Fantasy Calendars

[SilverLeaf167]

Many settings include relatively detailed calendars of their own. Typically this just means new names for months and weekdays or something (like in the Elder Scrolls or Dwarf Fortress), but some go further and mess with the length of days, months or years, for example.

Have you ever made a custom calendar yourself or played in a group that used one? How different was it? How much did it actually affect your immersion, or the game itself? Was it an interesting part of the setting, or just a distracting detail everyone kept forgetting? Do you have examples of particularly good or bad calendars?

Personally I've gone the easy way of simply declaring that everything works as normal, especially as there tends to be plenty of weeks-long travel or downtime, but I'm currently wondering whether I should do something with month names. Finnish months kinda work pretty well, since they already have names like Pearl Moon, Hay Moon and Mud Moon, but they might still feel weird in-character, as the whole group is Finnish anyway. A player actually asked whether Thursday was still called that in a world without Thor, and I couldn't really answer.

[Âmesang]

I attempted to piece together a very simple calendar for WORLD OF GREYHAWK^® to help me keep track of time whilst writing notes, 'cause I didn't want to simply write, "Day 1…," "Day 2…," &c.; and by that I mean an actual calendar that you could print out, hang on your wall, and mark off dates.

https://www.schadenfreudestudios.com...reyhawk%29.pdf

At some point I need to track down some old GREYHAWK art to make it look a little less bland. On a related note I can't seem to find what day the "Day of the Great Signing" was. All I can find is it's month and year.

[halfeye]

Many settings include relatively detailed calendars of their own. Typically this just means new names for months and weekdays or something (like in the Elder Scrolls or Dwarf Fortress), but some go further and mess with the length of days, months or years, for example.

I like the later Elder Scrolls games a lot, but their Calendars are weird. If you don't timeskip, a day lasts I think two hours, the sun rises and sets at 6 o'clock even in Skyrim, which is supposed to be semi-polar, and there are no differences in the weather between seasons.

[TheCountAlucard]

Exalted's setting uses a lunar calendar of fifteen 28-day months, with a five-day period outside the year, referred to as "Calibration." It is considered an inauspicious period, in which the gods break from their normal vigil, and the moon completely disappears from the sky.

The months are tied to the cycle of elements in Creation: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Wood, with each getting a month as Ascending, Resplendent, and Descending.

[hymer]

I like a simple, ralatable and well-ordered calendar, which requires a well-ordered world and some well-ordered people. So I usually base my calendar on the legendary dwarf observatory in Kharandafar.

[SilverLeaf167]

I like a simple, ralatable and well-ordered calendar, which requires a well-ordered world and some well-ordered people. So I usually base my calendar on the legendary dwarf observatory in Kharandafar.

That link reminds me; how much thought have you given to the current year in your games and settings, and how relevant has it been?

My setting's chronology is based on "OG" and "NG", meaning Old Gods and New Gods. The current year is 1986 NG. The OG period preceding it was at least 6000 years long, but thanks to the massive cataclysm that devastated the whole cosmos and even destroyed the pantheon, practically all information about it has been lost, apart from whatever plot hooks I want to throw in. It's a handy way to leave some mystery and spare some effort without having the world be too young, either.

I feel like most of these things are only important for the GM, really... the players often don't really need even the last few decades of history.

[Calen]

I use normal months in my game, the idea was so that the players dont lose immersion by asking how many months a voyage took based on the journal or whatnot. I dont feel like it is a perfect system but I am not going to change mid-campaign. I dont use days of the week at all. I think that my next campaign world is going to use this tool. http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/calendar/ and make something unique. So I'll see how that goes.

As far as the years in my campaign I have a timeline of events back to when the humans first landed on their new home. In celebration of their new lives they marked their calendars as a new year. The other races either didn't care what the year was called or decided that they could use the human system when dealing with humans "to be polite".

[hymer]

That link reminds me; how much thought have you given to the current year in your games and settings, and how relevant has it been?

Well, for some of my players, it couldn't matter less. When they learn something happened in this or that year, they either don't care about the chronology, or they ask something like 'how long ago was that?' or slightly better 'when was that in relation to the civil war?' I keep the current campaign date and year on the front page, updated after each session, so it's easy to find out if they want to.
Some use it, though. The players got a letter as a handout, and they saw the date it was written, and two of them looked at each other, and one said something like 'that's just before the God Emperor died'. They immediately saw a connection. So I like to think it's not exclusively for my own benefit.

[Honest Tiefling]

I've done one. It is hard getting players to remember the names, so I wouldn't sweat it. It was quite similar to an earth year, however, and quite ordered. What's really hung me up is remembering which season it is, especially in regions that don't follow the Winter/Spring/Summer/Fall cycle. Erm...Whoops.

[VoxRationis]

My most recent campaign was set in a fantasy version of Rome, so they used the Julian calendar. My most recent campaign settings have kind of ignored the whole week/day/month thing (at least for the moment) to focus on years and dates; my most-fleshed-out one had a 361.4-day year (the elves were noted for having a 4/10th-day-long day, while others had a leap day).

