Felarya/Negav Calendar

Ehm...this thread might have been done before. Maybe. I don't know...i think 9 full oages of deep thread is just too much for me to confirm or infirm the idea of making this thread

SO! Yeah, I've come up with the idea while looking at my calendar. If I think right, I doubt negavians are all earthlings, mh? So, they probably have a different system of...time periodization. if it hadnt been created yet, i was wondering if we couldnt build a Felarya calendar that will have total different month's name, days in a week, days in a month and days in a year =P tell me what you guys think about it, because when i see it in my mind, i can only see a great activity of name creation that will be useful in the future for felarya i have few ideas in my mind, but i wanted to know you guys' opinion

I've already proposed this, in my idea thread.

https://felarya.forumotion.com/t2031p105-time-for-one-of-these-the-home-of-jt-s-ideas

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The Felaryan Calender

The "Felaryan" Calender is called such as it was used by the Sagolians before being taken as the timing system of Negav. It is speculated, however, that this system could extend to even pre-Sagolian days. Even the Dridder Empire used the Felaryan Calender, in essentially the same format of years, with slight differences within a year, especially in the naming and organization of the months.

The Felaryan Calender utilizes Twelve Months in a Year.

Each Month is exactly 36 days.

Each Month is divided into 6 weeks, which are 6 days long.

Each Felaryan Year is thus 432 Days. The Felaryan Calendar does not make use of modifiers such as leap years.

The Months are each named after a variety of things and, traditionally, are themed around certain aspects of life. Typically, the last week of each month is dedicated to a holiday, though some month's holidays are celebrated more widely than others. For example, the 1st Month is the Mirrored Month, or Month of Mirrors - tradition records that one should reflect on their achievements of the past and coming year. The last days of the Mirrored Month are in preparation for Cal-Chanim on the last day of the month. The 12th Month is the Hallowed Month, or Month of Candles, which tradition states is a time of religious contemplation in time for the new year, ends with the celebrations of Kris'Maas. Other Months have celebrations for love, or remembrance of the dead, or other such things.

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I tried to keep a system vaguely close to an Earth year, while still being different (and simpler, I think.) I considered 10 months, but kept the 12 month system as 12 is a more versatile number for dividing up the year. (10 only has 4 factors, 12 has 6 and is the lowest number with that many.)

Of course, I only have a few holidays and ideas for months laid out. I invite others to go ahead and name stuff.

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SO! Yeah, I've come up with the idea while looking at my calendar. If I think right, I doubt negavians are all earthlings, mh?

Yep. Earth has no official link to Felarya within the setting's multi-verse. I personally like it that way, it encourages more creativity in character design, race design, less breaking of the 4th wall, and so on. There is the occaisional person who gets randomly sucked through, but that's about it.

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So, they probably have a different system of...time periodization. if it hadnt been created yet, i was wondering if we couldnt build a Felarya calendar that will have total different month's name, days in a week, days in a month and days in a year

I don't believe an official one has been created. Really, the way someone measures time is likely fairly situational. Im just going to run through a few scenarios with some ideas.

- Predators (...and to a degree, native Felaryans in general): No real method for measuring time. No real need to know how to measure time beyond figuring out how early/late in the day it is. Not to mention nearly all of them are illiterate as well. The only groups of predators I could see having any kind of calender would be the Fairies in some of the more civilized regions of the Fairy Kingdom, the Nekos and Elves living near Negav (they probably just use whatever Negav uses), and maybe some of the Dridders in the Dridder Forest who still use whatever kind of calender the Dridder Empire used back in the day.

- Offworlders: People from other worlds are just going to bring their own forms of time measurement with them. While they aren't going to be completely accurate on Felarya (since the day is likely not the same length), it will be what those people are used to and most familiar with. Even then, in order to at least keep the days and nights accurate, they will probably need to re-adjust their clocks and watches fairly often.

- Negav: In Negav, you have a mix of offworlders and native Felaryans. I believe the issue of time measurement would be solved in a similar way that they solved their written language issue (the translation effect only translates spoken language, not written word)...a special calender would be created for use in Negav, and be considered the standard one to be used within the city.

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i was wondering if we couldnt build a Felarya calendar that will have total different month's name, days in a week, days in a month and days in a year

The months and years used on the standard Earth calender are all based on astronomical measurements, and planetary movement. Felarya has neither of those. It may have a few different months, based around seasons, historical events, festivals and the like. As far as years go, I really doubt they would even bother to measure them. Years don't matter a whole lot when people are immortal. Plus there's no real way to determine a yearly length, because Felarya does not orbit around a single star in any predictable pattern. I think that any mention of ages, years, lengths of time, and such on the wiki are just for our benefit, so that we have a better idea of when stuff happened.

