Zompist Bboard Again

The way the benśentin is described in the Almeopedia as “a yearly holiday...on which all laws were reversed, and blasphemy, disorder, and insubordination ruled.” Now, there seems to be some similarity with the Roman Saturnalia, but the description here seems...a little more extreme, something more like a premodern Purge. (Heck, the Romans seem to have just swapped places with their slaves, put on costumes, and done a little gambling--nowhere near enough to reverse all laws.) And given that a lot of the punishments seem to be fines, does that mean that the person who committed a crime would rewarded by the treasury for their deeds? Did the victims’ families have to pay the fine instead?
Would it be possible to explain the holiday a little further?

Saturnalia is a pretty good model. Masters would serve food to servants, and were ordered to clean the house. A beggar was placed on the throne, with the king as his servant. You could tell your superiors what you thought of them, and the gods and their images were disrespected. You might dress as the opposite sex, go where you normally were not permitted, have sex that was normally illicit. It also had aspects of Carnival and April Fool's: people got drunk early and played minor pranks on each other.

If this were D&D, it would be a nightmare for the DM, because many players are rules lawyers and love seeing how much they can bend the rules. The Wede:i were not like this. They didn't use benśentin in particularly clever ways, and there were natural limits.

The main one, of course, was that it was just one day. Sure, the beggar king could make edicts (in fact, they were expected to)-- but they would all expire the next day. The slave could ask for the master's choicest possession... but it reverted to the master afterward.

In practice, the expectation was that a master would be treated as they treated their servants. So, if he regularly beat them, he could be beaten. If he didn't, then he couldn't. Several sources, in fact, state that this was the major purpose of benśentin. The Canons forbade brutality toward servants anyway, but benśentin made the particularly arrogant think twice. It also served a redistributive function (though other festivals did too): for once, the elite showered the masses with food and gifts.

As for serious crimes... well, in a sense if you really wanted to commit a murder, benśentin was a good day to do it-- things were chaotic, people were drunk, you could claim to be carried away. But you probably wouldn't get away with it. The judge's attitude might well be "Yes, the murder was legal that day, but today it isn't, so you are a murderer." He might also simply conclude that you had planned the murder beforehand, and the premeditation was a crime. Finally, a judge might point out that laws were reversed; but that if there was no law that allowed Muku to murder you, then there was no law to reverse on benśentin allowing you to murder Muku.

It's also worth pointing out that the Wede:i kingdoms were not market economies, so you couldn't (say) walk into a shop, order a beer, and have them pay you. But if you were an inferior, you'd get free food anyway, in one form or another.