Unified in-universe calendar. [Petpeeve]

Argent Dawn
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Yo yo all!
I am here to discuss a petpeeve of mine, and maybe we as the argent dawn community could come together and solve this petpeeve of mine if many of us maybe feel the same!
I do not think many do, and I am just being nitpicky! heh.
It comes down to the names of the days and the months, as we all use the real world names for our days and months, and it kinda takes me out of this fantasy world planning events in character having to use the real life names for the day and months I am speaking of.
The days and months are based on historical figures and real life religions that have no connection to our fantasy world.
So maybe we as AD could start to use our own calendar with lore friendly names for months and days that we can use in character!

Here are my proposals for the “A-Dawnien Calendar”:

  • January - Azures Birth
    (Named after the smaller moon “The Blue child” the months start anew and a new year is “born”)

  • February - Queens frost
    (Named for being the last of the frost and in honour of the winter queen)

  • March - Rezans moon.
    (No good reason, I just like rezan and think Troll king loa would have some impact on the world as they once was a giant empire.)

  • April - First Bloom.
    (Named after that the first spring flowers and plants starts to bloom)

  • May - Malornes Wake
    (Named after the Demigod Malorne, as spring and bloom is peak)

  • June - Sun’s peak
    (Named for the brightest days of the year)

  • July -

  • August - The Celestials dawn
    (Named after the august celestials, and that summer is coming to an end. also a nice throwback to the august celestials)

  • September - Elunes rest
    (Named after the goddess Elune and that she is going to rest as fall is upon the world and life slows down)

  • October - Hallows Harvest / Harvesters moon
    (Named after the strange things that happens this month and farmers need to harvest their crops)

  • November - Norgannons weave
    (Named after the Titan Norgannon, and how he weaves the the night sky and brings in the winter dark)

  • December - Moons Veil
    (Named after the biggest of the moons, The white lady as the year as come to an end)

Days:

  • Monday - Mironsday
    (Named after the keeper Mimiron, held in high regards by the Gnomes, a day to start being productive and inventive)

  • Tuesday - Therasday
    (Named after the elemental lord Therazane, The stone mother, The earth mother)

  • Wednesday - Help?

  • Thursday - Tyrsday
    (named by the humans after the titan keeper Tyr)

  • Friday - Freyasday
    (Named after the Titan Freya)

  • Saturday - Help?

  • Sunday - Help?

Well, this is just an idea for a more cohesive lore friendly calendar that we could use ingame incharacter.
Hoping to hear from you all.
The Big Love.

  • Rard
2

I can’t say it’s really something I’ve seen others fuss over much at all. The Days and Months and Seasons have been this way since Warcraft began over 3 decades ago.

We’ve always just had: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and the 12 Months + 4 Seasons as they are currently and it’s the way characters both in-game and in external media handle dates. I think some people rationalise them as a Titan thing but that’s really just headcanon rationalisation.

I can’t really say I feel it needs changed either, or if others would feel it does, it’s always been this way and it’s sort of a “don’t reinvent the wheel” thing at this point. 3 decades is a long time to get used to something.

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The way I go with this is the way I go with idioms from IRL that wouldn’t apply in-game, for example, some I’ve encountered:

  • “Doing this completely vaccinated me from doing it again”
  • “Blaster 2000”, since in game we’re at year 635 or something.
  • Stockholm syndrome (which I call Stratholme’s Syndrome even if it’s not exactly it).

For those I just overlook them as if those specific words or vocabulary somehow have an existing meaning in-character, and I decide my character understands the idiom in a way it fits their world.

It’s the same principle in the way we don’t have all the words of a specific language so they are bound to be similar if you were to pay attention to the in-game translation.

So when using months and days of the week, be it in Common or in Darnassian (I play nelf) I consider my character tells their own version of the day/month, properly translated among characters, and for convenience between players we use the real world ones.

