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Time

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 162
Even the most superficial treatment of a campaign setting needs to deal with history and the passage of time. Every ancient ruin, powerful artifact, and court intrigue is rooted in the past, and history brings context to adventures. Your decisions on such things as the age of the world, the nature of the calendar, and even the length of the seasons have significant impacts on the stories that unfold.

The Role of Time

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 162
Time creates continuity and strings together what would otherwise be a collection of random events, dungeon crawls, and journeys. A world is much more than a vague stage for the adventurers to act upon. To bring depth to the setting, you need to look into the past and establish at least a loose framework for history. How many generations ago did people first arrive in the area? How far back does the current ruling family trace its lineage? How long ago was the port city founded? And what do all of these have in common, if anything?

Time also acts as a pacing mechanic, both during the adventures you run and when connecting them together. The use of downtime for healing, recovery, and crafting items (to say nothing of adventurers who have family or business obligations) is made more real when you know what being away from the story for that length of time means. Does a villain have time to recover his forces after the last battle, or is he still weakened? Does the war in the neighboring kingdom get worse, or do diplomats forge a peace accord? To this end, it might be useful to establish a campaign calendar that allows you to track time in-game, and that can also be filled out ahead of time with major holy days, festivals, and other time-sensitive events to give your campaign added verisimilitude and easy adventure hooks.

Time in Your Game

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 162
In most fantasy settings, time is a linear construct, a series of dates on a line. This is the standard construct, but it can also be tweaked. Do the people of your world think of time as a series of never-ending cycles or in terms of ages defined by a common theme, such as the Dark Ages or the Age of Reason? Does history repeat itself ? If so, is this repetition what leads to prophecy, and how does it affect the role of sages, historians, and storytellers? Alternatively, you might decide that time happens all at once, a singular, shared hallucination—this obviously becomes complicated and makes great demands on your world’s cosmology, but it can be a fun conceit nonetheless.

Assuming time is linear and cause leads to effect, how long are your world’s years, seasons, months, or weeks? In most cultures, these are labels for meteorological or cosmic events that can be reliably tracked. The sun goes down every day, the moon goes through its phases every month, the seasons come in cycles of four, and so forth. Any and all of these could be altered or eliminated, so long as you think of some reasonably sensible explanation for it.

Changing such things as the length of the day is more significant than the length of a season or even a month, because it can directly impact an adventure. If a day in your world is 32 hours long, how much of that is night? How does this change the length of a typical “business day” for markets, farmers, craftsmen, or guards? What about magic users whose abilities refresh each day?

A common world-building twist is adding moons or perhaps some other great cosmological object. If you do this, you provide your world with another reliable marker for time’s passing, so be sure to consider its effects. Is the smaller moon faster or slower? When a comet manifests in the heavens, does it signal the changing of kings or the beginning of a ritual war?

Finally, you should think about how tightly you want to bind such things as government, religion, or magic to the marking of time. Do people think of time in terms of the emperor’s reign? Is each day of the week connected to a religious practice or observation?

Celebrating Time

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 162
Holidays, festivals, and other calendar-based events provide easy world flavor and adventure hooks.

Holy days are connected to religious events, often signifying anniversaries of important events. This might be the birth of a religious leader, the foundation of the religion itself, a period of abstinence, or a day of miracles and portents. If your world has many gods, then almost every day might have some religious significance. Don’t go overboard, however, or you’ll lose that sense of drama that comes with the observation and its associations. Holy days also make great deadlines, such as the heroes needing to return a missing magic artifact to its temple before the holy day arrives.

Festivals usually take place over several days. Anything can be used as an explanation for a festival, from the celebration of the new harvest to an annual coming-of-age rite for the town’s youth. Because they can extend over more than a single day, they’re an excellent backdrop for an intrigue or a lengthy episodic adventure.

Don’t forget the extraordinary events that the heroes themselves have a role to play in, either. If the player characters liberate a town from years of domination, then that’s cause for a new celebration!

