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Campaign World Changes Depending on Current in World Date

Astinex

New member
Sorry if this has been addressed already. I've only recently been playing around with the program and had an idea for a feature, I didn't see readily apparent.

So in my campaign world, there is a long history. Many changes have occured over centuries. I was wondering if there was, or is planned to be, a feature that would allow me to enter relevant dates that would change depending on what current date was being looked at in campaign.

Example:
The settlement of Dugan's Hold is established 356ga, (Guilded Age).
Dugan's Hold becomes a village, 372ga
Dugan's Hold becomes a Town, 395ga
Dugan's Hold is razed by a dragon, 401ga

I was hoping there would be a way to enter all these different setting pieces into the campaign world, but the relevant data would only show depending on which date the in-game story was at.

For example if I was running a game in 390ga Dugan's Hold would be a village with the requisite NPCs and such, but the post 384ga events wouldn't show. And if the game advanced in time past 395ga, PCs returning to Dugan's Hold after a 5 year world spanning journey would find it had grown to town size. With the new NPCs being present, and some older NPCs having moved away or passed on.

This way, I could start games at various eras within my game world, but not have to worry about which events took place or hadn't yet.
 
The last time I asked about this I was told no.

With the ability to copy realms it would be possible to build your base realm, just the physical geography and other unchanging elements, and then build different realms for the different eras without much more effort than what you envision.
 
How about making an original Topic for Dugan's hold with prefix of 356ga. Duplicate it to Dugan's Hold prefix 372ga and make changes as required. Duplicate it to Dugan's Hold 395ga and make changes. Rinse and Repeat.
 
So the issue here is that Realm Works is primarily a tool where the current Realm is for "right now". It does not have any kind of "current date" vs "other dates" setup that would hide or reveal anything. This also gets into reveal being fairly manual. Just because the date has now rolled around to a new threshold, that probably should not automatically reveal anything.

Remember, too, that is it kind of assumed users will have a pristine "base copy" of their background Realm and make a "working copy" (or export and copy into a "working realm") for each campaign they run.

My suggestions:
  1. As mentioned, use multiple Topics with a Suffix to identify the time for each. Maybe not the specific date, but more of a "Time Period" like "Early Gilded Age", "Middle Gilded Age", etc.)
  2. Use "Views" by time period to separate/show different Time Period versions of the same Topic.
  3. Use multiple Topics as above, but make a "Time Period" type Topic the root contained of all versioned Topics by Time Period. In the tree display (if you use the "Show Hierarchy" option), you can right-click on the root and assign it to the current "View"; the application will ask if you want to assign all children with it, making it easy to add/remove all Topics under the same Time Period from the View.
  4. Use separate Realms for each period, and only import the one that applies to the current campaign. (Not useful if you're planning a time-travel situation where the current Period can change over the course of the campaign).
 
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