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.
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.
- 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.- Yes, there will be references to what day/date it is and potentially how far it is from another day/date. The leap year is important for inner story, but not obvious, reasons also.
OK, Trusted and Respected Contributors, here's a challenge along the lines of the ones that @Twifoo has issued in the past.
Please refer to the full thread above.
Lets see if we can come up with a reasonable approach to the request that ChristianHauer has issued: creating a workable fantasy calendar, 14 months to the year, months of varying lengths as specified in the table created above.
I'm assuming that we'll do what the "real calendar" does, begin with a day zero and that have each day increment that by 1, so that date math can easily be done. But how to set it up so Christian, in his fantasy story, can do such things as:
- name two dates in his fictional/fantasy calendar and know how big the gap is between them, or
- set a deadline of 2 1/2 of his fictional months from "now", and know what that deadline is, or
- any/all of the other things we do with calendars?
SergeiBaklan mtarler NikolinoDE PeterBartholomew1 HansVogelaar Riny_van_Eekelen