# Setting up a Fantasy Calendar



## Appleseeth (Feb 6, 2009)

I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I'm having trouble keeping track of dates and how much time my PCs take during adventures. I think it would be very useful to have something where I can quickly jog down notes about what happened each day of an adventure. I'd also like to be able to set up fantastic names and date conventions for the months and years. Does anyone know of such a program? If not, this sounds like my next .NET project.


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## Ydars (Feb 6, 2009)

For my old Palladium campaign I used to have to keep a very accurate campaign chronology because;

a) there were three moons in the sky, each with different phase behaviour.
b) there were therefore 3 separate calendar systems in use by various cultures.
c) magic varied with the phase of one of the moons.
d) psionics varied with the phase of the second moon.
e) A triple moon; where all moons were in the sky at the same time was an event of enormous calamity; basically it was a night when the "spirits of the old world" would walk again; not good.
f) for one of the of the five days of the week (Kronstag) the tribal cultures the PCs interacted alot with had a religious prohibition on speech and would only use sign language.

I can assure you, all I needed to do was map out the phases of the moons in three columns of Excel with another two columns for days of the week and months of the year and then type in a brief summary of what happened each day to keep track.

It worked so well that I once interweaved the events of one campaign with the events of the previous campaign (that took place a year before), so that they effectively took place SIMULTANEOUSLY in campaign time.

It was brilliant; things the PCs from the first campaign did had an effect on the second campaign at exactly the right time.

So by all means create your tools but honestly, simple is fine for this.


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## Lanefan (Feb 6, 2009)

Ydars has some great ideas, but even those might be more complex than you need.

It's easy to design a game calendar:

Step 1 - decide what defines a month*
Step 2 - decide how many months you want each year to have
Step 3 - decide how many days each month (and thus, year) will have
Step 4 - dream up some names for these months.

* - or other suitable calendar division

In my current game, a year has exactly 360 days divided into 9 months of 40 days each, based on a combination of the two moon cycles (one is 20-day, one is 80-day).  I used Tolkein's elvish names for the seasons (Hrive, Yavie, Laire, etc.) for 6 of the months and dreamed up names for the other three.  For simplicity, I've made this the standard even though non-elvish cultures use different names for the months.

Disclaimer: the Tolkein names idea is not mine; I took it from my first DM, whose world had 6 60-day months that used the names as intended.

In my previous game, I dreamed the calendar up from scratch - 13 months of 28 days each for a 364-day year - and named the months according to culture.  Dwarves, not associating with moons as much, invented the "week" instead - 7 days long and exactly 52 of them each year. (364, by the way, is a *very* convenient number for this sort of thing)

In my first big campaign I used real-world names for the months, but that got really confusing when looking back on things later - "is that 'August 5th' in my notes referring to the game date or the real date?" was an oft-heard grumble of mine.   And it was nowhere near as flavourful; much more of a sense of fantasy is invoked by saying the game-world date is "Eolna 9" or "Lequi 15" instead of "February 6".

Lanefan


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## Appleseeth (Feb 6, 2009)

I think I will start with your idea Ydars, but maybe still develop that program. I need to keep my coding skills up after all. Earning more fame and fan mail beyond my Random Treasure Generator wouldn't be too bad either. Would you mind posting a screenshot of the excel sheet, just so I could maybe get a better idea of what you did? That would very much be appreciated.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Feb 6, 2009)

No software but I've written a little bit about game calandars:
Calendars
I've just updated it a bit too.


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## Stoat (Feb 6, 2009)

I bought a copy of the Old Farmer's Almanac, the one with the yellow cover and the nail hole in one corner.  It has multiple calendars which note the phases of the moon, the positions of the planets, appearance of comets, etc.  It also contains a lengthy section predicting the weather for the year.

I picked a day to start the campaign on and circled it on one of the calendars.  Every time a day passed in the game, I crossed it off.  I used the info in the Almanac to keep up with the moon, the weather and other interesting in-game phenomena. 

It's not fancy, but it was easy and it gave me good results.


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## jgsugden (Feb 6, 2009)

Simple is better. If you keep it simple, the PCs could follow it without much thought. 

I did a Calendar for my campaign that was very practical:

12 months.
30 days per month.
5 days per week.

The moon is new on the night of the 15th, and full on the 30th.

Each month has a formal name, but the common folk just refer to them by how they relate to the seasons: Early Spring, Full Spring, Late Spring, Early Summer, Full Summer, Late Summer, etc...

The consteallations actually move in my world - the movement, creation and destruction of constellations is used in fortune telling.


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## grodog (Feb 7, 2009)

Ed Greenwood wrote the "Merry Month of...Mirtul?" in Dragon #47; it's about designing your own fantasy calendars and is worth looking up if you own the Dragon Archive CDs.  

