It has a Tevish-ish feel, to be honest, though I couldn't explain why.



If Zhiran is 10k years old, then the Cabal can't have more than 600 years and change? (Giving more than 50 years post-Mending)

I'm interested in the timeline because of this thing I'm working on, which would be fundamental in defining the backstory of two of my characters. I might need a hand later on, but I wouldn't be averse to feedback before then

on a related note, I know I've asked this before, but ballpark how long ago do y'all think the Mending was compared to when most of our stories are happening? like how old could you be and still be a post-mending walker?

I go with the canon "present" which is 50-60 years after the Mending, but I don't go for very specific time frames: Elphimas' amnesia happened 10-20 years ago... i dunno much about the others. I'll drop by later and add the timeline for my stories.

EDIT: Here.

A brief time after the Mending: Broken Stars
-30~40 years "ago": Legacy -> Bad Blood
-10 years "ago": Elphimas loses their memories -> Awake in the Dark
A Mouthful of Venom -> Just a Statistic
Another Day, Another Fight -> Healing Path

Unknown point in time:
-The Pearl of the Black Queen
-Dragon's Blood

alright, well in that case it seems like I won't be able to accomplish my simultaneous goals of a) having Vella be hundreds of years old, and b) having her not be an oldwalker. although she can probably be one of those "had more power but lost a lot of it" walkers which serves a similar purpose. I just don't want her to be particularly godlike and I'm trying to work out the details of how to fit that into existing frameworks. I don't really need much in the way of specific time frames: it's just if I could get her across the line by having he ascension be, say, 300 years ago instead of 400 I'd probably do that 'cause who cares, but if not then I won't.

300 instead of 400? Did you mean 40?

In my opinion much of the "divinity" mindset comes from, well, the 'walker's personality. (I think the ridiculous power of ancient 'walkers come from the peerless mastery of magic through practice rather than mere time) Though to be honest, the talk of cults in Around The Table makes me think Vella has a bit of a god complex

oh, no, she's definitely in the hundreds: she just spent 50 years prepping the Ossia plan, and Around The Table established that she'd been active for at least a century before then. it's just, like, if the consensus was that the Mending was in the hundreds of years ago at this point, I'd like to set it up so she's younger than that. or her ascension is, anyway: Vella's thousands of years old at least, it's just most of that time she was stuck on Olmregan.

I had read that sentence wrong, my fault.


That's a long-ass time... she does hold a grudge, huh?


We don't have too many oldwalkers around that didn't benefit from some anti-aging magic, in a form or another (like Kahr being carbonited), but Fisco is a human still alive (and rather old) after the Mending, so that puts "his present" within 40 to 80 years from the event. Since he has stories with a lot of other M:EM characters (Aloise, Beryl, Daneera, Kahr, Lukas, Antine, Sundar, Penelophine, Jackie, the Rulus...), it's safe to assume a significant part of the Archive happens within his lifespan.


Is her race naturally immune to aging? (is there info about Olmregan somewhere?)

that and she also commits to projects.

I started a dossier a while ago, but haven't written much yet. the short answer, though, is yes: it's not entirely clear where the Il'Mar came from, but there's only been 12 of them and they all predate the Aesthetic Treaty (roughly comparable from a metanarrative perspective to the Guildpact.) which is thousands of years old. they can be killed, but they don't age, and Olmregan is a relatively non-violent world so only 3 of them have died in that time. I've been thinking a lot about them lately, and may wind up writing their section of the dossier soon.

Of course, there is very little consistency in official materials on this subject anyway. Also, and this has bugged me a lot over the years, which measurement do you use? I mean, yeah, we've got AR, the more or less official calendar. Which I believe originates on Diminaria. So is a year on Ravnica the exact same length as a year on allDiminaria? What about a year on Tarkir? These planes are different sizes and have vastly different decidedcosmology, but somehow they all have the same calendar unit? Even though Earth has multiple different ways of defining a year ON THE SAME PLANET!?

