Time in the Underdark

[Endur]

How would you keep track of time in the Underdark?

And, even if you could, would you bother to do so?

Sunlight doesn't matter in the underdark. Even the temperatures are unlikely to change much over the course of a year, particularly in the lower levels of the Underdark.

Think about the typical underdark races, Mindflayers, Drow, etc. These are slave-taking races. The masters live lives of leisure and the slaves work. Neither need to keep track of time for hourly wage purposes.

So why do you need to track time? Well, maybe for cooperation, except the Drow are Chaotic and don't cooperate much. Mindflayers are also extremely selfish and not knowing for cooperation.

 

[Phineas Crow]

Setting up meetings must be hard... no one knows when to show up.

 

[Turjan]

Hmm... at least in FR some Underdark cities have either faux day/night cycles or some sound signals telling the time of the day.

Even without things like that, humans have an inner clock with a cycle of approximately 25 hours.

 

[RangerWickett]

A sufficiently large body of water underground would have tides; I think even lakes on the surface have mild tidal changes, so an underground sea would let you keep track of the passage of days and the moon (though they'd likely have almost no idea what's causing the fluctuations if they haven't been to the surface).

Any species that developed underground (as opposed to, say, dark Elves, who came from the surface) would think of time very differently. What things have a regular cycle when you take out the sky?

• Sleep cycles.
• Tides.
• Need to eat and drink.
• Perhaps some manner of exotic creature that 'blooms' regularly; maybe a certain fungus reacts to subtle changes in gravity and only grows during spring and fall?
• Dripping of water from stalactites.

Thing of timekeeping around those sorts of things, and establish different tiers of time. A day might be roughly set to how often you have to feed your pet displacer beast. A month might be based on tides noticed in the local resevoir/calendar. A year might be set to the normal time it takes a child to be born after copulation.