Calendars for your world

Not every world has our months, our years or our moon. Rescriptus reads the dates of your story, the When in the story of a chapter or scene and the dates on your wiki pages, against a calendar. Earth's calendar is always there. You can add calendars of your own, as many as the story needs, and write dates in them.

Open the story wiki and choose Calendars in the row of tools across the top.

Earth's calendar

It is built in: twelve months, leap years, weekdays, seasons and Earth's Moon, with years written BC or AD (or BCE or CE). The seasons are those of the northern hemisphere unless you choose the southern one on this page, which flips them: spring then starts in September, and “summer 2026” is December 2026 to February 2027.

Make a calendar

Choose New calendar. A calendar has:

• A name and a short label, such as Ardan Reckoning and AR. The label goes after a year (1204 AR) so that a date can say which calendar it is in.
• Months, in the order they come, each with its number of days. They can be any number, and any length.
• Weekdays (optional): the names of the days of the week, in order, and which one the first day of year 1 falls on.
• Eras: how years are written. One counts up from 1 (1 AR, 2 AR, …). You can add one that counts down towards it, so that “1 BR” is the year before “1 AR”.
• Leap rules (optional): some years get extra days. A rule matches every Nth year, except those that are also a multiple of another number, unless they are also a multiple of a third: Earth's is every 4, except 100, unless 400. A matching year either gets more days in a month you name, or gets an extra month, of any length (one day makes an extra day), after a month you name.
• Moons (optional): any number. Each has a name, a cycle (the days from one full moon to the next, which may have a fraction) and a date in this calendar when it was full.
• Seasons (optional): each starts on a day of a month and runs until the next starts.
• A clock: hours in a day and minutes in an hour, and, if you like, named times, such as “second bell” at 2:00.

Under the form, Try a date reads what you type against the calendar as you are editing it, and shows the date in its own words, its weekday, its season, each moon's phase and the time. If something in the form is wrong, it is listed in plain words and Save calendar waits until it is fixed.

Writing dates in a calendar

Write the label after the year, or the calendar's name:

• 3 Frostmoon 1204 AR, Frostmoon 3, 1204 AR, Frostmoon 1204 AR, 1204 AR
• 3 to 5 Frostmoon 1204 AR, 1200 to 1210 AR (ranges), c. 1204 AR (about)
• spring 1204 AR, using the names of your own seasons: a season runs from the day it starts to the day before the next one starts, so the one that begins late in the year can end in the next
• 5 BR, if you gave the calendar an era that counts down
• second bell, 12 Thaw 1204 AR or 12 Thaw 1204 AR, 2:30: a time of day with a single day, as your clock writes it
• 3 Frostmoon 1204 in Ardan Reckoning or Ardan Reckoning: 3 Frostmoon 1204, using the name

A date that names no calendar is read against the default: Earth's, until you choose another under How dates are read. A date can always name Earth: 3 March 1204 AD. A day your calendar does not have (the 30th of a month of 28 days, a leap day in a year without one, the extra month in a year that has none) is not a date, and the box says so quietly; it is kept as you wrote it and listed apart.

Story order and the timeline

Each calendar has a list of its own, ordered by day, in story order on the plan and on the timeline, headed by its name. Dates in two calendars cannot be compared unless Rescriptus is told how they line up. Under How calendars line up, write one line for each link, naming the same day in two calendars:

1 AR = 1 January 1000

(a date that names no calendar in a link is Earth's). Linked calendars share one list, in order of the days they have in common, so a chapter in Ardan Reckoning can come between two chapters in Earth years. A link that disagrees with the others is reported, and not used.

The file

Everything you set here is in a plain file at the top of your project, calendars.yml, which you can edit by hand. It goes with your project to every device, is saved, merged and kept in History like the rest, and is in Download everything. No export of a book reads it. This is the file for the example above:

default: AR
calendars:
  - name: Ardan Reckoning
    label: AR
    months:
      - { name: Frostmoon, days: 30 }
      - { name: Thaw, days: 28 }
      - { name: Seedtime, days: 31 }
    weekdays: [ Moonday, Tideday, Earthday ]
    eras:
      - { label: AR, direction: up }
      - { label: BR, direction: down }
    leap:
      - { every: 4, except: 100, unless: 400, month: Thaw, days: 1 }
      - { every: 7, after: Seedtime, name: Midsummer, days: 2 }
    moons:
      - { name: Selene, cycle: 29.5, epoch: 1 Frostmoon 1204 AR }
    seasons:
      - { name: Cold, month: Frostmoon, day: 1 }
    clock:
      hours: 20
      minutes: 50
      times:
        - { name: second bell, at: '2:00' }
links:
  - 1 AR = 1 January 1000

Rescriptus keeps your comments and any key it does not know, and changes only the lines that you change. A calendar it cannot read is not used: it is listed on the page with what is wrong, and left in the file exactly as it is. If the whole file is not valid YAML, the page says so, changes nothing, and dates are read against Earth's calendar until you fix it.