Timeline/Calendar

[RunningRyan]

Hi all newb here!

So I've seen this before a few times but I was just curious if anyone's had any follow up/luck with the Timeline and Calendar system for RW. Personally this is kinda a huge roadblock for me because I'm using RW in the "create an entire world" perspective. As worlds are prone to do, they move in the continuum of time and cities/empires/nations rise and fall with the flow of time. Honestly I was hoping to integrate different Era's (My worlds terminology for Millennium's,) and Age's (again, terminology for Centuries) with the rise and fall of cities, places, forests, mountains and such.

Honestly my question is whether someone has implemented this and if so how?

I basically was wondering if it's possible to click on a certain time within the timeline and see the regions change within my world i.e. some cities no longer there due to collapse or forests being chopped down etc...

 

[AEIOU]

The type of functionality you describe in your final paragraph has not been mentioned either in the forums or by LWD over the last three years. I would not expect timelines that change what you can see in RW in the near future.

Timelines and calendars work fine if you have a world that uses a Gregorian-like calendar. Everything is in place to define eras and ages and whatnot already. Broad sweeps of time are easy. The macro tracking of time doesn't require much more than the ability to create entries and then group them into chunks of time.

What has not been implemented are customized calendars which will allow for custom day, week, month, year, etc definitions. Tracking time at the micro level is more difficult if you are not using traditional days/weeks/months. Lunar tracking of multiple solar bodies may be implemented. Weather and tides have not been confirmed so not likely in the near term.

I use Excel to track events using date systems from four different societies but I do so only at the year level so I have worked around calendar customization. I'm more interested in the flow of history rather than who was born when -- movements and patterns are much more interesting to me than celebrity trivia. I add date snippets to entries for birth, death, marriage or event. I'd say 95% of my date entries are events. If the event spanned or involved multiple entries (like a city, a forest and a king) I will copy the entry to each pertinent entry.

 

[Cornelius]

As AEIOU says calendars were not implemented yet.

One of the options you have is to give each topic a tag with the proper era and/or age. That way you can use the filter to have only those topics visible about a certain age or era.

 

[Greebo]

Since the information for any given city may change drastically from era to era, I am not even sure whether your idea is feasible.

I decided to create one realm for every major era / epoch of my gameworld. Currently this is rather cumbersome, but with calendars and the content market this will work more smoothly. I hope.

 

[AEIOU]

Just create multiple entries for the city and add a suffix of the date it is based upon. Make as many entries as makes sense.

New York City (1200 AD)
New York City (1600 AD)
New York City (1700 AD)
New York City (1850 AD)
New York City (1900 AD)
New York City (1950 AD)
New York City (PRESENT)

Since multiple time periods are important to you, make a new tag of Era (or whatever). Then put in all of the Eras. Then for the city, add a custom snippet of Era which has the tag of Era. Select the appropriate Era for the city from this list. Rinse and repeat. Now you can filter on that tag and see all of your cities that existed during that Era. If something existed in multiple Eras, just add each of the appropriate Eras when you are making your selection.

I use the above method for identifying regions and source material. This way I can sort on the Duchy of the Rampart to get all material associated with the Duchy -- cities, people, events, dungeons, adventures, etc.

Once you have things sorted, create custom views for each Era so you can quickly change from one to another.

 

[AEIOU]

As for separate realms for each Era, nothing will change to make that more workable with the Marketplace except that you could merge them. But if you plan to merge, why not create them all at the same time anyways???

If a category or tag or snippet doesn't exist, you can usually create your own.

 

[RunningRyan]

Wow that was a fantasic reply, thank you all so much! I've honestly been neglecting Realm Works, which I've had for years now, because of the massiveness of it all.
Thanks a whole bunch all and I'll be back on to throw some questions in the fray...

quick side question do we have any idea when they may implement customization for calendars? I do have my own variation that I would like, though it's not life or death here, to implement.
-Ryan

 

[RunningRyan]

So since I'm also new to this whole dealy, especially tags and such, would you suggest making a domain for the Era's Tag? Like Timeline or something?

