I have a question.

Have any Galbarian cultures done any astronomy yet? My characters probably won't introduce it IC, I'm just curious.

Probably not much aside from "Oh, look at the pretty, big, round, and twinkly things in the sky."

@Muttonhawk I think both me and bb did some minor comments.

They probably have observed constellations and frequent phenomenons​, as that is something easy to take and shows up even in simple isolated cultures. More organized tribes probably can differentiate planets already.

@Double Capybara Cool, does that mean we can formalise a calendar to use now? It might help us with our temporal inconsistency problems in future.

@Muttonhawk If this is about calendars, then the Vetruvians already have a calendar based on the annual flooding of the Mahd.

That's all well and good, but I was hoping to have something more like a dating system that we could use to annotate IC posts for a more consistent series of events at some point going on (or at least circa dates). If we could get something preferably close to a planetary circuit of the sun, we can have a better idea as players of when a post is taking place in canon.

Something like Inundation 401 + 20 days might be a bit unwieldy.

Point is, we might have systems, but we haven't actually had a sheet explaining how these systems work.

@Muttonhawk That's fair enough. I agree that we need a dating system for the sake of consistency. It can easily be incorporated into the header. Just a matter of someone making a system/explaining a system we can use.





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Sounds good to me. Let me code tag that for ya and someone else can volunteer to design a calendar.

[centre]Character Name
Level
Might
Detection/Concealment

[hider=Summary]Summary[/hider][/centre]

[right][xTime] xDay xDate, xYear[/right]

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@Muttonhawk The urtelem have a solar calendar, measured with standing stone rings near some lens groves. Different storylines have progressed at different speeds and the starting point was never solidly defined, but overall it's about year 100 in urt time.

I'll go over my own posts and get back to it sometime.

@Antarctic Termite If you can find the point at which it started, I can at least make an effort at backdating some major events. Anything too fuzzy can be circa some sufficiently big margin of error.

Oh my. A calendar will be a lot of tension. So much stuff is going to clash against each other.

Well, not everything has to be in sync. Anyone who is doing stuff that they anticipate to run over a broader time range may find it useful to simply use approximate year dates rather than specific days or times.

I don't want to enforce any stringent systems, I just want to help add some consistency.

Oh definitely. Trying to sort all these story arcs into an actual concrete timeline will be hell. I'm not even sure if we should try.

Could be handy to have around, though.

It hit me earlier. The way to canonise the time inconsistencies from around the time of Slough's 'second death'.
I'm thinking that Vowzra's disturbed state at the time caused a slight disturbance in the Time stream, meaning that time did not operate properly for everyone from the moment of Slough's death.
When Vowzra died, this was exacerbated. The fact that a plane with vastly different time passage to the rest of the universe was torn in (New Chronos) also added to the imbalance, and now there are some rather large time inconsistencies across the board. This wouldn't be anything anyone would notice immediately, but it provides an explanation for why close to 22 years (an estimate) have passed in Yara's plot since she arrived in Vetros while somewhere else one year or less may have passed.

I'm thinking this instability will be sorted by the end of the Yara storyline (coming soon!) and that can be the next 'global event' from where our new time system can come into effect - once Termite explains it. Thoughts?

Edit: This time inconsistency think only applies to everything happening from the moment of Slough's second death, so any inconsistencies before that will have to be sorted out in a more orthodox manner.

@Kho The issue is that I feel time will just deviate again because of the playstyles. But we can try, I guess.

@Double Capybara If it does deviate again, at the very least we'll have a concrete idea of how far in the past or future each storyline is. This isn't about restraining anyone from going as far ahead or from staying as far behind as they want, it's all about actually knowing where in time each storyline is taking place and ensuring that each plot is actually being consistent with itself regarding its timing. That's all this really is. Other than putting a small date in the header, nothing substantially changes.

Also, just remembered: the Eskandars do have a calendar - I haven't fleshed it out, but it appears to be lunar and begins with the birth of Eskandar. So Arcon is sorted in that regard.

Ugh, I feel like I want to throw up.... seriously guys, Im at a loss here. I sit down to write, I get maybe 1k words done, and then more shit is getting thrown at me in RL. I haven't read the IC in forever because I barely have time to shave let alone write.

....why did nobody mention life after school sucked? What are your tricks to pounding out the amount of content you do?

@Dawnscroll Oh, you know, the usual. Outlining posts before writing them, setting aside regular hour-long blocks if I really need to make plenty of progress, accepting that Termite has too much free time to keep up with him, etc.

I have a question.

Have any Galbarian cultures done any astronomy yet? My characters probably won't introduce it IC, I'm just curious.

Gerrik did a bunch of astronomy, and still likes to star-gaze, although since Gerrik hasn't yet been introduced to mathematics it is entirely phenomenological. This information has spread, and was actually one of the reasons Fiberslayer had the Chipper-genocide way back (back at the first post which mentioned the Chippers). This probably won't have resulted in a calendar yet, but will have sparked some interest of astronomy, especially among Chippers.

But as already mentioned, the Vetruvians and urtelem both have their own calendar systems. The urtelem stone calendars will work best for making an actual calendar, because it is linked to the position of Galbar in its orbit around the sun.


Re: Time/date for posts. Let us not attempt to retrospectively date posts, because that is more effort than it is worth.
And let us also not make portions of Galbar have time flow at different rates to other portions of Galbar, because what happens if you travel from one place to another, and what of Galbar's orbit around the sun? Such an ad-hoc explanation is asking for trouble.

However, I do feel that approximate dates will be useful, especially when relative to a major event (eg. the Realta invasion). This gives a consistent passage of time and a proper indicator of age. For instance, I have no idea how old Gerrik is. My original head-canon put him as just a hundred or two years old, but he's been around long enough IC, from the invention of fire to present day, that he is probably much older. While it will be a hellish effort trying to retcon the dates of older posts, adding dates to posts here-after will be handy.

Additionally, adding dates for your own posts is not too difficult. First, find a dated event. Second, figure out how approximately long after that event your post will have taken place. For example, let the Blinding Purge be our reference event, since this was a global event of global significance that happened over an extremely brief period of time (one or two days).
Looking at Gerrik's timeline, Gerrik was in Fibeslay at the time of the Blinding Purge, and left immediately after. He traveled some distance, possibly for a year or two (I haven't figured out how quickly Gerrik typically travels), then settled down in Tallgrass, where he has been for maybe half a year.
Looking at the Xerxes battle timeline, preparations for war have been ongoing in Alefpria since the Blinding Purge. Lifprasil received Father Dominus at that time. Production of Cosmic Knights began once Alefpria received refugees of the Blinding Purge, as indicated by the Twins post (so some weeks later). Concurrently, Tauga enacted a coup of Xerxes some time after (probably soon after) the Blinding Purge. Xerxes was under her control for some time. Then Amartia returned. Xerxes fell into revelry for 30 days, then came the blood rain and Xerxes began preparations for war immediately. While the period of Tauga's dictatorship is somewhat ambiguous (Termite can clarify it if necessary), the battle will probably occur approximately one year after the Blinding Purge (at this rate).


Although this brings up a small matter of units of time. The year and day are obvious, since they tie into physical motions of Galbar. However, the 'week' and 'month' are not so relevant to Galbar. Galbar has multiple moons, each likely having different orbital periods, so using the phases of the moon to denote time would be rather ambiguous. It could be done, but would be inconsistent across cultures depending on choice of moon. Additionally, to my memory, no Galbaric religious traditions have been established regarding any periods of time shorter than a year. This leaves no established consistent unit of time between day and year for Galbar.