And do note that I picked my example planes with care, as each of them has important events that have been explicitly placed a certain number of years in the past. Numbers that don't make sense (Ravnica has two guilds focused on science. Still, they haven't created anything much of actual use to society in TEN THOUSAND FREAKING YEARS?! Why don't they have a combustion engine yet? Or at least doing something useful with all those steam engines? The Izzet should have supercomputers by now.)

So, in short, I am absolutely convinced that a year on Ravnica is a lot shorter than most other planes, and also the Magic timeline is worse than Zelda.

Multiple starting points for calendars and defining the first day of the new year, but to my knowledge years are the same length everywhere as they are designed to measure the cycle of seasons; there might be small differences because of the .25 extra day each year, but that's another issue I think?


...Yes, as an Izzet fan I feel for that, but that is an hand-waved issue in basically any fantasy though. (btw, the Izzet mizzium monitospheres or w/e they're called are propelled by fuel combustion -one time their backfire is used to kill attackers in the books- and have a ridiculous amount of mobility, they probably have a bunch of inventions that are either strongly limited by cost/resources -is mizzium easy to make?- or they just keep them for themselves)


In the Ravnica books months have 27-30 days and there are 12 months, so unless days are comically short (which would be remarked upon by basically any visitor, you would probably see the sun move in the sky) a Ravnican year is roughly the same length as an Earth year. The weird thing is Ravnican lifespans, but they supposedly change when the plane opens to visitors? Dunno, Teysa doesn't seem to age a lot but she's a pureblood Orzhov so idk.

Surely the Magic timeline is not helped by having a crapton of writers with varying interest in keeping canon streamlined, but I think this page gives a decent ballpark for events.
From that page, btw:

I feel like it's worth noting the current "human era" calendar is at 12,019 years (according to Kurzgesagt and, by extension, Cesare Emiliani). What I mean by that is, approximately 12,000 year ago, humanity made the first step from being disorganized hunter-gatherers to being an organized society capable of building things and changing our world. This is the approximate date of the first temple, discovered in Anatolia, built during the Stone Age, with (according to this video) such massive stones that needed amazing feats of collective planning and construction that we're unsure how early humans accomplished it (this was 7,000 years before the Great Pyramids at Giza, which are still being studied on how they were built).

I feel it's also worth noting that throughout human history, it's been singular discoveries or inventions that have led to massive paradigm shifts, such as metalworking to bring about the Bronze Age revolution, or mechanical innovations to bring about the industrial revolution. By the same token, politics have historically held back the widespread use of new technologies, and dependence on one type of technology or fuel (such as oil in the current era) has led to hesitance in adopting revolutionary technologies.

What I'm trying to say is, if the Guildpact is assumed to be both very early in the history of Ravnica, and the ultimate in political suppression of advancement (in favor of keeping all powers "equal"), then I don't think it's so far outside the realm of possibility that the Simic and Izzet are at their current level of scientific advancement after 10k years. That's before we even consider the "sideways" advancements that we can't really conceive from having available technological routes that we can't really conceive of in the real world (i.e. mana and magic gives them a completely different path to technological advancement than our mundane tools in the real world).

Oh, and the Simic already have better prostheses than we do, being fully integrated with the nervous system and as dexterous as the missing limb, as well as ACTUAL suspended animation that we're still studying; meanwhile the Izzet have actual guns.


Sidereal year vs. Tropical year vs. Anomalistic year, just to name a few non-culture-specific ways of measuring a year.


Maybe, but IIRC, Ravnica is also said to be somewhat smaller than Earth, while Dominaria is supposed to be something like twice the size of Earth? That means that AR years are likely longer than our years, rather than Ravnican years being extra short.

What I meant is: the definition of year originates pragmatically from the need to track seasons (interestingly, Chinese representation of the term "year" apparently derives from the image of harvest) -> non-seasonal calendars need some external point of reference -> different calendars are mostly different approximations of a chosen astronomical year, often based on the movement of some celestial body.


Are those planes stellar systems, so orbital mechanics can be applied properly? (obviously flat planes work on completely arbitrary rules) I should refresh my physics, but I'm pretty sure that with any given planet mass you can arrange any given orbital period varying the other variables*, like the mass of its sun - and maybe even g, I'm not sure every plane has exactly our very laws and constants of physics.

