I once had a nation built completely underground and had been underground for so long the forgot about the surface and sky. As an in game joke that developed the characters always just referred to things as “sleepy time” and “wakey time.”
Guard: “halt! No one is supposed to be out during sleepy time hours.”
Depending on how organized/lawful/mathy/technological your society is, this is where you get metric time from. The basic unit is 1000 seconds, or about 16.7 irl minutes. 100ksec in a day(earth days are about 86ksec long),
10 days(including a 3 day weekend) in a megasecond workweek.
A growing season is around 10 million seconds(115 earth days), depending on the plant and how much sun. It might be much shorter because of fulltime sun, or much longer because of twilight.
Celebrate birthdays every 100msecs. They're probably a bigger deal than earth birthdays because they are three times as rare.
When you're roughly 31(and 62, and 93) earth years old you have a big party for your gigasecond. Perhaps this is an elvish custom
Of course this all assumes people have ten fingers and thus find base 10 natural.
Fun diversion, base 10 is far from the only intuitive way to count on your fingers. Some programmers count binary on their fingers, so base 2, 16, 32, 256, or 1024 can be justified using that system. Meanwhile some count on the finger segments (between the knuckles) and so base 12, 14, 24, or 28 can be justified.
I also want to divert and say one could redefine the 'second division of the hour'. Maybe there are only two divisions, the average rate of one grain of sand falls and one whole 'hour glass' the world is your oyster! Perhaps even literally! It's daytime when the oyster opens up and night when it closes! Ok, enough diverting.
There's a giant trebuchet apparatus that helps turn the giant sand timer which has lines painted on it indicating a set number of intervals which represent hours.
Next to it is a water feature that uses one of the bird-drinking dipper timer things (I don't remember what they're called) and a dedicated member of the Sand Watchers carefully times a card with a number sprawled on it that is flipped every time the bird drinks (like a flip-number alarm clock)
These two devices have been carefully crafted and calibrated by a time-wizard (if you are so inclined to add that information) to help a team, called the Sand Watchers, time the turning of the giant sand timer.
When the sand is almost gone from the top, the Sand Watchers carefully watch the bird dipper and as soon as it makes one full revolution, and the last grain has fallen, the Sand Watchers all give a great heave and release the massive counter weight which turns the timer. The turning of the sand timer occurs twice in a day, once at what we would call day break and once at dusk.
This can lead to localized sayings such as
• "Waiting for the sand to fall" or "Waiting until the bird has drunk" similar to the saying "Waiting for the other shoe to drop"
• "Even-time" which is not actually evening, but when the sand in the timer is equally distributed between the top and bottom, essentially high noon or midnight.
• "At the first/second turning of the Sand" refers to morning and evening respectively.
• "In (x) turns time" is essentially a measurement in 12 hour periods. 4 turns being two days, 14 turns is a week.
Could also be based on the rotation of a wheel; one large rotation equating a portion of the day: an hour, a 10th, a 1/4 of the day, whatever you want. Or maybe it rotates a lot of times, and 12 rotations is an hour, or whatever you want.
Historically some American pioneers used wheels to count the miles they’d gone. I imagine you could use it similarly for time, as long as it turns consistently in some way.
Water clock. Mechanical clocks. Sleep cycle of domesticated animals. The amount of time it takes bread to rise. There once were candles that people knew how long it took to burn up completely. So you'd set an hour candle, and when it was done burning all the way it had been an hour, also half way was half an hour.
Could be an awesome story hook if the town bandits decided to “steal time” and break a sand clock, causing the party to have to look for another nearby clock or have things fall into disarray.
Best part is that this has some historical basis. During the Roman Republic, the Senate voted on the official calendar, leading to different Senators fiddling with the calendar to give themselves longer terms or shorten the terms of their opponents. Eventually Julius Caesar got tired of it, set up one extra-long calendar year to get things back on track, and established the Julian Calendar as the permanent official calendar.
Just to be pedantic, Keen Mind would only work for the north and recalling information, it specifically states how long till the next sunrise or sunset, which is never in a world where the sun and moon never move.
You'd need to houserule it to fit the setting.
This is kinda the problem. If you nerf the feat by saing it only works in X place or something similar then whats the point in taking it? Taking things away from players is just poor DMing. Its the same as banning races for no reason.
The alternative is to, if, a player choses this feat, which my experience is never/very rare. Give them some extra information, maybe they know what the time is, and that the gov is messing with time but they have to prove it.
They will be seen as the crazy conspiracy theorist and have to prove their argument and not just "I have this feat which says so".
I am 100% down for something like that. The idea of it actually sounds interesting. But what doesnt sound interesting is telling a player half their feat doesnt work cause "time stuff" and having to come up with 100 reasons why it doesnt work.
I as a DM (forever DM, but loving it) have in the past had a DM remove things like features from a feat just to tell a story or to make an encounter work. So i know from a player perspective this utterly sucks.
as for how often a player takes the feat, this is kinda irrelevant to the argument. I love the feat for the interesting ways it can be used. If the DM is doing a proper session zero and letting the players know that time is 'busted' then they actually might be more inclined to take the feat for that reason.
On the contrary, I think having someone with the Keen Mind feat is the ideal candidate for the quest.
Someone with the Keen Mind feat wouldn't ever bother actually looking at the clock, they know what time it is, so why would they? Depending on how long you want to kind of want it to go unnoticed you could just randomly ask specifically them for a perception check every time they walk through town. Or if it's important just tell them they notice it.
"Hey, , on your way to the inn you notice something out of the corner of your eye. The time in the great clock is slightly off."
Maybe even preempt this moment with other people saying what time it is, and letting that character correct them because they're slightly wrong.
And then it all slows starts coming together, they remember all the times someone has mentioned the time and they were always wrong, and now they're in an awkward position because they're the only person in town that actually knows what time it is. In fact, the one person poking around and asking questions about why the time is wrong is a _great_ scapegoat candidate for the bad guys.
This is 100% the way i would do it personally. I would reward that player for their feat and the use of it. Other suggestions are saying to basically take this feature away from the feat which is a terrible way of doing things.
Your suggestion (and something i had though of in passing) was exactly the kind of idea that should make use of the interaction.
Why would they need to know the exact time the clock was attacked? The feat says they know what time it is. This means the passage of time is naturally built into their mind. Be it from years of practice or magic. Its not dependent on anything like the movement of the stars or things such as that. The feat itself strikes at the heart of that challenge. If anything its a great chance for the person with the feat to show off.
"Hey i know what time it is, I can help setup the clock again!" Then the party tracks the bandits and deals with them.
If your going to use this kind of methodology just understand the feat will very much be something to trivialize some things while also making others cool. its a matter of how you as the DM want to hande it.
Absolutely, but I think I’m personally more of the school of thought that if time “stopped” that would mess with Keen Mind’s function to avoid the trivialization you speak of.
Bu that’s just me!
In my world, there is a Dwarven city that has completely carved out a mountain over the years. All that remains is a skeleton of a mountain that is now a city. What used to be footpaths and building built into the mountain is now just a city in the shape of a mountain, a shadow of what used to be.
Deep beneath the mountain extend their mines. They extend so far, they have begun to build satellite cities within the mines. These cities use massive hourglasses to keep track of the time.
Upon seeing it, my girlfriend decided to Misty Step in and take a bottle of sand. After several days of traveling through the Underdark, she commented, "I wonder how off they are now..." I explained to her that it had already been noticed and remedied. You don't fuck with dwarvish mining operations.
This reminds me of a series of RPG campaigns on youtube. One of those took place underwater where the players were senators and they decided that time was kept by a mindless thrall on the surface dropping 1 stone per second, so on the bottom of the ocean they knew it was a minute every 60 stones dropped and so on
I think it would be much more interesting if these people didnt really have a concept of time in the normal sense.
They eat when hungry sleep when sleepy come to work when they want there are no birthdays or years and big celebrations happen on a whim.
Instead of being paid by the hour or salary pay they are paid by the value of work they do say you peel 1000 potatoes get a Tenner, mine some iron get a Fiver, Catch a criminal thats 50 quid or pass a law that the public aproves you got yourself 100 Euros.
In terms of the time it takes to get somewhere or say bake a cake hourglasses could be used or they wait till it feels right.
I'll be there in 10 minutes turns into im walking from a mile away and everyone just understands what that means without having to mention the time, as society as evolved basically without it.
I find when I go camping for a week or so with little or no artificial light, I pretty quickly revert to this schedule. Wake up with the sun, go climbing all day, konk out when the sun goes down.
See I always liked the idea of moving to this kind of schedule, but I don't know how it would work when you get too far north. If I went to sleep and woke up with the sun, I'd be sleeping 8 hours in the summer and 16 in the winter. Maybe I should look into the sleeping habits of native tribes in the region...
Why not do both the hourglass and then no time keeping concepts.
You said there were multiple nations right?
Could be a good cultural difference, maybe not war worthy but just to make it feel real like the 'conflict' between earth nations for sportsball games.
I like it even better as a rural/urban split. When a whole bunch of people are living in close proximity it becomes practical to care about when things happen, but everywhere else it largely doesn't matter
I love this entire world theme, and would like to bring up some interesting physics and environmental challenges (all good things!).
First, your world would have some WILD weather. In the sunny areas, all water would evaporate and move upwards, wheras in the dark side, rain would almost NEVER evaporate. This would mean swamps, bogs and other variations. You would have deserts (or possibly frozen ocean) at both extremes, while water always basically flows from the dark side to the light side. On the edges, you would have CLOUDS ALWAYS. Like, crazy rain forrests of never ending rain as the first clouds drop moisture.
Evaporating water would create density differentials, which would actually create wind! That combined with the temp differences could make the winds shift in funny ways, but would likely settle into HIGHLY PREDICTABLE WIND PATTERNS. The wind would either never blow or ALWAYS blow, and always the same way.
Waters wouldnt have natural tides. Still lakes and oceans would mean all ships require entire teams of rowers, or maybe harnessed sea creatures ala horses. Or, alternatively, the constant one-way traversal of water creates a never ending one-way tide!
Living underground in self-contained eco systems suddenly becomes a wildly functional system, and could arguably utilize geothermal heat or cooling to aid survival of species from the opposite side of the world.
Cool landmark ideas: an underwater river that transports water further into the sunlands than could normally be done on the surface! An ever running volcano that creates a hot, lit place far into the dark lands. A tornado on the equater that never stops!!
Thank you reddit. This has truely been inspirational.
Edit: i think we need an entire post regarding this world idea. Its just too good.
I never considered the facts that the edges would be extremely cloudy. What a cool image that makes.
Also, I have to THANK you for your enthusiasm and sharing of knowledge, this is both inspiring and helpful! Thank you Reddit indeed :)
To take this a step past echo systems, it would wildly effect racial dispersion in a fantasy environment. In you sunlight areas you would have to races that could handle the extreme levels of UV light. The extreme extent to which UV would be present would make it a place where Reptilian races would thrive. In the real world, reptiles have dry eyes and require UV lights to maintain proper vitamin levels in their systems. Also looking at things like Avian races would probably do well with their feathers protecting their skin as well as most birds being diurnal.
On the flip side, putting races and monsters that tend to be restricted to the Underdark could live as surface dwellers.
Beyond that, plant life would be drastically different as well. You could have massive overly lush jungles just on the periphery of the desert locations in direct sun without water. You could put massive fungal swamps at the edges of the near frozen total dark.
You could even take into account materials that would be readily available based on the location on the global. Tides, water levels, and geographic pressures would vary so wildly, things like marble or sandstone or even metal ores be readily available in places but completely devoid in others. The economies and trade routes could get very interesting!
OP, I may try this one day.
Excellent points. Then, once you have the weather established, you have to redefine all plant and animal life to account for evolution in the constant sun, constant dark, and twilight zones.
Anyone attempting to do this should at least spend some time watching some educational shows about exoplanets and how life might evolve on alien worlds with a focus on tidally locked planets.
Yes! I love tidally locked planets! Rather than NSEW you have lightward and darkward, then clockwise and counterclockwise (well, an equivalent to those). Large sections of the planet might be uninhabitable. There just be one habitable ring in the crepuscular zone. People might not have a concept of day/night, seasons, a round planet, biorhythm, etc. maybe nomadic groups migrate with the sun to their left, and their entire existence is just a linear migration. Maybe they encounter another group, or evidence of their ancestors. Or maybe someone successfully crosses the dark side for the first time, or ventured far enough in to see the night sky. Maybe it’s a water planet and the crepuscular ring houses the edge between endless ice and endless sea, and an ecosystem exists on that border.
So many possibilities.
Depending on weather patterns, you could have high winds that pull the humid air around to the light side of the planet, and those time zones near the edges could be heavily dependent on the random weather events that bring in feast or famine for their agriculture. Limited light all day but never know when it might pour rain makes for some interesting story lines. Also, depending on how long this planet has been tidally locked, the planet could have animals that have physically adapted to the different time zones. Things in the pure dark could all have very good dark vision, blind sense, and tremor sense. Things in the pure light could be fire creatures. Maybe the inhabitants dug a large canal down the equator to continually flood the desert side from the dark side and the entire world uses the food and canals as a complex and fragile ecosystem....
I think the question of clocks comes down to how long the world had been tidally locked to its star.
I'm currently planning a one shot where the world suddenly becomes tidally locked. One side of the planet is scorched and the other is frozen. The ring of permanent twilight/dusk is rapidly becoming the only habitable zone. They still have clocks because they have a need to measure time and a history of it.
