Posts Tagged ‘calendar’
Calendar considerations
I’m working on a believable world for my D&D campaign and the subject of a calendar has been bothering me for a while now.
I don’t want to simply change the month names and day names and presto, I have a new calendar. I want it to be different from the Earth calendars and I want it to be believable and consistent. However, simply changing the number of days in a year seems unwise, since that has other implications. Earth solar year has roughly 365 days, meaning that the planet rotates around its axis 365 times while it circles around the sun once. If there are fewer days, that would mean that either the planet is closer to the sun (hence hotter) or rotates more slowly (thus day and night last longer than on Earth). Both seem to be important concepts that cannot be simply changed, as they will have an impact on the plant and animal life on the planet.
It seems like the easiest way to change the calendar like this is to simply change the number of months. There are 365 days in a year, but maybe there are 18 months, 20 days each, and then a 19th month of five days that is considered holy? That would make things different, but still save me from considering all the implications of non-Earth planet. Of course, 18 months is a lot and it’s not as useful as 12 months. You can’t have a quarter of a year. A dozen is a very nice number indeed, since it can be divided evenly by 2, 3, and 4. The next such number seems to be 24, being divisible by 2, 3, and 4.
In short, I’m back to square one 
