I’m about to run Season of Ghosts and I would like a calendar to help keep track of time for the players.
Since Season of Ghosts takes place in a village in the country of Shenmen which is on the continent of Tian Xia, I feel like I should use the Imperial Calendar rather than the Absalom Reckoning calendar of the Inner Sea.
Problem is I can’t find what names the months or weekdays have in the Tian Xia.
While I wouldn’t be too surprised if the days of the week have the same name, I would be quite surprised if the month names were also the same, since in the Absalom Reckoning calendar, all of the months are named after different deities and most of said deities aren’t as major in Tian Xia.
Any help?
It's certainly unlikely that the Imperial calendar uses the same names. We can for convenience, but it might also be interesting to see what other possibilities arise when borrowing from the modern and/or historical east.
First and easiest option is that in at least Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the modern days of the months are just labeled by their number. January for example is yi yue or ichigatsu, which translate directly to "one moon" or "one month". This would be simple, if a bit bland, and would make remembering the month easy.
Meanwhile, Shenmen used to be a part of Lung Wa, so it feels likely that Chinese-inspired references would be especially appropriate, as the Empire pushes its accounting systems onto this region which is technically more on the fantasy culture than historically inspired side.
I dont know much about historical Chinese timekeeping, but I have been able to find out that the popular lunar calendar, which tracks time by the moon, gives month-like stretches of the calendar with names for each moon that reflect phenomena in those seasons. Historically, this seems to have been mostly tied to plants--plum month, orchid month, apricot month, but also ice month--but each month also had an alternate name which might be easier for us fantasy fans to track; names based on the animals of the zodiac. For this we could happily choose the established Tian Xia zodiac.
Note that for using these zodiacal names, the "first" animal (rat on Earth) covers the darkest part of the year, around the solstice (so not quite Nov or Dec) which might be actually pretty useful for borrowing the names of the Tian Xia calendar, as that would track to the Underworld Dragon (which is fire based, but a fire underground in a dark month seems more appropriate than not actually).
Of course, while you could use a direct moon-month correlation, this would require you to also do the mental math of figuring out intercalary days (days between years). That, or you can just lock down on using the same names but attached to the usual 30-day months, which would be a lot easier for the purposes of actually tracking everything in-game. In which case the Underworld Dragon is a simple 11th month, but in the absence of established lore, you can probably love that around to whichever set of months lines up closest to your preference!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
From Tian Xia Character Guide:
"The Tian people widely use the Dragon Empires Zodiac to mark the progression of years, months, and hours with one of its 12 constellations, though each nation can have a variation of the Zodiac and its relation to their calendar and fortune."
The constelations are, in order, Underworld Dragon, Swordswoman, Sea Dragon, Swallow, Ox, Sovereign Dragon, Ogre, Forest Dragon, Blossom, Dog, Sky Dragon, and Archer.
No speicific indication of when that cycle starts, but the description of Zi Ha in Tian Xia Word Guide implies the sixth through ninth lunar months (Sovereign Dragon to Blossom) are Summer, when the blazing light reflects off the mountains and the population retreats underground (this solstice would be in the middle of this range). This probably places the Underworld Dragon as the start of winter, equivalent to November/Neth or December/Kuthona. Associating the first in the cycle with November would be consistent with the historical chinese calendar.
Weeks there's less indication on, the Zi Ha sections mention them measuring time by weeks but also desribes them marking time within the month via the lunar cycle.
If you'd like, you can also use the Zodiac to mark hours -- again, going off historical chinese timekeeping, you'd divide the day into twelve two-hour blocks, with the Underworld Dragon marking 11pm to 1am. So you might wake up in the Swallow Hour and have lunch in the Ogre Hour.
Right, of course! I trusted the wiki this morning that there still wasn't really much exposition on Tian Xia months, but I should have remembered to look inside the World Character Guide!
... Although I am now extremely pleased to see that my guesses were rather well-founded, after all.
I'm also quite charmed and delighted by the idea of using the Zodiac to mark hours... Underworld Dragon marking the hours between 11pm and 1am just feels right.
It's unfortunate that the Blossom Moon falls late in summer instead of early in spring, but you can't have everything when adapting a fantasy setting.
--
As for the question of days of the week, while historically a 10-day week was more popular, for obvious reasons we probably shouldn't worry about going that deep.
In any case, the modern 7-day week in both Japan and China names the days after the sun and moon, and then the five elements, related to the 5 stars (planets), Fire, Water, Wood, Metal/Gold, and Earth.
These were tied to Mars (i.e. fire-star), Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, and Saturn respectively, although that information may be less useful in a setting without those specific planets--although I do wonder now which planets are considered generally visible to the naked eye in Golarion (and thus more likely to enter ancient astronomical culture) and which weren't discovered until later.
Make of this what you will!