[nedz]

I use a calendar of 13 x 28 day months - it makes tracking holy days for the various gods easier. The names of the months vary depending upon which country you are in, but that's just flavour.

[Vinyadan]

I think Tolkien made calendars in the Appendix A of LotR, but they looked like a reskin of the calendar introduced by the French Revolution to me.

[Malimar]

This is the extent to which I've worked out the yearly calendar:

The days of the week are named after the seven moons, and are all sacred to the goddess Sequoia: Sosday, Munday, Tawday, Wibday, Thoday, Freday, and Zabday.

The months of the year also have names.

(I haven't come up with names for the months of the year, but I'm reasonably sure there are twelve of them with roughly 30 days each.)

EDIT: I don't have the specific day of the year in mind when I run; right now it's "late summer". But I run three different parties in the same setting at the same time, so giving them specific days would very quickly get out of hand, trying to determine what changes to the setting each party makes and whether the other parties are before or after that party and so on. Letting it be timey wimey (one party has taken a month of downtime but is still contemporary with the other two) is less confusing.

What year things happened in is a bit complicated. My setting is relatively young; only 1270 years since the dawn of history (nobody knows for sure if the world was created in the year 700ai or up to 2000 years before that, but there are no records from before 700ai.) The dates are measured from the Inundation (the waters flooded the world over the course of 50 years) and the Subsidence (500 years later when the waters relented and some land came back) -- the calendar goes from 700ai to 1ai, 1ii to 50ii, 1pi to 500pi, then 1pd to the current year, 20pd.

But whenever I mention any dates to the players, I try to make sure to give both the date and how many years before the present day it was, because I don't expect anybody but me to keep track of four different eras.

[Âmesang]

I think Tolkien made calendars in the Appendix A of LotR, but they looked like a reskin of the calendar introduced by the French Revolution to me.

You can play with Tolkien's various calendars at the Encyclopedia of Arda.

http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/dates.html

EDIT: I actually used the Steward's Reckoning calendar for quite awhile until I became more familiar with WORLD OF GREYHAWK^® (being the default world of the Core rulebooks… not that anyone I've ever played with really payed attention or cared ).

[Telok]

I have a calendar, I may be able to post it tomorrow if anyone cares, that includes major religious festivals (several taken from ancient roman and hindu calendars), a few astrological conjunctions that affect how magic works during that time, a whore celebration, and a night that the disturbed and restless dead get to literally return in search of justice.

My players treated it all as just background fluff. Untill one of them missed a sacrifice day required for his religious prestige class and had to atone to regain his powers. I mean, the PrC description said there were several required sacrifices and I handed him the list of dates when he qualified.

[Knaight]

I am way too lazy to make actual new calenders, sort out holidays, etc. ahead of time. With that said, I do run a fair amount of space opera, which means that I do get to use varying local times with some frequently. A planet with a 24 hour day and a planet with a 37 hour day are going to end up using different local calenders, and there's no guarantee that either of them match up with a space station, or yet another planet where only the poles are inhabitable. Having that variation helps a lot with setting immersion.

[Freelance GM]

Have you ever made a custom calendar yourself or played in a group that used one? How different was it? How much did it actually affect your immersion, or the game itself? Was it an interesting part of the setting, or just a distracting detail everyone kept forgetting? Do you have examples of particularly good or bad calendars?

My setting has standard Earth years, but the calendar has 4 seasons, and 8 months (45.5 days each), which correspond to the 8 deities of the setting. Those 45 days are also divided into five-day weeks. The remaining days of the year are holidays. 4 are split into 8 half-days, each marking the beginning of a month. The last one is a leap-day for venerating all 8 gods.

The year is something like 87 or 88 AC, which stands for After Collapse, referring to the magical plague that wiped out the token Empire's capital city.

I try to make the calendar relevant at least once a campaign, with the major town throwing a party for one of those eight half-day holidays.

[Joe the Rat]

My current game has a bunch of alt-names for the various races the last GM put together, but they are never used by the players, and the only time I use them now is in non-Common sources. For days and months, I just give up. It's easier for everyone to have a sense of seasons without remembering that Ulgulos is Fantasy-March. The best I do is when I'm pidgining a language, then swap names. According to the Flogorod Gaartenteknik, Mittelmaerz is when you should plant your liftvine cuttings.

I haven't named the days, but I use sennight / fortnight time periods.

Part of this has to do with calendars. The setting has three different calendars in use: Imperial, High Castle (local archaic), and Resplendent Sun (the monk's). different month-names, different start years, different new years... It's May 11. Align that as makes sense to your character.

[Mr.Moron]

The Iron Kingdoms has detailed calendar and we printed one out and use it for our game. I wouldn't say it features centrally. It's mostly just to bring up cool little points of like when a holiday is going on, or when a player's birthday is. On occasion we'll note that hey "all 3 moons are full it's pretty bright out tonight" or the like.

It's a nice little detail. I couldn't tell you all the names of months and it hardly figures into session-to-session play but it's nice to have there.

