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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / Time

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?