Time
Entries
Question: The game runs on a twelve month calendar right now. Do the months have names or are they just numbered?
Answer: I'm going to mirror rl names in the few cases it comes up. This is one of those cases where I very intentionally stay ambiguous because while renaming days of the week or months for a fantasy world is very cool, it also confuses the heck out of every new player and for a very minor touch raises the barrier of entry significantly. So I'll stay intentionally vague on the names for now unless I come up with a very seamless coded way to always remove ambiguity or clear up uncertainty about something characters would always 100 percent of the time know but their players often would not.
Question: Assuming (and I feel like I've heard people say this) that clocks are a relative rarity in the Compact, do people (peasants specifically, but even nobles from smaller/less wealthy domains) have special names for the times of day? Is it like in our medieval times where there might be a bell at the local house of worship, or a bell rung by someone hired to do it, which announces specific times? Would it be like in the morning is the Queen's bell and at noon is the Sentinel's bell and in evening is Tehom's bell and at around 9 is Aion's bell or something like that? I know this is probably in overthinking it territory, but crunchy world building stuff like this is the best, and I have occasionally had to refer to the time of day and found it felt a bit awkward to be like oh, it's 3:47, what up?
Answer: Clocks are very rare, though I think 'o'clock' is still thematic for simplicity sake, that it's still caught on. Bells are common, and the great cathedral has one that sounds off on the hour (climb to the top of the great cathedral for the Bell Tower room). In more rural areas, where a bell is distant, times of day are usually broken up into 4 parts. At 6 am, a bell of the closest church would ring to start the new day, which would be marked as Creation's Canticle of Dawn (named for the triad of creation, mangata petrichor and lagoma). For the godsworn in rural areas, this often means waking to sing morning prayers as farmers tend their fields. At 1 pm, or 13 hours past midnight, starts the Artisans' Canticle of Day. At 7 pm starts the Concepts' Canticle of Dusk, and then at 1 am, 13 hours past noon, starts the Thirteenth's Canticle of the Vigil.