Spoiler:

I think having a calendar for Native Felaryan would be useful and neat.

but..there is days and nights on felarya. it means they must rotate around something, or something may rotate around them. i find it very sad that there is no such calendar, because i think it would just add more....realism to the world, which, we said it, was becoming more and more than a simple vore world and blablah. and, yeah maybe they immortal, but humans need to be fixed in time. they cant just live "days after days" and not care about their place in a timezone. and look at the chronology here it says we're present time at 2068 AU (though i dont know what AU means..o.o)(after ur-sagol?). to count years, you gotta count days and months.

and even if you affirm that immortal people doesnt care about dates, people can still die. and negav is a huge economic city, they gotta make calculation about their benefits and such. I think a calendar would in fact be very useful to Felarya.

and J-T, its a nice start you have there

Krisexy26 wrote:

but..there is days and nights on felarya. it means they must rotate around something, or something may rotate around them.

The problem arises from the fact that your statement isn't true. Day and night is the result of Felarya's sky "reflecting" the sky of another world. Things like constellations, day and night cycles, and possibly even seasons aren't as structured as they are on a true planet.

I find time and measurement to be a great relevancy, beside counting years, you'd want to know when to set certain things into motion at the most opportune time.(no such thing as 'precise' is much in felarya) Which means that some organized groups have their own definition of minutes/hours and so on. That can be from personal preference if The person is outside from Felarya, using their own intuitive logic to create a system which deems fit to them.

I remember Karbo saying Felarya "borrowed" it's sky from other dimensions and whatnot.

This would mean the sky would always be changing, but I'm a bit puzzled as well. What DOES regulate the day/night cycle?

In truth, the day/night cycle is just what every writer is comfortable with, since as real persons, we experience day and night, which we take as natural. I think it should be up to Karbo to answer that query.

someone, bring karbo here!

It's definitely an interesting question ^^

And I love JT's idea of having specific names for months and, why not, days. This can be fun to try and create them

Now as I see it, time measurement in Felarya is a tricky affair. It essentially revolve around day and night, but the thing is Felarya reflect the sky of others worlds, meaning there will be inevitable variation in day/night cycle.

So to me, time is calculated based on day/night cycles, but their effective lenght can vary.
For example you can have a person who is 20 years old and then a person who is 23 years old in another time but who have, in essence, lived less than the first person.

To us It's a difficult concept to wrap our mind around but this is the way I imagined the things to work on Felarya. In a world with no space I feel it's about the only valid way, what do you think ? ^^

well, we were discussing about it. ill put the ideas ive come along and what had resulted from it

first of, yeah we declined the day night thing since its skies from other worlds. though, we may not only base the calender on the sky, but on other things, such as weather or anything like that. then, the cycle idea came along. there is no name to then, though. its just like...there'd be for example 40 days in a cycle. then, there'd be for example 6 cycles. so it goes like the gregorian calender a bit, just with different terms. then, after having reached the last day of the last cycle, everything goes back to the first cycle and on and on. when we reach the end of a cycle, it is named "sequence" (though names may be changed).

now, on what concept we shall build the calender? no idea. my idea was like...yes, the sky changes, but the sky from like...2 months ago may come back. so we just have to determine when a sky may come. and if you say it comes whenever it wants, well itll just make me sad :/ i mean, there must be a logic somewhere! if not, like i said, we can do it with the weather, or, even more felarya related, with the soil itself. the emanations that can come out of it, the degree of magic tell me which one you like more

(sorry guys if ive forgot some ideas we agreed on :/ i just cant remember anything ^^

Due to various problems arising through the nature of felarya, we cant make a calendar based off seasons, since a lot of regions would have seasons with irregular paterns (ie- the miraga forest could have summer, fall, summer winter, spring; while the misty glade could have spring, winter, spring, summer, fall) which would make it impossible to organize a calendar this way.

The problem arises mostly due to the way Felarya borrows it's "Sun", which affects seasons like I said, and also days, like Karbo said. Someone could be 4,000 hours old and another person could be 5,000 hours old, but the person who was 5k hours old could be numerically younger than person one. This kind of makes it a nightmare to figure out an effective calendar, not even bringing into light the translation issue they would have. (there might be an enchantment that channels the translation effect onto paper.)

However, a civilization MUST have a unified calendar (what if different countries in europe today operated with different days in longer/shorter months with more of them in it per year?), other wise organizing meetings between government officials, military officials, get-togethers would be hard to organize as well, since there's no basis for measurement of time in any given way. The only way would be to mention days, but what if someone had an appointment far in the future? Say one mage was booked for the next 243 days, that's a lot to keep track of, and count.

