Felaryan Calendar

Hmm... I guess you have a point. Taking notes from other villages and civilizations as the elves expanded their territories might have been what helped them discover the stability of the Sarafaras. I still think they should get the idea of dividing their fields into twelve small plots specifically due to their religious practices, just so it ties in better with the theme of the months being named after phrases related to their gods.

Going back to the circle field for a moment, if a field shaped like a circle is too impractical, maybe the wheel was instead used as some kind of religious symbol or an old representation of their calendar? Kind of like a zodiac wheel, except themed after their gods rather than astrological symbols.

The farm don't necessarily need to be circles, I just drew it that way since it does a good job of illustrating the cyclic nature of the farming. And for what it's worth, I actually envisioned more of a donut shape, where the 12 plots form a ring that surrounds a central plot of land that holds the farmer's house and maybe some livestock.

Also, the problem with there being dead zone between circles, while rectangles would be able to completely fill the available land, may not actually be relevant, because it's not in the elves' best interests to fill the land with farms anyway. Felaryan farms benefit from having corridors of jungle between them, because the canopies will cover the farms and make it hard for harpies to spot them from the air. Converting large swaths of land entirely to farms is incredibly conspicuous, and we only get away with it on Earth because the local wildlife has no way to stop us from raping the planet turning everything we see into a giant shopping mall *ahem*... being conspicuous. Felaryan wildlife is an entirely different story, bless the place, so farms there have to be more discreet.

Illy wrote:

I do still think that the idea of actually subdividing the fields and having multiple harvests should come from isolated villages (Elven maybe, so the idea gets better support due to being Elven in origin), then adapted to the specific number because of their faith.

What if there were twelve original elven settlements in old elvish lore? You know like before the Shadow Elementals flooded the land and left most ghostly ruins. That way there's no issue with over crowding....even though I believe the elves should have one last bastion in Elfiga Valley <.< But that's an issue for another day.

Oh really interesting discussion on the day measurement and clock
This one really deserves some reflexion of its own.

And I agree that the entry could use some more precisions.
Please don't hesitate to propose your own take on it !

For the circle thing, I think Ilceren is making a lot of solid points.
So maybe we could have two kind of plots : More functional ones, in square, that progressively and naturally imposed themselves across the empire, and a few circular ones that are more used as a kind of ritual ( circle of life and so ) and more symbolic ?

What about something like a Wheel of Fate? Like, a clock of life and death, moving via magic that could be read by mages? For example, the clock would be hidden in ones subconscious, but could be somewhat read by mages and sages to tell the nurture, and fully read by Felaryan Deities? Just a thought, as Karbo suggested.

With an ever-changing sky and no significant seasons to use as a mark, keeping track of time in Felarya has always been a difficult task. Many civilizations in the distant past have devised their own methods to measure the passing of time.  Some tried using the phases of the moon as a basis for a lunar calendar, while others used the appearance of specific constellations as a marker for each "month".  But as the number of moons and their phases could change at a day's notice, and whole arrangements of stars would suddenly disappear for indefinite amounts of time whenever Felarya would connect with a different sky in another part of universe, none of these methods proved reliable enough and were swiftly abandoned.

It wasn't until the dawn of the Elven Empire that the first true Felaryan calendar came into being.  The elves found the most reliable (and satisfying) way to measure the passing of days in Felarya: the growth cycle of a remarkable plant called Safaras.

History

During the early days of the empire, the High Elven Council was struggling to come up with a consistent calendar to help plan their future conquests.  The obvious solution was to use something that had no relation whatsoever to the moons or the stars.  Their first thought was to use the growth of plants as a basis, as they were practically unaffected by the changing skies.  However, even these were not reliable enough.  Their growth could vary wildly from one seed to another and bad weather could further stymie how long it would take to reach maturity, if it even reached it at all.

As the empire continued to grow and expanded its territories, a new agricultural plant was discovered.  Over time, elven farmers made an astonishing discovery about it.  No matter where they were planted or how well they were tended, seeds that were planted around the same time would all reach maturity with remarkable consistency.  Even poor weather conditions did little hinder its growth.  It could survive all but the worst of droughts and the most devastating of floods.

Once the news reached their ears, the High Council, believing they had found the solution to their problem, commissioned farmers all across the empire to study and learn the plant's growth cycle.  Farmers would wait from dawn to dawn, counting every passing day until the whole plot they had planted had become ripe and ready for harvest.  The results were astounding.  The number of days it took for the plant to fully germinate from a seed to a ripe plant was incredibly concrete and precise, with only marginal deviations of a few days between two plots at worst.  Using this data, the High Council decreed that the farming of crops all across the empire be centered around the incredibly reliable growth of the plant, and farmers began transforming their fields to act as their calendar.  They dubbed the plant "Safaras", meaning "Orderly" in ancient elvish.

The Elven Calendar

Taking note of how certain villages preferred to have smaller harvests once every few months rather than a big one once a year, the elves decided to divide their farming fields into twelve plots, one for each god in the Elven Pantheon.  At the beginning of every month, they would plant one of the plots and then count down every passing day until it was time to plant the next seed.  A year was deemed to have passed when the very first plot of Safaras had fully grown and was ready to be harvested.  Once the plot had been harvested, it was replanted immediately.  Come the following month, the elves would then harvest and then replant the next field, creating a perpetual cycle of monthly harvests.

Thanks to this method, the elves were able grow food across the empire far more consistently, which gave them an incredible edge over their enemies during their numerous campaigns across Felarya over the next centuries.  Other civilizations would eventually discover and adopt the elves' farming method as their own until it had become ingrained in the mind of every men, women and children all over the then-known world.