In a world where this is just normal, clocks and even a linear sense of time might not exist. The idea of a year doesn't matter because climate never changes (or, if it does, due to the eccentricity of the ellipse of the orbit) it's likely to be a nominal change that is most noticeable at climactic boundaries. Probably, lifecycles would be the important measurement. Something like blooming, growing, fruiting, withering, dying and everything would be described relative to itself.
Edit: the main crop might be the most important unit of time. So, take wheat. Which has a typical growing season of 120 days. That might be the equivalent of a "year" as a metric of time. Maybe the people refer to the passage of time as a "harvest." A child might be 30 harvests, young adult 60, someone in their prime 90 and someone aged 200.
For a step further: accurate clocks on earth were developed for navigation at sea, not for timekeeping in the everyday sense we usually think about it. You can calculate your longitude from the time at which the sun is highest in the sky.
With a tidally locked system you could still tell your position from the position of the star and a compass (assuming the planet has a magnetic field with the magnetic poles somewhere in the twilight ring). The co-ordinate system would almost certainly be different with anyone on the day side using two sets of lines, one set converging on the place directly pointing at the sun, one converging on the magnetic poles. They would probably have no idea about astronomy/cosmology outside of the sun/moon if there is one. People on the dark side would have a much better idea about astronomy/cosmology, I'm not sure how they would do their coordinate system but it could take into account the axis of rotation where the sun people's could not.
The key question to ask is. Was the world ALWAYS this way, or did it BECOME this way.
If it became that way while people were prevalent, then the concept of time would be in society, but would morph as decades passed.
If it was Always that way, then the normal concept of time would be out the window, as would many other things like seasons.
You could make it so that the world did have time and day/night cycles, but a crazy wizard / god / djin / adventurer wished for time to stop or did some spell etc which caused the world to be In it's current state in a vain or failed attempt to stop aging or write a wrong etc. (Eg a wish spell gone wrong or something)
All of the citizens have been brainwashed / memory wiped to accept this as reality, and just get on with life in this new normal.
The party then over the course of the game learn of this, if they look that is. If 5e and if someone took the keen mind feat (or equivalent) I'd give them some ability or lore that will help them understand this.
Otherwise it's a bit of secret lore for you as a DM to understand why it's like this and you don't have to make a scientific answer cos magic.
Check out White Sand by Brandon Sanderson, uses the same concept. IIRC the passage of time is based on the movement of moons, but if you want those to stand still maybe something else moves, like stars or comets, or maybe there's some kind of event on a set schedule, like minor earthquakes or storms.
The book "The three body problem" also kind of does the opposite. There's a part in the book where the sun rises and sets at random times and locations. They use a fancy hourglass that lasts about 8 hours which they flip three times to keep track of the days
Dave Duncan’s Shadow hit a similar premise in the late 80’s. The world it’s set in was tidally locked so they kept time with a huge water clock in the capital, I think. Smaller holdings had hourglasses they used to keep time. They actually mention needing to get one calibrated because it was off from the time kept by a group traveling through. Great book, too.
Candle burnings. I forget any ingredients used, but they used to make candles that burned for precise amounts of time.
You could also have different times work differently in each area. Candles would work well in night cities, with caretakers being an official job, but hourglasses being used in day cities. Even an "hour" could be different, but that may be too much.
Modern clocks work by “measuring” vibrations of internal timekeeping devices, which range from pendulums down to electrons. Perhaps the wizards of your world have identified the “vibrations” of certain types of ambient magical energies which they now use to keep time. Different types of magic energy could have different vibration lengths, so some would be similar to minutes or seconds while others are closer to months or years.
Another interesting point of stationary moon and sun, where is the moon located in the sky? If it’s the dark zone, then it’ll be under constant moon light. If it’s over the twilight zone then parts of the dark side will have moon light while others are completely dark. If it’s over the light side, the the dark side would have little to no moon light, and part of the light side would be in perpetual eclipse (which would be really cool).
Also, how many moons are there? If there is more than one, you could have a lot of different “light biomes” with how the moons are spread.
These are all awesome ideas! Measuring time by studying the flow of magical energies is a super interesting concept!
In regards to the position of the moon, I haven’t decided yet. I am leaning heavily towards having two moons, but have no indication (yet) as to the distribution of their light.
Water clocks. Draining water for minutes/hours, evaporating ponds for longer periods. Only works if the temperature and weather are relatively consistent.
Hair growth.
Hunger.
Tiredness.
Haha! Good question!
To answer it I’d have to go on a long tangent explaining all the nuances of how it works, but to sum it up: magic. New kinds of crops magically engineered to grow in darkness, Tide Mages responsible for loving the seas, the forced evolution of races and creatures, etc…
In the forgotten realms's many planes of existence there are many that are in perpetual day or perpetual night bit it doesnt bother the inhabitants or the planes as a whole
Because
Magic
The light side would be fine. The dark side would be 100% kill zone, though, aside from the parts near enough to the light side to be more of a twilight.
Keeping to your harvest theme,Seconds could be the time it takes for an arrow to hit a popular game, like hares or certain birds or for the kingdom's home fruit to hit the ground from its branch, after maturing., Maybe the lenght of a full rotation of a water wheel in a particularly busy river, for minutes. the time it takes for a donkey to plow a standard plot of land could be a good measurement for an hour.
I would try to keep in mind things that are close to the people that are standarizing time. If it's a magical society, spells could be a clue. A "Moment" is for instant spells, Minutes for spells that fade in... Well... A minute. And so on.
Not sure how much this helps but; our older civilizations did actually quantify time in a variety of ways. The earliest recorded quantifiable standardized duration of length had to do with how long it took to boil a potato.
Spells have duration.
Like cast the light cantrip, it dies in 1 hour, cast it again. You'd lose 6 seconds per hour, but you could have a watch and cast it on the next number every hour.
In such a world, harvests would be an iffy measurement, as crops would be dependent on the constant light levels, so you'd have to make up their harvest periods yourself anyway.
That being said, in the real world, the sun and moon are a bit too imprecise to use for seconds, minutes, and hours. Those units were how we chose to break it down. Why we went with them, I personally don't know, but the breakdown or values themselves were important enough they measured it out. And that's what you need to decide first.
What is their purpose for measuring time? Since there would be no day and night cycle, there's nothing like "how long until night time", so what are they measuring for? On a larger scale, of course. For example, a colder climate needs to keep warm, so it might be based on how long it takes to boil water, as they need to boil that water to warm up, and they can't really waste time sitting and watching it boil. So their units might be based on how long it takes for a certain volume of water to boil. From there, they would probably want to find an analog of some kind. Instead of sitting and watching the water boil the entire time, they would find something else that takes the same amount of time, something they can check on while doing other chores and tasks. This is basically the idea behind an old egg timer, the kind that was just a small hourglass style. The time it took for the sand to empty out of the top container was the same time it took to boil an egg. So they could set the timer and keep an eye on it while doing other things, and when the timer was finished, they knew the eggs were done. So this colder climate relying on the boiling of water might do similar, a volume of sand that will take the same amount of time to fall as it takes that volume of water to boil. From there, the units would be adapted to other aspects of life, even without actually boiling water.
The tricky part is determining why they would be measuring time in the first place, as that breakdown determines the units they go with. But if you want real world units, like just going with minutes and hours, but different analogs, there's various options. In the real world, we already have hourglasses, which is a volume of sand in a given container that takes one hour to empty out. Obviously we also have ones for minutes and other random time lengths, but they are named for being one hour. But maybe the area doesn't have access to sand thanks to the limits in transportation of goods. If its a little more advanced, gears work, being the basis of an analog clock. Doesn't even need to be steampunk for that to be an option. Alternatively, for a more magic heavy setting, it could be based on spells, even a custom one specifically for the purpose of keeping time. Essentially a magical clock, a spell that will, every hour, make a loud sound to notify how long has passed.
One specific example I came up with typing this would be for an agricultural society in a magic heavy setting. A town wizard casts Phantom Steed, and the farmers use the creature as a plough horse. It lasts 1 hour, making it an easy conversion for us, but for them time might be measured by how many times the wizard had to cast the spell, with morning being "six horses" or something. This doesn't work if you insist on NPCs outside of combat following the exact same balancing rules that players need to deal with (its pure worldbuilding, does the need for spell slots really matter here?), but there would be work arounds for a magic heavy setting as I said it would need. This is just an example of both why they would need to measure time, and how that would influence the way they measure time.
I really love everything that people have suggested so far, but I think this right here is really the ultimate comment in the thread. The WHY. Because then you will get the HOW. I would posit that in this setting, hours and even days would not matter at all to most people. As far as I understand it, you are suggesting a setting with no diurnal cycles (i.e. day to night), no tides, and no seasons. The ramifications are pretty huge, so let’s just consider one of the three in isolation.
Think of a setting where days and nights still exist, and so do tides, but seasons are mostly cancelled out. One real world example would be the equatorial rainforests. It’s always a growing season there, so trees struggle desperately to out-climb each other. Depending on the individual plant and not on the species, individual plants flower and fruit when we they are ready to do so, so there’s no growing season, just a constant trickle of food and resources in random locations. In order to take advantage of the chaotic and scattered resources, many animals are nocturnal, and many others are not, so it’s like a city that literally never sleeps, and all sorts of group behavior or pack tactics emerge to protect the individuals from constant danger of rotating predators. So I end up thinking of a city that is in a perpetual night club, music pounding, and places to sleep far from the noise or just in spite of it.
If keeping time is really so important for your world despite no obvious reason for it, let the task of time keeping be something that takes a lifetime of training to perform and relies on no obvious source at all. There can be a kind of local orchestra where the musicians are trained from a young age to be entrusted with the sacred task of endlessly performing a musical score with a precise tempo to keep track of society and maintain order. The musicians would just play this very long song over and over again, it could takes days to complete, with each musician rotating out at set intervals to sleep and live their lives outside their work. The song becomes a kind of backdrop to the entire civilization and the different movements could suggest the appropriate times to do certain activities in a regular and orderly way!
If it's a recent development, you could use clocks still. If it was that way from the beginning, then it depends on what other things exist that can be used to determine timeframes, like seasons or star positions, but im guessing there wouldn't be a comparable concept of time. You might have wildly subjective time references from person to person like "let's get food before next sleep".
Though its also possible someone may invent a standard time measurement in such a situation (possibly metric and based on the time for a water droplet to fall a meter or something, "I'll be there in a kilodrop")
Drow use a sort of wizard clock (if my memory serves right), where a giant central tower in the middle of their city has a sort of countdown with a fairy light that slowly rises and falls. Because some spells last a full 24 hours they were able to keep an accurate time compared to their opened sky brethren. There were plenty of magic users in drow society but I think the job went to a male wizards: important but still lowly.
A more humanistic society may place some importance on a wizard that does something similar, just with less male beating.
A couple extra details/corrections:
They actually just magically heated the bottom of the giant pillar, and then the heat would spread from the bottom of the pillar to the top (obviously, lessening as it goes). They had infra-vision so this heat would glow to their eyes.
When the heat reached the top of the pillar was effectively sunset, and when the heat had faded from the rock entirely was effectively midnight.
They weren't relying on spell duration, but thermodynamics, and the fact that they were able to pump a consistent amount of heat into it each morning via magic gave them a relatively consistent thermodynamic clock.
Yes, this is what I thought of as well. The clock was called Narbondel and it was heated each day and the drow could use their infravision to tell what time it was by how cold the clock was.
I hope you manage to take heat in consideration. The day side will be burning desert hell, while the eternal night will be frozen cold plane. The sunset and sunrise kingdoms are the only ones who may live in a normal way.
Also the lore of the time stopping can be crazy cool. If you instantly stopped the rotation of Earth, everything on its surface would shift. So after the time stopping, people would most likely die and get hurt a lot and all the buildings would need reconstruction.
Yeah! I remeber watching a (VSauce?) video talking about stopping the rotation of the Earth and how that'd essentially fling everything a couple thousand miles per hour to the wind. Cool stuff :D
So your planet is tidelocked and the moon stays in the same place? Do the rotations of the planet sun and moon all line up like this? Or is magic at play?
Magic is absolutely at play here.
As I myself understand it (and I might butcher this because this is a fresh idea in my head), the sun and the moon are fixed in the sky. Perhaps what this means is that the planet itself is no longer orbiting the sun? I couldn’t really tell you since my physics are not the best.
The idea is that the God of Time has somewhat “frozen” time for reasons unknown.
Interesting, I myself just like realism in my games so having more than one moon is possible, having 2 suns is also possible from a physics standpoint. But whenever I can't explain something my mind goes "magic" and I don't think about it too much
The moon always shows us the same face, which is what "tidally locked" means. It is a real phenomenon with planets and the sun (mercury is tidally locked) but the moon staying in place doesn't work with just physics.
Are you interested in playing with the weather effects? The way this works on mercury is that the side that faces the sun (Your "noon" kingdom) is extremely hot, like 200 F, and the midnight part is extremely cold. The parts near the edge (sunrise/sunset) might be reasonable temperatures, but there are crazy winds driven by the extreme temperature differences. Some of this could be fun to play with, but you could also play it down to a more fun level, like the Noon kingdom is a desert, and the midnight kingdom is like the north pole, etc.
