Calendars

The most complicated and complex feature of Kanka, calendars are a frequent source of headaches for the Kanka team.

At a fundamental level, calendars are used to track day-by-day events of your world. Calendars and entities are linked through reminders.

Long-lasting reminders

Reminders are only displayed over the span of maximum 2 months. If your reminder lasts longer (for example a multi-year war), create multiple reminders. For example:

War declaration: date the war started
First battle: date of the first battle
Paris falls: date when a city fell
Peace deal: date the war ended

Gregorian calendar

If you want to mimic the gregorian calendar (the one used in most of the western world), you can copy this calendar to your campaign. Note that it isn’t an exact copy of the gregorian calendar, as popes and kings over the centuries have added/removed days or even months from it willy-nilly.

Advancing calendars

If you want your calendar to increment by one day automatically every day, you can do so in the calendar’s Advancing date option in the Calendar tab. This advances the day by one every night at 00:00UTC.

Parent Calendars

A calendar can have a parent calendar. This is practical if you are running several campaigns and want multiple “today”s.

Once you have your base calendar, create a copy of it, to duplicate the config of days, weeks, months, moons, seasons, etc, and set the template parent calendar field to the parent.

When viewing the child calendar, it will show all of its reminders, as well as the reminders from the parent.

Warning

Reminders form a parent calendar cannot be hidden or removed from a child. Doing so will delete the reminder from the parent, rather than hide it in the child. Reminders from the parent calendar aren’t duplicated but simply shown.

Eras

If you want to split your calendar into multiple eras, create multiple calendars and use the Suffix field. This tremendously reduces the strain on the Kanka servers.

Min and Max year

The calendar’s year can be -2’000’000’000 to 2’000’000’000. The same is true for reminders. This means you can have a calendar and reminders before your calendar’s year zero.

Year Zero

By default, all calendars start on year zero, if you want, you can disable this when creating a new calendar, making it start on year 1.

Date format

By default, calendar dates display as d M, y s, but this can be changed around to your preferred formatting.

Imagining our real date of February 4th 2023, the following values will render like this:

d: Displays the day number (4)
M: Displays the month name (February)
m: Displays the month number (2)
y: Displays the year (2023)
s: Displays the calendar’s suffix (CE)

All other letters are ignored. You can use (space), - and , in between values.

Why doesn’t the calendar support X, Y or Z feature?

The calendar is by far the most complex feature of Kanka, and the one most prone to breaking when something changes. Adding a single new feature to it can result in weeks of work, with even more weeks of bug fixing afterwards. This is why it is often memed on in the Discord.

Other tools like fantasy-calendars have a team working solely on their calendar app for years, which result in more features by virtue of not having to build a whole worldbuilding and TTRPG management tool at the same time.