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nightmarist · 2 years ago

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if *I* were to make a dragon age calendar id probably go with a solar calendar, sure, or a harvest/seasonal calendar since most of Thedas seems very season-dependent.

The official stuff does say they have four seasons and 365 days but that's boring. Let's have some fun.

Thinking in terms of, this is a fantasy world with two moons and a sun, and technically a non-earth planet, the calendar could move slower or faster, and the seasons and axis could be different from earth.

Also, the fact it has two moons... One, as we see in The Hissing Wastes, is huge. Or rather, very very very close to Thedas. It probably causes lots of very strong tides and storms on the waters nearest to it on the other side of the world, but I also don't know where it moves, and if it gets farther away at different times of the year.

Satina, according to DA lore, is the specific moon that is celebrated. I don't like the "Satinalia" obvious Saturnalia reference so maybe calling the celebration Satinatum or similar if its based off Tevinter (and therefore a filtered/bastardized Roman Latin thing happening). They should probably also name the other moon.... There could probably therefore be Two special celebrations of the moons.

The "seasons" they seem to primarily talk about and experience are: Winter, Summer/Harvest, Rain, Funeral(?). The occasional references to Summer but Summer and harvest season are sometimes in the same breath.

I think/assume the Rainy season is in between Winter and Harvest, and Winter marks the beginning of their year.

Winter -> Rainy Seasons (everything is melting and is wet) -> Harvest (things have grown from the rain, time to harvest before Winter, and mixed in a bit of rebirth symbolism for funerary and other rites).

Each culture could have a slightly different calendar, but with Tevinter colonization it could have converted many over to the Tevinter calendar.

Because of the obvious Roman Latin influence on Tevinter, we can probably bastardize some Latin for flavoring up the names.

Maybe something like, Glacelis, Luvelis, and Messis (ice, rain, harvest, loosely).

OK so we have 3 seasons now for general Thedosian peoples.

We can probably keep 300 days, but rather than make it exactly like earth's 365, we'll give it a good round number. Just 300 sounds fine. 3 seasons, 100 days each. 100 days split in 2 is 50, split those 2 more you get 25.

You can still have 12 "months" by making them 25 days each. maybe, every end-month is a 5 day celebration, and the extra special 5-day celebrations are the liminal weeks at the end of a season.

DA wants to have 5-day weeks so it works out that way anyway.

If you want to really get fucky with etymology, we could change "week" to something else (but its not necessary since "week" just means "a set").

1 round of the sun = 1 day/dae. 5 days = a Daeset 5 Daesets = 1 Solset 4 Solsets = 1 Season Final Daeset at the end of a Solset = Feast Days

Not changing too much bc you'll accidentally invent a whole language + it still needs to be understandable to like. Players. lmao.

Thedosian Solsets: Wintermarch, Guardward, Dragonwatch (Or Drakonfound*), Cloudreach, Bloomtide, Justiniapoint, Solacement, Andrasteworth, Kingsway, Harvestmere, Firstfall, Haringrise

*Drakon was one of the original founders of Andrastean, the original month was called Drakonis but welt somewhat out of place name-wise. Likewise, it's usually good (and historically accurate) to rename things that are similar as means of easier conversion, so an old Thedosian name for the month could be Dragonwatch (perhaps a time of dragon mating season or hunting etc?) be renamed to Drakonfound. Also I just liked having a giggle at "Dragon Watch... Dragon.. FOUND"

You could also divide it evenly via weeks/daesets. There would be a total of 60 daesets, and thus still 20 daesets per season if you want to divide it perfectly even (100 days each season still), but if you make daesets only 3 instead of 4 or 5, that makes an interesting number.

15 daesets in one seasons could equal 3 solsets/months, with 1 daeset of celebration at the end of a season instead of one at the end of each solset. That would therefore make 9 total solsets instead of 12 (and frankly I think the last 3 months of the original DA calendar feel/sound kind of useless to me).

