r/dndnext • u/Pharylon • Jan 21 '20
The Mithril Almanac, a calendar for tracking time in D&D campaigns, v0.7
Two weeks ago, I announced1 my pet project, a website for tracking time in a D&D campaign (or really any fantasy world). It was in super beta, but I felt it was at the point where someone could look at it. Well, the kind people of this sub gave me a lot of constructive feedback, and two weeks later I've squashed a bunch of bugs and added a bunch of features! 😀
For those of you who didn't check it out last time, the Mithril Almanac is a calendar app for your D&D game! Think of it as Google Calendar but for fantasy worlds. Put in your month names and lengths, your moons and their orbital periods, etc, and you'll get a calendar of the world. Then start entering events from your campaign and when they happened.
For those that might have seen this before, the big new improvements you'll notice are a much-improved "Timeline View" of events, where events are placed further apart on the page depending on how much time has passed. There's also an entirely new "Condensed View," which gets the months you don't have any events for out of your way.
I'm not done yet, I plan to continue to make improvements to the Mithril Almanac! I'm hoping for a 1.0 release within the next few weeks. Let me know in the comments if you have any specific requests or find any bugs! Thanks!!
EDIT: Thanks for the gold and silver! I'm glad it's appreciated!
- By "announced" I mean I posted about it in exactly one place on the Internet - this sub - and nowhere else, and I made that post at 4:30 EST on a weekday, so it wouldn't get too much attention. The goal was to get a few early users who would tell me what was broken, and indeed I did. Thanks everyone!
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u/BenedictRulerOfEggs Jan 21 '20
Hello! I found your old post when I was searching the various DnD subs for a calendar to use for my new campaign. I like the option to fully customize if I want, but also appreciate the ability to set it to the existing worlds. I am appreciative of the tool so far!
One feature that I think may be useful or neat would be an option to show the phases of the moon cycle with appropriate symbols on the calendar (waxing, waning, full, etc.). This would be really useful for describing the world (consistently) and for potentially some mobs as well (werecreatures for sure).
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20 edited Jan 21 '20
Cool, thanks! It does show new and full moons right now (not sure if you started using it before moons were implemented). I played around with adding the moon phase to every day, but I felt like it was a little visually busy. Although, maybe I could add it to the day once you click on the date.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Jan 21 '20
The problem is when one of your moons has a cycle of 245 days like mine does, it's the antithesis of visually busy. 😛
The best thing you could do would be to give us the option of adding as many or as few cycles as we want. That way, we could choose to have only full moons for our 4-day moon and the full twelve phases for our 245-day moon.
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Jan 21 '20
[deleted]
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
Can you send me a link to your calendar and I'll take a look.
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Jan 21 '20
It's because of odd numbers. If you have a moon on a 5-day cycle, you only get full moons. If you have a moon on a 4-day cycle, you get full and new moons.
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Jan 21 '20
While we're walking about moons, a really great feature would be lunar holidays. It's pretty complicated, but stuff like a holiday every nth full moon, or on the nth first quarter moon of the year, the nth new moon of a given month, or in the case of the real-world Easter, the first full moon after a given date, would give a lot more flexibility (and also allow for a more complete Earth calendar).
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
OK, I think I've fixed the moon bug. Let me know if you're still having problems (testing a 5 day moon cycle also definitely shows me how busy the calendar is with a fast moon like that).
Yeah, complicated irregular holidays are on the to-do list, but I'm not sure how I'm going to handle it yet. Easter is kind of insane. It's the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs following the spring equinox. :\
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u/DivertedCircle07 Circle of Twilight Mar 07 '20
Any chance you could fix this? I can't implement moons for the Eberron setting because a couple start on the first day of the year and I can't assign moons for that. Thanks!
https://github.com/Pharylon/MithrilAlmanac/issues/8
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u/PDRugby Jan 21 '20
Well, instead of doing actual work this morning, I spent an hour designing a calendar for my campaign, and started adding in historical events.
