Time in campaign worlds is often overlooked. I am referring to calendars and yearly cycles. It rarely seems important. But every now and then someone decides it will give there fantasy world more depth and they create their own fantasy calendar. The GM promptly stops using it after a while since it only confuses the players more.
"So what day is it?"
GM: It's the twelfth of Grune.
"When is that?"
So why bother? Well, the GM was right. Adding an actual fantasy calendar does help in breathing life to the world but the information that calendar conveys has to be useful/translatable to the players. So how do you do that?
Well step right up my friends because I have the only calendar you will ever need for your Fantasy Realm. It's suitably foreign yet strangely natural to understand. First let's take a jaunt back into our own history and the creation of our modern calendar. Suffice to say what we use today was heavily developed by the romans (July for Julius and August for Augustus Caesar). Before that, the year was marked by two things: Seasons and Astrology. Months are a product of our world that may never have been adopted by yours.
So how about Astrology? You could tell your players what stars are in which constellations, but unless they have your night sky memorized, this will be information the won't digest.
So how about Seasons? Yup. Let's say my world convenient has a 360 day year (close to our year). Divide that by four seasons and you get 90 days a season. Since most common folk can tell what season it is, and it's primary importance to farming (astrology was more for kings), that will likely be how they mark their calendar.
So the next time your player asks "What day is it?", you can tell them it's the 45th day of spring. They now know what season it is, what the climate will be like, and that spring is on the way out. No months necessary.
Okay so what about sci-fi? If your heroes are visiting alien worlds, then time matters less to them. The players will be visiting different weather biomes and time zones so seasons will be whatever they are at the location. If you want, just keep a generic Stardate like 202110.12 (that's todays post date: Oct 12, 2021) and just update each game day to the current date.