So that would make, instead: Glacelis: Wintermarch, Guardward, Drakonfound Wintersend Celebration Luvelis: Cloudreach, Bloomtide, Justiniapoint Harvestmere Celebration Messis: Solacement, Andrasteworth, Kingsway Day of immolation*

*A celebration to send off and honor lost souls, rather than "All Soul's Day" the way it was originally named. It's obviously supposed to be All Souls, Dia de los Muertos, Halloween, etc shoved together with costumes and funerary rites. Initially it's intended purpose in DA is to honor Andraste's burning. I would probably liken it to those kinds of celebrations where you burn an effigy, like The Burning of Zozobra.

Taking that into consideration, I think the Immolation would be a sort of thing where you burn old things you don't need/want, burn things for luck, burn prayers to reach The Maker or Andraste, etc. It would also be culturally relevant since in my new calendar it marks the start of Winter, so burning fuel to stay warm fits secularly (such as the many fire-associations during Christmas and our other real-world winter holidays)

Renamed a few other months just to sort of keep the flavor of how the months are named.

I assume the Avvar being Norse-based have a sort of two-season Winter-Summer split calendar, or perhaps because they are a more animistic they could have a calendar based on animal hibernation and migration, which may sound like it'd be the same but they could have ever so slight variances. Perhaps they would have months called Crowsflight, Bearsleep, Beespring, etc. I'd have to do more research on where, exactly, Avvar live and what the wildlife they have near them are.

The solsets could be used to keep track of the seasons, but I don't see why there couldn't be lunar calendars for Thedosians as a whole, sort of like the two calendars in mexica, a sun calendar and a ritual calendar. Certainly I assume at least a few cultures would have them, there are two moons. That feels culturally significant. There is supposed to be a special holiday to celebrate just one of the moons. Maybe there are two separate sets of lunar calendars for different holiday celebrations.

I would also wonder how the moon phases differ from one another, and if it is possible to track when they are the same, or if they eclipse one another. I'm not as knowledgeable on lunar calendars so I'll have to look at real world lunar calendars to see how they divide months, years, celebrations, and maybe things I havent thought of (if I ever feel the feverish need to do this again haha)

Anyway, I got tired but here are my zany thoughts about dragon age calendars.

#dragon age #dragon age meta

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pinayelf-archive · 5 years ago

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I'm a bit scared to ask this off anon (idk, dont wanna bother ya!), so here we go! Can you talk a bit more about your HCs for Seheron? I'm super curios :0c (-☣️)

Nope it’s not a bother at all lol, I could go on about my Seheron headcanons all day lmao

Disclaimer: These are all headcanons used in my personal canon and not official canon, nor is it the only right way to headcanon Seheron.

In my headcanon, Seheron is the Thedosian equivalent of the Philippines, which disclaimer is my own headcanon so anyone is free to have their own since there is no official Bioware canon

The reason I headcanon Seheron as the Philippines is because a lot of the lore regarding it reminds me of or parallels to the Philippines. There’s rice terraces there, there’s rainforest and from the looks of it a tropical climate

Seheron has also been occupied for some time by both Tevinter and Par Vollen, the Philippines has a long history of being colonized and occupied and I saw parallels

In fact from the wiki: “The fog dancers tell stories of the land Seheron once was. They say that the griffons of the Grey Wardens came from Seheron. They speak of the ancient Curse of Nahar that brought the fog, and the promise that will one day lift it. They tell about the March of Four Winds, about the lost people who fled to the northern islands and about the heroes who learned from the elves.“

That reminds me so much of how much pre-Colonial Filipino history has been lost or how things from then have been changed and shaped so much from the different countries that colonized and occupied us

A lot of the architecture in Seheron is largely based off Tevinter styles, which means Tevinter culture is now rooted in modern Seheron society, much like how Spanish and Western things are prevalent in modern Filipino society

Now heading off that - if you ask Bull about Seheron he talks about how there are ports and towns and civilians - these would be the people who live in ~modern (or more or less the culture that assimilated with Tevinter and Par Vollen influences) Seheron society. Then there are the Fog Warriors, who in my take are people who stick to the old ways of Seheron culture long before Tevinter took over.

