Sinai Player Guide v5.0

8.1 Measuring Years

Official documentation uses the reign of the current Captain-Astromancer to determine the year of the calendar. (There is also a yearly number, determined by "Rephidim Time Reckoning", dating from the time that the Temple believes the Expedition to have occurred at.)

Examples

8.2 Holidays

Rather than measuring the year in months or weeks on Sinai, most widely used calendars instead measure the day of the year based roughly on the number of days before or after the nearest important holiday. The Rephidim Temple Calendar is the most widely used calendar, and its religious holidays are celebrated across the globe, though some local cultures may ascribe different names and purposes to these celebrations than the Temple dictates.

8.3 Time of Day

Days are 24 hours long. Locals measure the day in hours from sunrise to noon to sunset, i.e. "Three hours after sunrise".

This said, the Earth tradition of measuring the hours of the day in two sets of twelve hours (running from midnight to noon, then noon to midnight) is recognized at the very least in Rephidim and in many of the Nordikan nations (such as Chronotopia).

8.4 Timeline

The following is a rough timeline of major events in Sinai history, along with semi-major events that have happened in recent history (i.e., during the time of roleplay on SinaiMUCK), or else hold some sort of special significance to PCs.

Timeline

8.5 Calendars

For the sake of (relative) simplicity, Sinai's years correspond in length (and leap years) to years in the real world. The New Year occurs on February 1st on the Sinai calendar. In order to calculate the in-game year for events preceding the "Four Year Jump", take the real year and add 4100 to it. (Example: 1999 + 4100 = 6099) If, however, the month is January, subtract one year (6098), because the "New Year" hasn't happened yet.

For events following the Four Year Jump, for roleplay starting in the year 2000, add four years to the previous calculation. (Example: 2000 + 4104 = 6104)

The calendars presented here can be used as examples, and for calculating the IC date in not only the years listed, but in others as well. Basically, you just need to know the real-life month and day, and then check one of these calendars to find the Sinai Julian date (day-of-year) and the Sinai Holiday Date. Just be sure that if the year you're calculating for is a leap year, you also use a calendar that has a leap year. The day of the week doesn't really matter, since Sinai has no established precedent for the day of the week (or weekends) anyway.

On the other hand, if it is 5 days after New Year's Day, it would be presented as "New Year's 5", "New Year 5" or "New 5".

The day before a holiday may be presented as above, or else listed as an "Eve", such as (for example), "New Year's Eve" instead of "1 New Year". These days, however, are not officially considered holidays, even though some early celebration may take place in the evening.

Note that holidays are presented (as in the example above) with a dark background and white text. Some special one-time events (not yearly occurrences) that happened in the course of role-play are listed on these calendars, marked with a different colored background. Sometimes, these may cross-link to an explanation of the event.

"Arcane Dates" are handled similarly to Rephidim Temple Holiday Dates, except that the College Esoterica started employing its own calendar after its move to Caroban. (Actually, the calendar existed before that, but was fairly obscure and hardly used for general purposes.) The Arcane Calendar has 12 holidays, each corresponding to a different Sphere of Magic, spaced apart at 30 day intervals, with a 5 day (or 6 day, during leap years) period that starts off the new year, to round things out.

8.6 Passage of Time in Role-Play

In the course of role-play, the passage of time goes fast or slow. In the course of combat, while we wait for the PCs to make their actions, and the GM to pose the results, it may take many minutes -- maybe an hour or so -- for a few seconds of combat to be resolved. On the other hand, by doing a "fast forward", the GM may suddenly jump forward in time minutes, hours, days or more, in order to speed things along to the next "scene".

That said, in theory time passes at the same rate as real life, in regards to the passage of days. If a log was made about a year ago, then it happened about a year ago in "game time", most likely. The exceptions may be more than the rule, but this is the guidepost we use to try to keep track of the overall passage of time of events in relation to each other. For the most part, if you role-play on Thursday, and something big happens, then when another GM runs a log on Friday, the events of Thursday's role-play will be about a day in the past.

We can't always keep to this. Sometimes, in the middle of a big battle, the net goes down, or someone has to leave, or we've just been staying up far too late, and have to work in the morning. We may have to cut things off, then pick them up again later. This rough idea that IC time passes at the same rate as real time does is just meant to be a rough guideline, to help us keep a chronology to the events that happen in logs, when we've got several GMs and several parallel threads.