Goes the same with accent, I slap “Darnassian accent” even if it doesn’t exist, or relate to an existing real world accent, I admit my character and others characters understand where it’s from.

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Thursday is coming from Thorsdag or in english Thor’s day. Comes from viking era dedicated to Thor. So, I give you that one. Lore acurate

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I think the only thing this would create is confusion because you´d have people using these terms in front of others who have no idea what they´re talking about. Using real days and months is the least confusing option unless Blizzard provides us with their own names that we can then apply to RP.

Secondly, the names of months and days are not universal in the real world. Why would various races of Azeroth have the same name for days and months, especially ones pulled from cultures that others may despise or be unfamiliar with? An elf or a human naming a month after troll loa doesn´t really make sense. And Pandaria hasn´t even been discovered until 15 years ago in-universe, why would a month be named after August Celestials?

Overall, I think this is an absolutely pointless effort that would only harm the RP by bringing in more confusion by creating server lore that is not needed and doesn´t even make that much sense in-universe.

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It’s chewsday innit?

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I just use numbered months, seasons, and a lunar calendar. Personally, if it’s about making things immersive, you don’t necessarily need a unified calendar! A unified calendar is a quite modern thing, and different fantasy races probably would differ from each other about what’s important to them to divide the year.

For example, a goblin mercenary might divide time in fiscal periods, rather than years, a night elf might use a lunar calendar, a Darkspear Shadow Hunter could use a calendar based around rituals dedicated to the pantheon of the tribe - and so on, ad infinitum.

An attempt to unify Azeroth’s peoples into just one calendar would trade one avoidable problem that causes a lack of immersion for one big unavoidable immersion-breaking problem where somehow, some way, all of Azeroth has decided to adopt the same calendar, and agreed on its naming conventions - which at best would feel disjointed, and at worst, it’d make you wonder why some of the races and cultures of Azeroth would even use it.

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And I see that. :slight_smile:
Ofcourse it is a nitpicky petpeeve of mine and it is hard to explain why saying " It happend on a friday… in august!" brings me so much out of the RP experience as it does… well August might not be the worst of the months, as we got the “August Celestials”, but in this universe there are no in world explanation of why the days and the months are named what they are… they just are, and although it may not be broken, it is terrible world building.

…You know… I never thought about it like that, that was the big brain smart argument!
I can go with that! :slight_smile:

The two biggest and longest living empires are both the Zandalari and the Night elf empires, both being a thing before the sundering, and therefore it would stand to reason they would know of the August celestials as they existed before they were hidden away on Pandaria.
Like ancient greeks and romans have influenced how we name our months, so would the troll and night elf empires.
When it comes to the Orcs and Draenei, they would adopt these names as they came from a different world, they do not know how many days are in moon cycle here, or how long a year is, maybe the seasons differ slightly? maybe Draenor have a thirty hour day.

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With the exception that what people know as a ‘modern’ calendar is a calendar decreed official by the Catholic Church as late as 1582 - and even then, only a part of the Christian-practicing world used it until the last couple of centuries, with parts of the world not using them, and Azeroth at large would have absolutely no point of reference or deference to night elves or the idea of a unified troll culture - which wouldn’t be a thing, as shown with the Darkspear Heritage questline, where it’s confirmed that different tribes pray to different loa.

A unified calendar in Azeroth beyond seasons and numbers for ease of communication, would make no sense whatsoever - especially not if it’s under cultures such as the trolls, with a religion unique to each tribe, and night elves, that were pretty much unknown by an entire continent barring Quel’Thalas until only twenty-two years ago.

To try and streamline everything for ease of comfort in-universe would feel very off-putting if what you’re trying to achieve is something that makes the world feel more alive, because you’d just be replacing something already used for ease of usage, for something used for ease of usage, only that this time it’d be explicitely canon, off-putting, and more difficult to keep a track of - thus doing a worse job for none of the immersion.

