Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Golden Zealot 08-27-05, 01:47 PM	this has been a royal head scratcher for me im making a world of people, and they just got out of a war which could have been anytime from the last generation to hundreds of years ago, i havent decided yet, but i did get thinking that i had no kind of calender or any way for people to record historyand years gone by, so i was wandering what kind of calender is used in the official campaign settings, or does anyone have any original ideas? this is mostly background, the players wont care, but some old mage they speak to might menti on it. otherwise, its just for me to keep track of history
Seeker95 08-27-05, 03:47 PM	Depends on which "official" setting you mean. Eberron, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk all use different calendars. In my campaign, the different races / species use a number of different calendars. To make things easier on myself, I use "real world" calendars. One human culture uses the Hebrew calendar, another uses the Gregorian (with an adjustment of 1986 years to keep it out of sync with today), and one uses the Iranian/Zoroastrian calendar. The orcs use the Mayan calendar, and the lizardfolk use the Islamic calendar. A fairly new race to the world uses the Baha'i calendar. A decent resource for converting a Gregorian calendar is Tima and Date (http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/). An online resource for multiple calendars is Calendars of the World (http://webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar.html)
Tzor 08-27-05, 07:20 PM	Most campaign worlds tend to use minor variations on the modern calendar system. The modern calendar system generally divides the year into a series of months of irregular day intervals. Each is counted linearly (as in the 5th day of the 5th month) although it is possible to replace the numbers with a table of names. (Modern calendars only do this for months.) On top of this system a repeating cycle of days was defined as a week. The modern calendar is based on the seven day week but some campaigns use a 10 day week. A 10 day week was also attempted in the conversion to Metric by the French revolution, but this attempt quiclky failed. Campaign worlds have an advantage in that the year can be defined to be a nice number of days, instead of the odd and fractional number that happens on the Earth. Lankhmar used a straightforward system but used names for both the months and the days. The Romans had the notion of months, but not our notion of days. Instead the month was divided oddly into two specific dates, the first of the month, and the idus, the 15th of the months of March May July and october and the 13th of the day for all other months. Instead of counting the days from that point, they counted the days until that point. Weeks were unknown. The system used by the Mayans was similiar to a regular calendar (well they actually used three different systems at the same time) but what we would call a month, also cycled on a daily basis ... only the fact that the day cycles were not a multiple of the month cycles kept each day unique within a complete cycle. Thus after 1,1 was 2,2 and so forth. The next question is the counting of years. Most systems tend to use a linear system, although Lankhmar used a frequently resetting linear system that was linked to a table of names ... the result was it was probably impossible to accurately place any historical event of more than one generation past.
Amaril 08-27-05, 07:56 PM	The Greyhawk Calendar is interesting in that it is composed of twelve, 28-day months with a one-week festival between each quarter. You can do a search on Google to find it. I beleive Canonfire.com has one or two. The Forgotten Realms and Eberron calendars are available on this web site.
Draco Strang 08-28-05, 07:08 PM	I just use the FR calendar and dating system in all my campaigns, both FR and non-FR. It's simple, well laid-out, and ready to go. The concept of a tenday is more logical than the seven day week that we confine ourselves to.