What are the months significance? What are their names? What does the weekday names represent? When are the solstices, and do you track the moon(s)? What holidays are important in your setting? These things can tell you and your players a lot about your setting. Commemoration days, days of the faiths, etc. Which faiths that have left their marks, as well as what earthly (material plainy?) events are celebrated or remembered really says a lot about the culture of your world. The game-technical part of tracking days and travel times is one thing, but the other, more important thing is that a calendar represents the culture. It is usually okay to track days and seasons, or convert our own calendar, but if you have the time, I personally enjoy creating a calendar - hard as it may be. The players each have their own copy (originally just my horrible sketch, but one of my players made a pretty good digital version I might upload somewhere at some point). The players also have a large laminated version of the map for when they want to draw and plan.Ĭalendar: Tracking time is once more popular, or so I've heard.
And no matter how detailed or simple your map is, the landscape and names themselves set a certain tone. The important thing for me is names of the areas and cities, as well as landscape and distance. It has been written a lot of materials on starting small, or starting top-down that I won't detail here. Map: It can be as elaborate you want, cover a city or local community, a nation or empire, a collection of nations, or a whole continent, for that matter. These are two of the most important things for a homebrew campaign, I think. For my current campaign I've only printed out two things to my players so far: A map, and a calendar.