So for all of what's necessary, a calendar MUST be figured out, otherwise people in Negav would be driven insane from the organizational nightmare. I will think of one later, but for now I may humbly recommend JT's calendar. (Holidays would be impossible to celebrate if you didn't know when they were coming).

Alrighty, first several thing need to be stated.

1: Nearly all predators, besides those in the Fairy Kingdom and some in the Dridder Forest maybe, are illiterate. They have no need to record any time other than what time of the day it is.

2: The usage of calender systems would be very situational. The only places you would see the need for a calender system would be in the major cities, like Negav, Chiotia, Kelerm and whatever other ones may exist.

3: Because of this, there won't be a single, unified Felaryan calender...but many calender systems that are unique to their city and/or civilization of origin.

So, we get to the most documented settlement, the city of Negav. This place has a huge amount of diversity, with travellers coming in from a dozen different worlds, not just seeking adventure, but also to trade, and peddle their wares. While the translation aspect of Felarya certainly helps make that easier, some things would need to be put into place to help things run smoother. For example, the translation only works on spoken language, so I think it is only natural that the Magiocrats and/or Vishmitals would develop a standard written language to be used within the city. This way, you don't end up with a complete mess where every shop, bar and inn is using a different written language.

Of course, as the trade hub it is, there would need to be an official method of record-keeping as well, which would lead to the formation of the Negavian Calender. Now, when designing this kind of system, several things need to be taken into account.

1: It needs to be simple. You have people coming in from a bunch of different worlds, so you need a system that can be picked up and learned relatively easy.

2: While being simple, it needs to have enough depth to be able to keep long-running, easy to read records.

So, out of this, Krisexy, Aisu, myself and a couple others in the chatbox brainstormed our way to this idea. I will just break it down piece by piece.

- Day: The standard Felaryan day, of course, is the first unit of importance. I believe Karbo has said that Felarya's day is fairly similar to Earth's, just to make things easier for the community. He'd have to confirm exactly how long it is though.

- Cycle: The cycle is the next unit of time measurement in Negav. It is composed of a set number of days. Aisu suggested 100, because it is a nice, round number. This would mean that a Negavian cycle is a little over 3 months long. There would be a set number of Cycles, I just threw out 6 as a random number and Aisu suggested 10, since it is nice and even...and the Cycles would run in order before repeating (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and then back to 1, for example).

- Sequence: This is the last unit of measurement used in the calender. A Sequence can kind of be thought of as the equivalent of a year, and is made up of a single, complete set of Cycles. When you reach the end of the 10th Cycle (using Aisu's example), you will go into Cycle 1 of the next Sequence. Sequences are really just there to allow for enough depth in the calender to keep accurate records over long periods of time.

So, a sample date in Negav could be...

32nd Day, 4th Cycle, 58th Sequence or 32 - 4 - 58 for short.

Considering the Great Destruction ushered in a new ruling force within Negav, and it was the Magiocrats that really helped interdimensional trade to explode within Negav, I think that they would have been the ones to create the calender, with the 1st Sequence starting right after Micolon's fall on their official records.

It is important to keep in mind that this system is only going to be used in Negav though. Chiotia, Kelerm and all the other big settlements are going to have their own ways of measuring time. I think it would help show differences in their cultures as well. Negav's calender is stiff, plain and buisiness-like...Chiotia's calender, for example, probably is not. They exist all on their own, with no one coming in from other worlds except for the random person that gets sucked through. Their calender is going to be more personal, and less concerned with being simple for new people to pick up. The only new people most settlments get, besides Negav, are people that are born there and the occaisional random offworlder that got sucked through (and maybe the occaisonal traveler that survives the trip out to them).

i think cliff is better than me to explain stuff :/ meh

also, i just want to add that cycles will have names too. lets say we are in the 7th day of the Neko cycle (eh eh eh) and eh..sequence 27!

it could be said like this: 7th day of the Neko cycle of the sequence 27

OR!!

Neko 7th, 27. (<--that is my idea, not being copied from earth calender of course )

but yeah cycle names could be the name of big emperor of both humans and nekos and, why not, tomthumbs (if we are able to recall a emperor tomthumb, that is xP) i dont think naming a cycle something like "Nemyra cycle" is a good idea because, if i remember correctly, humans gets eaten by fairies ans such. same thing for dridders and nagas and blabla. negav have been built to PROTECT humans against them, not to worship preds in their calenders :/

names, although, will be discussed when the calender will be agreed and will not be discussed if the calender is being rejected

Hmmm, I dunno. Remember, the point of it is to be simple for everyone to pick up and learn. I think giving all the different cycles their own unique name would work against that. Most of the people coming in from offworld are not going to know, or care about what the Felaryans call different things, especially if they're just traders that will never venture outside the walls.