*Real-world example: both Mars and Jupiter have longer orbital periods than Earth, but one is smaller and the other is larger.




Other question: what's up with Raven's new avatar?

You haven't looked into the Chinese calendar, have you? A normal year is about 355 days, and every leap year adds an entire leap month of an additional ~30 days, meaning it varies between ~350~380 days. The Aztec/Mayan calendar also quite famously measures time in 3 cycles: their smaller everyday cycle of 13 months with 20 days each (260 days), a full 365-day solar cycle, and a larger cycle which measures the two smaller cycles' synchronization (measured in something like 7,000 years). There's also a calendar from Bali, Indonesia (which I hadn't known about prior to checking my numbers for this post) called the Pawukon calendar which apparently only has 210 days. (I'm doing light skimming, but other sources seem to say that Pawukon doesn't even have a year like we know it, and instead runs 10 different 10-week cycles at once.)

In addition, I think you're downplaying the difference between lunar and solar calendars, the two most common types of calendars across the world, which have a difference of around 11 days. The Gregorian calendar reformation was in large part done to actually bring the seasons back in line with when they were supposed to be, because centuries of drift had left winter in July and Easter in August, or something like that.(citation needed) That's actually the basic difference between the Gregorian and Chinese calendars: the traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, and it's far from the only one in the world.

Basically, don't think ANYTHING is "universal" when it comes to human culture, not when a culture can count by saying "one man plus 20" to mean 53.


Well, the problem with that line of thinking is that it equates to almost the same as "a wizard did it" -- it assumes there are so many variable that can't be accounted for, that there's no use trying.

However, rather than going down that road, I'd like to say that:

• Official sources seem to say that Dominaria is 2.5x the size of Earth and a year is 420 days of 24 hours
• Dominaria is decidedly a planet in a solar system, from official sources
• Pg. 8 of the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica does, indeed, say a Ravnican year is 365 days long

Meaning *gets a calculator* the 10,000 years on Ravnica since the Guildpact was signed has only been ~8,690 years on Dominaria.




Very good question.

I admit I'm not very knowledgeable about time-keeping tradition, though I'd be curious to know the reason why years with significantly different numbers of says exist, as cultural reasons can be often traced back to practical ones. It also occurs to me that 360-ish day years are less significant near the equator, where seasonal differences are less pronounced.


It took me a while to presume to have understood that reference.


In a multiverse where a plane was cut into five slices like a pizza? I reserve the right to be a bit skeptical about the use of science Even with the same g, my point about stellar mass and orbital radius stands: saying bigger planets have slower orbits is intuitive, but not strongly supported by data. (though there may be some tendency along those lines? I'm rusty at physics)


Cool. Would be funny if it fell right on some important event on Dominaria.

mostly it's 'cause we have two main long-form repetitive cycles we can measure by, the seasons and the moon, and they don't line up. the moon's less directly relevant but it's a lot easier to track in the short term, so a lot of cultures started measuring with that first and then tried to retrofit it onto a seasonal system.

I always thought that the first day of the year should align with the first day of spring. Admittedly, it would only work for one hemisphere, but I always thought that would make more sense than starting the year off in the dead of winter.


I'm not sure what you mean. What "new" avatar?

For the record, the DnD book basically staples Ravnica onto the Earth calender with different names.
The Dominarian calender is, for the record, 420 days.

I assume you watched the same Numberphile video that I butchered the reference to. I admit, it's been a long time since I've watched the video, so I could only go by vague bits of memory.

I have a bunch of conflicting ideas about Sharaka's development, and I need to decide how many planes Jack can tap for artifact knowledge. For each of those items, should I ask for someone to bounce ideas with or it's better to post it on the forums so everyone can offer their opinion?

not entirely sure I understand the question, but broadly speaking I think if you need answers for specific objects it's probably best to talk to that object's creator directly, whereas if you just want a random list of available things, I'd just post publicly and ask who has cool stuff to use.