the Incarnation, it does not explicitly include the other two persons of the Trinity.

Not only do I wan to wish the blessings of the sanctified water upon all who bother to read my blog, but I also wanted to highlight the idea of time in terms of an RPG.

One of the things that makes a really good adventure is placing pressure on the party through time. Most often this takes place in terms of resource management — how long will our torches last? how long can our cleric keep us healthy enough to survive another encounter? One can also use time as a limit before something bad happens, like (to use the Rescue the Princess trope) the dragon eating the princess at dawn.

Today’s celebration of Theophany also calls attention to yet another use of time. This week has been nothing but preparation for me because of having to prepare for all the changes that happen because Theophany falls on a Sunday. In other words, time can dictate major changes in a dungeon or an adventure location depending upon when one goes there.

For example, there might be a door that can only be seen and opened during a full moon (as in the Lord of the Rings) or an entire section of dungeon (which might hold the key to an important treasure hold) is only present at certain times of the day, week, month or year.

The extra danger for the adventurer is what happens if they stay too long? Where do they end up? Trapped until the next time this dungeon section is due to appear? Or do they end up in another dungeon that this section is apart of the rest of the time? Or do they end up on an entirely different world?

Saintly Saturday: St. Kyriake the Great Martyr

Today is the feast of St. Kyriake the Great Martyr. The title Great Martyr is given to those saints who had to endure many tortures prior to their death. St. Kyriake was originally accused by a pagan suitor who, out of rage for being rejected, turned the saint and her family into Emperor Diocletion. Seeing her beauty and the wealth of her parents, Diocletion attempted to convince St. Kyriake to renounce Christ. Even after a severe beating, she refused. After this, she was shipped to various places in the Empire to be tortured and tempted.

She ended up in Nicomedia (in modern day Turkey), where she was hung in the air by her hair and burned with torches. This only seemed to make her stronger in her faith. Indeed, Christ visited her in a vision and healed her wounds. Finally, her torturers gave up and scheduled her to be decapitated; however, during a prayer just prior to her execution, she gave up her soul in peace in the year A.D. 300.

The name Kyriake literally means The Lord’s Day (Sunday) and reminds me of a level of campaign detail that I usually neglect, but wish I didn’t — time and calendars. Although, in theory, such detail allows for player immersion into the game world, in practice I always find that our conception of time is so ingrained that alternate names of days and months tend to take players out of the world rather than farther into it. I always end up redefining these names and time frames back into our own. Therefore, I don’t usually bother.

However, I am reminded by St. Kyriake, St. Paraskeve (the Day of Preparation or Friday) and St. Sabbatius (the Sabbath or Saturday) that Greek does have an alternate system for naming days that isn’t too outside our own experience of time to take us out of a game world.

For the most part, the days of the week are simply numbers. For example, Monday is the Second Day (of the week). Friday (the Day of Preparation) refers to the Jewish practice of doing all the work for Saturday in preparation for not working on the Sabbath — the Seventh Day on which God rested. Sunday (the First Day) is called the Lord’s Day because it is the day of the Resurrection.

This method implies a simple way to tell time that will be easy to associate with our own experience. Months can be replaced with familiar time frames such as seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) and days can be named by number — the Second Day of Spring, for example. Alternatively, months could be replaced by the cycles of the moon. Days could be numbered either according to the New Moon or the Full Moon (this could be particularly useful if the world has a magic system tied to the phases of the moon).

Personally, I would be tempted to combine the two. To keep it simple, each season would have three moons. Days could be named thusly: The Second Day of the First Moon of Spring. For those interested in maintaining the idea of weeks, there can be 28 days every moon. Thus, the first, eighth, fifteenth and twenty-second days are the Lord’s Day.

As a curiosity, this system would have 336 days in a year, 84 days per season, and (assuming the days are numbered from the New Moon), Pascha (Easter) would always fall on the Fifteenth Day (or Third Lord’s Day) of Spring — the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.