There's also a good time-tracking set of DM aids in Dragon #123 (Lisa Cabala's  "Time Flies...").  

If you're a Greyhawk fan, there are a pair excellent calendars published in Canonfire!'s downloads section @ Canonfire! - Downloads
I use Clay Luther's calendar in my games, and it's full of easily-portable ideas you can snag for your own calendar too (holidays, etc.).


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## Ydars (Feb 7, 2009)

Hi Appleseeth! 

Here is my campaign chronology for a Palladium campaign set in my own world I ran in 2005. 

excel file here YouShare - Free File Hosting V1.5 - Campaign chronology

MHTML file here YouShare - Free File Hosting V1.5 - Campaign chronology

It is best to download the files as they don't display at all well.

This section of the campaign lasted 17 sessions or around 60 days of campaign time (some of this due to a time shift whilst the PCs were imprisoned in another world where time flow was much slower). Note that one of the major themes about the campaign was the PCs discovering Lentisi tribal culture, as they knew nothing about it before, so I could really run with it and not need the PCs to know it from the beginning.

The aim of this calendar was to make the Lentisi tribes seem more real, more distinct from a bog-standard fantasy culture and also to flesh out their beliefs. You will see that this is more to my game than a bunch of names. Inherent in these calendars are how the people using them think and what they believe in. In my game, the calendar MATTERS. The PCs could not ignore it. If they spoke aloud on Kronstag, the day of silence, they could be punished for a religious crime and be imprisoned. Build in these kinds of things to your calendar and the PCs will have no choice but to take notice. I would also always use which day it was to describe the background colour of what was going on in the tribal villages and towns whilst the PCs were out and about. 

I really found it useful to have such a detailed structure, because if I was stumped, I would just run with something happening because of the day and often it would lead to an adventure seed that I could push. I did have an overarching plot but did not use this as the major campaign force on every day.

You will see that there are two calendars in this example, being tracked on the left. The Turian Calender is the main calendar of the "civilised" world and has months dictated by the phases of the Bright Sister (large phasic moon) with a year of about 402 days. The Month is coloured to indicate season so a yellowish/reddish month is summer (e.g. Mittern) and a blue one winter and spring (e.g. Lenth) and autumn are shades of green. The Turian week is 8 days, though I have not tracked this here because this was not of major concern in this campaign. Ideally I would have had another column for Turian day-names, but my players know this so well that it was unnecessary. The year changes for Turians at the Festival of Meddenyarn, in High Summer.

The Lentisi calendar, followed by the tribes that live in the Wastes, is different and uses a 5 day week (Kern). This week has a number of features and you will see the days abbreviated to the day number as follows 1K or 15Fe would be 1st of (month) Kronstag or 15th of (month) Fennistag.

I wanted my week to reflect the ordinary life of the tribes it described and so I used to map out what tended to happen on each day of the week as the Lentisi are very religious and, like all primitive socieities, have a routine.

K; Kronstag; a religious day of silence. Only sign language may be used and no lamps or fires may be lit because Kron is a god who loves silence and darkness and he dwells under the Hollow-hills.

Fe; Fennistag; washing day, because the Fennis-stone is the traditional stone used for washing clothes. Also a day when the Lentisi children tend to go a bit crazy after the silence of Kronstag.

Fi; Fishtag; A day for eating Fish and revering the God of the Rivers and Lakes, Udan. This is also the day when the Lentisi make tiny reed-boats and set them adrift on rivers and lakes, often containing a small lit tallow candle.

M; Martag; market day and the day when most people would choose to travel as it is the day blessed to Sablar, the God of travel, family and friendship.

Y; Yortag; a day of cleaning and repairing the home and of the veneration of the ancestors.

Kronstag.

Note that the Lentisi month is dictated by Kron's Eye, a non-phasic moon, with the appearance of Kron's Eye signalling the beginning of a new month. Thus Lentisi months and Turian months are not only different lengths but start at different times. The Lentisi new year begins in midwinter, as befits a tribe whose chief god is master of Darkness and silence.

At the beginning of the campaign, I would have any religious festivals, Lentisi and Turian, on a blank version of this document, that already had days, weeks, and months mapped out, as well as the phases of the moon. I would also insert some interesting things like the Triple moon conjuction (all moons in the sky at once) to add an element of the time-plot to the game. I also sometimes would map out things I knew were going to happen ahead of time and put them on this sheet, over-writing them when the time-line caught up with them.

You have no need to go this far, but just examine the principles of this and you should be fine; the calendar should be a living, breathing thing, not something esoteric. Days of the week should have different flavours and how the group using the calendar track the passage of time should be tied to their beliefs.


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## Ydars (Feb 7, 2009)

Appleseeth; was this useful? Is there anything else you need?


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