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Greeks haven´t influenced the months, they´re purely Roman thing and not even used across Europe (Czechs and Poles for example have their own names of the months).
Also, the big difference between Roman Empire and Zandalari/Kaldorei empires is that Europe was effectively Rome fanclub for over 1000 years after (western part of) that empire ended. Also, Romans created the calendar as we know it (before it got slightly adjusted by Catholic Church, as Wraithwood said), so that´s added point in favor of people adopting their months.

We have no lore on either night elves or Zandalari creating unified calendar. If we are to stray into headcanon, I´d even say that Eastern Kingdoms would not follow night elven calendar because it stands to reason that night elves would base their calendar around the Moon, while high elves (who eventually got in contact with humans) are all about the Sun and would likely follow solar calendar. Which is kind of another point, unlike in Europe where Rome was seen as something amazing that we tried to cosplay as ever since, the cultural influence of Zandalari is non-existant outside of trolls, while culture of Kaldorei empire is renounced in one form or another by most current elves, be it greater focus on nature and Elune by night elves or cultural focus on the Sun and worship of Light by blood/high elves.

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Interesting take! The phenomenon already has in-universe term and is known as Durnholde Syndrome but the more the merrier, I guess! :+1:

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I did not say that they had a unified calendar, But the night elves were once dark trolls, and would believe in the Loa, over time, the night elven influence would change some parts, then once the highborn sail across the sea, being the more advanced culture would bring this calendar too the titan born races there.

I am not saying this is how it should be or have to be, I am trying to suggest a calendar that “WE” can use, that feels at home in universe.

But this is not the argument, as what ever messy naming system I could come up would, would make more sense than saying our worlds names for days and month, but I think Neridris is right, I should see it as This.

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I´ve already explained why it wouldn´t:

You´d then have to create multiple separate calendars, not unified one, just like there are many separate calendars in the real world.

And there is no visible troll influence left either in night elven nor Highborne societies.
Also, what makes you think high elf culture was more advanced than that of dwarves, gnomes or humans? Yes, they had greater understanding of magic, but why should that translate into those races adopting their calendar? Slavs were technologically less advanced than Germans when we migrated into their territories around the end of antiquity, yet we still use our names for days and many still have their own names for months too.

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I mean, Feb already makes no sense to me, sorry.
Shadowlands, being an absolute panning for existing lore as it is, is also not exactly common knowledge, outside of the Ebon Blade and the ‘chosen ones’ player character?

I see the Elf and Pandaren response to this being a hearty “Hell no!” for centuries, so…

The flanking two are fine, but Malorne for Trolls, now? I dunno if they might passively class him as a kind of Loa, but the link with Night Elves specifically (Tauren or HM Tauren too? Not sure) would probably get scoffed at by them.

Pandaria was unknown to the rest of the world, bar some Old As Dirt Night Elves, for years and years. This… just makes no sense, sorry.

See previously for Elune - Night Elf Specific - and response from particularly the Trolls of Azeroth. The rest are… fine, I guess?

No strong thoughts on this, negative or positive. At the same time, some of them are very much like their Real World counterpart origins, which kind of makes their eventual end point a little moot. How much, and how soon, did the inhabitants of Azeroth actually know enough about the Titans to name them, though? I was fairly sure (non-game fiction outwith my knowledge…) it wasn’t until the ‘WoW Era’ that the races mostly started delving into Titanic lore?

I don’t want to spoil anyones cereal. At the same time, it all just feels like… kind of a bolt on? And what happens when you RP with someone in game who doesn’t frequent the forums, and will just get super confused at all this, to them, made-up-ness they have to keep interrupting RP to ask about (if they even engage after that)

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There have been other attempts in the past to rename month and maybe even day names, and I’ve hated them all. The problem with those is also that… you’d have to server-wide enforce it, and that’ll never be okay. It’s fine if you use it guild-wide, but once you interact with others, it’ll become very difficult to understand what the other is talking about. It’s forcing headcanon on people, which I take issue with.