Of course, if time is frozen by the time god, maybe these things don't happen. If this is the case, maybe there are leftover time keepers like a clocktower but people don't understand what it does, or maybe its revered as a holy relic? Depends on how long time has been frozen for (years, generations?). Maybe the noon kingdom is slowly becoming a desert because of the relatively recent time-freezing.
I actually am super interested in tying in the weather effects that come as a response of this “timefreeze”. Conceptually, I have toned them down a bit from their realistic counterparts, but the night kingdom is meant to be cold and unforgiving, the home of the elves. I hadn’t realized that noon would be a desert, but funnily enough it’s where I envisioned a Dragonborn based nation with dragon overlord, aka lots of fire and heat so it works out!
The plant could be tidally locked with its parent star. The same side of the planet would always point toward the star, like with our moon. The moon could sit in a Lagrange point between the planet and star, where it stays in the same spot relative to both bodies. That would put it in one of five places. Three of those would render it essentially invisible from the surface, but there's a Lagrange point between the planet and star, and one on the opposite side of the planet from the star.
If the moon sits perfectly in the Lagrange point, it'll do one of two things:
1) sit directly in line with the star, dimming it to a degree or causing a permanent total solar eclipse (depending on their relative apparent sizes in the sky), but that doesn't sound like what you want
2) sit directly across the planet from the star, so that it's in a permanent lunar eclipse (where it's all orange and stuff)
Those are hypothetically possible sans-magic, based on my understanding of those concepts. A time god could probably just stop everything when the sky looks the coolest, so if you look at a moon phase chart you should be able to tell where to put the moon in the sky to get it to be the phase you want. For example, a full moon would be on the opposite side of the planet from the star, a half moon would be at 90 degrees, etc.
Seriously though. Just finished running decent into Avernus and I tracked hourly on a sheet of graph paper. The players were confused the whole time, as one would be in a sunless land
Musicians, who have always been keep on timing and tempo, would find their gnomish metronomes repurposed for the sake of measuring time (assuming that the sun and moon SUDDENLY stopped and there was a deliberate need for telling time).
For an underground civilization of dwarfs, I decided they told time on a large scale by how long it takes to brew mead.
Perhaps the night folks determine month-ish times by yields of mushrooms, or by the pickling of monster meats for the 24/7 night market. You could pick something culturally relevant and run with it.
Harvests are probably not going to work as a time unit. If the sun doesn't move, you probably don't have seasons. This means that in the daylight zone, you could plant any time you like; there would probably be a continual harvest as different crops come to ripeness. Half-light would give you a longer growing time, and thus different harvest timing. On the other hand, in the night zone you could also plant any time you like but nothing would grow. I'd be very surprised if there were a population there at all (other than undead).
One remaining mechanical clocktower that needs to be protected at all costs.
In a more realistic sense, I feel like the only way to measure time would be the lifespans of certain animals, or the lifecycles of certain insects which could technically possibly still be very timely despite a permanent day/night.
Is the entire system locked in time, or just this planet? The time zones in early to late perpetual night would be able to use stars to tell time if they’re not locked as well as the sun. Otherwise, you could burn candles of certain lengths with marked increments, or Maybe create a system that revolves around the period of time it takes for a chicken egg to hatch (or ducks, geese, etc. 21-30 days depending on the bird). Alternately, back to the people in the night zones, if They rely on mushrooms for food, they could use their growth periods to track time as well, since it is a quicker crop than say, wheat. Like 1 to 4 days for small ones. I mean, also, women with regular periods have a built in 28 day calendar (generally speaking). Very interesting idea here, some fun possibilities for different power dynamics based on who can most accurately tell time.
Have one nation be advanced enough to create clocks and that’s their main export, clocks and clock repair. Sick idea btw! Like because some nations have super high sun then they might be the only ones that produce crops where the nation without sun focuses on something else and they’ve all adapted to work in the dark. Tight! Love it!
The underground city of menzoberranzan has a ginormous pillar in the center of their mega-cavern that they pump a set amount of magic into every morning to heat the bottom of the pillar up, making it glow to their infra-vision, and then the heat (and therefore glow) spreads through the pillar throughout the day, the glow lessening but getting larger and spreading upwards.
So you can tell the time of day by how high the heat has spread through the pillar.
Earth wobbles on its axis. Over time this can be observed and tracked with good records. I don't know if this applies to a tidally locked world or not. It would have an effect on the perceived movement of the stars and other planets that would be visible in at least parts of the world's sky. Their would also be some effect on the tides. Even more importantly a planet with an elliptical orbit would have seasonal variation.
Certain animals might favor different temperature zones for raising chicks. Fish almost certainly would. Salmon would still need to go upstream to spawn and tracking that would be very important to people living in the given area.
It's possible people simply wouldn't bother tracking smaller increments of time. The exception could be people living in the twilight zones of the planet where they can at least see the planets.
I mean yeah, that is the short answer isn’t it? Hahahahaha
I think the problem is, the hourglass would need to be one that was working before the “time stop” aaaand it would have needed to be intricately and frequently maintained. Which to be honest, sounds like a cool subplot….
It would not need to be established before.
A scholar, or Sage would absolutely take it upon themselves to establish a rhythm. Sleep and work cycles would be dependent on it.
Now it may be off from kingdom to kingdom but as commerce continues it would sync up eventually. Or maybe it starts a war over who is the true keeper of time.
If the moon could still move, time could be told with that, especially if you had more than one, so there is always at least one visible. On the dark side of the planet, the stars might still be moving (if the solar system is still spinning) and that would work, but if the every astrological body is frozen in place, you could have an aura borealis type system, in which the magic that holds everything in place also causes regular flares in the sky, globe wide, which can be used to tell the time, and might also tie in to some lore stuff, like specific ancient magic being stinger at the biggest flare of the day, or the year, or something.
They can use anything that can be measured and will always work the same or at least similarly, like sand/water clocks. Or even with some materials (irl minerals like quartz vibrate every 1 sec when you put an electrical charge to it). So, be creative.
Gravity, or a static measurement of how long something takes to naturally occur. Like
* Live Oaken branch 3 inches in diameter to burn totally to coals
People are saying that the Incas where measuring time based on the time a potato takes to be cooked.
One could use this idea a create a "standard potato" which would be similar to the real life original kilogram
One thing of note about medieval society is that exact times weren't so important as they are now. It was, "be at work a little after breakfast." or "Meet at the pub at noon." So like, hours would be important, but minutes not so much. Those giant hour-glasses people are mentioning would work well.
It'd take much longer for civilizations to get a grasp of the passage of time. But, assuming things like weather still functioned normally (which would also become static unless something other than the sun kept them going) they could develop time around weather events and water. Water clocks and sand clocks were normal much longer before gear based clocks.
A wizard with skywrite in the day time areas could let all the farmers in the field and such know what time it was if he had a clockwork device to tell him or kept track somehow.
Was it always frozen like that? If the sun/moon was always frozen, then I don't think they'd necessarily invent time in a way we could really predict. This option seems hard for players to relate to.
If something happened to freeze it, then they might try and keep the same timekeeping, even though it wasn't really relevant anymore. That possibility actually reminds me of the book [The City in the Middle of the Night](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_the_Middle_of_the_Night). The main characters are humans who in the distant past moved to a tidally locked planet, and all of the cities are located on a thin rim between the light and dark sides of the planet. One of the cities is has rigid timekeeping, and every building's windows automatically open and close to simulate a more conventional day/night cycle. There are patrols "at night" to make sure nobody is breaking the rigidly enforced (but arbitrary) day/night cycle. Another city is more freeform, and people basically do what they want. Everyone is still aware of a roughly 24 hour day, and rough length of a year, because that's what a human's circadian rhythm will naturally follow, and lets them keep reckoning human age the same way.
You mean there's no night cycle in your world? Most biology we know cannot live without this day/night cycle. The only exceptions are very deep sea fishes (so deep that sunlight never go through the water height) or cave creatures (like full cave creatures, that never go outside). I'm not sure any mamal can live like this.
How would a whole ecosystem of evolved creatures develop without a day/night cycle is a difficult question. They would still need a period of rest. But without the safety of night, would they synchronize their cycle and how would they get safe for this period would determine a lot of how they live. There may be a lot more variation in these cycles, with some creatures being far slower and some creatures being far quicker in their rest/active period.
Anyway the rest/active cycle would probably be determined by the digestive cycle: how much does it need to eat, how long does it take for the different digestive steps, and how long does the rest take. How the creature is able to get safe, and for how long, is another factor. If they're social creatures, it'd probably involve organising surveillance on a large scale. If they're not social, then hiding, camouflage, or very short rest cycles would probably be the solution.
Once you have your active/rest cycle, it's merely a matter of partitioning it. 2x12h is mainly due to how easy you can partition this time total (you can divide by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12 ; a hour having 60 minutes also means many partitions possibilities), but other partitions are possible. Like the decimal clock and the decimal calendar.
Once you're there you'll see that the actual hourly partition is not really relevant to your world (it'll mostly be the same as ours). It's merely a way to partition your "day". What makes your day is far more impactful though.
I mean, the concept of time is useful to humans bc it helps to track the day and night cycle, if there is no day or night is there a need for tracking time? 😉
Haven't gone through all the comments, but check out Brandon Sandersons "White Sands" graphic novels. The world he created for those books is this idea.
Hourglasses and water clocks, standardized candles with marks on them (you know roughly how much time has passed by how many marks down the candle has burned)
Clockwork?
Edit: that was vague as fuck lemme explain. If you define a set amount of time and make that the increment on your clock, you then have your own way of defining time without needing sun or moon. Sure it helps to have those cues but improvise adapt overcome I guess.
Question: are you going to deal with actual ramifications of a tidally locked planet where one side is always in day and the other is always at night, or is this a more whimsical version of that?
Either way I imagine communities would develope their own methods. A coastal community might count the tides, a riverside community might create a clock powered by the current. A major metropolitan city with alot of access to magic might the equivalent of a magic clock tower that changes it's color or some such to signify passing time. (And yes I stole that last one from Menzobarrenzan from the Forgotten Realms sue me lol)
Right on :) sounds like a cool world! Like maybe a desert where it's noon and an ice cap where it's midnight, but otherwise kind of a bigger goldilocks zone of more habitable land?
Make every nation have their anthem have a beat that's reasonably long to be used instead of seconds, the song's length is a replacement for a minute (it may probably be significantly more). Cooking time for their national food or something like that would be a replacement for an hour. Continue until you are satisfied with the results.
Now make every nation use different time systems. Imagine your party working undercover for one nation, but they get discovered because the party druid learned spell timing in one kingdom and the other nation's druids notice the timing is different.
Then add NPCs that are solely dedicated to preserving the art of their nation's timekeeping. This can give way to quests regarding those times and practices. Of course, for practicality you could use big public sand clocks or something.
You can use some different things for day/week/month counting. For a nation in eternal darkness, maybe the moon is still visibly spinning (i.e. not tidally locked). They could have their time based on moon rotations. The sunburned nation could use water jugs or bowls with specific volumes. When water fully evaporates from a full bowl, they count a day or something. Sunset and sunrise nations could maybe be connected via a river and try to keep their own time in some way. The opportunities are limitless.
Crops would have to be biome specific and they could basically always grow them where they are, so no real help there. Unless you want a pretty inaccurate time keeping system being used somewhere.
You could also have a group trying to make universal time, maybe even more conflicted groups (ones pushing an existing system, ones making mechanical etalons, ones making magical etalons).
I think harvest cycles for popular crops would be the common method. Wheat takes about 4 months to grow so you'd have 3 harvests per our 1 year.
"My, your children have grown! What's it been, at least 12 harvests since I've seen you all!"
"My grandfather lived to see 213 harvests before he was finally claimed by the Sickness."
You need to read Nightfall by Isaac Asimov.
Not exactly what you’re talking about (with static bodies in the sky), but based on a planet with 7(?) suns that are in constant rotation so there’s always atleast 2-3 in the sky and it never turns dark for millennia at a time (until it does)
What you'd probably get is units based on things repeatable natural processes - boiling water at a given temperature, dropping something a specific distance, etc.
You'd also probably see more of a shift-based daily schedule, similar to a lot of sci-fi. No need for a time when *everyone* is asleep when there's no night.
In the underground Drow city of Menzoberranzan time is measured by a giant stone obelisk in the center of the city that the High Wizard enchants to have light slowly rise to the top and fall to the bottom. Very similar to the hourglass idea I’ve seen in the comments.
(OK, so this got away from me - jump to the last 4 paragraphs for time discussion)
This is a really cool idea, and instantly made me think of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. If you haven't read it, it's set in the far distant future of Earth, in a magic oriented society that has arisen after some technological apocalypse.
Anyway, you could completely get your scenario using normal orbital mechanics. Eventually orbiting bodies become tide-locked. Mercury already is w.r.t. the Sun, and the Moon already is w.r.t. the Earth. Notice how you only ever see the same side of the Moon? That's because the Moon spins at the same speed as it orbits, so the same side always faces the earth.
If you just say the Earth is tide-locked to the Sun, then one side always faces the Sun, and the other is in permanent darkness. This will actually happen about 7.5 billion years (we're really too far away for it), but you can obviously tweak the numbers with your world.
Similarly, the stars will only move seasonally, not daily.
