WORLDBUILDING: KEEPING TIME (Patreon)

The Importance of Keeping Time in the Realms

In issue 47 of The Dragon, an unassuming article appeared under the silly title of “The Merry Month of . . . Mirtul?” (new titles for Dragon articles were almost always bestowed by the editors, no matter how clever—or otherwise—the original titles we writers had already given them happened to be). I recall overhearing some gamers perusing that then-new issue of the magazine at a local hobby shop (yes, such places still existed back in those dear gone days, and glorious—if usually less than clean—places they were, too, beloved hangouts for fellow nerds, crammed with gaming treasures and oddities and delights waiting to be discovered, or afforded, which is why so many issues of Dragon got read, and reread, and handled to lovingly battered state, before coins enough were scraped together to take them home), and one of them sneering, “This guy must be sleeping with all of the editors to get them to publish his g-d calendar, for Gygax’s sake!”

Now I honestly can’t say that the tactic of seducing Jake or Kim ever crossed my mind back then or since, but I was familiar with that sort of scorn already. If you enjoyed D&D® for its Dungeon™-related side (by which I mean not Dragon’s longtime sister magazine, but rather the board game that has enjoyed so many iterations over the years, the “find the traps the hard way, get into the room, fight the monster, and take its treasure” gauntlet or gantlet theme of classic dungeon-crawling D&D®), the entire notion of keeping track of time can seem boring, or a pain (“What do you mean the magic-user hasn’t had time to study and get his spells back? Let’s just skip over that!”) at best.

But keeping track of things, in an ongoing sequence of events, is the very essence of a campaign in gaming—Donald Featherstone, just to name one veteran published gamer, was doing it long before D&D® existed.

The most popular way he as a historical recreation wargamer employed of playing a campaign as a succession of sandtable battles was to divide a real-world regional map into sections corresponding to a homemade “dresser” or “chest of drawers” made of glued-together matchboxes. Opposing forces moved into marked-off map sections by opening the right drawer to place their poker chip or coin or other small token into it; if they discovered an enemy token already in the box, the combatants had encountered each other in the field, and the armies of miniatures were deployed onto a tabletop for a fight to begin.

This process still works, folks, even if you’re playing rounds of Magic: The Gathering®—if each one is what the framing tale tells you, a duel between wizards, than you can play a campaign of wizards trying to duel their way up the ranks of some imagined hierarchy, and so achieve things beyond the scope of the immediate hand of cards. If instead you’re playing Lords of Waterdeep, each victory could win you more money to start the next game with. And so on.

In a roleplaying campaign, accurate timekeeping means things matter. Being sorely wounded or falling prey to a disease and needing time to recover creates implications beyond the jaunty “I bribe the cleric to heal my character and we go on to the next room” attitude of the pure hack-and-slasher. (Please understand that there’s nothing at all wrong with enjoying hacking and slashing, but I’m thinking here of what makes D&D® different—and something more, that players invest so much emotion as well as time into—than a beloved board game that is played over and over out of the box the same way.)

Yes, down on the personal level, it means the players who have more time to sit down with the Dungeon Master® can’t accomplish ridiculous amounts more with their characters than fellow players can, simply because they can cram six days’ worth of adventuring into an afternoon and then do it again the next day, while other players’ characters sit idle because those players have real-world obligations. However, more importantly when you’re trying to create a simulated life for an entire setting, like the Realms, it makes geopolitical events start to make sense. A realm roundly defeated on the battlefield, with their armies scattered, can’t miraculously field an intact army again two days later at the other end of the continent, just because no one’s keeping track of losses and the time it takes armies to march and how long wounded need to be tended and how food and drink reach anyone to keep them on their feet and fighting.

Consequences make everything matter more. Orc hordes sweeping down out of the Sword Coast North, for example, cease to be nuisances or even “black comedy” relief, but become grave perils that force busy player characters to drop even juicy plans almost at fruition because they can see the grim consequences of not doing the right thing at the right moment.

So a calendar may be a mental annoyance to busy players overwhelmed with their real lives whose weary brains might prefer that Monday night in the real world is also Monday night in the Realms, just so they don’t have to think about such things—but timekeeping of some sort is vital.

I called that Mirtul article by the far less prosaic name of “The Calendar of Harptos,” because that’s what that particular calendar was called—oh, yes, there were others, but the good folks at TSR weren’t interested in confusing gamers with a variety of ways for keeping track of the passing days, and probably wisely so, though the calendar used by most dragons in the Realms is something worth exploring, some day.

And it has amused me in a weary sort of way to see an editorial boo-boo enshrined in lore through edition after edition, despite my repeated attempts to fix it, in notes and dealings with many editors down the passing years (Why isn’t it ever fixed? Well, editors always know better than the creator of something; that’s why they’re editors, doncha know?): Alturiak was and is known colloquially throughout the North and the Heartland as “the Claws of Winter” or “the Claws of the Cold.” However, Ches is known as “Ches of the Sunsets” or “the Time of the Sunsets” and not “the Claws of the Sunsets,” and Tarsakh is known as “Tarsakh of the Storms” or “the Time of the Storms,” and not “the Claws of the Storms.”

The Calendar of Harptos is dominated by weather descriptors because it matters most to farmers, who of the sentient “civilized” population are tied most closely to the land and its growing conditions. The conditions prevailing in the aforementioned North and Heartlands of the continent of Faerûn, that is.

However, an attentive read of the calendar reveals not just the annual festivals and observances shared by many faiths, but the enforced-by-the-weather interruptions of easy travel and bulk trade shipping. Or to put it another way, in winter harbours freeze up and deep snow and ice makes barge and wagon travel impossible and travel on foot imperiled by hungry wolves and worse, so wherever you are when freezeup or the first heavy blizzards come, there you tend to stay for the cold months. Making you a captive audience for whatever serial murders or unfolding mysteries or monster attacks or dungeon delves necessary thanks to coming starvation the Dungeon Master® wants to inflict.

See, it’s a lot more than some funny names for months and Eddie deciding he wanted the lengths of months cleaned up and some “special days” marked throughout the year. It matters.

Amazing, the power and reach a few words and ideas have. It’s what keeps me creating.