Forum Discussion
Creating a Fantasy Calendar
ChristianHauer see if the attached does everything you want. I locked the sheet except the 2 green cells where you enter the start & end dates but there is no password if you want to unlock it.
ChristianHauer wrote "But will that make it so I can customize how many days are in a month? Because the fantasy world has varied days in a month compared to the Gregorian calendar."
Ahh, Narnia meets Lord of the Rings meets Wrinkle in Time
May I suggest you spell out a bit more fully how much the days in those fantasy months might vary. Are there twelve fantasy months, more or less, or does that number itself vary. Do the number of days in Januly vary each time Januly rolls around? Or is it just that Januly has 15 days whereas Febember has 44?
And so forth?
I think you're going to have to create a new function, which can be done in Mac or in Windows, but you need to spell the situation out a bit more before anybody can help.
Well, here's a start. I'll keep noodling on this to see if I can turn it into something more functional. And let's invite others to do the same.
How do you plan to use this calendar IN your fantasy world? This includes such things as "Are there seven day weeks?" "Do the days of the week have names?" Or some other span called a week? And so forth..... All of those kinds of questions would be important to think through in order to start using that matrix meaningfully.
- The weeks are seven days long. I do have names for the individual days/months. However, I wasn’t sure that was important for the function. If we can use the place holders you came up with for now, mathetes, that would be nice.
- But HOW are you going to be using these in the course of the narrative?
Will a character be saying "I'll meet you three Xdays from now" and you'll need to know that will be the nth of Decidate, for example. Or that it'll be the fifth of Zunicorn?
And do you really need a Leap Year? That adds a wrinkle in time (not quite a tesseract) where I wonder if it is crucial to the story. I'm sure it can be accommodated if saving the universe depends on it......
I'm not at all sure I can resolve these, although it's fun fantasizing, but I do know that HOW you'll use your calendar will be important in the shaping of any calendar functions.