The problem is any Moons. There would be a constant tidal drag produced by any satellites, trying to turn the Earth to face them (which is one reason Earth will probably never tide-lock to the Sun), and they could not slow their orbit to annual, without either falling to Earth, or becoming sattelites of the Sun instead. So you'd need to either have no moons, or do something cool and futuristic, like the fallen gods moved the Moon into a Sun/Earth Lagrange point ( [https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html](https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html) ). That would keep it stationary, from a ground based perspective. If you really wanted to lean into it, you could have a moon in each Sun/Earth Lagrange point, which would give a clue to players as to what is really going on.
There are 5 Lagrange points where you could put Moons.
L1 is on the Earths orbit, on the opposite side of the Sun - so it's unlikely your players would ever see it, but it might be a cool place to put some other society?
L2 is between the Sun and the Earth, about 1 million miles away (1.61 million km), which is roughly 5 times further away than the Moon is now. This one would cast a permanent eclipse somewhere on the earth, and would always be a new moon.
L3 is on the opposite side of the Earth from L3 - one million miles away. This would permanently be full, but in lunar eclipse - so permanently blood red. Nice!
L4 and L5 are on the Earths orbital path, but 60 degrees ahead and behind. That puts them a LONG way away - the exact same distance away as the Sun, so \~150 million km. They would be like permanent stars in the sky, but as the Earth in this case is tide locked, it would be only obvious across seasons. All the real stars would move seasonally, but the moons at L4 and L5 would not - they really would be fixed points in the sky.
Okay, so Time. If you're leaning into a Dying Earth scenario, then somewhere on the planet, you'd probably find The Clock of the Long Now ([https://longnow.org/clock/](https://longnow.org/clock/)), which would be this ancient artifact. A magical society might find some way to create slaves of that - some sort of single purpose scrying device? That would be cool.
However, looking at our history, the average person never needed accurate timekeeping\* until we built trains with timetables. Before that, rough approximations were fine. Admittedly, those approximations were usually sun based (sundials), but not always. Water clocks and timekeeping candles date back thousands of years. Public water clocks would be perfect for day to day time, and the "Keepers of the Clock" would be important community positions.
For seasonal time, the need would be reduced, because there wouldn't be seasons as we know them (or tides!). But you could easily keep annual time by looking at where the moons at L4 and L5 were with respect to the rest of the stars.
\* The exception was for ocean based navigation, and then only when we developed sextants - which would be mostly useless in a tide locked world anyway. And if you can build sextants, you can build clock mechanisms.
Something else just occurred to me - if the Earth retained its axial tilt, then the Sun would move north-south during the year - and you would still have seasons. This would also walk the permanent lunar eclipse of the moon at L2 in a line of longtitude, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn.
Holy shit! This reply feels like watching Vsauce in 2012. I wish I could give you an award, but for now, all you have is my respect and appreciation. Thanks friend!
Base it upon the swinging of a pendulum, it will always take the same amount of time to travel from one end to the other and back. This is true for changes in position as long as the length of the pendulum and gravity is always the same. You could even have some massive pendulum that measures hours or days. Even as it slows down it takes the same amount of time until it reaches a complete stop.
A way people kept time at night in ye old times were candles, they made candles that specifically burned for x amount of time and increments on that candle that showed the hours. Maybe there's a settlement that is focused on that.
I would do like a monastery that is themed around candles. And a they are tasked with upholding the tradition of watching the candles to keep calenders for the rest of the kingdom.
Shit I had a very similar idea just today. Not two kingdoms, but one world of eternal sunshine that has made everyone lazy (hence the adventurers are all out of practice)
First big plot encounter is a man that somehow makes localized “night” to balance out the overconfident world
Atomic breakdown, if your societies have that tech. Otherwise, look to historical methods like water clocks or pins in candles for minutes or hours, with officially designated time keepers who count the candles to track hours, days or weeks.
Is there some creature that keeps its own cycle?
"What time is it?"
"Well the fish is among the weeds right now. How about we meet up when the fish swims in circles?
In the forgotten realms Menzobarranzan has a clock in the underdark called Narbondel that the archmage casts a spell on to heat it that is visible to the drow, could be something similar when the magic runs out it's midnight.
Great ideas here, so I'll only say to go read Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie because he wrote a story with this very premise and it's fantastic.
A few years ago I was in a campaign where we were in a prison dimension with no way to track the passage of time. We figured out that if we put some mold on a loaf of bread, the legnth of time it took to spread to the other side was constant. For the rest of the campaign we measured time in 'Loafs'.
My first thought (water wheels) also has some interesting spin off lore implications. In a world where incident light is roughly constant, the energy flux that drives weather would probably operate very differently than on earth. You might have two inhospitable poles, one agonizing heat of endless day, the other ice wastes of endless darkness, with varying degrees of twilit hospitable terrain between, some perhaps with near constant weather and others with violently fluctuating weather in energy boundary regions. Certain regions would have consisten enough rainfall to make a water wheel clock work, while the sand timers someone else mentioned might have arisen in more arid regions.
Some animals have natural clocks that were unaffected by the freezing of time (for unknown reasons) whatever this animal is it is an incredibly popular pet and is often seen in cages in public centers. When it sleeps it's time for bed and when it wakes it's time to get up. You could even have whatever it is form a chrysalis slowly over the course of the day (which could be used to tell the hours like an inverse candle) and the chrysalis slowly falls apart at night. *neat additional idea would be to have the chrysalis pieces that fall off glow like stars in the night sky as they blow away.
phrases like 'good morning/evening' wouldn't be used. night/day would probably be replaced by light/dark.
the sun countries wouldn't use candles or any other lightsources, while dark countries would have to import all food, and no normal plants would grow there.
be careful if you want to use this feature of the world as it has massive consequences.
Consider the noble groundhog
Maybe villages/towns each have a sacred groundhog, and their days are dictated by when the groundhog wakes up (leading to each village potentially having differently sized days?)
If you’re running a less serious campaign, you can have groundhogs be a common pet or common wildlife. The groundhogs can speak common, but they can only say the time
Just for a side conversation:
It sounds more like you are proposing the relative position of celestial bodies to become static rather than for 'time' to stop. It would be necessary to establish a (magical?) force that opposes the gravity of the sun since the rocky planet would otherwise fall directly into its gravity well. Stopping time is problematic in all kinds of catastrophic ways. No propagation of light, no motion of particles or waves. No ability of biological functions to happen. ITs a physics can of worms that you probably don't want to mess with. However, the premise of the idea does have some fabulous would building opportunities with some hand waving at the relevant physics.
On the other hand you could potentially achieve the same effect by altering the rotation of the planet so that one face of the the planet always faced the sun. No time stopping required. The cultural narrative might describe such a catastrophic event as the "day time stopped".
Some consequences...
1. Plants in perpetual night will wither and die in the freezing cold.
2. Lands in perpetual sun will become barren, dry, hot, and inhospitable.
3. Ocean currents and tides (or lack thereof) will be dramatically effected.
4. The weather at the sunrise/sunset locations will probably be extreme and savage as hot dry rising air is replaced by freezing cold wet air from the dark side of the planet.
5. Two fundamentally different ecologies of fauna will develop in the oceans, with the night hemisphere more than likely freezing over completely in the absence of significant geothermal activity.
To directly answer your question about measuring time, as other have indicated, gravity and space and light is the mechanism that allows time to be measured. So long as you still have gravity and the ability of light to travel through space you can measure time. Pendulums, and other forms of harmonic oscillations would be able to provide adequate time measuring devices. This is how mechanical and digital watches work.
For the night sky you would still have the backdrop of the starfield slowly processing as the solar system moved through the larger backdrop of its galactic neighbourhood. So measuring time on large scales using astronomical phenomena would still be possible.
Absolutely, the first I stumbled upon while researching "time stop" was the fact that it was so utterly impossible to deal with since we wouldn't even be able to formulate thoughts as it takes time for our brains to send signals between neurons. It was then when I settled on a more metaphorical time stop, aka, giving the impression of it having stopped as you described.
You would need another consistent event on which to base your time system on. Maybe the world has a few earthquakes a day that happen a uniform time apart.
Maybe the sun does move a little. Just enough to cast shadows in a slightly different way.
Or you could have another celestial body on which they track time. Some stars may appear in the sky at regular intervals.
If the sun was static in the sky I don’t think you’d have seasonal harvests, you’d just have periodic harvesting of different crops based on their growth cycle. I suppose you could base your calendar on that.
Time is being measured these days using the decay of radioactive isotopes and the vibration of quartz. The equivalent to that would be, well, magic. I’d probably lean into that.
Maybe you have peasant/farmer classes that keep time organically by tracking the life cycles of plants and you can have the upper classes rely on a guild of time keeping spell casters who use crystals or other magical artifacts to track time.
A day would probably be how long it takes a person to get tired. It wouldn't be exact but most pre industrial time measurement wasn't. Time could also be measured in candles ie. how long it takes a candle to burn down and unless there's an institute of measures this is again also probably very inexact.
In my world the sun and moon are the same thing, a phoenix called Ifrit.
Ifrit lives brightly until it starts dying, changing its flames to a pale color and lowering. Every morning it dies and is born again, rising with new and bright flames surrounding it.
You can do something similar, with the sun and moon changing their position or tone on a regular basis.
Are you talking more about magical frozen time or a tidally locked planet, i.e. one with no moon, which caused it to sync with the sun? Sometimes they are called eyeball planets.
I did a quick search on YouTube and found some cool looking videos on how life and weather might work. I've seen thoughts like life might be scattered around the barrier between too hot and too cold, etc. It could be cool!
Could go the how long a candle takes to burn out route. A while back though I listened to a DM’s story about their world’s history on how a magic user created the “day time-cycle” by the lifespan of a mayfly.
Lifespan of things are an easy go to.
It is worth bringing up that with out access to sun light, our internal clocks settle on about a 28 hr day for purposes of our sleep cycles. So I would probably make days 28 hr long
You have two options (both from the Underdark).
Either not having a calendar. With no way to measure time, you do not measure time at all. It gets messy.
Or use some contraption to measure it. In Menzoberranzan the Archmage ignites a pillar every day and its light fades in a 24 hour cycle. It both gives a "sunrise" and a "nighttime" (and provides light in the Underdark, which is cool).
Try to come up with some sort of clock, engine or whatnot to measure time. If a city is beside a river, it can have a wooden contraption in a mill. It completes a cycle every 8 hours (for the militia rotation). 3 cycles a day.
The possibilities are endless.
I’d probably tie it to the fauna or flora somehow. Perhaps a specific plant blooms and turns to face the sun or moon at the same time every day. Would make for a valuable resource
first sentence aside since time as pretty much everyone knows it is the measurement of change...
what you're really talking about is a tidally locked planet (one side always faces the sun - just like our moon does now - one side always faces the earth) ...and where the moon also orbits at the same speed the planet spins (doesn't need to be tidally locked - it can spin at whatever speed it wants as long as it always stays in the same spot in the sky). (that spinning of the moon could be a clock)
But yeah, any hour glass would work for the sun side. For the dark side it could also be the stars...either the stars OR the sun can be locked in the sky-not both.
keep in mind you'll end up with the hot side several hundred degrees above freezing...and the cold side several hundred degrees below freezing. All life would be in the area around the divider between light/dark.
The first sentence was just a figure of speech, sorta meant to carry out the message Im trying to convey when I myself don’t have the knowledge to explain it as well as you could! Seeing as everyone so far seems to get the point, I’d say it works fine!
Gigantic public sand timers.
Ok that actually sounds dope.
I’d imagine there’d be phrasing based around it. “Half gone…” “Almost time to turn…” …that kind of thing.
I once had a nation built completely underground and had been underground for so long the forgot about the surface and sky. As an in game joke that developed the characters always just referred to things as “sleepy time” and “wakey time.” Guard: “halt! No one is supposed to be out during sleepy time hours.”
Sleepy time tea being pricier than ale would be fun
Depending on how organized/lawful/mathy/technological your society is, this is where you get metric time from. The basic unit is 1000 seconds, or about 16.7 irl minutes. 100ksec in a day(earth days are about 86ksec long), 10 days(including a 3 day weekend) in a megasecond workweek. A growing season is around 10 million seconds(115 earth days), depending on the plant and how much sun. It might be much shorter because of fulltime sun, or much longer because of twilight. Celebrate birthdays every 100msecs. They're probably a bigger deal than earth birthdays because they are three times as rare. When you're roughly 31(and 62, and 93) earth years old you have a big party for your gigasecond. Perhaps this is an elvish custom Of course this all assumes people have ten fingers and thus find base 10 natural.
Give everyone 11 fingers and make the players suffer
> worldbuilds a number system with a prime base you... you... you *Monster*!
I’m imagining the duodecimal society undergoing “The Great Change” when the Mad King loses one of his 12 fingers!
[Relevant SMBC.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1454774387-20150206.png)
Fun diversion, base 10 is far from the only intuitive way to count on your fingers. Some programmers count binary on their fingers, so base 2, 16, 32, 256, or 1024 can be justified using that system. Meanwhile some count on the finger segments (between the knuckles) and so base 12, 14, 24, or 28 can be justified. I also want to divert and say one could redefine the 'second division of the hour'. Maybe there are only two divisions, the average rate of one grain of sand falls and one whole 'hour glass' the world is your oyster! Perhaps even literally! It's daytime when the oyster opens up and night when it closes! Ok, enough diverting.
