Time and history · Mythforge

Give your world a calendar, date scenes and events, and read its history on the timeline.

Invented worlds keep their own time: their own eras, months and history. In this lesson you'll give your world a calendar, date your scenes and lore, and read it all on the timeline, which also catches scenes that slip back in time by mistake.

What you'll do

Set up your world's eras and months.
Date scenes, characters and events.
Read the timeline, and check your story's continuity.

1. Open the timeline

On a phone, open a world's Home tab and tap Timeline. On a wider window it's in the sidebar. It starts empty: everything on it comes from dates you give your scenes and lore.

2. Set up the calendar

Tap Calendar on the timeline.

Eras: one per line, earliest first. A short name in brackets is shown after years.
Months: one per line, in order. Or leave them out and set Months per year, and they're numbered.

For The Ashen Reach, the calendar is:

Eras
Before the Pyres (BP)
Age of Pyres (AP)

Months
Thaw
Bloom
Highsun
Harvest
Ashfall
Deepfrost

The Calendar sheet, with eras and months

The sheet shows an example date as you type. Use the standard calendar goes back to January to December, with no eras.

3. Date your scenes and lore

A scene: open … (Scene details) and fill in When.
A lore entry: fill in its Dates card. The two dates are named to suit the category: Born and Died for a character, Founded and Fell for a place, When and Ended for an event.
A new event asks When as you create it, so it goes straight onto the timeline.

Type dates the way you'd say them. Mythforge shows how it reads each one ("Reads as 3rd of Ashfall, 312 AP") before it's saved. All of these work:

312
312 AP
3rd of Ashfall, 312
Ashfall 3, 312
c. 300
early 312
late Ashfall 312

If you leave the era out, the date goes in the latest one.

4. Read the timeline

Everything dated is listed from earliest to latest, under era and year headings. Scenes are squares coloured by manuscript; lore is a dot in its category's colour. Anything with a start and an end, such as a life, also runs as a bar beside the years it covers, so you can see whose lives overlap.

The timeline on a phone: eras, years, events and scenes

On a wide window, the world's history and your scenes sit in two columns either side of the years:

The timeline on a wide window, with history and scenes either side of the years

Filter by Show (All, Scenes or Lore), Manuscript, POV, Category and Tag. Each filter narrows only its own kind, so you can see one book's scenes against the whole history of the world.

5. Check your continuity

Choose one manuscript in the filter and switch Order to Story order. The scenes are then listed as the reader meets them, with their dates. A scene set earlier than the dated scene before it is flagged ↶ "Set before the scene before it". That's either a flashback you meant, or a slip to fix. The same ↶ shows on the corkboard and in the manuscript's list.

Try it

You have a draft taking shape. Next, the tools for making it better: Revise your draft.

Go deeper: The timeline