In-Character Timeline

Wes

Administrator
Staff member
I would like to start documenting some of the history of Ayenee, and it got me asking about the IC timeline?

How is time measured in Ayenee? What are the calendars used?

What year is it now?

Does IC time have any relationship to OOC time?

Currently I'd have to describe the events of Ayenee in terms of OOC dates, but that's not ideal since our characters don't know it's 2017 OOC.
 
Raven's input would likely be invaluable here. Very good person and resource, especially considering her inadmissibly long history with Ayenee, in particular.

I have a thousand different IC timelines rolling simultaneously. It's convoluted...
 
What we need is for several people to post their own recollection of the history of Ayenee.

Perhaps a little research across the internet could help.

Then, once we have gathered a pile of different perspectives, we can begin to mash it all together into one centralized, triangulated history of the realm.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wes
I have rewritten this a few times and each time makes me sound more like an ass than the previous version.Hopefully, this will be less generally abrasive. So I will just say a Shared IC timeline is a logistics nightmare in the very best case scenario. As for the calendars, I think that could be varied depending on the characters religion, location of origin, and the group they associated with.
 
Maybe we need to straight-up say that Ayenee appears to be a region where time is in a mild state of flux?

Also the nice thing about an IC timeline is that once you have one, you can start attaching stuff to it and it makes future RP less confusing, and it gives past RP a sequence of events that can be followed. The order of events is more important than the actual dates they occurred on, and the order of events will have OOC dates which is our marker for where they go on the IC timeline.

For example, on my other site, we decided that on year IC = one year OOC (note that our IC year has a 10 month nonstandard calendar, though). So we have a "default" place to put any new RP on the timeline. However we also give players the flexibility to RP things on whatever date makes sense. So if you started a year ago on 5/12/38 and only 3 days have passed in the IC, you'd just start the posts with a timestamp with the date 5/15/38 instead of the current-ish date of 5/14/39.

So I guess the question is, for Ayenee, what's the big event that the calendar years start on? For the Yamataian calendar, it's the foundation of the Empire. For the real world it's (sort of) Jesus's birthday. When should the Ayenee calendar start?
 
I explained something similar with Velusia, I started it in yahoo chat, a distant land near Ayenee. When yahoo chat changed and dropped the user chats, I ended up having to move it from forum to forum, adapting to each one it was moved to. Certain places in Velusia are just odd, just not from this world, while other places have a slight temporal displacement, due to the fact the entire land itself was moved. Ayenee has moved a lot, and each person has a different perspective with time concerning it. Back in the day I use to have to explain how someone in a car drove up to the castle in Velusia, we were centered in a medieval fantasy time, but this outsider obviously came from a time period more displaced than our own.

Also I once tried to nail down irl time compared to ic time, it was something like one month ic being equal to week ooc, but sometimes one day ic was equal to a week irl. Nailing down ic time compared to ooc time is, again a perspective, one that shifts. Sometimes it takes a week for a single day to pass. The fact I have to wait for responses now, compared to a whole week in chat being summed up in a day. If it were chat we could go back to a week or a month being wrapped up in the space of a irl day. With posting things have slowed down, so time in Ayenee itself has slowed, now it might take a week or two just for a day to be concluded.

So If I were going to tamper with time, I would note that the death of yahoo user rooms ooc has an effect on the way time flows ic, before yc time was pretty fast, after it slowed a good chunk. Also sorry if this comes off rambling, I haven't had my morning coffee yet.

The other thing we have to look at is landscape, I have set up a map showing the lands of Thera which is were all the kingdoms I messed around in with my characters existed. I started with Velusia back in the day, because I was not sure if the Blackthornes were welcome in Ayenee since a rumor started they were banished. I figured having some sort of land outside Ayenee was a safe bet for then and future possibilities. Eventually that land grew as I wanted to try my hand at other styles, other characters, and a landscape needed to be mapped. Also these lands like Ayenee, have disappeared and reappeared over the years.

I think a good plot might be trying to fix the temporal fractures that must be rampant throughout Ayenee. I also think you could have old plots resurface if time gets way out of whack and the past suddenly meets the present. I've been trying to sweep up this plot hook in Thera myself over the years.

Anyway I've gone off topic, landscape, what does Ayenee look like, where are things located etc. etc. Many rp sites, forums, and games have solid maps, I think Ayenee at one time had a map, I know I saw one once cause it inspired me to make a map of my lands. Time is our enemy, it always has been in the case of Ayenee, 90% of the websites pertaining to Ayenee have disappeared over the years, now we are left we a small handful.
 
I may have the map of which you speak Eseer is this the one?
 

Attachments

  • PRIME.jpg
    555.1 KB · Views: 8
Hmm I think it is actually older than that one. I remember seeing it around 98 or 00 that's when I started mapping everywhere I went ic. I stopped doing that from 2001 to 2004 then started again in 2005, but for different reasons, I became the dm of our tabletop group so I started converting everything for that. I remember it was tied to a website that talked about net etiquette and T1 fighting.
 
The history of Ayenee is like...

