The Role of Time

Time creates continuity and strings together what would otherwise be a collection of random events, dungeon crawls, and journeys. A world is much more than a vague stage for the adventurers to act upon. To bring depth to the setting, you need to look into the past and establish at least a loose framework for history. How many generations ago did people first arrive in the area? How far back does the current ruling family trace its lineage? How long ago was the port city founded? And what do all of these have in common, if anything?

Time also acts as a pacing mechanic, both during the adventures you run and when connecting them together. The use of downtime for healing, recovery, and crafting items (to say nothing of adventurers who have family or business obligations) is made more real when you know what being away from the story for that length of time means. Does a villain have time to recover his forces after the last battle, or is he still weakened? Does the war in the neighboring kingdom get worse, or do diplomats forge a peace accord? To this end, it might be useful to establish a campaign calendar that allows you to track time in-game, and that can also be filled out ahead of time with major holy days, festivals, and other time-sensitive events to give your campaign added verisimilitude and easy adventure hooks.

Time in Your Game

In most fantasy settings, time is a linear construct, a series of dates on a line. This is the standard construct, but it can also be tweaked. Do the people of your world think of time as a series of never-ending cycles or in terms of ages defined by a common theme, such as the Dark Ages or the Age of Reason? Does history repeat itself? If so, is this repetition what leads to prophecy, and how does it affect the role of sages, historians, and storytellers? Alternatively, you might decide that time happens all at once, a singular, shared hallucination—this obviously becomes complicated and makes great demands on your world’s cosmology, but it can be a fun conceit nonetheless.

Assuming time is linear and cause leads to effect, how long are your world’s years, seasons, months, or weeks? In most cultures, these are labels for meteorological or cosmic events that can be reliably tracked. The sun goes down every day, the moon goes through its phases every month, the seasons come in cycles of four, and so forth. Any and all of these could be altered or eliminated, so long as you think of some reasonably sensible explanation for it.

Changing such things as the length of the day is more significant than the length of a season or even a month, because it can directly impact an adventure. If a day in your world is 32 hours long, how much of that is night? How does this change the length of a typical “business day” for markets, farmers, craftsmen, or guards? What about magic users whose abilities refresh each day?

A common world-building twist is adding moons or perhaps some other great cosmological object. If you do this, you provide your world with another reliable marker for time’s passing, so be sure to consider its effects. Is the smaller moon faster or slower? When a comet manifests in the heavens, does it signal the changing of kings or the beginning of a ritual war?

Finally, you should think about how tightly you want to bind such things as government, religion, or magic to the marking of time. Do people think of time in terms of the emperor’s reign? Is each day of the week connected to a religious practice or observation?