Article on Time and Place

[Arlanthe]

Something I constantly strive to improve in my games is the sense of time and place in the world. I think it would be great if some article on this were to appear on the site.

Basically, the technique is an attempt to weave descriptions of seasonal events, and note holidays, character birthdays and the like into each gaming session to note the passage of time. I try to do this in an off-handed way by "dropping" bits of text in at the beginning, middle, and end of each session. Such as "You rouse yourselves on the mid-Flamerule morning, inhaling air not entirely cooled from the summer heat of the previous day", and later "the seasonal temperatures seem to have resurrected a cloud of mosquitoes above the pond, floating as a fuzzy haze".

Hinting at place is of course an element of story anyway, as a practiced DM already weaves details about the location into the story in fine threads of detail. "You hear the soldiers leaning on the easement, flitting unintelligible Damaran syllables between them", and describing unique clothing or activities for the area.

Over time, I like to really make the players feel that the world is changing in every possible way, and constantly look for ways to improve this. So.. someone should write an article indeed!

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Good call - Let's open source it: what do we GMs do to make time and place live for the players? Maybe we can make a wiki-article for the Playground..?

I like to use weather. For my campaign, I wrote a little weather generator in XL that creates weather a few times per day. It varies depending on the region: colder in high lands, wetter at the coast, warmer closer to the equator. It helps me set the day in motion, and makes describing stuff a bit easier - and it helps disguise when I'm using plot-determined weather (see Elan's comment in this strip (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0199.html)).

I also use languages - humans speak different languages in different regions (and so do elves to a lesser extent). The "common tongue" is determined by what region the game starts in: there's no guarantee the PCs will be able to communicate outside their homelands.
With that in mind, I've made the names of places and people in the homelands as British as I can - including Celtic variations for some regions. Further away, the naming themes become Egyptian, Latin, Sumerian. I find this helps make things feel "foreign" and exotic to the players.

[InaVegt]

Time
I find creating a calendar with holidays, season changes and moon phases for the players, and an extended version with secret events to happen at certain dates, and a plot calendar for a single plot with all modifying dates to work wonders for creating a sense of passing time. Don't forget to describe nature as appropreate for the season and don't let it snow in summer time when you have a temperate climate for that area, unless the plot demands it of course. In one campaign the temperature based zones of the campaign shifted somewhat depending on the season and climate of the area (a deep inland area had cold winters and warm summers, with aprrpreate movements/behavior changes of animals and monsters (bears slept in winter, but immediately attacked the players if they woke them up, there were different birds in winter than in summer, some changes in which monsters were in the area)
Place
To create a sense of difference in places I base my countries of RL cultures, both extinct and still existing. Dwarves might have a theocracy similar to that of ancient egypt (With the son of moradin, a demigod as their leader) while elves could have a democracy similar to that of athens (true democracy with each citizen voting for every change of law) as their nations are a city at most. Humans would have a culture for every nation, closer nations similar to eachother, of course not only the government types are different but the rest of culture as well (dwarves don't like making high scale decisions, as they are usually made for them, while elves value freedom of choice into the extreme. Dwarves only use money when trading with others, as they gain items which they need for their proffesion, while elves might have a lot of different types of coin, ranging in value between 0.1 cp and 1000 pp, including strange values like 230 pp named the magical weaponry coin, used for buying magic weapons)

[Koji]

Calendars require a LOT of work if you're going to make your own. Is there an easy place to find calendars for common gameworlds?

[InaVegt]

Calendars require a LOT of work if you're going to make your own. Is there an easy place to find calendars for common gameworlds?

Forgotten realms calendar (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/frx/20050525x)

Ebberon planar calendar (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebwe/20041129a)

Of course, you can make it easy or hard, I generally have 336 day years, divided into 12 months of 28 days. each season starts and ends at the change of a month (Winter generally is the 12th, 1st and 2nd months of the year). A month starts at full moon and I just give every month a fancy name. Then I place holidays. For my secret GM calendar it's a bit more, secret GM dates/happening of several sorts.

[Arlanthe]

Hm, the weather generator is a good idea. I just use tables, but it gets pretty rough. Not only does it disguise plot weather- but how often do characters ever get to use call lightning? Weather can be used for adventure hooks too- overdrenched fields, droughts, etc.

I also like the "secret" GM calendar thing, I sort of keep a crib sheet for that. I like the FR calendar tool, but it would be even greater if someone made a comprehensive "calendar builder" that you clicked a button and- boom- weather, astronomy, everything.

[kensai]

You might also consider having metaplots in the game - things that going on in the world, not affecting the PCs directly. Such as a kingdom gearing for war; it takes a long time, and is visible in a variety of ways. Drafting, taxes go up, stocks, rumors, general attitude, propaganda against the enemy to prepare the minds of the people for what is ahead. Such gradual changes could be a lot more pleasant of course - such as changing in what people wear, deals, trading, royal marriages. They would not however be isolated events, but trends and slow, large-scale plotlines that do not directly involve the PCs. At least, not at the start.