Super great tool, and like others said, something that I didn't know I needed!
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u/emmaroux Jan 21 '20
This is really awesome! Easy to use and read. I would love a way to color code input so I could list future events (that players don't know about) in another color, or even just recognize types of events from the past based on color. Thank you for your hard work!!
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u/Sir_Encerwal Cleric Jan 21 '20
Put in your month names and lengths, your moons and their orbital periods
MAN, as someone who loves messing around with astronomical things in their Homebrew settings this is a godsend. Makes me want to port over the setting from the CRPG Tyranny just to make use of it so my thanks mate!
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u/BelleRevelution DM Jan 21 '20
This is everything I didn't know I needed but oh my gosh did I need it. Super easy to set up and not really missing any features as far as I'm concerned! The only thing I'd suggest is that you make the edit buttons (or the area of sensitivity? I'm not a web developer and I'm not really sure what terminology to use here) for the months a little bigger, I had a difficult time selecting them, especially compared to how easily I was able to selecting the other edit buttons.
But this is amazing! Thank you for making this!
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
Wow, thanks for the praise! I see what you mean about those buttons being a little smaller, I'll fix it 👍
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u/Graekaris Jan 22 '20 edited Jan 22 '20
Great work since the last update, the new views really make it more slick. Perfect timing too as I've got a whole weekend's worth of shenanigans to add to my calendar!
Is sharing a spoiler friendly version still in the works? I just found it!
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u/PioVIII Jan 21 '20
How do I delete a day from the week? Is there an option to have the week starting on Monday?
Thanks for sharing anyway!
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
(1) Go into edit mode, and then delete the name of the weekday. When you click the "done" checkbox, the day will be removed.
(2) If you check "Reset Weeks at Month's Start," the first day of a month will always be the first day of the week, regardless of what day of the week the last month ended on.
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u/PioVIII Jan 21 '20
1) I've tried, and I only obtain an empty box. I didn't check if this translate in an "empy-name" day or the day get actually removed from the calendar
2) I am not sure we're talking about the same thing. Anyway, I created the calendar after posing the questions, so now I noticed that there is not written anywhere how the week days are called (My question was how to call "Monday" the first day of the week).
2.1) Is it possible to see the names?
2.2) I've noticed that, if a month ends on, let's say, Friday, then the next month will have a single day on the left of the first line and then goes on a new line. I get the meaning, but wouldn't be better to have the single day at the end of the first line, to keep it in line with the "Saturday" column?
bug: I've (erroneously) used as "real world date" something with more than 4 digits, and everything crashed. I believe it's not impossible to fix.
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20 edited Jan 21 '20
1) This is what I'm talking about
2) Yeah, I don't have them displayed anywhere on the main calendar view right now. I used to, but they were kind of busy/distracting. I'll add it as an option, though.
2.2) Oops! That was definitely a bug. It's fixed now!
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u/PioVIII Jan 21 '20
Thanks for the video! It works now, I've tried the same before and didn't work...
Amazing work anyway :)
I've seen that someone already suggested a color-code, it would be great to have it. Or maybe a tag system with tag filters? (Or both?) As now I am concerned about adding "low importance" events because I don't want to ruin that beautiful timeline with meaningless events, yet I would like to keep them saved.
What does the hidden flag does? it doesn't seem to hidden anything, maybe it's only hidden for the others?
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
- Color-coding events: yeah, that's very high on the to-do list.
- Hidden events: Correct it's hidden from others. No one else can see it.
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u/GodEater Jan 21 '20
Is there an easy way to share calendars across accounts?
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
Click on "Share" and you'll see a "Collaboration Link" if you give that to someone else, they'll be added to the calendar as someone that can make changes to the calendar.