 

[AEIOU]

Go to Manage
Choose Tags
Click + at top left
Give it a name - for your purposes I'd use Period
Click + for Add Tag
Add each of your time periods, Era's and Age's
Save
Done

Go to Manage
Choose Categories
Choose Location-Community
Click hammer-and-wrench next to 1. Overview
Choose Add Snippet Type
Give it a name - for your purposes I'd use Period
Choose Tags from pull-down
Select Tag of Period
If desired, select a default Tag selection
Make sure that Shown and Auto Add are both checked
Save
Done

Now add communities to your realm and use your custom tags.

 

[AEIOU]

As far as when calendars will be released, Rob promised unequivocally they will definitely for sure without a doubt be out by Christmas; however, he did not specifically state which Age or Era for said holiday. Nor did he identify which multiverses this event will happen in.

 

[MNBlockHead]

I really like AEIOU's suggestion. My more lazy approach would be to just have one topic and then use sections within the topic to given era-specific information. The problem with my approach is that you can't filter on your data as easily. With AEIOU's approach, you could easily show only topics relevant to a specific era, which would allow you to run multiple campaigns in the same realm but at different eras.

Since I don't plan to do that, the era information is more for background information, so I'd just create a "history" section to the topic and subsections for the different eras, where that information is important to my campaign or an adventure.

I do use data snippets to record when players visited or did something noteworthy at a location. While you can use reveal history to get the same thing, I like to see the campaign's history in the timeline, not only as a log of what they've done but also because their actions become part of the history of the realm.

Just create multiple entries for the city and add a suffix of the date it is based upon. Make as many entries as makes sense.

New York City (1200 AD)
New York City (1600 AD)
New York City (1700 AD)
New York City (1850 AD)
New York City (1900 AD)
New York City (1950 AD)
New York City (PRESENT)

Since multiple time periods are important to you, make a new tag of Era (or whatever). Then put in all of the Eras. Then for the city, add a custom snippet of Era which has the tag of Era. Select the appropriate Era for the city from this list. Rinse and repeat. Now you can filter on that tag and see all of your cities that existed during that Era. If something existed in multiple Eras, just add each of the appropriate Eras when you are making your selection.

I use the above method for identifying regions and source material. This way I can sort on the Duchy of the Rampart to get all material associated with the Duchy -- cities, people, events, dungeons, adventures, etc.

Once you have things sorted, create custom views for each Era so you can quickly change from one to another.

 

[MNBlockHead]

As far as when calendars will be released, Rob promised unequivocally they will definitely for sure without a doubt be out by Christmas; however, he did not specifically state which Age or Era for said holiday. Nor did he identify which multiverses this event will happen in.

Despite the best campaigning of many of us, a user survey used to prioritize development of new features found custom calendars below Journals and some other items that I forget. Maybe after the Content Market is finally released, LWD will be able to speed up the release of new features so that we can get custom calendars, but at this time it seems to be in perpetual someday/maybe limbo.

I'm curious how they are going to sell material in the Content Market that uses non-Gregorian calendars. Doesn't seem like the timeline is going to be useful for adventure paths and other content that makes use of in-game calendars. Kinda hoping content creators will start demanding custom calendars. Their votes would likely be weighted more heavily. (I personally think that GM votes should be weighted more heavily than players, but that doesn't seem to be the case, given that Journals rose to the top, over custom calendars and printing).

 

[Cornelius]

Seeing both ideas MNBlockheads (1 topic with sections about the era's) and AEIOU (1 topic for each era). I would go about it this way:
If you have a game where the PCs are in only 1 era, and all the rest is background information, then I would use MNBlockheads idea. This will have everything together and all information is in one place.
If you have a game where the PCs travel between the era's and you need specific information on only the situation in one era I would use AEIOU's option.

If you go for AEIOU's option I would add a snippet with a link to the previous and next era's, so you can also quickly move through all the era's if needed.

 

[Greebo]

As for separate realms for each Era, nothing will change to make that more workable with the Marketplace except that you could merge them. But if you plan to merge, why not create them all at the same time anyways???