[D+1]

Pretty much the limits of my own efforts and thoughts on the matter is:
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/calendars.htm

[Velaryon]

My campaign is in the Forgotten Realms, which uses a 365 day calendar with an extra day every 4 years just like ours, but organizes it into 12 months of 30 days, and 5 special days outside of the months, which are usually holidays or celebrations and whatnot. When I started the game I asked the players whether they would rather use that or our own normal calendar for simplicity, and they voted to use the Faerun calendar.

I keep track of time passage by noting the current date in my session notes for every time we play. I've had some games where weeks passed in one session, others where two or three sessions in a row took place in just one day (that was a brutally tough battle for them).

It also matters because one PC has a pregnant wife... who has been pregnant for several years out-of-game because of the slow passage of time in-game and how long we often go between being able to play. Every once in awhile the player will needle me about how his character's wife has been pregnant for four or five years now.

[Jomo]

I think I've come up with a really good style of calendar that manages to both be exotic and easy for all the players to understand, even the players that don't pay much attention.

Instead of breaking the year down into months and hoping people don't get confused about the months' names, you can break it down into seasons.

So, your campaign can start on the 41st day of Autumn or the 85th day of Spring. The DM can decide whether the seasons have 90 or 91 days, or any other number. On top of that, you can also have the year be tied to something the characters will be interested in. Something like "year 14 after the Revolution" or "Year 210 after the Plague of Zombis" or "year 103 after the Great Peace, and year 3 after the Centennial Massacre", or somesuch.

I've made several calendars before, most recently one with 350-day years and 25-hour days, just because I wish there were one more hour in a day, and I like how closely the math lines up with real-life years.

[GAAD]

My world has 17 months, each 24 days long (because Arc Numbers yo):

Spoiler

Show

Valus,
Kuaratus,
Giius,
Phiira,
Avion,
Barba,
Hiirus,
Kuuromori,
Basaran,
Rirzh,
Silozhia,
Paalaagia,
Faalanks,
Sinobia,
Argus,
Malus,
and Kiia.

Each month is a Shadow of the Colossus boss's name filtered through an Faerie accent, in order, with the exception of Kiia, which is the name of the current Summer Queen.

[goto124]

Maybe if there was a calendar that's easier and simpler than the Gregorian calendar most of us typically use, I would be on board...

Maybe every month starts on the same day of the week, such as Sunday or equivalent? Maybe every month has the same number of days? Maybe every year has each day fall on the same day of the week (e.g. 1st of January is always a Sunday)? If the campaign is limited to places with similar seasons, maybe the seasons match up neatly with the months?

[nedz]

Maybe if there was a calendar that's easier and simpler than the Gregorian calendar most of us typically use, I would be on board...

Maybe every month starts on the same day of the week, such as Sunday or equivalent? Maybe every month has the same number of days? Maybe every year has each day fall on the same day of the week (e.g. 1st of January is always a Sunday)? If the campaign is limited to places with similar seasons, maybe the seasons match up neatly with the months?

That's why I have a calendar of 13 x 28 day months

[Jomo]

Also, doesn't the standard D&D calendar have 12 months of 30 days each, and 10 days in each week? That's how my first DM ran it, and calendars haven't come up in other campaigns. That makes the days of the week line up perfectly every month, and makes the math easy.

The problem is that a game always has to involve either a world where the months have names that the players will never learn, or names that are nigh-exact copies of names from the real world. Thus there's a tradeoff between a fantasy calendar being easy to understand and being exotic. We can all have fun inventing new calendars with lots of new months, maybe based on description of the weather or based on Latin names for numbers, or anything else. And there are advantages to all of those. However, if it's the DM's wants to have both exoticness and understandability, I think the best solution is to have a calendar based on seasons rather than months.

[Malimar]

Also, doesn't the standard D&D calendar have 12 months of 30 days each, and 10 days in each week? That's how my first DM ran it, and calendars haven't come up in other campaigns. That makes the days of the week line up perfectly every month, and makes the math easy.

I believe that's the Faerûn calendar, from one of several standard settings.

[Lord Torath]

Maybe if there was a calendar that's easier and simpler than the Gregorian calendar most of us typically use, I would be on board...

Maybe every month starts on the same day of the week, such as Sunday or equivalent? Maybe every month has the same number of days? Maybe every year has each day fall on the same day of the week (e.g. 1st of January is always a Sunday)? If the campaign is limited to places with similar seasons, maybe the seasons match up neatly with the months?

For this, I use twelve 28-day months with Gregorian names for the months. Four extra weeks are equally spaced 3 months apart: Sowing Week (between March and April), Mid Summer (between June and July), Harvest Week (between September and October), and Mid Winter (Between December and January) for a total of 364 days per year. Solstices and Equinoxes are in the middle of the appropriate week.

Each month has the same dates on the same weekdays, and with a 28-day lunar cycle, the moon is full and new on the same days each year. Each year is identical to all other years, players don't need to memorize new month names, and the whole thing is fairly simple, while just different enough.

[Âmesang]

So you basically use the Flanaess calendar from WORLD OF GREYHAWK^®. Granted, I do enjoy it's simplicity; though it must be lousy for calendar manufacturers since the common person probably just reuses the same one over and over.

[Lord Torath]

More or less, yes. With the extra weeks re-positioned and everything renamed to more familiar terms.