LogFAQs > #897001252

Zeus posted...

Fantasy calendars have always been a bit of a sore spot with me. While they make sense from a worldbuilding perspective, I find them unnecessarily confusing as a reader because I often can't remember the context (ie, the order of days and months, how months correlate to times of year, etc).

More annoying still wold be the notion that there likely wouldn't be any accepted universal calendar in a fantasy setting since nations would more likely style the days and months after their own kings and/or gods.

I think that's actually why a lot of fantasy settings that go with their own calendar tend to bypass the real world influence entirely. ie, whereas our calendar is six months named after gods (some relatively obscure), four months that are literally just numbered 7-10, and two named after the guy who created the calendar and his adopted dad, worlds like D&D's Faerun or Tamriel in the Elder Scrolls just give all their months seasonal-sounding names like Deepwinter, First Seed, Summertide, Frostfall, and so on (or conversely, the way Native Americans named the various full moons of a year Harvest Moon, Hunter's Moon, Wolf Moon, Blue Corn Moon etc).

As for being universal, it kind of makes sense in a setting where you're explicitly saying that "Common" exists as a language and has spread to nearly every civilized land the players will ever reach, because in turn traders would almost certainly refer to months and other units of time in conversations, which would then culturally spread over time. So while you might still have various regions referring to a given month by its original regional name, those people would also fully recognize the more common usage - and in time, the common usage would likely grow to replace the regional (which is what happened in our world).

(And that's assuming a setting doesn't have a long-dead ancient empire in its past that ruled over 90%+ of the continent at one point before disintegrating, leaving behind cultural remnants embedded in language and behavior across a wide area. See also, Rome's influence on modern Western culture. For instance, in Tolkien, most "common" tongue and shared cultural usage in Middle Earth is a remnant of Numenor, as spread by Arnor and Gondor at their heights of power.)


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