If a category or tag or snippet doesn't exist, you can usually create your own.

I have three vastly different eras of my gameword with several hundred years and quite a few technological advances between them: late medieval / early renaissance, late 19th century and near future.
When I started world building in RW, I thought my approach with three realms would make it easier to keep the different versions of cities and countries organized.
Some locations ceased to exists, some rich areas turned to slums et vice versa etc.

And shouldn´t I be able to copy e.g. a city from one realm to the other and then rework it accordingly, once the content market is fully released?


On the other hand, the tag idea sounds great, too.

 

[Parody]

I'm curious how they are going to sell material in the Content Market that uses non-Gregorian calendars. ...

The reason those who want calendars don't have them is because the Realm Works team wasn't happy with the UI for creating custom calendar schemes. LWD could still create those calendar schemes for their chosen content creators and/or allow those creators access to the existing UI. This would likely allow folks using certain popular campaign worlds to finally get the calendar(s) for them.

It may be, however, that those content creators don't care as much about calendars as the few vocal folks on this forum do. Not all adventures, campaigns/adventure paths, or other content care that much about dates.

 

[MNBlockHead]

It may be, however, that those content creators don't care as much about calendars as the few vocal folks on this forum do. Not all adventures, campaigns/adventure paths, or other content care that much about dates.

Perhaps. But it would be a shame that campaign settings with rich historical content may not be able to make use of the timeline functionality because they do not use Gregorian dates.

 

[Silveras]

The reality, as with so much of RealmWorks, is "it depends".

It depends... on what the user is trying to do.
It depends... on what material the user has available and wants to include.
It depends... on what feels comfortable to the user.

For example, in the case of Call of Cthulhu, because there are separate setting sourcebooks for different time periods, separate realms by time period may make sense, as they are practically "different settings" even if they are all in the real world.

Another example is the Forgotten Realms.
For the launch of 4E D&D, WotC re-wrote the geography of the Realms. They seem to have done so again in "the Sundering" for 5E D&D. The geography, races, and other setting materials are so different in each period ... pre-4E, 4E, and 5E, that separate Realms may make the most sense in RealmWorks for them.

As I view RealmWorks, it is a "point in time" view of the world. Historical events can be recorded, but I don't get the feeling that one realm is meant to support more than one period of time. RealmWorks is always "now" for an active campaign. The more different places are by time period, the more the argument for a separate realm makes sense to me.

 

[AEIOU]

For my own work, I assume present-day for all entries and if there is something of historical relevance, I add a date entry and a quick description of what was changed/added/destroyed. Simple.

Back to the OP's question, my answers to him are based on the assumption that one group of characters will be visiting different Era's and therefore the different locations need to be separate. Maybe time travel or visions or something. My suggestion also works for tracking PC versions over time or other bits of info where you need specifics only about a single point in time.

However, if the information regarding what happened to something over the Era's is for the GM only as historical background, then I totally agree with @MNBlockhead. Just add a history section to each entry and dump it there for your reference.

If you are running different groups through different Era's, then @Silveras has the better approach.

My rule-of-thumb would be to pick the option that is appropriate for the intended group and how you want to track its interactions with your world.

 

[RunningRyan]

Hah! Well then, perhaps someday in the far off future in a distant realm perhaps this will happen. :3 Having been part of QA and on the Tech side of things I can certainly attest to random crap taking place and pushing deadlines back. Who knows what's happened ey?

 

[Greebo]

As I view RealmWorks, it is a "point in time" view of the world. Historical events can be recorded, but I don't get the feeling that one realm is meant to support more than one period of time. RealmWorks is always "now" for an active campaign. The more different places are by time period, the more the argument for a separate realm makes sense to me.

Same here. Like I said, the three versions of my campaign world differ greatly due to technical and historical change. And even though player groups will eventually stumble upon plots and actions of other groups from the earlier eras, no timetravel will occur.


Since time plays a significant role in my campaigns on the micro as well as the historical level, I hope for the calendar tool to come soone.
And I will test the tag idea for historical background information amd charakter development.