Harry Potter's Birthday
Every year the village square hosts a birthday in three parts, and only the middle part involves anything you would recognize as a celebration. For thirty days nothing happens on purpose. For thirty-seven hours something does. Then, for the whole of August, parcels arrive from people who fully intended to be on time and were not, which is the part the event is actually about.
The Three Phases
The event runs on the calendar, not on a dice roll. It opens and closes itself, every year, with no announcement and no administrator pressing anything.
| Phase | When | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Privet Drive | July 1 to July 30 | Nothing. Deliberately. |
| The Squashed Cake | July 31, midnight in England until July 31 has finished everywhere on earth | Guaranteed gold, the Green Icing buff, a keepsake badge, and sometimes a gem |
| Belated Owls | All of August | One parcel per real day, up to five per year |
Outside those two months the event is not merely quiet, it is absent: no nav in the village, no line in the village description, nothing on your New Day. It is the rare seasonal fixture that can be left switched on all year without anybody noticing, which is precisely why it is.
Phase One: Privet Drive, July 1 to 30
Number four has decided nothing is happening. The lawn agrees. The car in the drive agrees. Inside, somebody has turned the calendar to August a day early rather than be asked about it.
You may leave a card. It pays nothing. This is not an oversight and it is not a bug you have found: there is no gold in it, no gem, no buff, and no experience, and the game will tell you so in as many words while you are posting it. The card is not passed on. It goes into a letterbox at a house that has agreed not to look in the letterbox.
- One card per player per year. Posting a second changes nothing and the game declines to pretend otherwise.
- The count is real. Every card left is added to a server-wide tally kept separately for each year. That number is the entire payoff, and it is collected on the thirty-first.
- The tally resets annually. This July's number counts this July's cards and no others, so the figure read out on the thirty-first is true rather than flattering.
Phase Two: The Squashed Cake, July 31
The door comes off its hinges at a quarter past midnight and somebody the size of a small outbuilding steps through it holding a box that has been sat on. He explains the state of the box immediately, without being asked, in the manner of a man who has had several hours of walking in which to rehearse it. The icing is still legible. He considers that the important part.
- Guaranteed, not a roll. Turn up on the day and the cake is yours. There is no chance to fail and nothing to lose by trying.
- Gold scaled to your level, on top of a floor that everybody gets regardless of level.
- Green Icing, a healing buff that lasts a good stretch of rounds and mends you in combat. It is sugar, structurally, and it is behaving like medicine, which nobody has satisfactorily explained.
- A keepsake badge, the Squashed Cake, which goes on your profile permanently, dented corner included.
- Sometimes more: a bonus purse and a gem, flattened into the cardboard underneath and never mentioned by the man who brought it.
- Once per year. One cake per player per event year, and the guard is the year itself rather than the game day, so the twelve New Days you pass through in a single real day do not reopen it.
- He reads out the tally. However many people left a card in July, he will tell you the number, along with how it compares to the number the household managed. The comparison is not close. A tally of none and a tally of exactly one each get their own wording, on the grounds that a man reading a number aloud to a square should at least be able to count to one in the usual way.
- He accounts for your card. If you left one at Privet Drive in July, he says so while he is reading the tally out, so the number on the thirty-first is a number you are in rather than a number about other people. He declines to say which card was yours. It does not matter and he knows it.
Why the day is thirty-seven hours long
The window opens at midnight in England, because that is where the birthday is, and closes when July 31 has ended in the last time zone still holding on to it. That is thirty-seven hours rather than twenty-four, and it is intentional: wherever you are on the planet, if it is the thirty-first where you are, the cake is there. The clock is honest about how much of it is left.
Phase Three: Belated Owls, all August
It turns out his friends did remember. They were at school, four hundred miles north, with no dependable way of knowing the date and a postal service made entirely of birds with opinions. Every parcel is dated the thirty-first. None of them arrived on the thirty-first. Each one carries an apology in the top corner, which is somehow the nicest thing about the whole month.
- One parcel per real day. Not per game day. A game day is two hours and you will pass through about twelve of them between one midnight and the next; the owls are unmoved by this and come once per actual day, measured in UTC.
- Five parcels per year by default. Once you have opened them all, that is the lot, and August goes quiet.
- What is in them: gold, a gem, a couple of extra forest turns, or Late Post, a healing buff that wears off several weeks after it should have. Each parcel reads as being from somebody specific, late for a specific and entirely believable reason.
- You do not need the cake first. Miss July 31 entirely and the parcels still come. Being forgotten on the day is, after all, the premise.
You also get one line about the owls on your own New Day, once per real day, so a returning player finds out the month is happening without having to walk to the square first. It is text and nothing else: no reward hides in it, and reading it costs you nothing.
Small Print
- It is annual and permanent. Next July it runs again with no code changed and nothing switched on by hand.
- Nothing here can be claimed twice. The cake and the card are locked to the event year, the parcel to the real day, and each lock is taken in a single indivisible step, so a double-clicked link produces one cake and one apology rather than two cakes.
- All dates are UTC, except the two ends of July 31, which are deliberately anchored to England's midnight and to the far side of the date line respectively.
- No House points, no titles. This event pays in gold, gems, turns, buffs and one badge, and stays out of the House Cup entirely.
See also the Birthday Elf, which turns up for your birthday and is a separate fixture with separate rewards, and the Birthday Owls.