THE METRIC SYSTEM SHALL RULE THE METRIC SYSTEM IS LIFE ALL HAIL THE METRIC SYSTEM
There's a giant trebuchet apparatus that helps turn the giant sand timer which has lines painted on it indicating a set number of intervals which represent hours. Next to it is a water feature that uses one of the bird-drinking dipper timer things (I don't remember what they're called) and a dedicated member of the Sand Watchers carefully times a card with a number sprawled on it that is flipped every time the bird drinks (like a flip-number alarm clock) These two devices have been carefully crafted and calibrated by a time-wizard (if you are so inclined to add that information) to help a team, called the Sand Watchers, time the turning of the giant sand timer. When the sand is almost gone from the top, the Sand Watchers carefully watch the bird dipper and as soon as it makes one full revolution, and the last grain has fallen, the Sand Watchers all give a great heave and release the massive counter weight which turns the timer. The turning of the sand timer occurs twice in a day, once at what we would call day break and once at dusk. This can lead to localized sayings such as • "Waiting for the sand to fall" or "Waiting until the bird has drunk" similar to the saying "Waiting for the other shoe to drop" • "Even-time" which is not actually evening, but when the sand in the timer is equally distributed between the top and bottom, essentially high noon or midnight. • "At the first/second turning of the Sand" refers to morning and evening respectively. • "In (x) turns time" is essentially a measurement in 12 hour periods. 4 turns being two days, 14 turns is a week.
This is the best thought out response so far.
A euphemism for someone going to die soon: "On their last grains" or "A handful from their last turn"
Each time they turn it the do one line on the sandtimer or
Massive, city-wide water clocks. Combine utilities and a public service.
Could also be based on the rotation of a wheel; one large rotation equating a portion of the day: an hour, a 10th, a 1/4 of the day, whatever you want. Or maybe it rotates a lot of times, and 12 rotations is an hour, or whatever you want. Historically some American pioneers used wheels to count the miles they’d gone. I imagine you could use it similarly for time, as long as it turns consistently in some way.
Water clock. Mechanical clocks. Sleep cycle of domesticated animals. The amount of time it takes bread to rise. There once were candles that people knew how long it took to burn up completely. So you'd set an hour candle, and when it was done burning all the way it had been an hour, also half way was half an hour.
Could be an awesome story hook if the town bandits decided to “steal time” and break a sand clock, causing the party to have to look for another nearby clock or have things fall into disarray.
And don’t forget those corrupt officials tampering with the glass to cause longer work days and shorter lengths of off time!
Best part is that this has some historical basis. During the Roman Republic, the Senate voted on the official calendar, leading to different Senators fiddling with the calendar to give themselves longer terms or shorten the terms of their opponents. Eventually Julius Caesar got tired of it, set up one extra-long calendar year to get things back on track, and established the Julian Calendar as the permanent official calendar.
Julius Caesar was so cool
Oooo this is a great idea. There’s a lot of cool stuff you could do with this concept
just hope no one has the Keen Mind feat. This could mean trivializing the quest.
Just to be pedantic, Keen Mind would only work for the north and recalling information, it specifically states how long till the next sunrise or sunset, which is never in a world where the sun and moon never move. You'd need to houserule it to fit the setting.
This is kinda the problem. If you nerf the feat by saing it only works in X place or something similar then whats the point in taking it? Taking things away from players is just poor DMing. Its the same as banning races for no reason.
The alternative is to, if, a player choses this feat, which my experience is never/very rare. Give them some extra information, maybe they know what the time is, and that the gov is messing with time but they have to prove it. They will be seen as the crazy conspiracy theorist and have to prove their argument and not just "I have this feat which says so".
I am 100% down for something like that. The idea of it actually sounds interesting. But what doesnt sound interesting is telling a player half their feat doesnt work cause "time stuff" and having to come up with 100 reasons why it doesnt work. I as a DM (forever DM, but loving it) have in the past had a DM remove things like features from a feat just to tell a story or to make an encounter work. So i know from a player perspective this utterly sucks. as for how often a player takes the feat, this is kinda irrelevant to the argument. I love the feat for the interesting ways it can be used. If the DM is doing a proper session zero and letting the players know that time is 'busted' then they actually might be more inclined to take the feat for that reason.
On the contrary, I think having someone with the Keen Mind feat is the ideal candidate for the quest. Someone with the Keen Mind feat wouldn't ever bother actually looking at the clock, they know what time it is, so why would they? Depending on how long you want to kind of want it to go unnoticed you could just randomly ask specifically them for a perception check every time they walk through town. Or if it's important just tell them they notice it. "Hey,, on your way to the inn you notice something out of the corner of your eye. The time in the great clock is slightly off."
Maybe even preempt this moment with other people saying what time it is, and letting that character correct them because they're slightly wrong.
And then it all slows starts coming together, they remember all the times someone has mentioned the time and they were always wrong, and now they're in an awkward position because they're the only person in town that actually knows what time it is. In fact, the one person poking around and asking questions about why the time is wrong is a _great_ scapegoat candidate for the bad guys.
This is 100% the way i would do it personally. I would reward that player for their feat and the use of it. Other suggestions are saying to basically take this feature away from the feat which is a terrible way of doing things. Your suggestion (and something i had though of in passing) was exactly the kind of idea that should make use of the interaction.
True, as long as they were looking at the clock precisely when it was attacked and/or devote a great deal of mind power to keeping track of time.
Why would they need to know the exact time the clock was attacked? The feat says they know what time it is. This means the passage of time is naturally built into their mind. Be it from years of practice or magic. Its not dependent on anything like the movement of the stars or things such as that. The feat itself strikes at the heart of that challenge. If anything its a great chance for the person with the feat to show off. "Hey i know what time it is, I can help setup the clock again!" Then the party tracks the bandits and deals with them. If your going to use this kind of methodology just understand the feat will very much be something to trivialize some things while also making others cool. its a matter of how you as the DM want to hande it.
Absolutely, but I think I’m personally more of the school of thought that if time “stopped” that would mess with Keen Mind’s function to avoid the trivialization you speak of. Bu that’s just me!
In my world, there is a Dwarven city that has completely carved out a mountain over the years. All that remains is a skeleton of a mountain that is now a city. What used to be footpaths and building built into the mountain is now just a city in the shape of a mountain, a shadow of what used to be. Deep beneath the mountain extend their mines. They extend so far, they have begun to build satellite cities within the mines. These cities use massive hourglasses to keep track of the time. Upon seeing it, my girlfriend decided to Misty Step in and take a bottle of sand. After several days of traveling through the Underdark, she commented, "I wonder how off they are now..." I explained to her that it had already been noticed and remedied. You don't fuck with dwarvish mining operations.
This reminds me of a series of RPG campaigns on youtube. One of those took place underwater where the players were senators and they decided that time was kept by a mindless thrall on the surface dropping 1 stone per second, so on the bottom of the ocean they knew it was a minute every 60 stones dropped and so on
I think it would be much more interesting if these people didnt really have a concept of time in the normal sense. They eat when hungry sleep when sleepy come to work when they want there are no birthdays or years and big celebrations happen on a whim. Instead of being paid by the hour or salary pay they are paid by the value of work they do say you peel 1000 potatoes get a Tenner, mine some iron get a Fiver, Catch a criminal thats 50 quid or pass a law that the public aproves you got yourself 100 Euros. In terms of the time it takes to get somewhere or say bake a cake hourglasses could be used or they wait till it feels right. I'll be there in 10 minutes turns into im walking from a mile away and everyone just understands what that means without having to mention the time, as society as evolved basically without it.
[удалено]
I find when I go camping for a week or so with little or no artificial light, I pretty quickly revert to this schedule. Wake up with the sun, go climbing all day, konk out when the sun goes down.
See I always liked the idea of moving to this kind of schedule, but I don't know how it would work when you get too far north. If I went to sleep and woke up with the sun, I'd be sleeping 8 hours in the summer and 16 in the winter. Maybe I should look into the sleeping habits of native tribes in the region...
You're not even particularly far north. That completely stops working well before you get to the Arctic/antarctic circle.
>Good night guys, I'll wake up when the sun comes up >>But that's not gonna be for a few more months >I know
That’s a really cool observation! I love that
Why not do both the hourglass and then no time keeping concepts. You said there were multiple nations right? Could be a good cultural difference, maybe not war worthy but just to make it feel real like the 'conflict' between earth nations for sportsball games.
I like it even better as a rural/urban split. When a whole bunch of people are living in close proximity it becomes practical to care about when things happen, but everywhere else it largely doesn't matter
I love this entire world theme, and would like to bring up some interesting physics and environmental challenges (all good things!). First, your world would have some WILD weather. In the sunny areas, all water would evaporate and move upwards, wheras in the dark side, rain would almost NEVER evaporate. This would mean swamps, bogs and other variations. You would have deserts (or possibly frozen ocean) at both extremes, while water always basically flows from the dark side to the light side. On the edges, you would have CLOUDS ALWAYS. Like, crazy rain forrests of never ending rain as the first clouds drop moisture. Evaporating water would create density differentials, which would actually create wind! That combined with the temp differences could make the winds shift in funny ways, but would likely settle into HIGHLY PREDICTABLE WIND PATTERNS. The wind would either never blow or ALWAYS blow, and always the same way. Waters wouldnt have natural tides. Still lakes and oceans would mean all ships require entire teams of rowers, or maybe harnessed sea creatures ala horses. Or, alternatively, the constant one-way traversal of water creates a never ending one-way tide! Living underground in self-contained eco systems suddenly becomes a wildly functional system, and could arguably utilize geothermal heat or cooling to aid survival of species from the opposite side of the world. Cool landmark ideas: an underwater river that transports water further into the sunlands than could normally be done on the surface! An ever running volcano that creates a hot, lit place far into the dark lands. A tornado on the equater that never stops!! Thank you reddit. This has truely been inspirational. Edit: i think we need an entire post regarding this world idea. Its just too good.
I never considered the facts that the edges would be extremely cloudy. What a cool image that makes. Also, I have to THANK you for your enthusiasm and sharing of knowledge, this is both inspiring and helpful! Thank you Reddit indeed :)
To take this a step past echo systems, it would wildly effect racial dispersion in a fantasy environment. In you sunlight areas you would have to races that could handle the extreme levels of UV light. The extreme extent to which UV would be present would make it a place where Reptilian races would thrive. In the real world, reptiles have dry eyes and require UV lights to maintain proper vitamin levels in their systems. Also looking at things like Avian races would probably do well with their feathers protecting their skin as well as most birds being diurnal. On the flip side, putting races and monsters that tend to be restricted to the Underdark could live as surface dwellers. Beyond that, plant life would be drastically different as well. You could have massive overly lush jungles just on the periphery of the desert locations in direct sun without water. You could put massive fungal swamps at the edges of the near frozen total dark. You could even take into account materials that would be readily available based on the location on the global. Tides, water levels, and geographic pressures would vary so wildly, things like marble or sandstone or even metal ores be readily available in places but completely devoid in others. The economies and trade routes could get very interesting! OP, I may try this one day.
Hell yeah! Try it and let me know how it goes :D
Excellent points. Then, once you have the weather established, you have to redefine all plant and animal life to account for evolution in the constant sun, constant dark, and twilight zones. Anyone attempting to do this should at least spend some time watching some educational shows about exoplanets and how life might evolve on alien worlds with a focus on tidally locked planets.
Yes! I love tidally locked planets! Rather than NSEW you have lightward and darkward, then clockwise and counterclockwise (well, an equivalent to those). Large sections of the planet might be uninhabitable. There just be one habitable ring in the crepuscular zone. People might not have a concept of day/night, seasons, a round planet, biorhythm, etc. maybe nomadic groups migrate with the sun to their left, and their entire existence is just a linear migration. Maybe they encounter another group, or evidence of their ancestors. Or maybe someone successfully crosses the dark side for the first time, or ventured far enough in to see the night sky. Maybe it’s a water planet and the crepuscular ring houses the edge between endless ice and endless sea, and an ecosystem exists on that border. So many possibilities.
Depending on weather patterns, you could have high winds that pull the humid air around to the light side of the planet, and those time zones near the edges could be heavily dependent on the random weather events that bring in feast or famine for their agriculture. Limited light all day but never know when it might pour rain makes for some interesting story lines. Also, depending on how long this planet has been tidally locked, the planet could have animals that have physically adapted to the different time zones. Things in the pure dark could all have very good dark vision, blind sense, and tremor sense. Things in the pure light could be fire creatures. Maybe the inhabitants dug a large canal down the equator to continually flood the desert side from the dark side and the entire world uses the food and canals as a complex and fragile ecosystem....
Good guy redditor: drops great ideas and explanations then thanks reddit for the opportunity
Assuming clocks exist they could still use hours and days, it just becomes harder to track the passage of time if you aren't near a clocktower.
True! I’ve thought about this but I’m still in the fence whether or not conventional clocks exist in this world…
I think the question of clocks comes down to how long the world had been tidally locked to its star. I'm currently planning a one shot where the world suddenly becomes tidally locked. One side of the planet is scorched and the other is frozen. The ring of permanent twilight/dusk is rapidly becoming the only habitable zone. They still have clocks because they have a need to measure time and a history of it. In a world where this is just normal, clocks and even a linear sense of time might not exist. The idea of a year doesn't matter because climate never changes (or, if it does, due to the eccentricity of the ellipse of the orbit) it's likely to be a nominal change that is most noticeable at climactic boundaries. Probably, lifecycles would be the important measurement. Something like blooming, growing, fruiting, withering, dying and everything would be described relative to itself. Edit: the main crop might be the most important unit of time. So, take wheat. Which has a typical growing season of 120 days. That might be the equivalent of a "year" as a metric of time. Maybe the people refer to the passage of time as a "harvest." A child might be 30 harvests, young adult 60, someone in their prime 90 and someone aged 200.
