The Calendar

By Shamus Posted Friday Sep 23, 2005

Filed under: Tabletop Games 8 comments

I didn’t use a special calendar until I made this site. Since then, tracking dates has become confusing for me. If I see something dated August 20th, is that the date we played, the date the event took place in-game, or the date it was posted to the website? So, I’ve created an alternate calendar to use in-game.

To keep things simple, there are 12 months, and every month has exactly 28 days. So, each month starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday. The calendar uses Dunlock Years (dy) and our first campaign began in 1500dy.

Here are the names of each month:

Yearfall (January)
Highwinter (Febuary)
Lastfrost (March)
Galefront (April)
Newbloom (May)
Greentide (June)
Suncrest (July)
Last Summer (August)
Land’s Blessing (September)
Harvest (October)
Sunwane (November)
Wintertide (December)

 


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8 thoughts on “The Calendar

  1. deadlytoque says:

    “Last Summer” seems like a bad idea. How do you talk about it in past tense? For example: “Last August, I went to Edmonton Folk Music Festival, and the August before that, I ripped the pocket out of my brown blazer.” Compare “Last Last Summer, I traveled to the Bardic Festival of Applemoor, and the Last Summer before that, I tore my cloak on brambles.”

    The first usage (Last Last) is clearly awkward, and to avoid it means coming up with some pretty tortured syntax. The second one is also a problem, although it’s only evident if you actually say it out loud. It makes it sound like you are listing summers “and the summer before that, etc.

    Easiest fix? Just flip the words around, and mush them together: Summerlast. Loses the relation to “Lastfrost”, but better matches “Wintertide”.

    Other than that, very good, catchy names.

    I’ve always had such a hard time with calendars in fantasy settings, because players refuse to remember what month is what, so we always degenerate into just using modern months. Your problem with record-keeping is probably the best argument to stick to a fantasy calendar I’ve ever heard.

  2. axcalibar says:

    My world’s calendar has 30 day months with 6 day weeks, that way I get exactly 360 days to a year. I thought it’d be neat to have a calender that looked like a clock.

  3. God of Awesome says:

    I’ve had similar system created soley in my head. Basically 12 months made of 30 days with weeks of five days. Then an extra week tacked onto the beggining or end and an extra day every four years.

    Now this idea suddenly hit me, a calendar based around Seasons with the start in Spring and end in Winter.

    Extra day ever four years
    Extra week
    March – Springstart
    April – Midspring
    May – Springend
    June – Summerstart
    July – Midsummer
    August – Summerend
    Septemper – Fallstart
    October – Midfall
    November – Fallend
    December – Winterstart
    January – Midwinter
    Fabuary – Winterend

    The extra week at the beggining of every year would be a religious holiday observing the creation mythos and Leap Day is when the apocalypse is supposed to happen so babies born then are simply recorded to have been born the next day.

    1. Gordon says:

      huh. Apparently, This is more or less the order of months the Romans used (Make note that September is the seventh month, October is the eighth month…)

  4. dude, says:

    My world doesn’t have seasons (i thought it would be hard to keep track of), which makes it weird for dates to be season based, so i use a metric time system:

    10 days per week

    10 weeks per month

    10 months per year

    and dates are referred to by day#, week#, month#, then year#, which would create something along the lines of: the third day of the sixth week of the first month of the year 2010, yada yada yada. Or the way most people would do it is last week whatever happened.

  5. louis says:

    I really like your choices for month names shamus except last summer I’m going change it to sun fall and might use it in my campaigns

  6. literaryfirearms says:

    I definitely cheated and wound up going with the Discordian Calendar, which consists of 5 months of 73 days with 5 day weeks. The mechanic I liked about their calendar was they threw in feast days on the 5th and 50th days of every month. Ten feast days worked out really well for the ten gods in the setting.

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