If you absolutely dislike the month names, I’d just go with using numerical months instead, e.g. it’s the first month of the year right now. In a few weeks, it’ll be Month II, etc.

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I was trying to make the wow counterpart day names similar, as it would make it easier to remember.

The Ancestors of all the titan forged were in direct contact with the titan keepers, like the legends of Tyr, places named Tirisfall or Tyrs fall, the silverhands and all that. Verbal legends may have survived through the generations, their origins just forgotten :slight_smile: Like in the realworld there are stories, traditions, words and such that we only have recently rediscovered why or how they came to be.

And when we delve into the depths of night elven ruins and after BFA we see all the titan influence on Zuldazar, I think it would be easy to imagine or conclude that there would be forgotten tales and legends and words lost to the veil of time :slight_smile:

I am also just fund of imagining the small things of how a fantasy culture and people would react to certain things.
But as others has stated, this is just a “head canon”, and I am also just curious to see how others feel about my little petpeeve and share my little idea :slight_smile:

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I am quite sympathetic to the idea of in-universe days of the week, and months. It’s fun, if a little impractical.

When it comes to WoW though, given how it near wholly derives its Titan Pantheon from the Germanic Gods, I have always head-canoned that the days of the week are the same as they are in English, because they have in-universe, a very similar origin.

‘Wednesday’ in the Warcraft Universe could easily have derived from Odyn, just as Wednesday linguistically did in English and the other Germanic languages (Woden’s Day). This is the case for all the days of the week, really.

The months are more difficult, but as mentioned above, there is no reason to assume that the different peoples in the Warcraft universe have the same calendar. For example, I presume the Night Elves use some kind of Lunar Calendar (though I wonder what the impact of there being two moons might have on it).

Unless Blizzard writes or provides details on this sort of thing though, I think its sensible to just either avoid using the months or days in RP, by saying something along the lines of “the fifth day of the first month.” or just adopt the English months and years. Otherwise you won’t have a consensus, and just cause a bit of confusion.

Its fun to speculate about though. I do like a bit of silly in-universe terminology. Final Fantasy’s ‘ilm’s’ and ‘malms’ always got a laugh as a (pointless?) adaption of ‘inches’ and ‘miles.’

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Whilst a great idea, thought and such I do wish to coin the term of “Simpler is better”. The less complex you make it the more easier it is to access for everyone else.

New RP’ers might not know about this change of ways even if the collective of RP’ers started using it. Some might still decide to use another to the point it could potentially cause a rift of communication.

I do like the idea of the months but; For every season there is a named event anyways.

New Lunar Moon
Love is in the Air
NobleGarden
Midsummer Fire Festival
Hallow’s End

You get the point though mostly.

I think to change something as simple as the Mon-Fri might just be a far-fetched and past the post.

If you wanted to make it easier I tend to use ‘days’ or ‘weeks’ from now rather than specified weekly days. So let’s say today is Monday and we have a mission on Wednesday I just say we leave in two days.

Stuff like that makes it just a bit easier for everyone to understand.

Absolutely love the idea though and can tell you’ve put a good concentration of thought into it.

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While concept is incredibly interesting and the names super creative… I just don’t see a reason to use it in game. Cultures would just not name something that important after elemental lords and Titans and their Keepers, especially not if their own culture isnt Titan derived.

In real life, these names came up due to Gods that were very much part of daily life and culture, spread through conquest and prozeletyzing, and simmered over a few thousand years to end up where we are now. But the Titans aren’t part of the daily lives of almost anyone except the Dwarves of Warcraft.

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As someone who RPed in ESO where the setting has in-universe calendar names, I’m gonna be real honest with you

It’s a pain for everyone and nobody remembers them by heart even when there’s an official source. Everyone has to open up uesp to look up the calendar just to namedrop the name of it. Nobody enjoys it.

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