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Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen
GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / Time

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).