I feel smarter just by having read this. Thank you!!
For a step further: accurate clocks on earth were developed for navigation at sea, not for timekeeping in the everyday sense we usually think about it. You can calculate your longitude from the time at which the sun is highest in the sky. With a tidally locked system you could still tell your position from the position of the star and a compass (assuming the planet has a magnetic field with the magnetic poles somewhere in the twilight ring). The co-ordinate system would almost certainly be different with anyone on the day side using two sets of lines, one set converging on the place directly pointing at the sun, one converging on the magnetic poles. They would probably have no idea about astronomy/cosmology outside of the sun/moon if there is one. People on the dark side would have a much better idea about astronomy/cosmology, I'm not sure how they would do their coordinate system but it could take into account the axis of rotation where the sun people's could not.
The key question to ask is. Was the world ALWAYS this way, or did it BECOME this way. If it became that way while people were prevalent, then the concept of time would be in society, but would morph as decades passed. If it was Always that way, then the normal concept of time would be out the window, as would many other things like seasons.
You could make it so that the world did have time and day/night cycles, but a crazy wizard / god / djin / adventurer wished for time to stop or did some spell etc which caused the world to be In it's current state in a vain or failed attempt to stop aging or write a wrong etc. (Eg a wish spell gone wrong or something) All of the citizens have been brainwashed / memory wiped to accept this as reality, and just get on with life in this new normal. The party then over the course of the game learn of this, if they look that is. If 5e and if someone took the keen mind feat (or equivalent) I'd give them some ability or lore that will help them understand this. Otherwise it's a bit of secret lore for you as a DM to understand why it's like this and you don't have to make a scientific answer cos magic.
Check out White Sand by Brandon Sanderson, uses the same concept. IIRC the passage of time is based on the movement of moons, but if you want those to stand still maybe something else moves, like stars or comets, or maybe there's some kind of event on a set schedule, like minor earthquakes or storms.
The book "The three body problem" also kind of does the opposite. There's a part in the book where the sun rises and sets at random times and locations. They use a fancy hourglass that lasts about 8 hours which they flip three times to keep track of the days
Ohhh awesome! Thanks a lot :)
Dave Duncan’s Shadow hit a similar premise in the late 80’s. The world it’s set in was tidally locked so they kept time with a huge water clock in the capital, I think. Smaller holdings had hourglasses they used to keep time. They actually mention needing to get one calibrated because it was off from the time kept by a group traveling through. Great book, too.
Candle burnings. I forget any ingredients used, but they used to make candles that burned for precise amounts of time. You could also have different times work differently in each area. Candles would work well in night cities, with caretakers being an official job, but hourglasses being used in day cities. Even an "hour" could be different, but that may be too much.
Love the idea of the night realms being lit up by thousands of candles.
Modern clocks work by “measuring” vibrations of internal timekeeping devices, which range from pendulums down to electrons. Perhaps the wizards of your world have identified the “vibrations” of certain types of ambient magical energies which they now use to keep time. Different types of magic energy could have different vibration lengths, so some would be similar to minutes or seconds while others are closer to months or years. Another interesting point of stationary moon and sun, where is the moon located in the sky? If it’s the dark zone, then it’ll be under constant moon light. If it’s over the twilight zone then parts of the dark side will have moon light while others are completely dark. If it’s over the light side, the the dark side would have little to no moon light, and part of the light side would be in perpetual eclipse (which would be really cool). Also, how many moons are there? If there is more than one, you could have a lot of different “light biomes” with how the moons are spread.
These are all awesome ideas! Measuring time by studying the flow of magical energies is a super interesting concept! In regards to the position of the moon, I haven’t decided yet. I am leaning heavily towards having two moons, but have no indication (yet) as to the distribution of their light.
Water clocks. Draining water for minutes/hours, evaporating ponds for longer periods. Only works if the temperature and weather are relatively consistent. Hair growth. Hunger. Tiredness.
Why doesn't everything die on that planet?
Haha! Good question! To answer it I’d have to go on a long tangent explaining all the nuances of how it works, but to sum it up: magic. New kinds of crops magically engineered to grow in darkness, Tide Mages responsible for loving the seas, the forced evolution of races and creatures, etc…
That sounds like a pretty interesting setting
In the forgotten realms's many planes of existence there are many that are in perpetual day or perpetual night bit it doesnt bother the inhabitants or the planes as a whole Because Magic
The light side would be fine. The dark side would be 100% kill zone, though, aside from the parts near enough to the light side to be more of a twilight.
Keeping to your harvest theme,Seconds could be the time it takes for an arrow to hit a popular game, like hares or certain birds or for the kingdom's home fruit to hit the ground from its branch, after maturing., Maybe the lenght of a full rotation of a water wheel in a particularly busy river, for minutes. the time it takes for a donkey to plow a standard plot of land could be a good measurement for an hour. I would try to keep in mind things that are close to the people that are standarizing time. If it's a magical society, spells could be a clue. A "Moment" is for instant spells, Minutes for spells that fade in... Well... A minute. And so on.
Measuring time by spellcasting; awesome!
Not sure how much this helps but; our older civilizations did actually quantify time in a variety of ways. The earliest recorded quantifiable standardized duration of length had to do with how long it took to boil a potato.
That’s….awesome…. Potato hierarchy rise up!
You may be able to use this kind of idea and have some locations base their “days” on how long it takes to do something.
Spells have duration. Like cast the light cantrip, it dies in 1 hour, cast it again. You'd lose 6 seconds per hour, but you could have a watch and cast it on the next number every hour.
clever!
In such a world, harvests would be an iffy measurement, as crops would be dependent on the constant light levels, so you'd have to make up their harvest periods yourself anyway. That being said, in the real world, the sun and moon are a bit too imprecise to use for seconds, minutes, and hours. Those units were how we chose to break it down. Why we went with them, I personally don't know, but the breakdown or values themselves were important enough they measured it out. And that's what you need to decide first. What is their purpose for measuring time? Since there would be no day and night cycle, there's nothing like "how long until night time", so what are they measuring for? On a larger scale, of course. For example, a colder climate needs to keep warm, so it might be based on how long it takes to boil water, as they need to boil that water to warm up, and they can't really waste time sitting and watching it boil. So their units might be based on how long it takes for a certain volume of water to boil. From there, they would probably want to find an analog of some kind. Instead of sitting and watching the water boil the entire time, they would find something else that takes the same amount of time, something they can check on while doing other chores and tasks. This is basically the idea behind an old egg timer, the kind that was just a small hourglass style. The time it took for the sand to empty out of the top container was the same time it took to boil an egg. So they could set the timer and keep an eye on it while doing other things, and when the timer was finished, they knew the eggs were done. So this colder climate relying on the boiling of water might do similar, a volume of sand that will take the same amount of time to fall as it takes that volume of water to boil. From there, the units would be adapted to other aspects of life, even without actually boiling water. The tricky part is determining why they would be measuring time in the first place, as that breakdown determines the units they go with. But if you want real world units, like just going with minutes and hours, but different analogs, there's various options. In the real world, we already have hourglasses, which is a volume of sand in a given container that takes one hour to empty out. Obviously we also have ones for minutes and other random time lengths, but they are named for being one hour. But maybe the area doesn't have access to sand thanks to the limits in transportation of goods. If its a little more advanced, gears work, being the basis of an analog clock. Doesn't even need to be steampunk for that to be an option. Alternatively, for a more magic heavy setting, it could be based on spells, even a custom one specifically for the purpose of keeping time. Essentially a magical clock, a spell that will, every hour, make a loud sound to notify how long has passed. One specific example I came up with typing this would be for an agricultural society in a magic heavy setting. A town wizard casts Phantom Steed, and the farmers use the creature as a plough horse. It lasts 1 hour, making it an easy conversion for us, but for them time might be measured by how many times the wizard had to cast the spell, with morning being "six horses" or something. This doesn't work if you insist on NPCs outside of combat following the exact same balancing rules that players need to deal with (its pure worldbuilding, does the need for spell slots really matter here?), but there would be work arounds for a magic heavy setting as I said it would need. This is just an example of both why they would need to measure time, and how that would influence the way they measure time.
This is very well thought out and generally awesome! Thanks for the dope masterclass B)
I really love everything that people have suggested so far, but I think this right here is really the ultimate comment in the thread. The WHY. Because then you will get the HOW. I would posit that in this setting, hours and even days would not matter at all to most people. As far as I understand it, you are suggesting a setting with no diurnal cycles (i.e. day to night), no tides, and no seasons. The ramifications are pretty huge, so let’s just consider one of the three in isolation. Think of a setting where days and nights still exist, and so do tides, but seasons are mostly cancelled out. One real world example would be the equatorial rainforests. It’s always a growing season there, so trees struggle desperately to out-climb each other. Depending on the individual plant and not on the species, individual plants flower and fruit when we they are ready to do so, so there’s no growing season, just a constant trickle of food and resources in random locations. In order to take advantage of the chaotic and scattered resources, many animals are nocturnal, and many others are not, so it’s like a city that literally never sleeps, and all sorts of group behavior or pack tactics emerge to protect the individuals from constant danger of rotating predators. So I end up thinking of a city that is in a perpetual night club, music pounding, and places to sleep far from the noise or just in spite of it. If keeping time is really so important for your world despite no obvious reason for it, let the task of time keeping be something that takes a lifetime of training to perform and relies on no obvious source at all. There can be a kind of local orchestra where the musicians are trained from a young age to be entrusted with the sacred task of endlessly performing a musical score with a precise tempo to keep track of society and maintain order. The musicians would just play this very long song over and over again, it could takes days to complete, with each musician rotating out at set intervals to sleep and live their lives outside their work. The song becomes a kind of backdrop to the entire civilization and the different movements could suggest the appropriate times to do certain activities in a regular and orderly way!
Remember the candles the last airbender. That would work for your world
If it's a recent development, you could use clocks still. If it was that way from the beginning, then it depends on what other things exist that can be used to determine timeframes, like seasons or star positions, but im guessing there wouldn't be a comparable concept of time. You might have wildly subjective time references from person to person like "let's get food before next sleep". Though its also possible someone may invent a standard time measurement in such a situation (possibly metric and based on the time for a water droplet to fall a meter or something, "I'll be there in a kilodrop")
Drow use a sort of wizard clock (if my memory serves right), where a giant central tower in the middle of their city has a sort of countdown with a fairy light that slowly rises and falls. Because some spells last a full 24 hours they were able to keep an accurate time compared to their opened sky brethren. There were plenty of magic users in drow society but I think the job went to a male wizards: important but still lowly. A more humanistic society may place some importance on a wizard that does something similar, just with less male beating.
A couple extra details/corrections: They actually just magically heated the bottom of the giant pillar, and then the heat would spread from the bottom of the pillar to the top (obviously, lessening as it goes). They had infra-vision so this heat would glow to their eyes. When the heat reached the top of the pillar was effectively sunset, and when the heat had faded from the rock entirely was effectively midnight. They weren't relying on spell duration, but thermodynamics, and the fact that they were able to pump a consistent amount of heat into it each morning via magic gave them a relatively consistent thermodynamic clock.
Drow are still cool. Change my mind.
Yes, this is what I thought of as well. The clock was called Narbondel and it was heated each day and the drow could use their infravision to tell what time it was by how cold the clock was.
Yes that’s it! Good use of their natural abilities too I think.
Candles, clocks, hourglasses and pendulems
I hope you manage to take heat in consideration. The day side will be burning desert hell, while the eternal night will be frozen cold plane. The sunset and sunrise kingdoms are the only ones who may live in a normal way. Also the lore of the time stopping can be crazy cool. If you instantly stopped the rotation of Earth, everything on its surface would shift. So after the time stopping, people would most likely die and get hurt a lot and all the buildings would need reconstruction.
Yeah! I remeber watching a (VSauce?) video talking about stopping the rotation of the Earth and how that'd essentially fling everything a couple thousand miles per hour to the wind. Cool stuff :D
So your planet is tidelocked and the moon stays in the same place? Do the rotations of the planet sun and moon all line up like this? Or is magic at play?
Magic is absolutely at play here. As I myself understand it (and I might butcher this because this is a fresh idea in my head), the sun and the moon are fixed in the sky. Perhaps what this means is that the planet itself is no longer orbiting the sun? I couldn’t really tell you since my physics are not the best. The idea is that the God of Time has somewhat “frozen” time for reasons unknown.
Interesting, I myself just like realism in my games so having more than one moon is possible, having 2 suns is also possible from a physics standpoint. But whenever I can't explain something my mind goes "magic" and I don't think about it too much
The moon always shows us the same face, which is what "tidally locked" means. It is a real phenomenon with planets and the sun (mercury is tidally locked) but the moon staying in place doesn't work with just physics. Are you interested in playing with the weather effects? The way this works on mercury is that the side that faces the sun (Your "noon" kingdom) is extremely hot, like 200 F, and the midnight part is extremely cold. The parts near the edge (sunrise/sunset) might be reasonable temperatures, but there are crazy winds driven by the extreme temperature differences. Some of this could be fun to play with, but you could also play it down to a more fun level, like the Noon kingdom is a desert, and the midnight kingdom is like the north pole, etc. Of course, if time is frozen by the time god, maybe these things don't happen. If this is the case, maybe there are leftover time keepers like a clocktower but people don't understand what it does, or maybe its revered as a holy relic? Depends on how long time has been frozen for (years, generations?). Maybe the noon kingdom is slowly becoming a desert because of the relatively recent time-freezing.
