D&D 5E The Mutliverse and Time

[fjw70]

With the multiverse the official seeking for 5e I am curious about something. Did Planescape sync up the time from the different D&D worlds? If you traveled from FR to Krynn was there a way to figure out what the year was in one place if you knew it in another? Or did PLanescape just leave that up to individual DMs?

 

[TarionzCousin]

I distinctly recall using whatever era I wanted in Greyhawk, Krynn, Athas, etc. when a group journeyed there in my Planescape™ campaigns. So if there were an official timeline I ignored it.

Also, I don't recall there being an official timeline.

 

[Remathilis]

Officially, no.

That said, there are a few crossover events that can be used to link the timeline. Ravenloft and Planescape have fan-timelines that link to other settings. Using them (and cross referencing other events) gets the following. (Note, these years all manage to link up; this is not the CURRENT year in any of these products).

Planescape 2 years post Faction War (2 years post Factol Hashkar's Reign)
Birthright 2041 MA, 1527 HC, or 554 MR
Dark Sun Free Year 15, or Mountain’s Defiance of the 190th Kings Age
Forgotten Realms 1371 Dale Reckoning, Year of the Unstrung Harp, or 13 Present Reckoning.
Ravenloft 754 Barovian Calendar
Dragonlance 388 AC, 5 SC
Greyhawk 591 CY
Mystara 1010 AC

Of course, the calendars of these worlds don't all contain the same amount of days, so its moot anyway; they'll eventually fall out of sync. Buts its a good start.

(Source: lots of google searches)

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

There was specific mention in a Planescape supplement (On Hallowed Ground...I think) about recent events on Krynn. Specifically, that Krynn had been cut off from the planes and its crystal sphere closed due to the events of the Summer of Chaos (when, in Dragonlance lore, Takhisis stole the whole planet).

I don't know how that event syncs up with the FR and GH timelines, though. Especially with FR having a 100 year jump in the 4E era.

 

[Jester David]

The timelines vary.
Dragonlance pulled ahead 30 years at one point, then the Realms shot ahead 100 years. Ravenloft snuck forward 5+ year while Dark Sun actually went back a little bit. Greyhawk is all over the place, but steadily advanced with Living Greyhawk.

So, I guess each "crystal sphere" or world or whatever might have time passing at a slightly different rate. Or time in Sigil and the planes might be weird and allow stepping forwards and backwards in other worlds.

 

[aramis erak]

Officially, no.

That said, there are a few crossover events that can be used to link the timeline. Ravenloft and Planescape have fan-timelines that link to other settings. Using them (and cross referencing other events) gets the following. (Note, these years all manage to link up; this is not the CURRENT year in any of these products).

Planescape 2 years post Faction War (2 years post Factol Hashkar's Reign)
Birthright 2041 MA, 1527 HC, or 554 MR
Dark Sun Free Year 15, or Mountain’s Defiance of the 190th Kings Age
Forgotten Realms 1371 Dale Reckoning, Year of the Unstrung Harp, or 13 Present Reckoning.
Ravenloft 754 Barovian Calendar
Dragonlance 388 AC, 5 SC
Greyhawk 591 CY
Mystara 1010 AC

Of course, the calendars of these worlds don't all contain the same amount of days, so its moot anyway; they'll eventually fall out of sync. Buts its a good start.

(Source: lots of google searches)

Actually, they could remain perfectly synced if the various game worlds are different alternate prime planes, rather than just different locations on a single prime. Time flow between planes wasn't actually identical - especially on the astral. ISTR a 1000:1 time ratio Astral to prime.

 

[MG.0]

I think a nice cheat to keep the various calendars in sync in the long term would be to make each world's year the same duration despite containing a different number of days. This means the days are not really quite the same length but the differences would be miniscule, e.g. comparing calendars of 360 days vs. 370 days would mean that an hour (3600 seconds) on one world would be 3700 seconds on another, or an extra 1 minute 40 seconds. Small enough to ignore.

 

[Shemeska]

Actually, they could remain perfectly synced if the various game worlds are different alternate prime planes, rather than just different locations on a single prime. Time flow between planes wasn't actually identical - especially on the astral. ISTR a 1000:1 time ratio Astral to prime.

Time didn't flow on the Astral, or at least the negative effects of time (though they retroactively caught up with you if you left the plane without magical protection to stop it). But time outside of the Astral was still marching on at its own pace regardless.

 

[Prism]

Our campaigns hop about from prime to prime occasionally and rather than saying that time is fixed between them we assume that its more like a river, in that it flows at different rates and creates eddies where time slows. So sometimes 1 year in Greyhawk might be equal to 1 year in Faerun, but at others times it might be a 5:1 or even 10:1 ratio.

An idea that I got from the Narnia stories was that time flow has a relationship with magic in the world. For example a few years on earth might map to several hundred years in a highly magical world. This kind of helps explain why although Faerun has moved forward 100 years, while we only advanced Greyhawk a few years. The Spell Plague being a huge burst of magic had unusual effects on the speed of the flow of time in Faerun. This kind of stuff also helped us explain how we moved our existing characters in the Realms over from 3e to 4e. We left in 1380 and spent a short time on another prime (from our perspective) to return in 1489.

I like the idea that Eberron has barely moved forward at all being a world moving towards science and compared to Faerun has less magic in its modern age.

Anyway, that's how we do it, and only because we do have characters that move between the primes and planes in our campaigns and connect up to our other characters on occasion

 

[aramis erak]

Time didn't flow on the Astral, or at least the negative effects of time (though they retroactively caught up with you if you left the plane without magical protection to stop it). But time outside of the Astral was still marching on at its own pace regardless.

Better go reread the various incarnations of the Manual of the Planes - time is quite subjective in official D&D. (I checked the 3E one, and it explicitly states that time isn't multiversal.)