The easiest way to make the world feel alive is to use a calendar.
You don’t even have to fill it out to begin with. Maybe make some notes like “Hey, these are the days of the weeks, here’s what their cultural significance is” and have like I don’t know twelve months each with thirty days or something and go nuts.
But then as the campaign progresses you might think “Hey you know what’d be great a religious festival” and then boom write that down in your calendar and the next time the players enter a settlement go like “Yeah everyone’s getting ready for the Feast of St. Cuthbert” or some shit, I mean it wasn’t an established fact about the world before but now it is, and now your players will also know that they can expect a Feast of St. Cuthbert around the same time next year.
Also holy shit seasons. You check your calendar and realize that Winter is almost here and then suddenly the first snow falls and travel through the wilderness becomes much more perilous because not only do the characters have to contend with wandering monsters but also with the hazards brought on by snowfall. We’ve all probably thought how cool it would be to run a hexcrawl in a snowy setting where surviving the cold harsh wastes is the focus of the campaign, but holy shit, the passage of seasons means that Winter is basically like a time-sensitive snow hexcrawl.
And if you actually have time and aren’t lazy like me do go ahead and fill all these out beforehand in prep. Heck, if you’re feeling really brave you can even come up with a system of fantasy astrology and oh man how cool would a system of star signs each granting minor character bonuses like in ADOM be
Some ways to fantasy up your calendar:
You could change the length of the week. Faerun uses a metric ten-day week, for instance.
You can change the length of a month. Again, Faerun uses a 30-day month, like above, with the year balanced out with holidays that aren’t part of any month (intercalendary days have historical precedent in e.g. Rome), but there are other options. The Neverwinter Nights games, though nominally officially Forgotten Realms material, use a 28-day month, as does the one Heroes of Might and Magic game I’ve actually played (HoMM 3). You could use exact lunar months so that the day of the month corresponds to the phase of the moon.
You could change the number of months in a year. There are real-world calendars that do this, most having 12 months + an optional leap month (lunar calendars tend to do this, notably the Jewish calendar and also the Chinese lunar calendar)
You could change the number of days in a year
You could change the relationship of solstices and equinoxes (turning of the seasons) to the start of the year/month. Unless you’re doing something weird with your astronomy, your solstices and equinoxes will be evenly spaced throughout the year, but you could, for instance, put the new year exactly on a solstice and have your months start on the solstice/equinox rather than putting the solstices and equinoxes late in the months.
You could do something weird with the astronomy and have two, or more, moons.
You don’t need to start off tracking the phase of the moon or anything like that, but once you set one, you can project forward and backward and make determining it a simple calculation. Once you are, then the phase of the moon could impact your mage’s spells.
You could go to a “lunar week” where rather than weeks having a consistent number of days they begin and end at the full, dark, and half moons.
If this is up your alley you can also check out a few articles I wrote on this very subject!
http://www.duckandrollgames.com/tavern/2017/1/10/campaign-calendar
http://www.duckandrollgames.com/tavern/2017/1/14/small-time
http://www.duckandrollgames.com/tavern/2017/1/16/counting-years
http://www.duckandrollgames.com/tavern/2017/1/24/naming-time
Are all very much relevant and touch on and expand some of the ideas mentioned above!
This is fantastic and as soon as I have some free time back I’m definitely doing it.
I made a post about this some time ago and I can really recommend using the calendar creator at donjon
Calendars
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