Chronology & Time

Time in a fictional world is harder than a date field. A world may have its own calendar, or several, or none. Two events need to be orderable even when nobody has decided what year it is. And a campaign at the table sits at a different point in the story than the canon does. Chronicler treats chronology as its own bounded context because these problems deserve a real model, not a timestamp bolted onto a resource.

The present, and where play stands

A chronicle has a present moment, the world's "now". From it, era lifecycle follows: an era is past, current, or, with an authored speculative flag, something that has not happened yet. A campaign does not have to share the chronicle's now. A scope-resolved effective present lets play sit at its own point in the timeline, so the same world can be read as it stands in canon or as the table currently knows it.

A time-range query returns what falls inside a window, and membership of an era is inferred from where a resource is present, rather than stamped on it by hand.

Ordering without a calendar

The core insight is to separate ordering from formatting. Underneath everything is an invisible spine of moments, found or created on demand, and a moment is a single ordinal number. Ordering two events is comparing two ordinals, which works whether or not anyone has invented a calendar for the world. A custom calendar, when it exists, is a formatter laid over the ordinal, deferred and optional. So the system can always sort the timeline, and pretty dates are a presentation concern rather than a prerequisite.

A timeline is an independent world-time axis, and a track is a read-time lens over one timeline rather than a stored copy, so a viewer can look at the same underlying time in more than one way without duplicating it.

Where this connects

Chronology places what Resources exist in world time, and the effective present is part of how Play, reveals and campaigns shows a campaign its own view of the world.