If you’re walking in on the middle of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeons series, there’s an index here.

One piece of preparation that really helps with world-building is a calendar. It gets a whole section in the second edition DMG, but I think of a calendar as twofold: It helps track what’s happened in your campaign to help you prepare for the future, and it helps you improvise.

A campaign calendar is in a real-time calendar, divided into 52 weeks rather than months or days.

Each week or fortnight, generate a holy day, a celestial occurrence, or a magical event. Don’t create the whole year in advance; leave it to your preparation time. Flexibility is better! Remember that different regions will celebrate different religions and festivals, so as your party moves, you can introduce different events.

Each time you complete preparation, be sure record of what happened in the world is written in the calendar. It helps to colour code or highlight different types of event, so it’s easier to track across the whole calendar.

This is a really simple addition, but in combination with a d100 random events generator, it’s pretty powerful for creating a sense of space.

There are some bits and pieces that I’m not sure for in the structure I’m picturing for the book, and this is one of them. I don’t want sidebars, really, because despite the optional rules abounding in second edition, they’re often clearly the lesser or greater choice in the opinion of the designer. In a way, everything in Advanced Fantasy Dungeons is optional, but because of that I want everything to have it’s place so players want to choose the option.

This has been a part of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon Series! Let me know your thoughts on calendars and time keeping, if there are questions left unanswered, whether I’ve overlooked anything glaring, or anything of the sort!

Idle Cartulary

25th May 2022