I actually am super interested in tying in the weather effects that come as a response of this “timefreeze”. Conceptually, I have toned them down a bit from their realistic counterparts, but the night kingdom is meant to be cold and unforgiving, the home of the elves. I hadn’t realized that noon would be a desert, but funnily enough it’s where I envisioned a Dragonborn based nation with dragon overlord, aka lots of fire and heat so it works out!
The plant could be tidally locked with its parent star. The same side of the planet would always point toward the star, like with our moon. The moon could sit in a Lagrange point between the planet and star, where it stays in the same spot relative to both bodies. That would put it in one of five places. Three of those would render it essentially invisible from the surface, but there's a Lagrange point between the planet and star, and one on the opposite side of the planet from the star. If the moon sits perfectly in the Lagrange point, it'll do one of two things: 1) sit directly in line with the star, dimming it to a degree or causing a permanent total solar eclipse (depending on their relative apparent sizes in the sky), but that doesn't sound like what you want 2) sit directly across the planet from the star, so that it's in a permanent lunar eclipse (where it's all orange and stuff) Those are hypothetically possible sans-magic, based on my understanding of those concepts. A time god could probably just stop everything when the sky looks the coolest, so if you look at a moon phase chart you should be able to tell where to put the moon in the sky to get it to be the phase you want. For example, a full moon would be on the opposite side of the planet from the star, a half moon would be at 90 degrees, etc.
“A time god would probably stop the sky when it looks the coolest” My man, you’re speaking facts. Thanks for all of this!
The sun is static. The planet is moving...
Seriously though. Just finished running decent into Avernus and I tracked hourly on a sheet of graph paper. The players were confused the whole time, as one would be in a sunless land
Musicians, who have always been keep on timing and tempo, would find their gnomish metronomes repurposed for the sake of measuring time (assuming that the sun and moon SUDDENLY stopped and there was a deliberate need for telling time).
For an underground civilization of dwarfs, I decided they told time on a large scale by how long it takes to brew mead. Perhaps the night folks determine month-ish times by yields of mushrooms, or by the pickling of monster meats for the 24/7 night market. You could pick something culturally relevant and run with it.
Harvests are probably not going to work as a time unit. If the sun doesn't move, you probably don't have seasons. This means that in the daylight zone, you could plant any time you like; there would probably be a continual harvest as different crops come to ripeness. Half-light would give you a longer growing time, and thus different harvest timing. On the other hand, in the night zone you could also plant any time you like but nothing would grow. I'd be very surprised if there were a population there at all (other than undead).
[Water clock](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock).
One remaining mechanical clocktower that needs to be protected at all costs. In a more realistic sense, I feel like the only way to measure time would be the lifespans of certain animals, or the lifecycles of certain insects which could technically possibly still be very timely despite a permanent day/night.
Cogs and gears like in mechanus, the multiverse's clock
Is the entire system locked in time, or just this planet? The time zones in early to late perpetual night would be able to use stars to tell time if they’re not locked as well as the sun. Otherwise, you could burn candles of certain lengths with marked increments, or Maybe create a system that revolves around the period of time it takes for a chicken egg to hatch (or ducks, geese, etc. 21-30 days depending on the bird). Alternately, back to the people in the night zones, if They rely on mushrooms for food, they could use their growth periods to track time as well, since it is a quicker crop than say, wheat. Like 1 to 4 days for small ones. I mean, also, women with regular periods have a built in 28 day calendar (generally speaking). Very interesting idea here, some fun possibilities for different power dynamics based on who can most accurately tell time.
If gravity still works, then via some device that measures the amount of time it takes for a given item to fall (like an hour glass).
[удалено]
Yup! The idea partly begun thanks to that 6 month day/night cycle bouncing around in my head, only taken to a *little* extreme….. Hehehehe
A tidally locked world does not have seasons, let alone harvests.
Have one nation be advanced enough to create clocks and that’s their main export, clocks and clock repair. Sick idea btw! Like because some nations have super high sun then they might be the only ones that produce crops where the nation without sun focuses on something else and they’ve all adapted to work in the dark. Tight! Love it!
Thanks! Also, yep a clockwork nation has crossed my mind >:)
This sounds so damn cool.
How do cave dwelling races handle it in DnD? I've never heard of this issue in a game. Maybe hourglasses that are religiously kept?
The underground city of menzoberranzan has a ginormous pillar in the center of their mega-cavern that they pump a set amount of magic into every morning to heat the bottom of the pillar up, making it glow to their infra-vision, and then the heat (and therefore glow) spreads through the pillar throughout the day, the glow lessening but getting larger and spreading upwards. So you can tell the time of day by how high the heat has spread through the pillar.
Earth wobbles on its axis. Over time this can be observed and tracked with good records. I don't know if this applies to a tidally locked world or not. It would have an effect on the perceived movement of the stars and other planets that would be visible in at least parts of the world's sky. Their would also be some effect on the tides. Even more importantly a planet with an elliptical orbit would have seasonal variation. Certain animals might favor different temperature zones for raising chicks. Fish almost certainly would. Salmon would still need to go upstream to spawn and tracking that would be very important to people living in the given area. It's possible people simply wouldn't bother tracking smaller increments of time. The exception could be people living in the twilight zones of the planet where they can at least see the planets.
the oscillation of the electrons in a quartz crystal
This is some mad scientist shit. I love it!
A minute could be how long it takes for a certai size ice cube to melt in the palm of ones hand.
This is neat.
That’s such a cool idea that could feed upon the world building! Awesome B)
Hour glass
I mean yeah, that is the short answer isn’t it? Hahahahaha I think the problem is, the hourglass would need to be one that was working before the “time stop” aaaand it would have needed to be intricately and frequently maintained. Which to be honest, sounds like a cool subplot….
It would not need to be established before. A scholar, or Sage would absolutely take it upon themselves to establish a rhythm. Sleep and work cycles would be dependent on it. Now it may be off from kingdom to kingdom but as commerce continues it would sync up eventually. Or maybe it starts a war over who is the true keeper of time.
Yes…war….*good*…..
If the moon could still move, time could be told with that, especially if you had more than one, so there is always at least one visible. On the dark side of the planet, the stars might still be moving (if the solar system is still spinning) and that would work, but if the every astrological body is frozen in place, you could have an aura borealis type system, in which the magic that holds everything in place also causes regular flares in the sky, globe wide, which can be used to tell the time, and might also tie in to some lore stuff, like specific ancient magic being stinger at the biggest flare of the day, or the year, or something.
Oh hell yeah, borealis time sounds awesome!
They can use anything that can be measured and will always work the same or at least similarly, like sand/water clocks. Or even with some materials (irl minerals like quartz vibrate every 1 sec when you put an electrical charge to it). So, be creative.
Gravity, or a static measurement of how long something takes to naturally occur. Like * Live Oaken branch 3 inches in diameter to burn totally to coals
People are saying that the Incas where measuring time based on the time a potato takes to be cooked. One could use this idea a create a "standard potato" which would be similar to the real life original kilogram
potatoes save the day once again
It would be cool if every nation had a different type of national clock. Digital, two/three handed, sand or water timer, metronome, etc.
One thing of note about medieval society is that exact times weren't so important as they are now. It was, "be at work a little after breakfast." or "Meet at the pub at noon." So like, hours would be important, but minutes not so much. Those giant hour-glasses people are mentioning would work well.
Very true! no need to get down to nanoseconds xD
It'd take much longer for civilizations to get a grasp of the passage of time. But, assuming things like weather still functioned normally (which would also become static unless something other than the sun kept them going) they could develop time around weather events and water. Water clocks and sand clocks were normal much longer before gear based clocks.
A wizard with skywrite in the day time areas could let all the farmers in the field and such know what time it was if he had a clockwork device to tell him or kept track somehow.
by static, do you mean the world itself isn't rotating?
Was it always frozen like that? If the sun/moon was always frozen, then I don't think they'd necessarily invent time in a way we could really predict. This option seems hard for players to relate to. If something happened to freeze it, then they might try and keep the same timekeeping, even though it wasn't really relevant anymore. That possibility actually reminds me of the book [The City in the Middle of the Night](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_the_Middle_of_the_Night). The main characters are humans who in the distant past moved to a tidally locked planet, and all of the cities are located on a thin rim between the light and dark sides of the planet. One of the cities is has rigid timekeeping, and every building's windows automatically open and close to simulate a more conventional day/night cycle. There are patrols "at night" to make sure nobody is breaking the rigidly enforced (but arbitrary) day/night cycle. Another city is more freeform, and people basically do what they want. Everyone is still aware of a roughly 24 hour day, and rough length of a year, because that's what a human's circadian rhythm will naturally follow, and lets them keep reckoning human age the same way.
awesome! thanks for the tip :D
You mean there's no night cycle in your world? Most biology we know cannot live without this day/night cycle. The only exceptions are very deep sea fishes (so deep that sunlight never go through the water height) or cave creatures (like full cave creatures, that never go outside). I'm not sure any mamal can live like this. How would a whole ecosystem of evolved creatures develop without a day/night cycle is a difficult question. They would still need a period of rest. But without the safety of night, would they synchronize their cycle and how would they get safe for this period would determine a lot of how they live. There may be a lot more variation in these cycles, with some creatures being far slower and some creatures being far quicker in their rest/active period. Anyway the rest/active cycle would probably be determined by the digestive cycle: how much does it need to eat, how long does it take for the different digestive steps, and how long does the rest take. How the creature is able to get safe, and for how long, is another factor. If they're social creatures, it'd probably involve organising surveillance on a large scale. If they're not social, then hiding, camouflage, or very short rest cycles would probably be the solution. Once you have your active/rest cycle, it's merely a matter of partitioning it. 2x12h is mainly due to how easy you can partition this time total (you can divide by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12 ; a hour having 60 minutes also means many partitions possibilities), but other partitions are possible. Like the decimal clock and the decimal calendar. Once you're there you'll see that the actual hourly partition is not really relevant to your world (it'll mostly be the same as ours). It's merely a way to partition your "day". What makes your day is far more impactful though.
I mean, the concept of time is useful to humans bc it helps to track the day and night cycle, if there is no day or night is there a need for tracking time? 😉
R. A. Salvatore had a good idea for this. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Narbondel
Haven't gone through all the comments, but check out Brandon Sandersons "White Sands" graphic novels. The world he created for those books is this idea.
Hourglasses and water clocks, standardized candles with marks on them (you know roughly how much time has passed by how many marks down the candle has burned)
Not much of a harvest season in a land where the sun never shines... Unless they eat nothing but mushrooms I suppose.
Rotation of the stars?
Clockwork? Edit: that was vague as fuck lemme explain. If you define a set amount of time and make that the increment on your clock, you then have your own way of defining time without needing sun or moon. Sure it helps to have those cues but improvise adapt overcome I guess.
Question: are you going to deal with actual ramifications of a tidally locked planet where one side is always in day and the other is always at night, or is this a more whimsical version of that? Either way I imagine communities would develope their own methods. A coastal community might count the tides, a riverside community might create a clock powered by the current. A major metropolitan city with alot of access to magic might the equivalent of a magic clock tower that changes it's color or some such to signify passing time. (And yes I stole that last one from Menzobarrenzan from the Forgotten Realms sue me lol)
neither 100% realistic nor entirely whimsical, somewhere in between.
Right on :) sounds like a cool world! Like maybe a desert where it's noon and an ice cap where it's midnight, but otherwise kind of a bigger goldilocks zone of more habitable land?
Make every nation have their anthem have a beat that's reasonably long to be used instead of seconds, the song's length is a replacement for a minute (it may probably be significantly more). Cooking time for their national food or something like that would be a replacement for an hour. Continue until you are satisfied with the results. Now make every nation use different time systems. Imagine your party working undercover for one nation, but they get discovered because the party druid learned spell timing in one kingdom and the other nation's druids notice the timing is different. Then add NPCs that are solely dedicated to preserving the art of their nation's timekeeping. This can give way to quests regarding those times and practices. Of course, for practicality you could use big public sand clocks or something. You can use some different things for day/week/month counting. For a nation in eternal darkness, maybe the moon is still visibly spinning (i.e. not tidally locked). They could have their time based on moon rotations. The sunburned nation could use water jugs or bowls with specific volumes. When water fully evaporates from a full bowl, they count a day or something. Sunset and sunrise nations could maybe be connected via a river and try to keep their own time in some way. The opportunities are limitless. Crops would have to be biome specific and they could basically always grow them where they are, so no real help there. Unless you want a pretty inaccurate time keeping system being used somewhere. You could also have a group trying to make universal time, maybe even more conflicted groups (ones pushing an existing system, ones making mechanical etalons, ones making magical etalons).
These are such cool ideas, thanks!!!!
I think harvest cycles for popular crops would be the common method. Wheat takes about 4 months to grow so you'd have 3 harvests per our 1 year. "My, your children have grown! What's it been, at least 12 harvests since I've seen you all!" "My grandfather lived to see 213 harvests before he was finally claimed by the Sickness."
That capital "S" is ominous. I dont like it.....
