Make Your Calendars Interesting, Not Impenetrable

This post is inspired by Marsworms’ excellent post about Moon-men,in-universe calendars, and zodiac signs. It’s great. It got me thinking, which means it got me writing, and now I’m shouting lukewarm takes into the void. You know where to direct your complaints.

So, calendars. Time management.

Everybody at this point probably knows the Gygax quote about the importance of tracking in-game time. “Something, something, meaningful time records kept,” or whatever. I don’t know. Point is, tracking days is important for all sorts of little logistical reasons that are individually not terribly interesting or exciting but snowball into things that are – dungeon restocking, getting lost and starving in the wilderness, things like that.

The problem is, I am terrible at time management IRL. I hate calendaring dates and meetings and all that. So the idea of doing this in a game totally blows. That’s a me problem, not an everybody problem, but I sincerely doubt I am unique in this regard.

Some people dress it up by making it a part of their navel gazing world building. Coming up with baroque and esoteric ways of marking the passage of seasons in your setting is certainly an immersive detail because there’s quite a collection of baroque and esoteric ways of marking the passage of seasons in human history. The problem is, nobody except for the world builder gives a shit. Your blog readers probably will not be all that interested, and your players certainly will not.

Now you might think this is me serving up a critique of Marsworms’ excellent post. I’m not. I already told you it’s great. If you read it, you will immediately see why – the moon-men only appear on full moons; the calendar itself is packed with setting detail (including differences between how peasants and the nobility track time; we should all be doing little things like this more often), the zodiac signs tie a PC into this calendar system and incentivizes player engagement via mechanical benefit during said zodiac period.

This is the Way.

Give the players a reason to sit up and take notice. Otherwise, its just ink spilled about details which (once more, with feeling) nobody except for the world builder gives a shit. If you are world building because you like world building, go for it, you won’t catch me kink shaming, but if you are cooking up setting details because you want your players to be immersed or you want readers to, uh, actually read what you wrote, ask yourself:

• Why should they care?
• Does it affect the player character?
• How much mental bandwidth does it take to understand?
• Can jet fuel really melt steel beams?
• What do these details add to the game?
• Is there a player benefit to knowing these details?
• What game mechanics does this interact with?

If you don’t have an answer other than, “well it’s cool/unique/important because 7491 years ago, Ur-King Cumsock IX declared…” It’s joever. The VVest is lost.

So where does the calendar come in?

In-fiction calendars can be a neat little way to sneak setting details into your game because you are (ostensibly) tying it into a game mechanic (tracking time). But this is a fine line to tread. On one hand, you want the calendar to matter; you want the players to care because it affects their characters, and in the process, you want the players to say, “Wow how neat, you are such a creative GM and this feels so immersive and cool.” On the other hand, you don’t want the calendar to be incomprehensible; you don’t want the players to have to pull up your giant homework assignment lovingly-crafted setting bible to remember what they’re supposed to call Wednesdays, and in the process, you don’t want the players to say, “Wow I cannot be fucking bothered, I’m going to go play WoW instead.”

Story time!

I’ve learned the difference first hand. In my first big foray into OSR-land, I was hugely smitten by Chris K.’s Hill Cantons (and still am, for the record) and really liked the way he typed up little weekly news roundups of what was going on in the game world. He even wrote up instructions on how he did it. Also great; I’m not knocking it by any means. I gave it a shot but realized after like week three that none of the players were reading it. So I asked for feedback and what I got back was, “There’s too many proper nouns to remember.” Which, in hindsight, was absolutely true. It was an in-game document delivered out-of-game, a poorly-telegraphed list of hooks/rumors, with which no real way for the PCs to engage. It was a world building exercise which (say it with me) nobody except the world builder gave a shit.

Moral of the story: just because you think it is cool and clever and vital to the game doesn’t mean your players will. Lets take a look at some calendar examples.

Functionally Useless But Thematic – Star Trek/40k

Star dates are functionally just the timekeeping version of technobabble. It’s fine because Star Trek, as a serialized sci-fi morality play, is not a setting where it matters. If it was a setting where it matters, star dates would be a terrible pain in the ass system for everybody – players and GM alike – in which to track time.

The date system for Warhammer 40k is a bit better, but not really, and the way it is used is again mostly as set dressing. It doesn’t really matter a whole lot if your campaign takes place in 420.069.M40 or 123.456.M41 when life is equally shitty and the setting doesn’t really change.

Gibberish – Tekumel

I’ve never played Empire of the Petal Throne or engaged with the setting of Tekumel and I never will because MAR Barker is a shithead nazi and Tekumel is the ur-example of the sort of world building wanking I’ve been whinging about in this post. I had a hunch it would annoy me; lo and behold, it did!

Not only does the start of the year begin on the spring equinox, the week divided into six days, and each day of the week and each month has a name in the Tekumel conlang that a player would assumedly need to know (and ideally, know how to pronounce). Ask yourself: what does this add to the game, other than utter frustration?

Just Different Enough – Elder Scrolls

I’m a huge Morrowind shill and will do my best to restrain myself here. One element of Elder Scrolls I do not, however, care for, is the calendar. It is just the Gregorian calendar (the one we estadounidenses use irl) but the days of the week and months of the year each have their own in-fiction names. How is this different than the odious Tekumel system, you ask?

Well you don’t have to learn an entirely different planet’s orbital period for one thing, but the other improvement is the fact the in-fiction names are “transliterated” into English. So instead of “Hasanpór/Shápru/Didóm” for the first three months of the year in Tekumel, ES has “Morning Star/Sun’s Dawn/First Seed” and in terms of days of the week, Tekumel has “Surúnra/Mugún/Zaqé/Rü’üsá/Tlakál/Daunél” while ES has “Morndas/Tirdas/Middas/Turdas/Fredas/Loredas/Sundas.” Yes, I know, those aren’t the names in English – but they are consistently close enough to the English days of the week that they aren’t a headscratcher.

So is this a happy medium? Sort of. It isn’t the worst, for sure, but it wouldn’t be my first choice. The days aren’t awful to understand at a glance, but the names of the month lack similar context clues. First Seed is March, Second Seed is May, August is Last Seed. The intervening months have entirely different names. While I can understand and pronounce these, I would have to look up on the ES wiki which month each corresponds with, and that again begs the question: what does this add to the game?

Quick And Easy – Middle-Earth

Yes yes, I know, I know – everyone (for good reason) wants to move away from jocking swag from Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien. But for all the incredibly specific lore details, decades of background, entire conlangs created, and everything else, Tolkien just used the Gregorian calendar. Part of this is probably due to him wanting the Hobbit/LotR to be the Anglo-Saxon mythology he desperately wished his mopey, seasoning-averse culture had. If I’m wrong on that point, I’m sure bigger LotR heads than I will descend to viciously correct my mistake.

I guess technically there are in-fiction names for the days and months, but the stroke of genius lies in not using them. Instead, as with everything in Middle-Earth, it is transliterated/given as its modern equivalent.

This is the boring and sort of lazy way to do it, but from a gameplay perspective, the least-bitter pill to swallow for a calendar to be table ready. If your players can’t understand how our irl calendar works, you have bigger problems. Does it add anything different or unique to your setting? No, not really. Does it detract from the game? Not at all, and there’s value in that.