A friend kept a rule of seven in effect - on any level of the game he had seven entities. They could be local key NPCs, main locations, empires, cities within an empire. The approach allowed quick expansion of detail where it was required, and made for a world that was alive with plots, rather than fixed and unchanging like a painting.

[Dizcorp]

I cheated with my world's calendar.

I stole one that doesn't get used anymore. The French revolutionary calendar, when translated into English, works remarkably well for me. Having my characters say "it's the fifth day of Wine, hurrah, festival!" is so much better than using our real calendar.

The Common language is still the common tongue of my world (represented by our common tongue, English), but naming conventions (and indeed language conventions) are different from region to region. The religious languages (Celestial, Infernal, Abyssal) are represented by Latin. Elvish is represented by Arabic (my world's elves live in the desert, hence I use the world's most famous desert culture...), Dwarvish by the Scandinavian languages, and so on.

One difficulty I've had with my game world is that the main continent of interest is set in the southern hemisphere. The group often have difficulty in realising that it gets warmer as they travel north!

Cultural archetypes are also interesting to play with. My main continent's "evil empire" is modelled on the Roman Empire, with bits from the Old, Western, Eastern and Holy ones... you name it, it might be in there somewhere. Said empire's high priest is named Julius, the emperor is called Laertes*, and a prominent archbishopess who various groups have encountered is called Dominia (goes well with the religion in question being Hextor...).

Yet a rebel child of this empire (a major antagonist in my game world) has an old-school Anglo-Saxon name - Ceolwyn. Other people have French names. If you've ever used random name generators, which call on a number of different lists of names, you'll be surprised at how quickly a game world can create itself.

It's all in making the world believable. D&D worlds, unlike the real world's history, has much more porous cultural boundaries. Elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and even orcs can be seen running around in a variety of lands, cities, kingdoms and armies.

To the man who talked of metaplots - not everything has to be the fault of the PCs, or even within their grasp. Just because the far-off kingdom of Squidgy has recently been conquered by the evil empire, doesn't mean that the characters can do much about it. The evil lich lord EvylBgr is too busy laying waste to the countryside to care of kingdoms...

I love world-building. I hope you write more on it in the future, Giant!

* 2 nerd points to whoever guesses the source of that name

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I cheated with my world's calendar.

I stole one that doesn't get used anymore. The French revolutionary calendar, when translated into English, works remarkably well for me. Having my characters say "it's the fifth day of Wine, hurrah, festival!" is so much better than using our real calendar.


That's a great source! It's unusual enough to feel fantasy, but it follows a year cycle that's familiar and understandable.

What you need from a calendar is a feeling of the passage of time, to let your players have marker events outside their adventures for when things have happened. If a vile demon-worshipping Baroness is going to marry a kidnapped youth on the Eve of Saint Heironymous's Nativity (to ensure the most unholy union), the build up to festivities and change of season become more memorable, and make the adventure more memorable.
You could call the same feast day "The Winter Solstice", and that might be right for your campaign, but inventing traditions that are familiar and still fabulous really helps to set a scene in a time and culture.

[kensai]

Yay, nerd points for me. =)

Thanks for the reference to the calendar. It will come in handy.

Roleplayingtips.com has plenty of articles on various aspects of roleplaying. A very recent one relates to the topic at hand; the results of a reader competition on annual festivals and plot hooks relating to them.

[Tim4488]

I've made two calenders for my own worlds, actually, both based on the idea of sticking close enough to the real-world calender that one year here is one year there (otherwise I just feel my life would be far too complicated).

The one for my current campaign world, Keis, runs as follows. There are 13 months of 28 days each, split into 4 7-day weeks, named basically on the practical events that happen in each. Snowfall, Frost, Thaw, Downpour, Greentime, Planting, Dragonstime, Flame, Toil, Harvest, Festival, Chill, and Freeze. Dragonstime was sort of thrown in because I ran out of ideas, but it's a fun plot idea to have one month where dragons are more active. That adds up to 364 days, the last day, our New Year's Eve, is a day of transition between years, reflection and such. I stole the rough idea from the Baha'i faith, but I'm hoping they won't mind. Each day has its own name too, since all of our day names are based on deities that don't exist in (most) D+D campaign settings.

Place I'm not so good on. I have made an effort to make one kingdom mostly Britishy, the place names are British, the NPC names sound English or so, and there's a mostly benevolent constitutional monarchy. I also have a free city that's very German-based, I found a name list of German first names from an elementary school class list or something like that online and it's been extremely useful. I've also created a loose idea of a place called Tond, with its own naming conventions, which are being slowly worked on (so far the only Tondi they've run into is an immigrant into the British-y kingdom, and his name was Devont Vond, pretty radically different from Andrew Smith).