Some general Seheron headcanons:

Seheron is not an Andrastian country. Even with outside influences, the constant warring between Tevinter and Par Vollen wasn’t enough to influence one singular religion. The main religions would be the Qun, Andrastian, and native Seheron beliefs

The main exports are rice and fish

Many native Seheron people have fled and moved elsewhere due to the war tearing the country apart (hence why my Amells, Couslands and Trevelyans have Seheron origins)

The fish sandwich thing Bull mentions a merchant sold is something like lumpiang sariwa, which is different ingredients wrapped in a soft spring roll wrapper.

The language they speak is based off Tagalog (and maybe some Ilonggo if I can figure out how to do it)

People from Seheron typically have Malay and Austronesian features - brown skin, black hair and dark eyes. So similar to people from Southeast Asia.

Fog Warriors

The Fog Warriors use both magic and melee in their fighting, that’s why they seem to slip in and out so easily without detection

They have their own religion

They are humans and they are friendly towards elves - in fact in my personal canon The Fog Warriors and Clan Bahaghari (the clan my Lavellans and Marikit’s mom originated from) cohabited with the Fog Warriors as they both sought to keep each other safe from slavers and the war.

The Fog Warriors have a leader with the title “Lakan”, which is also the title of a leader back in pre-Colonial Philippines around the Luzon region.

The leader of the Fog Warriors was named “Ilao” and she led her troops to save Clan Bahaghari from an Tevinter slaveship and died protecting them, so Imryll’s middle name is “Ilao” after her. She then names her daughter after her as well.

The Fog Warriors also speak Seheron

They treasure their mages and have their own schools of magic, much like the Dalish and the Chasind. Also like the Dalish they are attuned with nature magic, similar to keeper magic (like Velanna’s specialization)

Seheron elves

It’s extra dangerous for elves in Seheron due to the large Tevinter presence as well as the number of elven slaves on the Island

Like how Dalish elves from the South can speak common Dalish elves from Seheron can speak Seheron.

Most Dalish clans have long left Seheron due to the danger, Clan Bahaghari was the last to leave

Seheron elves have a distinct type of eye, which is that their iris is black and there’s no pupil, just a ring of white there. It sets them apart cause I think in some canon text it’s mentioned that dark-eyed elves are rare? I dunno lol, but I made this trait specifically because of that factoid.

So far that’s all I have! There’s more little details but this post would be 700 miles long lmao, but if there’s anything else I think of I’ll add something!

#Anonymous #seheron #dragon age #meta

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wyrdsistersofthedas · 8 years ago

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Happy First Day to All

With the new year, we thought it would be fun to mark Thedas’ holidays alongside our own calendar. To do so, we needed to figure out Thedas’ deceptively simple calendar and track it alongside our own. Both have 365 days, but they meter those days out differently. Looking through the fandom, there seems to be some confusion as to how closely Thedas’ calendar system mirrors our own. Is it pretty much the same, with the holidays even being similar to our holidays? Is it inverted since Thedas is a continent in a southern hemisphere? Does it follow a similar layout to the really ancient Roman calendar that actually started in March? All good questions, so we thought we would sit down and sort through the possibilities.

Click here for a larger version of the calendar.

Premise the First: Keep it simple, stupid.

One of the first ideas we came to was, if you are going to create a fictional world with a massively complicated lore that can be extremely difficult even for the creators/developers to keep track of, you don’t want things like the calendar system to be convoluted nightmares to figure out. The writers and developers need to be able to quickly ‘translate’ Thedas’ months into a frame of reference that tells them about the season, temperatures, weather, holidays, etc that would be happening at that time of the year in Dragon Age. An easy way to do this would be to base the Thedas’ chronology on your own calendar.

The Gregorian Calendar has been adopted by most countries as their secular calendar system. The Gregorian Calendar has 365 days divided into twelve months. So far so good. The two systems match up...to a point. If you really look at the Gregorian Calendar system is a bit of a mess. It is a good place to start, but you may want to tidy it up a bit.

