2025-03-08

Arden Vul: The Archontean Calendar

One of my players actually asked about the Archontean Calendar, and once again someone else already made a great web page about it which I will just link rather than recreating.  (Thanks!)

Okay, I'd feel bad making a blog post consisting totally of a link, so I'll talk about the Archontean calendar, as an non-spoiler example of how well developed the Arden Vul setting is.

The nice thing about the Archontean Calendar is that it has 12 months (easy to remember!) and each has exactly 30 days (how convenient, none of the variable days per month nonsense like we have).  Are we done?

Sadly, no.  The year on Magae is 372 days (not 365, not 365.25, not a nice evenly-divisible-by-everything 360), so that leaves 12 leftover days.  Wait, 12 days, 12 months, can't we just make them all 31 days and declare victory?  Well, that's what I would do, but the Archonteans are like the people who brought you Daylight Saving Time: never settling for a simple solution (ask your boss if you can move your shift an hour earlier in the summer so you have more time to play with bugs after work) when a more complicated one (redefine time itself for everyone!) would do.  They instead added two 6-day intercalary (new word for me; thanks Richard Barton) periods, which makes the calendar really ugly but does mean they don't have to count to 31.

Are the intercalary periods at least evenly spaced, like right at New Year's and Midsummer, or right at the solstices?  Of course not.  Again, this world feels realistic.  One of the intercalary periods (the Mercedonian Days, or Days of Wages) is right after the New Year, which is convenient.  But the other one (the Voluptarian Days, or Days of Pleasure) is two-thirds of the way through the year, between the eighth and ninth month.  Which totally makes faux-historical sense because it's the harvest festival, and harvests for annual crops in temperate climates are most often in autumn, but it drives me nuts because it's asymmetrical.  Just like our real-world calendar where we have 4 30-day months, 7 31-day months, and a 28-sometimes-29-day month.

The different year lengths and intercalary periods complicate any translations between the real-world and game-world calendars.  But it doesn't really matter much, so I probably won't bother.  If the players care deeply about the date for some reason that actually justifies burning GM time I'll track it accurately; otherwise I can mostly wing it by taking the real-world date (since we play once a week and PCs probably mostly delve once a week since all the DFRPG Town rolls are weekly) and changing the month name to the Archontean version.  The main need for dates in the game world is seasonal weather, and I just assume game seasons are roughly in sync with real seasons and use today's real-world weather in a city that's a decent analog in terms of latitude and terrain for the campaign location.

Finally, I'll mention the days of the week.  They are Basilsday, Lunday, Tothsday, Mitrasday, Tahsday, Horasday, and Demmasday.  So one for the emperor, one for the moon, one for Thoth (a greater god of the old pantheon, no longer popular), one for Mitra (new pantheon), one for Ptah (old pantheon), one for Horus (old pantheon, and not just unpopular but possibly dead), and one for Demma (new pantheon).  I just love the inconsistency; it feels like a silly jumble of historical accidents rather than something designed on purpose, just like the days here on Earth.

I guess if there's a point to this ramble it's that if you're trying to create a fictional world inhabited by humans, don't make things too neat and tidy.  Humanity is a mess of legacy systems and fiction should reflect that.

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