This is the soft release of a project that has been in the works for over a year, and has been surprisingly difficult to do the way that I wanted.
What is it?
What we have here is a full calendar for an Arcadian year, complete with artwork from campaigns, gods and their holy symbols, and list of holidays. Each month will tell you the phases of the moon, which gods are in the sky at a time, which ones are rising, peaking, and setting, when major holiday are, and when the high and low tides are for each day. There's also a section for notes at the bottom of each month.
How it came to be
When I started working in Arcadia, I used whatever realworld calendars I had laying around to track time, but the real world calendar has drifted over the millennia and doesn't quite fit the philosophy of time keeping like it should. For example, the new year used to start on the first day of winter - but since a year is 365.2422 days and the people who built our calendars thousands of years ago didn't have exact time keeping methods, the start of winter has shifted earlier and earlier. There have been a few corrections, but winter begins around December 21st, and the new year is in January. This is all find and well in the modern age, but for the lore and mechanics of Arcadia, the start of winter must line up with the new year. In fact, the start of each season must line up with the 1st of a month. That is just one example of why the real world calendar, an attempt to categorize time based on solar cycles which cares not for the elegance of human tracking, doesn't fit the Arcadian needs.
Thus, the desire to make a calendar that fits the world was born. This will be the calendar used in all official Arcadian campaigns going forward. It has taken a long time to work out all the details, and get everything just right, but it is finally done and ready for publication! We are working on some promotional material for the full release, but are making it available early for Patrons.
Finding a publisher to make the calendar I wanted has been very difficult. There are many custom calendar making services in the world, but none of them did all the things that I wanted in the quality I wanted, so we ended up using a notebook format instead of a calendar format - a decision I was hesitant to do at first, but now having seen the final product, I'm quite pleased with.
Details
This 35 page calendar also doubles as an art book, with my favorite selections from over the years. All of the artwork featured is done by Lichbrush, the unofficial artist of Arcadia, with generous donations of commissioned artwork by McTacky. We have artwork from Frozen Frontier, Dicing with Death, Akuban Knights, Embers of the Wilds, Hardcore Heroes, and some more.
I ordered a prototype version months ago and have been using it for sometime. The form factor is that of a softcover notebook which makes it great for tossing in a bag on your way to games without worry of pages bending. The paper isn't glossy or finished, so it holds ink and pencil very well.
I am very pleased with this calendar, and happy to share it with you all before the official release.
gl hf
Koibu
Dominik 'DCode'
2023-01-27 15:26:06 +0000 UTCJames 'McTacky' Gilray
2023-01-19 21:20:50 +0000 UTC