Premise the Second: Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Dragon Age, like all fictional worlds, involves elements from our own histories, mythologies, philosophies, and cultures. The same is probably true of the calendar system. Like we said before you probably want it to match up pretty nicely with the calendar system you already use, but the Gregorian Calendar is messy, mostly due to shenanigans of the people who created the system it was based on: the Julian Calendar. (I had a bunch of awesome stories about where the names of each month, and how many days were in them, came from when I was teaching an introductory course to western languages from my Latin background.) So if you smooth out the bumps in the Gregorian Calendar, what do you get? 12 months of 30 days with 5 left over. And what should you do with those extra five days? The obvious answer: holidays! Hey! That sounds exactly like Thedas’ calendar! In this way you end up with a calendar system that looks mostly like your own, but with enough differences to make it feel just a bit other worldly.

In creating this post I experimented with several ways of representing Thedas’ calendar in a way that I could superimpose our own calendar over it so that it would be easy to figure out which days are which in each calendar system. My first attempt at this resulted in this calendar wheel, which I thought would work since there are perpetual calendar discs that we use in our own world (one of which happens to be on my key ring), but now is clearly problematic. (Also, can you tell I have been on holiday with lots of time on my hands to do completely ridiculous meticulous fandom work yet?)

Although this alignment didn’t work like I thought it would, it did make me think of something. Said I to myself as I looked at the placement of the holidays, “That looks like the Celtic Calendar”. A quick google image search confirmed my thought...and provided excellent evidence of why the extra five days in the Thedas Calendar are where they are:

The holidays of Yule, Imbolg, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain match up perfectly with the placement of First Day, Wintersend, Summerday, All Soul’s Day, and Satinalia. It seems highly likely that the Wheel of the Year served as the inspiration for Thedas’ holiday system.

Premise the Third: Mix things up just a bit.

While most of Thedas’ calendar can clearly be show to match up with the Celtic Calendar, there are some important differences that through off most of the fans, including me. I want Satinalia to match up with Yule/Christmas and All Soul’s Day to be Samhain/Halloween, but seasonal timings don’t actually align.

Satinalia, according to the calendar placement would take place closer to Halloween than to Christmas. It’s a harvest festival. The descriptions of the the holiday make it sound like a combination of Halloween and Christmas. In the Feastday DLC, Satinalia is said to be “marked by sumptuous feasts, wild celebration, and naming the town fool as ruler for a day. Amid the feasting, it is customary for friends, lovers, and traveling companions to exchange gifts and pranks.” The description of the holiday on the Bioware website and in World of Thedas, Vol. 1 adds: “Once dedicated to the Old Goddess of Freedom, Zazikel—but now attributed more to the second moon, Satina—this holiday is ...[celebrated with] the wearing of masks.... In Antiva, Satinalia lasts for a week or more, while a week of fasting follows. In more pious areas, large feasts and the giving of gifts mark the holiday. Satinalia is celebrated at the beginning of Umbralis.” (emphasis added) So basically it is the last big bash before settling down for the bleak winter months. Sensible.

First Day, on the other hand, reads much more like a combination of New Year’s and Thanksgiving: “The traditional start of the year, this holiday involves visits to neighbors and family (in remote areas, this was once an annual check to ensure everyone was alive), as well as a town gathering to commemorate the year past, accompanied by drinking and merriment.” (emphasis added)

Wintersend is not placed at a holiday that is typically celebrated in the Gregorian Calendar, but coincides with the Celtic holiday Imbolc (St. Brigid’s Day having taken its place in the Christian Calendar). In Thedas, Wintersend was “Once called “Urthalis” and dedicated to Urthemiel, the Old God of Beauty, this holiday has now become a celebration of the Maker. It stands for the end of winter in many lands and coincides with tourneys and contests at the Proving Grounds in Minrathous. In southern lands, this holiday has become a day of gathering for trade, theater, and, in some areas, the arrangement of marriages. It is celebrated at the beginning of Pluitanis.” I think it is fascinating that the Dragon Age Calendar incorporates similar themes to those found in our calendar system. Many Christian holidays took the place of earlier Pagan celebrations, and the same seems to be true in Thedas. The Chantry co-opted the Tevinter holidays that were dedicated to the Old Gods, which had probably replaced ancient Elven holidays given that Tevinter’s Calendar is said to have been based on the elven system (according to the Prima Guide).