I imagine the Negavian calender as simple, stiff and businesslike. The only reason they even have it is because all the record-keeping that goes along with being a trade city pretty much requires it.

rcs619 wrote:

Hmmm, I dunno. Remember, the point of it is to be simple for everyone to pick up and learn. I think giving all the different cycles their own unique name would work against that. Most of the people coming in from offworld are not going to know, or care about what the Felaryans call different things, especially if they're just traders that will never venture outside the walls.

I imagine the Negavian calender as simple, stiff and businesslike. The only reason they even have it is because all the record-keeping that goes along with being a trade city pretty much requires it.

Names on things is something i wouldn't go against. I mean its not entirely business, like u said there's different people coming and even living there. So yeah for the people who lived there for awhile, would name the cycles something. You can look at it in a business like state, but it still has a relevance to have a quirky designation of a sort out of intuition. I would imagine the long term residents to pick up on that, even if the Magiocrats didn't initially give certain things in the calender names in the first place.

okay, i dont think going with cycles 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 for this simple reason: its ugly -_-

yeah sure magiocrats would like to make it abordable and blabla, but there's some limits. the first being we do not know at all how they would make it since they dont even exist. and since we are all artists (most of us), i think it would just make sense to make a calender with, not cool names, but you know what i mean. because for me, day 1 cycle 1 sequence 1 is...wrong. we use number just for now because we havent named them yet.

here's an example of a great calendar, which have been created sort of out of nowhere and the people had to get used to it.

Yeah, but the names are still, subtley numbers. Sure, it's not un, deux, trois, etc. But, Primidi, "Prime" as in First, "Duodi", "Du" as in two, "Tridi," "Tri" as in three, and so on. Even the Gregorian Calender does it, though the names are off from the month they represent ("December", "Deca" as in ten, but it's the twelfth month). So... yeah.

Of course, I personally, were I given the authority to do so, would rename the Gregorian Months to Priember, Duember, Triember, Quartember, Quintember, Sextember, September, October, November, December, Undecember, and Dodecember, so I may be heavily biased on the names vs. number debate.

I,m not dumb i know what december and november mean. but you see, its far from being 9 and 10, there is research in it.

since theyre french, they could simply have named it Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre, etc

but no

they named it Primidi, and so on. and they even gave a name to eac days. im only talking about naming the cycles.

If you start giving all the different Cycles their own unique names, you negate the purpose of the calender...to be simple, and to allow for record-keeping. Those are the only functions it is meant to serve, and the only purposes the Magiocrats, and most of the merchants, traders and business owners (which are the only people in Negav who's opinions matter on any issue) in Negav are going to care about. The Calenders of different worlds can have their own unique, fancy names, but Negav's isn't meant to. It all about function before form. If something works exactly like it is supposed to, it doesn't necissarily need to look pretty.

This is the Magiocrats, and maybe also Vishmitals, who made this. They aren't going to sit around are think up a bunch of names for the Cycles, they're going to leave it as numbers, and then go make the official statement that this calender is what Negav is going to be using now. They are a very buerocratic and conservative group, the calender they made should reflect that.

If you're going to add something to a civilization, it shouldn't just be for nothing...it should solve a problem and/or reflect the civilization's culture. It isn't about how the people creating the calender (us) would do it, it is about how the Magiocrats and/or Vishmitals would do it. Neither of them are the kinds of groups that are going to spend time thinking up a bunch of useless names that just overcomplicate a system they are trying to keep simple.

Compromise time!

Give the months names, but make the names numeral-based, as I would do myself if I was given the option here on real life.

Take some prefixes

Un-
Du-
Tri-
Quar-
Quin-
Sex-
Sept-
Oct-
Nov-
Dec-

That's 1-10 repectively. THat'll satisfy the number part, as CLiff wants.

Now think of a Suffix. If this were Earth, it'd be -ember. Perhaps someone that rolls off the tongue, as Krisexy wants.

what if i tell you that the magiocrats actually sat around a table and decided to give name because a "colored calendar would represent a colored civilization". see, i actually quoted them.

and when i created this thread, yeah i created it, i never meant the calendar to be "simple and boring". i thought it would have been a great idea to have make a good calendar. and also, i never said it had to be like "neko cycle" it could have been like..."Primirus cycle" i just dont want it to be one two and three because its ugly and, for me, doesnt at all represent the negavian population.