Crafting Time

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 162
When answering the questions in this section, don’t be afraid to start simple and add more as you run adventures. Write up a few important events in your setting’s history, shuffle those around, and when you’re happy with the story, you can set their dates and lay them out into a timeline. Even if you only have five important dates, that’s enough to provide context for dozens of potential adventures. And as the game progresses, you simply flesh things out more.

Some people really get into this aspect of world building, and that’s great. It’s important to remember, though, that unless an event has some value to the stories and games you plan on running, it isn’t worth burdening yourself or your players with it. If you are especially detail-oriented, you can go so far as to set up multiple timelines, keyed to specific topics: religion, politics, and technology, for instance. You could also transition this to a digital document, making it even easier to link events together. Be careful with this, though, as the complexity of such systems can snowball rapidly.

This last point cannot be stressed enough: one of the most common player complaints about a setting is an overzealous backstory. Don’t fall so in love with your world’s history that you marginalize your players. Historical facts should be presented in a manner that’s fun, exciting, and useful—or else ignored altogether.

Traps and Opportunities

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 163
While creating calendars and timelines is a lot of fun, it also carries with it a few design risks that can end up coming back to haunt you if you don’t take care.

Dates: Fantasy naturally lends itself to epic adventures, and the temptation with dates is to make the numbers large and sweeping—cities 10,000 years old, legends stretching back a hundred generations. Avoid this impulse! History is a lot shorter than you might think, and it doesn’t take long for people and legends to rise and disappear again. The United States itself is barely over 200 years old. Christianity has only seen 2 millennia. Ten thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were just starting to think about planting crops. And if it only took the march of technological process 150 years to go from the first internal combustion engine to a man on the moon, how come nobody’s invented a better plow in the 7 millennia the serfs have been tilling your kingdom’s fields?

While of course a fantasy world doesn’t need to correspond to the real world, there is still physics to consider. How old can your ruins really be, when stone and metal degrade without magical protection? For reference, scholars believe it would only take a thousand years without human upkeep for plant life and the elements to erase almost all trace of modern New York City.

Names: When writing up their worlds’ calendars, many GMs realize that our own calendar (with both months and days named after historical and mythological figures) seems out of place in-game. While making up your own names for the months or days of the week seems like the obvious solution, it can also be aggravating to players trying to keep track of time when the adventure begins on the third Blargday of Skurbgin. If you want to create new names, it might help to have the definitions readily available, to name them after your own gods or historical figures, or cheat a little and have the first letters stay the same (such as a workweek running from Mournday through Fireday).

The Age of the World

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 163
Time isn’t just about holidays, calendars, and politics. On a more cosmic level, the tone of the campaign may depend on how old or young the world is, and what this means to the people, places, and plots that play out upon it. While the standard fantasy world assumes such things as ancient empires and lost races as an explanation for the many dungeons, artifacts, and legends that feature in adventures, this is merely a default. Consider these other options.

Youthful Worlds

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 163
A young world is one that has only recently given rise to a civilized society, one in which many races are in their infancy or have yet to achieve cultural maturity. There are no ruined remnants of a lost age (or they may be buried so deep as to be yet undiscovered by the current residents). In such a world, magic may feel raw and untamed. The gods may yet walk the earth, or they have only recently inspired the creation of cults and churches. Military orders have yet to be founded. Races have not been divided by civil war or strife. The player characters are the heroes that future generations will tell stories about. Depending on how young the world is, you might decide some rules elements may be entirely absent—no iron weapons, no spells greater than 3rd level in power, and so on.

Ancient Worlds

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 163
In contrast to a young world, an ancient world has already hit the peak of its civilizations and is fast approaching its end. In the twilight of this setting, some races have been lost to history or have moved on to other shores in the multiverse. Technology may have come and gone, giving the setting either a dystopian, post-apocalyptic theme or a pastoral, back-to-nature aesthetic. Or it may have advanced to a truly astounding level, marrying the traditional fantasy elements to steampunk or cyberpunk tropes. If the world is ancient, tradition might be even more dominant over the lives of individuals. Sorcerers may no longer exist, having had their magical traits codified into the power of wizards. Barbarians and druids might no longer have a place, or perhaps their role is changed to that of degenerate savages.

Archives of Nethys

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