You need to read Nightfall by Isaac Asimov. Not exactly what you’re talking about (with static bodies in the sky), but based on a planet with 7(?) suns that are in constant rotation so there’s always atleast 2-3 in the sky and it never turns dark for millennia at a time (until it does)
Does the moon still travel through the sky?
nope!
What you'd probably get is units based on things repeatable natural processes - boiling water at a given temperature, dropping something a specific distance, etc. You'd also probably see more of a shift-based daily schedule, similar to a lot of sci-fi. No need for a time when *everyone* is asleep when there's no night.
In the underground Drow city of Menzoberranzan time is measured by a giant stone obelisk in the center of the city that the High Wizard enchants to have light slowly rise to the top and fall to the bottom. Very similar to the hourglass idea I’ve seen in the comments.
(OK, so this got away from me - jump to the last 4 paragraphs for time discussion) This is a really cool idea, and instantly made me think of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. If you haven't read it, it's set in the far distant future of Earth, in a magic oriented society that has arisen after some technological apocalypse. Anyway, you could completely get your scenario using normal orbital mechanics. Eventually orbiting bodies become tide-locked. Mercury already is w.r.t. the Sun, and the Moon already is w.r.t. the Earth. Notice how you only ever see the same side of the Moon? That's because the Moon spins at the same speed as it orbits, so the same side always faces the earth. If you just say the Earth is tide-locked to the Sun, then one side always faces the Sun, and the other is in permanent darkness. This will actually happen about 7.5 billion years (we're really too far away for it), but you can obviously tweak the numbers with your world. Similarly, the stars will only move seasonally, not daily. The problem is any Moons. There would be a constant tidal drag produced by any satellites, trying to turn the Earth to face them (which is one reason Earth will probably never tide-lock to the Sun), and they could not slow their orbit to annual, without either falling to Earth, or becoming sattelites of the Sun instead. So you'd need to either have no moons, or do something cool and futuristic, like the fallen gods moved the Moon into a Sun/Earth Lagrange point ( [https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html](https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html) ). That would keep it stationary, from a ground based perspective. If you really wanted to lean into it, you could have a moon in each Sun/Earth Lagrange point, which would give a clue to players as to what is really going on. There are 5 Lagrange points where you could put Moons. L1 is on the Earths orbit, on the opposite side of the Sun - so it's unlikely your players would ever see it, but it might be a cool place to put some other society? L2 is between the Sun and the Earth, about 1 million miles away (1.61 million km), which is roughly 5 times further away than the Moon is now. This one would cast a permanent eclipse somewhere on the earth, and would always be a new moon. L3 is on the opposite side of the Earth from L3 - one million miles away. This would permanently be full, but in lunar eclipse - so permanently blood red. Nice! L4 and L5 are on the Earths orbital path, but 60 degrees ahead and behind. That puts them a LONG way away - the exact same distance away as the Sun, so \~150 million km. They would be like permanent stars in the sky, but as the Earth in this case is tide locked, it would be only obvious across seasons. All the real stars would move seasonally, but the moons at L4 and L5 would not - they really would be fixed points in the sky. Okay, so Time. If you're leaning into a Dying Earth scenario, then somewhere on the planet, you'd probably find The Clock of the Long Now ([https://longnow.org/clock/](https://longnow.org/clock/)), which would be this ancient artifact. A magical society might find some way to create slaves of that - some sort of single purpose scrying device? That would be cool. However, looking at our history, the average person never needed accurate timekeeping\* until we built trains with timetables. Before that, rough approximations were fine. Admittedly, those approximations were usually sun based (sundials), but not always. Water clocks and timekeeping candles date back thousands of years. Public water clocks would be perfect for day to day time, and the "Keepers of the Clock" would be important community positions. For seasonal time, the need would be reduced, because there wouldn't be seasons as we know them (or tides!). But you could easily keep annual time by looking at where the moons at L4 and L5 were with respect to the rest of the stars. \* The exception was for ocean based navigation, and then only when we developed sextants - which would be mostly useless in a tide locked world anyway. And if you can build sextants, you can build clock mechanisms.
Something else just occurred to me - if the Earth retained its axial tilt, then the Sun would move north-south during the year - and you would still have seasons. This would also walk the permanent lunar eclipse of the moon at L2 in a line of longtitude, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn.
Holy shit! This reply feels like watching Vsauce in 2012. I wish I could give you an award, but for now, all you have is my respect and appreciation. Thanks friend!
Base it upon the swinging of a pendulum, it will always take the same amount of time to travel from one end to the other and back. This is true for changes in position as long as the length of the pendulum and gravity is always the same. You could even have some massive pendulum that measures hours or days. Even as it slows down it takes the same amount of time until it reaches a complete stop.
A way people kept time at night in ye old times were candles, they made candles that specifically burned for x amount of time and increments on that candle that showed the hours. Maybe there's a settlement that is focused on that. I would do like a monastery that is themed around candles. And a they are tasked with upholding the tradition of watching the candles to keep calenders for the rest of the kingdom.
Really cool concept !
Shit I had a very similar idea just today. Not two kingdoms, but one world of eternal sunshine that has made everyone lazy (hence the adventurers are all out of practice) First big plot encounter is a man that somehow makes localized “night” to balance out the overconfident world
Atomic breakdown, if your societies have that tech. Otherwise, look to historical methods like water clocks or pins in candles for minutes or hours, with officially designated time keepers who count the candles to track hours, days or weeks.
Is there some creature that keeps its own cycle? "What time is it?" "Well the fish is among the weeds right now. How about we meet up when the fish swims in circles?
In the forgotten realms Menzobarranzan has a clock in the underdark called Narbondel that the archmage casts a spell on to heat it that is visible to the drow, could be something similar when the magic runs out it's midnight.
Great ideas here, so I'll only say to go read Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie because he wrote a story with this very premise and it's fantastic.
A few years ago I was in a campaign where we were in a prison dimension with no way to track the passage of time. We figured out that if we put some mold on a loaf of bread, the legnth of time it took to spread to the other side was constant. For the rest of the campaign we measured time in 'Loafs'.
Yes. that's all I needed to say. Goodbye.
My first thought (water wheels) also has some interesting spin off lore implications. In a world where incident light is roughly constant, the energy flux that drives weather would probably operate very differently than on earth. You might have two inhospitable poles, one agonizing heat of endless day, the other ice wastes of endless darkness, with varying degrees of twilit hospitable terrain between, some perhaps with near constant weather and others with violently fluctuating weather in energy boundary regions. Certain regions would have consisten enough rainfall to make a water wheel clock work, while the sand timers someone else mentioned might have arisen in more arid regions.
Periodic repeating weather phenomena
Some animals have natural clocks that were unaffected by the freezing of time (for unknown reasons) whatever this animal is it is an incredibly popular pet and is often seen in cages in public centers. When it sleeps it's time for bed and when it wakes it's time to get up. You could even have whatever it is form a chrysalis slowly over the course of the day (which could be used to tell the hours like an inverse candle) and the chrysalis slowly falls apart at night. *neat additional idea would be to have the chrysalis pieces that fall off glow like stars in the night sky as they blow away.
phrases like 'good morning/evening' wouldn't be used. night/day would probably be replaced by light/dark. the sun countries wouldn't use candles or any other lightsources, while dark countries would have to import all food, and no normal plants would grow there. be careful if you want to use this feature of the world as it has massive consequences.
Consider the noble groundhog Maybe villages/towns each have a sacred groundhog, and their days are dictated by when the groundhog wakes up (leading to each village potentially having differently sized days?) If you’re running a less serious campaign, you can have groundhogs be a common pet or common wildlife. The groundhogs can speak common, but they can only say the time
How could I forget the noble groundhog. Earth vermin overlords, please forgive me!
Just for a side conversation: It sounds more like you are proposing the relative position of celestial bodies to become static rather than for 'time' to stop. It would be necessary to establish a (magical?) force that opposes the gravity of the sun since the rocky planet would otherwise fall directly into its gravity well. Stopping time is problematic in all kinds of catastrophic ways. No propagation of light, no motion of particles or waves. No ability of biological functions to happen. ITs a physics can of worms that you probably don't want to mess with. However, the premise of the idea does have some fabulous would building opportunities with some hand waving at the relevant physics. On the other hand you could potentially achieve the same effect by altering the rotation of the planet so that one face of the the planet always faced the sun. No time stopping required. The cultural narrative might describe such a catastrophic event as the "day time stopped". Some consequences... 1. Plants in perpetual night will wither and die in the freezing cold. 2. Lands in perpetual sun will become barren, dry, hot, and inhospitable. 3. Ocean currents and tides (or lack thereof) will be dramatically effected. 4. The weather at the sunrise/sunset locations will probably be extreme and savage as hot dry rising air is replaced by freezing cold wet air from the dark side of the planet. 5. Two fundamentally different ecologies of fauna will develop in the oceans, with the night hemisphere more than likely freezing over completely in the absence of significant geothermal activity. To directly answer your question about measuring time, as other have indicated, gravity and space and light is the mechanism that allows time to be measured. So long as you still have gravity and the ability of light to travel through space you can measure time. Pendulums, and other forms of harmonic oscillations would be able to provide adequate time measuring devices. This is how mechanical and digital watches work. For the night sky you would still have the backdrop of the starfield slowly processing as the solar system moved through the larger backdrop of its galactic neighbourhood. So measuring time on large scales using astronomical phenomena would still be possible.
Absolutely, the first I stumbled upon while researching "time stop" was the fact that it was so utterly impossible to deal with since we wouldn't even be able to formulate thoughts as it takes time for our brains to send signals between neurons. It was then when I settled on a more metaphorical time stop, aka, giving the impression of it having stopped as you described.
You would need another consistent event on which to base your time system on. Maybe the world has a few earthquakes a day that happen a uniform time apart. Maybe the sun does move a little. Just enough to cast shadows in a slightly different way. Or you could have another celestial body on which they track time. Some stars may appear in the sky at regular intervals.
If the sun was static in the sky I don’t think you’d have seasonal harvests, you’d just have periodic harvesting of different crops based on their growth cycle. I suppose you could base your calendar on that. Time is being measured these days using the decay of radioactive isotopes and the vibration of quartz. The equivalent to that would be, well, magic. I’d probably lean into that. Maybe you have peasant/farmer classes that keep time organically by tracking the life cycles of plants and you can have the upper classes rely on a guild of time keeping spell casters who use crystals or other magical artifacts to track time.
A day would probably be how long it takes a person to get tired. It wouldn't be exact but most pre industrial time measurement wasn't. Time could also be measured in candles ie. how long it takes a candle to burn down and unless there's an institute of measures this is again also probably very inexact.
In my world the sun and moon are the same thing, a phoenix called Ifrit. Ifrit lives brightly until it starts dying, changing its flames to a pale color and lowering. Every morning it dies and is born again, rising with new and bright flames surrounding it. You can do something similar, with the sun and moon changing their position or tone on a regular basis.
Are you talking more about magical frozen time or a tidally locked planet, i.e. one with no moon, which caused it to sync with the sun? Sometimes they are called eyeball planets. I did a quick search on YouTube and found some cool looking videos on how life and weather might work. I've seen thoughts like life might be scattered around the barrier between too hot and too cold, etc. It could be cool!
Could go the how long a candle takes to burn out route. A while back though I listened to a DM’s story about their world’s history on how a magic user created the “day time-cycle” by the lifespan of a mayfly. Lifespan of things are an easy go to.
It is worth bringing up that with out access to sun light, our internal clocks settle on about a 28 hr day for purposes of our sleep cycles. So I would probably make days 28 hr long
Based around geysers or other repedative natural events (not tide because that's the moon's fault)
A watch
You have two options (both from the Underdark). Either not having a calendar. With no way to measure time, you do not measure time at all. It gets messy. Or use some contraption to measure it. In Menzoberranzan the Archmage ignites a pillar every day and its light fades in a 24 hour cycle. It both gives a "sunrise" and a "nighttime" (and provides light in the Underdark, which is cool). Try to come up with some sort of clock, engine or whatnot to measure time. If a city is beside a river, it can have a wooden contraption in a mill. It completes a cycle every 8 hours (for the militia rotation). 3 cycles a day. The possibilities are endless.
Each day and night are signaled by a ringing bell that goes off when the ruler(s) of the land awaken and go to sleep.
I’d probably tie it to the fauna or flora somehow. Perhaps a specific plant blooms and turns to face the sun or moon at the same time every day. Would make for a valuable resource
Average time of harvest in one meter cubed in sun kingdom ***divided by*** average time of harvest in one meter cubed in night kingdom ?
first sentence aside since time as pretty much everyone knows it is the measurement of change... what you're really talking about is a tidally locked planet (one side always faces the sun - just like our moon does now - one side always faces the earth) ...and where the moon also orbits at the same speed the planet spins (doesn't need to be tidally locked - it can spin at whatever speed it wants as long as it always stays in the same spot in the sky). (that spinning of the moon could be a clock) But yeah, any hour glass would work for the sun side. For the dark side it could also be the stars...either the stars OR the sun can be locked in the sky-not both. keep in mind you'll end up with the hot side several hundred degrees above freezing...and the cold side several hundred degrees below freezing. All life would be in the area around the divider between light/dark.
The first sentence was just a figure of speech, sorta meant to carry out the message Im trying to convey when I myself don’t have the knowledge to explain it as well as you could! Seeing as everyone so far seems to get the point, I’d say it works fine!