DH5 Calendar

I've said before that I didn't want to mess with the calendar for my fantasy setting, because I think that trying to get people to remember fantasy month and day names is too much effort. What you gain in some nice fantasy-sounding touches you lose in coherency, because when you say that something happens on Far, the 4th of Olarune, that means very little because I doubt even Keith Baker himself would be able to immediately associate that with Friday, the 4th of February. He'd have to stop and think and do the calculations in his head. This is exactly why I get irritated with globalists and other morons who run around in America using the metric system. It doesn't mean anything to anyone. Who cares of meters are easier to use than feet, yards or miles from a mathematical perspective if you have to translate it into your head every time you see them before it actually makes any sense to you? Unless you don't mean to imply anything, like the time of year and the weather, or something, with your dates, then don't use fantasied up names for the names of the months and the days of the week.

However, I have thought of one way to do a different (and therefore cool) calendar for Dark Heritage that doesn't cause confusion in all but the most stupid of people; instead of being based on months, it's based on the seasons and weeks, and it uses the good old-fashioned English words for each of the seasons. This will lead to a few differences from our calendar, but not in such a way that it will confuse anyone. 

I'll also note that for convenience, I'm "rounding" and not worrying about the weird little things. Our year is 365 days, except for Leap Year when it's 366. Neither of these numbers is divisible by anything sensible, which is why we have a calendar where the exact number of days in each month varies. Years work better with weeks, in which 52 weeks is a year, although even then you're one day short. I'm not putting together a Dark Heritage calendar so that I can go around carefully tracking the passage of time in the setting, though—I'm doing it so I can round to something that's sensible, sounds different from how we do it here so it gives it that slight bit of "otherness" but which is easy to follow for those who may need to make a reference to a date.

Anyway, there are four seasons in a year, obviously, starting with Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. You'll note that this means the year starts more or less on March 1st rather than January 1st. Because the ancient world, and even many cultures of the Medieval world, still did this, until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the 1500s, that shouldn't feel too odd. And it doesn't really matter too much anyway. 

Lacking months, people refer to the date as the number of the season, i.e., the 45th day of Summer, for instance, which would be about halfway through it. Each season has 13 weeks, which are also sometimes referred to (just like we occasionally refer to the 3rd week of March), but in a more informal capacity. Now, this isn't exactly true that months don't exist; merely that the calendar isn't based on them. Months become a reference for four weeks, just like a fortnight is a reference for two weeks. We know that fortnights exist, and we use the term (I use we loosely; obviously fortnight is common in most of the English speaking world except America, where it's used very infrequently, and often in an attempt to sound British or old fashioned). We don't talk about the 5th fortnight of the year, but we may say that "You have a fortnight to come up with the money before I break your kneecaps." Months are used in the same fashion, but there are no formalized months in this calendar.

You'll note that if each season has 13 weeks, then they also have 91 days. The 91st day of each season is traditionally the last day of each season, and often the start of a holiday that lasts for the two days on either side of the changeover from one season to another. This doesn't exactly add up to 365 days a year (although it's only one short, so I'm not sweating it) and worrying about Leap Day is silly in a fantasy setting unless for some odd reason it's important to the plot. Like I said, I'm not trying to exactly match up the passage of time in the fantasy world and the real world; I'm trying to come up with a system that's easy to use and which, when rounded a bit here and there, still corresponds to a year of our time so that a year of Dark Heritage and a year in the real world aren't vastly different. 

While I don't know that there's necessarily any value in attempting to match up the real calendar to the fantasy one exactly, but one can exist completely without reference to the other, but I'll do it anyway, just for kicks. Spring corresponds more or less to our months of March, April and May, Summer to our months of June, July and August, Autumn to September, October and November, and Winter to December, January and February. I'm not making any references to solstices, or anything like that; I suppose that I could, but I prefer to go with a more "average weather" pattern; the changeovers of the months that correspond to the ends of the seasons tend to be, on average in the continental United States, when you start to notice the weather has consistently switched from one season to the other. There's obviously some variability here, depending on latitude and elevation and just the yearly variation you get, but that's mostly true that by the time September rolls around, you don't have to wait  until the equinox to notice slightly cooler temps and shortening days. Again, going with the principle that rounding rather than exacting calendars make more sense, I like this.

People refer to the actual day of the season, as mentioned above (i.e., the 57th day of Summer) or to the day and the week; i.e, the 3rd day of the 9th week of Winter.

I am not going to do anything to change the days of the week. There really isn't any change that can be made to them that isn't going to just cause confusion in everyone involved.

As an aside, I'm tempted not to worry too much about this, because I already know that I have as a bad habit the tendency to get caught up in hyper-detailing some dumb little esoteric detail of something that literally nobody cares about. But in this case, I think it's good like this, and I like the idea of being able to just refer to the third week of autumn, or the first day of the twelfth week of winter or whatever. Everyone will know what that means in terms of weather, climate and what's going on.