## Getting started Preface: at the time of writing this, I know very little about my new world because it's so new! First, I'm going to grab a fresh copy of my timeline template (it's free / PWYW) and add my world name to the document title so it's easy to find. To start things off, I'll figure out what the current date is in my world. My genre is heroic fantasy and the tech level is around 19thC but with magic, so I will choose 1837. ![[Pasted image 20240305130833.png]] I'm using a placeholder Earth reference because I haven't decided on a calendar system yet! When I decide that later I can add a new column to convert the dates (I'll show you how to do this later in this tutorial). For now, I'll add in my first event to mark the present date (I'll decide on the month and day later). The *Duration* and *Starting time from now* columns auto-populate because of the formula inside them, you don't need to type in those columns! ![[Pasted image 20240305130957.png]] ## Scope & Perspective Before making a timeline it's important to think about the scope of it (what span of time and topics it should contain) and the perspective from which it's being told. An example of this could be: a timeline documenting the expansion of an empire during the height of its power, but told from the perspective of their enemies. For this example I want to use this as a main timeline-of-everything for my own personal reference to keep track of things, whether they're known to the inhabitants of the world or the readers of my setting - so my scope is "everything" and my perspective is wiki-like and factual. I like doing it this way so that I can make small and focussed timelines from in-world perspectives later :D ## First events When starting a new timeline I always ask myself this first question: **what do I already know**? Well, the biggest mystery of my world is that the Jindo were the only beings who knew how to imbue items with magic and they all suddenly vanished during a war known as the Great Betrayal (where greedy nations tried to use enchanted weapons against their creators). So I add two events: one for the Great Betrayal (which I gave an event significance of Major/Global and event type: Military, war), and one for the disappearance of the Jindo (I put the event type as Miscellaneous because nobody is sure how exactly they vanished, or where to). I know that these events happened before the present day, so I dragged the rows into the correct order. ![[Pasted image 20240305152829.png]] I've also mentioned or decided on a few other things in my world, such as: - the city of Goldbrook - which is capital of Zendu - the "centuries-old jindo ruins" (so I now know that their disappearance must have taken place hundreds of years ago, but not more than a thousand) - floating islands - airships - magic - a great storm - some guilds - 2-3 traditions - and 5 characters That's it! I don't even have a map with other place names yet. So to start adding those in I began with the character's birthdays because I knew roughly how old they are. I just subtracted their age from the present year to figure out their year of birth (I'll still save the day and month for when I've got a calendar system sorted). As these characters are currently still alive at the present day, I'll leave the end date blank. For other characters if I fill that in it will tell me how long they lived! When it comes to character deaths, if it's significant I'll add a separate event for it but if the character is less significant I'll just put one event for their entire lifespan. As this timeline's scope is documenting everything that happened in the world, I've set these characters' births to Trivial/Personal. If any of them were a great political or religious figure it might be more significant in the grand scheme of things. Generally I reserve events that are "not significant" for tiny bits of lore or things that I personally want to keep track of but that aren't important to my readers. To make things clearer I also coloured the row for my present date to green. ![[Pasted image 20240305160109.png]] Now I can see that any events that are listed after the present day (without a date) need to be sorted somewhere. I use that area almost like a staging area before moving them up! ## Figuring out details To make the present day more interesting, I decided to make the date of the Great Betrayal be 299 years ago, so that people of today may be preparing local traditions to commemorate the anniversary of the event. Next, I decided when the guilds were founded. I wanted some of them to have formed not long after the Great Betrayal, and others to be much more recent. Some of them logically needed to follow a certain order (for instance, the College of Goldbrook cannot be founded before the City of Goldbrook was even established). As the tech level of my world is behind present day Earth, I did a quick search of capital cities, their estimated founding dates, and also the same for some prestigious colleges & universities - this helped me get an idea of how long ago the ones in my world may have began. I'm not going to list every event and choice made here, so the next sections I'll cover eras, filling gaps, and converting my Earth-reference years into my calendar system. ## Eras Once I added in some events I then looked over them to see if any were significant or relevant enough to have sparked a new era (such as a war or technological advancement). I decided to make the Great Betrayal have more importance and changed it to Milestone/Era changing and added an event after it to mark the beginning of a new era after the Great Betrayal (a significant war) ended. For now I'll call it The Age of Innovation because people in the world now had to get inventive instead of hiring Jindo to create enchanted artifacts - if I come up with a different idea for it I can change it later. I like to make my eras visually distinct so I'm going to colour the row in grey. Now that I have one era, what was the previous one? I kept the invention of airships after the Great Betrayal because I didn't want them to have been used in that war, so that rules out an "age of flight", plus it fits better in my Age of Innovation. So perhaps what came before was my world's Age of Discovery began in 1350 and ended with the Great Betrayal. So now I have two eras, the current one began 293 years ago and the one before that lasted 194 years, maybe I could add one before those that lasted a similar length of time? 223 seems like a good number, so I'll add in placeholder for an era until I decide what to call it. ## Filling Gaps I've got some pretty big gaps of empty time in my timeline right now, so to start with I'm going to look at any remaining events without dates and move them into the most logical time slot to help fill those gaps. Once those are in place, I start looking at dates that still have a large gap and move some empty rows between them so I can visually see what's missing. I then take a look at the closest events and see what might have triggered them to happen, or what may have happened as a result. If I get really stuck, I check the stats page of my sheet to see if I could add more of certain kinds of event types, and if I get really REALLY stuck then I check my list of 500 ideas to see if I get an "a-HA!" moment. To start with I'm going to aim for at least 10 events in each era. Because my timeline and world is so new, I'm going through my stats page and adding in interesting events of each type so that I can connect them together when I expand on the details later. ## Struggles I ran into (watch out for these) - Slipping into the habit of adding lots of technological advancement references (e.g. gunpowder, airships) without connecting them to anything else. - Not knowing what to name things and having no map or list of locations to refer to. ## Converting to a calendar system ## Formula for auto-calculating which era an event belongs in