Summerday sounds a lot like a traditional May Day celebration, which is associated with the Celtic festival of Beltane. World of Thedas, Vol. 1 notes that Summerday was “Once called “Andoralis” and dedicated to Andoral, the Old God of Unity, this holiday is universally celebrated as the beginning of summer, a time for joy and, commonly, marriage. Boys and girls ready to come of age don white tunics and gowns. They then join a grand procession that crosses the settlement to the local Chantry, where they are taught the responsibilities of adulthood. Summerday is a particularly holy occasion in Orlais. It is celebrated at the beginning of Molioris.”

It is harder to match All Soul’s Day with its seasonal partner in our calendar, Lughnasadh, which was a start of the harvest celebration. According to the wikipedia article, Lughnasadh “involved great gatherings that included religious ceremonies, ritual athletic contests (most notably the Tailteann Games, feasting, matchmaking and trading. There were also visits to holy wells... and religious rites included an offering of the 'first fruits', a feast of the new food and of bilberries, the sacrifice of a bull and a ritual dance-play in which [the Celtic god] Lugh seizes the harvest for mankind and defeats the powers of blight. Much of the activities would have taken place on top of hills and mountains.” (emphasis added) This sounds more like the description of Thedas’ Wintersend than All Soul’s Day, other than the harvest trappings.

So where did the inspiration for All Soul’s Day come from if not from Lughnasadh? Probably the next Celtic holiday, Samhain, with a bit of influence from Bonfire Night. In Thedas, All Soul’s Day “was once dedicated to the Old God of Silence, Dumat. However, since Dumat’s rise during the First Blight, Thedosians turn a blind eye to any old ties between the day and the dragon. The holiday is now known across Thedas as All Soul’s Day and spent in somber remembrance of the dead. In some northern lands, the people dress as spirits and walk the streets in parade after midnight. The Chantry uses the holiday to remember the death of Andraste, with public fires that mark her immolation and plays that depict her death. It is celebrated at the beginning of Matrinalis.” This definitely reads much more like the traditional Celtic celebration of the end of harvest and the coming of Winter (symbolizing death) even though it falls at the beginning of Fall in Thedas’ calendar wheel.

This correlation leads some DA fans to complicate Thedas’s calendar. I can overthink things with the best of us, but I really doubt that the developers (who live in Canada) are going to over convoluted things much. Think of the hassle it would be to figure out what the seasons would be or the month if they had inverted Thedas’ seasons because it is a continent in the southern hemisphere of the planet. Or if they had shifted the start of the new year to March, ala the ancient Romans, then all of the holidays would match our holidays more closely. That would make the Thedas’ calendar system convoluted and unwieldy to manage on a day to day basis. Plus these two tweets from Bioware seems to confirm that Summerday near the beginning of May for us (They place it on May 2, while my calculations say it should be the 3rd. Meh, can’t be perfect, right?). So, unless we get future information that changes everything, I think we can safely keep Thedas’ Calendar in line with our Calendar for now.

So there it is, dear fellow fans, a Thedas Calendar that we can all use to keep track of how their dates would correspond to ours. We are also working on an astrology system that would integrate our astrology with Thedas’. Because, of course, they have astrology in Thedas! [At least the Wyrd Sisters like to think so...but then we are weird like that. ;-) ]

(I mean, look at how similar Thedas’ Constellation chart is to ours! But that is a post for another day...)

Happy First Day to all!! May the coming year be filled with more joy than sorrow (and hopefully an announcement that DA4 is on its way!)!!

-MM

#dragon age #dragon age lore #dragon age meta #thedas #thedas calendar #reference #Thedas holidays #wyrdsistersofthedas

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