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 if 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.

Keeping track of time in Dark•Heritage

The calendar used throughout the Mezzovian Sea region is one developed by Terrasan scholars several centuries ago. Due to its uncluttered nature, and the fact that it's not too focused on local concerns, it has become popular throughout the region, including in Baal Hamazi, Qizmir, and Kurushat. In Kvuustu, where the natives don't really mark time except by the passing of seasons, it isn't used, and the Tarushans maintain their own ancient calendar.

Carbonell Abenmenax is credited with creating the calendar, and it is sometimes called the Abenite calendar, or simply the Terrasan calendar. It divides known history into three distinct ages, while admitting that an earlier age (or ages) must have existed, it is impossible to know any dates from them with any kind of certainty at all. The first age is the Age of Legends (A.L.) Many events during the age of legends are legendary or semi-legendary, hence the name, and dating for many events is imprecise or unsure. The Age of Legends lasted for 1972 years, from the traditional date that people arrived on the shores of the Mezzovian Sea (although there are lots of good reasons to believe that date is much older than what tradition dictates) to the rise of the Balshatoi kingdoms. The following Age of the North (A.N.) refers to the hegemony that people of Balshatoi, or proto-Balshatoi ethnicity dominated the region in a succession of nations and cultures and subcultures. The Age of the North lasted 843 years. It ended when Queen Gualharda d'Coysset officially declared the independence of Terrasa from foreign domination after many years of low-grade civil war, and this time was able to make it last. From that point on, no northern power has officially controlled any land on the southern coastline.

The Age of the South (A.S.) is the current age, referring to the gradual domination culturally and politically of ethnic Terrasans and their close relatives of the Mezzovian area (although in both Kurushat and Baal Hamazi, it is believed that year 1 A.S. is also the year that their own kingdoms were founded. And the arrival of the jann in Qizmir is not precisely dated; scholars there are starting to publish as fact the idea that they arrived from far to the east in 1 A.S. too, making the current age the semi-mythical founding date of all four of those major powers.) From the humble declaration of independence of Queen d'Coysset to the rise of what has come to be called the Terrasan Empire was a long journey, and for much of the first two centuries of the of the Age of the South, it was arguably a misnomer. And pundits, philosophers, politicians, and others who wish to make a point for whatever reason question whether maybe a new age shouldn't start now, as the old Terrasan power fades. Indeed, in Porto Liure, some scholars believe that the independence of that city-state will be seen in retrospect as the beginning of a new age where local politics and forces dominate, and no regional superpower controls the entire Mezzovian Main. Some of them have even started unofficially referring to the current age as the Age of Freedom, but that terminology has not caught on broadly, and mostly those scholars are mocked for their presumptiousness. Today's date (well, that can move around from time to time, so it's give or take 5-10 years or so, of course) is 567 A.S.

Abenmenax also created the divisions within each year that are widely used throughout the region. The 365 day year was divided into twelve 30-day divisions, with a 5 day holiday at the end of the year to make up for the remaining days. For reasons that are lost to the mists of time, Abenmenax decided to have the year officially end at the summer solstice (keep in mind that the Mezzovian Sea and all of the lands described here are in the southern hemisphere), so the year officially starts five days later. The month names in standard Terrasan are as follows: Gener, Febrer, Março, Abril, Majiol, Jugniol, Juliol, Agost, Setembre, Octubre, Novembre and Desembre. And last five days of the year do vary by region; each region naming them after local heroes or gods or rulers. In the Terrasan city-states, they are known, in order as el día Cherno (or simply Cherno), Peruno, Velo, Selvano, and el día Culsano.