Just Another Calendarman-ic Monday

(Your author, coming at you with all the powers he gained after being bitten by a radioactive page-a-day Far Side calendar in middle school.)

I've been thinking on and off about calendars since about 2015. That was a busy year. I needed to juggle two big projects: one usually on alternate Sundays, one roughly every 10 days, all year long, these alongside all the other normal activities constituting everyday life (food, work, family, art, uprising, etc.), and it was difficult to do such juggling. What worked for me that year was to: print out Bram Moolenaar's fold-and-stand-up desk calendar and

1. Circle my alternating-Sunday deadlines in red
2. Circle the every-10-day deadlines in green
3. Put it on my desk where I could see it

(Bram's yearly calendar. I recently discovered that this is pretty much the output of the Unix utility ncal with the -w flag! Unix can be pretty cool.)

It worked well for me! Obviously, this is not a tool that accepts a great deal of information, but for helping visualize a cadence of more or less regularly occurring events, it served effectively.

Over the next few years, unfortunately, the events to coordinate got less regular, less predictable, and probably more numerous. Bram Moolenaar's calendar stopped helping me organize things. That's whenDavid Malki stepped up. He has several long, interesting posts on calendars, and the high-end calendar he makes he is a beautiful, funny, and probably useful object. But what really fired my soul was his devastatingly simple "continuous calendar" idea¹, just a year's worth of boxes organized by month, fitting on six pages of printer paper.

(Malki's simple calendar.)

One reason for my soul's resonance with this object is context: at my work, a very common activity to to grab a blank piece of butcher paper, sketch out a grid representing a month or so, and calendar out some events in / for / of / constituting a campaign. This simple template of Malki's saved the drawing-and-adding-dates steps, and I used it a few times in different campaigns to help visualize timelines, deadlines, and possible conflicts. It worked well.

What didn't work well was trying to use the template to help organize my life. I had a couple problems with what he had made:

1. Squares too small to add significant information (70 squares on one 8.5x11 piece of paper is a lot)
2. Shading to indicate a month makes it hard to to write on with, say, a black ballpoint pen, or a Sharpie®|Pen., or whatever
3. I really hated having Saturday and Sunday at the end of the week: this was confusing because it meant that this calendar didn't match any other calendar I'd look at ever

So eventually I decided to stop being frustrated with a tool that didn't work for me. I decided to try to brew my own. I wanted bigger squares, I wanted weeks to start with Sundays, and I didn't want any shading. The best way to attain bigger squares seemed to be to move from portrait to landscape. I really liked Malki's insight about making the months flow into each other, so I kept that layout. I made a couple three-month templates and tested them, and they seemed to work the way I want them to work.

(My calendar looks like this. I like to mark it up with bill due-dates in red, and other notable things in black.)

If you would like to see if this tool will serve your purposes, you can download it and print it out and play with it. (Right now it runs from October 2019 through February 2021, so I recommend judicious use of the "print selected pages" function so as to save our mother the Earth from additional abuse.) If you find that you like using this tool, why not send David Malki a couple bucks: it was all his idea anyway! If you find that this tool doesn't work well for you, why not spend a little time figuring out why not, thinking about what you need, and go try to make something that will help you?

¹ What's hilarious is that Malki uses a different term, not "continuous calendar":

progressive calendar

By that, I mean a calendar that doesn’t have any breaks between months. I think I invented the term? By that, I mean “nobody else has ever used this term.”

Evidently, he IS the only one to use the term. Since I use a different term, perhaps I ... invented the idea? (No, no clearly I didn't.) Anyway, this is a long digression prompted by my inability to remember what words he actually used.

(Your author's ambitions when it comes to calendars.)

(Bonus Venture Brothers content re: calendars.)

The Forgotten Necropolis

This is a one-page dungeon type adventure of my own devising which I ran for my daughter using the Dungeons & Dragons B/X rules.  I knew she liked dungeon crawling moreso than hex crawling or role playing in villages, and give the players what they want, right?  So I had her create a separate party all her own of three characters.  These characters (the "Blackroot Three"!) I also located in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, although they started out at the southern edge of the Glow Worm Steppes and were making their way to the regional "metropolis" of Tarantis to seek their fortune.  A characteristic of the Wilderlands is that human settlements are typical small and far apart from each other, so it is easy to justify that the spaces in between contain abandoned, haunted, or re-tenanted towers, forts, tombs, catacombs so forth.  I therefore like to think this terrain is almost literally littered with remains of long gone ancient civilizations, and that although you may stumble upon a tomb, if you try to return to it you may simply not find it, the country being so wild and untamed.

Keeping with an earlier stated overall motive, I wanted to run a good orc adventure this time.  This posed the question: why are these Orcs in this dungeon.  What I devised was a simple tomb the party camps by, containing a single room underground (already long ago looted), but one wall of which has very recently been broken through, leading to secret stairs.  This in turn leads to a central domed chamber with a massive pentagram on the floor and bas reliefs of demonic worship (I also want lots of demons in my setting).  From this hub are further stairs leading down to undisturbed burial chambers, each eternally guarded by skeletons. In the last of these chambers the party finds the orcs' camp and two prisoners.  The prisoners reveal that the orcs are a tribe recently defeated by another orc tribe, but that the chief has found a map or clue indicating that there is cache of magical weapons in this necropolis.  The prisoners (now freed and part of the party as NPCs) insist they must stop the orc chief since he had previously sacked their village.

From the orcs' camp another wall is found broken through, leading to more stairs, a large cavern, and another burial chamber, at which the last of the orcs, including the Chief, are attempting to break through a large stone door.  After defeating the orcs, the party notes some depressions on the door which match brass sigils set into the floors of each of the burial chambers found at the upper levels.  The party removes each of the sigils from above, and inserts them into the spaces on the door, and the door at last opens revealing the crypt of an ancient king and his champions in the classic form of skeletons seated on thrones and benches, along with some +1 weapons and armor (which includes the necessary treasure experience points to level up the entire party to 2nd level).

The Adventurers in this session were:

THE BLACKROOT THREE

Hitty - a first-level figher
Fafnyr - a first-level fighter
Amber - a first-level cleric

JOINED BY

Matis - a first-level fighter (partial NPC)
Lina -  a first-level fighter (partial NPC)