There were vampires. They formed into clans. The clans began to battle in what would later be known as the Clan Wars.

The rest of it revolves around Castle Ayenee and Varsinax information. Not so exciting. The vampire part, and the Clan Wars... those are the most interesting times in the history of Ayenee.
 
However I believe to an ooc year= 200-400 ic years, which was generally accepted due to the diversity of everyone's timelines and kingdoms. Mind you some kingdoms in Ayenee were not affected by the mortal ideal of time, and we cannot forget those who travelled multi-dimensionally to-and-fro through various timelines and events.

Typically dates /years should start after an era that is momument to that era. For example the Draconuan wars= DC 100 (100 yrs after the Draconian war) or the exact period of a ruler in effect. Typically I labelled it similar to AYE XII with Roman numerals. Because it looked cool, lol. I never used our ooc months, and for a while I actually did have a calendar of ic months and seasons- but that was long lost, including geographical for Western Ayenee as typically that was where Darkbane had strong footing.

I have an AMAZING recollection of Ayenee events despite my ptsd, but then again, Ayenee is what got me through my darkest years as a child. My best childhood memories were Ayenee. And that is why I am so passionate about Ayenee.
 
I've always been a Southern Ayenee, tropical/jungle/desert landscapes and well away from the crisis that is central Ayenee. At one point I had worked out currency, months 13, holidays for races/nations. Hmm I wonder what parts of Ayenee everyone else identifies with?
 
The time when "power" characters roamed the chatrooms. I labeled it BPW (Before Power Wars) and APW (After Power Wars.) Mainly because after that, most people moved to forum and the chat turned to shit.

Although as a fan of Star Trek... I used the Stardate as Pan's actual birth/creation...
  • Birth |time| Date: 73185.5.
Its actually my birthday. 7/31/85 and the .5 would be mid day.
 
A good calendar could be very useful to establish... a way of tracking days, weeks, months, years... and of pinning down events. Time is very conceptual in the role playing world. Some people could span a thread across weeks - and some of mine have. Others have only covered a day, or mere hours... yet contain dozens of posts. Time is... fluid, especially in relation to irl time.

A plot to fix the temporal issues of Ayenee would definitely be good - something perhaps worth considering.

It could certainly feed into political motives.. a move toward rulership, etc.
 
You know, the fact that there's very few of us around right now could be useful, as we basically can do whatever we want without having to argue with a lot of people. On my other RP site, each change like this would be a huge multi-page debate thread. But as long as we can come to a consensus, the Ayenee world is basically our oyster. As I discovered so far as I fill in the wiki, like 90% of Ayenee's history is lost, so if we intend for Ayenee to get active again, we're going to have to start filling in the gaps by making up replacement lore ourselves (and maybe it'll make more sense this time around).
 
Interesting fact though, pretty much everyone I rped with in my Blackthorne/Darkthorne rps had no idea what Ayenee was. For a while I didn't even know what Ayenee was until someone linked a website to me with a map. It didn't sink in until .com though. In a way everyone in the rp saw a localized land that didn't exist in this Ayenee everyone spoke of. Then when I would leave that rp to go rp in Varsinax's Castle Ayenee or another person's rp it would either be in Ayenee or their own lands.

So in order to put together some sort of timeline/map we have to take what we have, put it together like a puzzle, create pieces to fit the missing ones, and collectively agree it looks good. That's a lot of work. Oh and for those lands that existed in the E & A chatrooms, but did not know of Ayenee, I am sure they exist out there, but the key words to finding them would not be Ayenee. It would more likely be yahoo chat, yahoo roleplay, yahoo something. Those lands are just as important, I took one Zalentra into my own lands when my character killed the king of that land. Kingdoms like that would otherwise just vanish along with the characters in them.

As it is, it seems like the internet has finally started to devour any history of Ayenee there was. The people that lived and breathed that history are facebook zombies now or have passed on. So if we are going to hammer out a timeline, we need active members working on this. Otherwise it will be procrastinated into oblivion with the rest of Ayenee's history. What little details there are out there, are quickly dwindling.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Wes
A timeline would be an interesting project....

In my case, the roleplay and stories that evolved since the days of Ayenee have spanned several centuries. I think most of us continued in directions after here, and have measured time in vastly different ways.

Also, something to possibly point out here is that there was more than one Ayenee timeline, possibly alternative universes even in the days of old. For example, not everyone acknowledges what I refer to as the Aoyn timeline with Varsinax's rule of Castle Ayenee and so on and so forth.

Due to the possible conflicts over timelines and alternate realities, possibly it would be easier to create a reboot of some sort? ie. The Prime Timeline vs. Abrams Timeline in Star Trek.

-

Stories have evolved significantly, especially in the case of my work since the days of Ayenee. I'd also like to think we'd all take a side of caution when ensuring we didn't ruin the glorious nature of freeform roleplaying that truly made it great. The mixing of genres, the range of things from fantasy to science fiction that all melded into the same melting pot of interaction.

-

Either way, that is my two cents - good to see people taking an interest in Ayenee again.
 
Back
Top Bottom