Calendar

Now what could a calendar have to do with D&D?

To begin with, it must be pointed out that most worlds are fabricated by DM’s who wish to explore the limits of their imagination without the restriction of anything like earth like reality or conditions. If rivers are desired to flow upwards into the mountains, if seas boil in slow bubbles like hot mud, if the trees are nomadic and march from land to land in the space of decades, then so be it. Magic, if not geography, justifies all.

And I won’t throw water on it. The use of one’s imagination is a holy thing. I defend it first and foremost.

There are some interesting problems, just the same ... beginning with the measurement of time.

Whatever name one posits for the passage of a brief expanse of time, moderately less than or greater than a second, or however long a day lasts or however many ‘hours’ might be in it, it does help to remember that the occasional calculation of time does depend upon a group of circumstances which are all too familiarly associated with earth. If it is wished to calculate the time it takes for a rider recently dismounted from his griffon to strike the earth, it is habitual to use the standardized calculation, 32 feet per second per second ... mucking about with the length of seconds, much less the density of the gravity well and its effect on all physics, has its consequences. But then, there’s always magic. Magic puts all things right.

Since this is a discussion about time – the calendar measures time – having a discussion about seconds, or about years for that matter, seems fortuitous. I don’t want to bore – we know that the second is not a random length. It is a subdivision of the solar day, the length of the earth’s rotation, as broken up into sixty parts of sixty parts, of twenty-four parts, that all seemed very logical at the time. It has to do with the somewhat equatorial culture that devised the early calendar (Babylonian), where night and day are equal for the better part of the year, and both the day and night being divided into 12 parts ... just as the moon divided the year into 12 parts. And as the counting method devised by the Babylonians was a sixty-base system, minutes and seconds became what they are. None of that really matters, except ...

If you change the size of the planet, or its distance from the sun, you change everything. The day lasts longer, the year lasts longer, things fall farther in the space of one second and so on.

The solar calendar was allowed into existence, at least partly, by the ever-clear skies of the desert and the flat horizon. A star rising above that horizon could be calculated to the exact moment, and observed a year later to rise again, on cue, according to a rather complicated set of mathematical calculations (the year not being exactly 365 days long). The ‘magic’ of being able to identify the rise of any particular star created the priesthood, and enabled the preparation of both the Babylonian and Egyptian cultures (the Egyptians getting the hang of it either independently or through ‘borrowing’ the technology) to prepare for floods before the floods came. Rivers operated on specific rules, based upon melting snows which the priests did not need to see in order to predict – to the day.

If you would change the length of the year, how would you judge the rising of stars – if it mattered. It does happen that the prediction of floods, and the creation of the calendar, enabled the existence of widespread agriculture and the feeding of thousands, and later millions of people. The predictability of earth’s environment, from the snows to the stars, profoundly allowed the existence of all civilization ... through the measurement of mere points of light popping up above the horizon.

There are some six thousand stars visible to the naked eye in the firmament. Of these, three thousand are visible, give or take, from any particular point of latitude (the north cannot see stars of the southern sky, and vice versa). While a particular location on earth causes the estimated three-thousand stars to rise above the horizon, through half the day the sun washes out those that might otherwise be see, so that at different times of the year different stars are seen from the side of the earth opposite the blazing sun. In a night, then, some 1,500 stars may be seen (give or take those blotted out by the dusk or dawn). Of these stars, nearly five in six are so dim as to be difficult to detect, particularly near the horizon. Thus, only 250 stars in a given night might be said to be ‘relevant.’

Priests would sit and identify every star, all night long, as it rose, and make calculations. In all, more than a thousand stars were carefully tracked, some of those stars expected to rise in the summer, or in the fall, or in the winter or spring. Each special star had a name, and each star heralded a specific quality or circumstance to be expected at the particular time of its appearance ... in the east.

What stars appear in your world? What do they convey? Who watches them? Do they make the world predictable enough to judge its trajectory through the heavens?  I wonder who out there has carefully mapped out the floor of their world, and then turned their gaze to map out the roof, also.

But what am I saying? It should be acknowledged that a world needs no stars, nor even a sun, except to rise and fall in a perfect earth day, without needing there to be any logic. There is an unwritten acceptance in D&D that no matter how strange the landscape, or how odd the weather or the seasons, none of this has any effect upon the will of its inhabitants to build cities or to plant crops which predictably sprout and give forth wheat without any question of the heat of the sun or the length of time it remains in the sky. If there is a calendar, it is almost certain to have thirty days in every month, and seven days in every week, with or without plan or purpose – because the DM does come from a world where this is so, and the DM would have it so in the world of the DM’s devising.

No matter what.