Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #145 - Calendars

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Calendars

This one is both a "mechanical" worldbuilding prompt, and also an opportunity to tell a story ! How is the calendar in your setting created ? Is it a solar one, or a lunar one ? If it's a lunar one, what happens if your setting has more than one moon in the sky ? What defines when a new year starts - midwinter, midsummer, some astrological or astronomical mark, or something in the natural world like the first flower of spring ?

How is the calendar in your setting divided - seasons, months, weeks, or something else ? Are there intercalary days like our 29th February on Leap Years to try to correct for minor slippage ? Or do the powers-that-be just allow the slippage to accumulate ? For that matter, who are the powers-that-be - priests, scientists, shamans, or something else ? If it's a sci-fi setting, do individual systems have their own calendars, or is there an Empire or similar which imposes a unified system of date management ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