After the fall of the Elven Empire, future civilizations such the Sagolian and Dridder Empire would continue to use the Safaras calendar pioneered by the elves, each putting their own unique spin to it such as altering the name of the months.  The Elven Calendar stood the test of time even as the world ushered in the modern age, and advancements in magic and technology rendered the ancient Safaras farming as a means of calculating the passage of days obsolete.  Today, it is the most used calendar used in Negav and Nekomura, and the most popular trade calendar employed by Felaryan merchants.

***

I'm ignoring the part regarding the name of the months and the meaning behind them because it's all pretty solid and doesn't need to be edited.  I'm also omitting the mention of clocks because I want to keep it vague in order to avoid having to expend more energy on a tiny, trivial detail than is necessary. I'm also keeping how the field was arranged pretty vague for the time being until we can come to a satisfactory design for how the ancient farms were set up. I kind of like Xion's idea of the Safaras fields being arranged in a ring around the main building, but I feel like that would take way too much space, and in return, attract even more unwanted attention from predators.

Nice job on this with that you cleanly explain several points that were missing indeed. Thank you ^^

Oh, crud, I didn't see this! O.o I only have time to skim through it, but it looks really good from what I can tell. Good job!

Alright I added that part ^^
And by the way i will take the opportunity to fill up the Elven Pantheon ( http://www.felarya.com/wiki/index.php?title=Elven_Pantheon )  with that pattern of positive / negative traits. If you have some ideas for them you are welcome

Just to be sure, is this all the information we'll be going with the Felaryan calendar? I plan on making a blog on the dA group and it occurred to me that I forgot to mention other ideas concerning the calendar, mostly variations in other civilizations like in Kortiki Town, the Elven District, as well as the fact that the Vishmitals have their own calendar that's completely different from the Negavian one.

Mhh for now yes as it's for the main calendar. But we can flesh it out with additional ones of course.

Alright, I think I have an idea for an extra paragraph.


Other Calendars in Felarya

Though the Elven Calendar is the most commonly used one in Felarya, numerous different calendars exist throughout the world. The majority of these are simple variations of the Elven Calendar, with different names for each month and a differing number of days per weeks being the only true difference between each of them. Factions that come from outside Felarya, however, prefer to use their own calendars, which bear little to no resemblance to the original Elven Calendar, rather than the Felaryan ones, as is the case for the Vishmitals, Delurans and the Othemites. Civilizations that have never witnessed the rise and fall of the Elven Empire such as Kelerm have also come up with their own unique ways of keeping track of the passage of days.

I was thinking about it earlier and it occurred to me that it's very likely that a different calendar is used in "Western Felarya" (everything west of the Akaptor) as a whole, which I guess would include Kellerm. But we have very little to go on for West Felarya as a whole, and I don't even think anyone's written stories or made characters for West Felarya at all.

XionGaTaosenai wrote:

I was thinking about it earlier and it occurred to me that it's very likely that a different calendar is used in "Western Felarya" (everything west of the Akaptor) as a whole, which I guess would include Kellerm. But we have very little to go on for West Felarya as a whole, and I don't even think anyone's written stories or made characters for West Felarya at all.

Does the name Garnet not ring a bell? Been the icon of the Western half of Felarya for ages now. Then again it has been a while since her author or fans did proper comic. =P But yes there's not many iconic preds or others from that part of the world. Should be our next project me thinks?

I don't think you quite know what an "icon" means, what with Garnet being a completely useless waste of space that hasn't done shit since her inception. Also, pretty sure Xion specified, as in, he literally wrote, that what he meant by the western half was everything past Akaptor, like Lamina and the Ivokhan Savannah. The rotting, hollow shell of Garnet's so-called character is located east of the desert, right next to the Great Rocky Fields even, which is nowhere near those regions.

But let's get slightly back on topic. I don't think working on the unexplored western half right now is a good idea. I admire your enthusiasm, but haste makes waste as they say. The current region has a lot of kinks that needs to be worked on, and rushing over to make a new region without a plan of action is not going to result in anything productive. I think it would be better to start small and then expand from there. For example, this is just me, but with Kelerm being being a town in the desert, I think a sun-themed calendar would be perfect for them.

But then we run into the same problem as before, in that Felarya's "sun" is unreliable, since it both changes at unpredictable intervals and doesn't (usually) change anything significant about Felarya such as climate or day length anyway. I will say that savannahs are typically defined by having a rainy season and a dry season, so the existence of the Ivorkan suggests that something over there is driving seasonal cycles of some sort, if not the sun.

I've said it before in this very thread and even posted it, but the Physics page DOES mention that something is regulating which skies Felarya takes its sun from to keeping being able to support life as to keep climates and day lengths consistent. It's LUNAR phases that are hopelessly impossible to follow and predict. For something like the sun, one way to keep track of days passing would not be to focus on the sun itself, but how long daylight lasts. Like how daylight lasts longer in summer than it does in winter. It's possible that the people of Kelerm have found a pattern to the length of days and discovered a method to keep track of it.

But all of this is just a suggestion to keep this thread on-track, rather than something serious, since developing Kelerm shouldn't start with the calendar.

What track is there to keep the thread on, though? We made the calendar. We did it, we ironed out the kinks, the job this thread was made for is done. We can't keep it on the rails anymore because the track has ended, so if it's going to live on we may as well let it meander.

XionGaTaosenai wrote:

What track is there to keep the thread on, though?

Day names?

Day names?...Anyone?

Indeed. Well school started, but I think people are just being lazy more so than anything at the moment. XD

Archmage_Bael wrote:

Indeed. Well school started, but I think people are just being lazy more so than anything at the moment. XD

Lazy, or discouraged?