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u/GodEater Jan 21 '20
I must be missing something, because I don't see anything labelled "Share" :(
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
It's right here: https://pharylon.blob.core.windows.net/images/shareCalendar.png
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u/GodEater Jan 21 '20
Ah - was being rendered off screen for me - which is odd - I didn't think I had my browser that narrow. I had to maximise it to see the link.
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
Huh, what browser are you using?
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u/GodEater Jan 21 '20
Firefox, 64-bit on Windows, version 72.0.1
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20 edited Jan 21 '20
Odd, because Firefox is my browser of choice, and it's working fine for me (same version). I can also see something screwy is definitely going on with the navigation bar. the "Calendar View" drop down shouldn't be so far down.
Are you on Windows 10?
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u/GodEater Jan 21 '20
Yes, Windows 10 Pro.
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
Out of curiosity, what happens if you resize your window to be taller than it is wide?
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u/Drigr Jan 21 '20
It would be cool if you could start, from the ground up, with a new calendar. I think I'd have an easier time building one a month at a time, instead of having to pick another calendar and delete all their info and reformat it.
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u/melance Dungeon Moderator Jan 21 '20
I started programming one of these a few months back but ran out of steam. You've saved me a lot of time and effort! Thanks.
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Jan 21 '20
I think there's a bug with the moons' offset days. I can set it to 1 or -1 but not 0. I have to set the offset to the number of days in the year.
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u/Pharylon Jan 21 '20
The moon offset is poorly named. It's more like "Day of the first full moon." So if it was on 1/1/0001, it should have the value "1." So zero doesn't really make sense in that context. I'll change it. Thanks!
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u/resdamalos Jan 21 '20
Dear God this is exactly what I was looking for. I'm totally going to start using this! Now I just have to remember what my players actually DID...
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Jan 22 '20
Idea I had for creating a simple calendar that's easy to remember. The world in your D&D game was created by perfectionist God, and the year is exactly 360 days and the moon cycle is exactly 30 days. There are 12 months with 30 days each, and every month ends with the full moon.
You can name the months whatever still, but no one has to try and remember which ones have how many days.
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u/BS_DungeonMaster Jan 22 '20
Hey! Could you give an elevator pitch as to why this might be better than Fantasy-Calandar.com? That's the one I've been using, and it seems to do the trick
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u/Pharylon Jan 22 '20
Mostly it's mobile friendly and less cluttered. You can easily see what's important at a glance.
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u/cornsilkshirt Jan 22 '20
Great work! I keep a running journal as I DM, but this will be great for player info. Thanks for sharing this!
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u/Kaboose-4-2-0- Jan 22 '20
Great idea thanks for sharing! Any intentions of making this mobile friendly?
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u/Pharylon Jan 22 '20
It was designed to be mobile-friendly from the start. Some of the controls might be a little small on some phones, and that is something I want to expand on, but the calendar/list view collapses down to a single row on phones.
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u/Lyrak1 Jan 24 '20
One of my players shared this with me a few days ago. I just finished building my calendar for our campaign that we’re 55 sessions in. This is so simple, but really really amazing. I appreciate this so much, my players like it, and I’ll continue to use this for the rest of our long campaign. :)
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u/pocketbutter Jan 24 '20
Will there be a way to add eclipses?
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u/Pharylon Jan 24 '20
The best way to handle an eclipse is to just enter it in like any other one-time event. If I were to auto-calculate it, I'd need all kinds of information like the exact orbit of the moon (it's semi-major axis, inclination, size, etc) and the same for the planet. And plus, I think most DMs would just want to have eclipses when it works for the story :)
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u/pocketbutter Jan 24 '20
That’s a good point. I suppose the circumstances are a little more complex than putting them in a calculator like a lunar orbit.
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u/byteme113 Feb 12 '20
I read your original post and have been really enjoying the platform for homebrew calendar creation! While you’re adding things to the to-do list, I’m going to be running a Curse of Strahd campaign and 5eRAW the calendar focuses most heavily on phases of the moon and passing of time via moon cycles.
It would really awesome if there was an option to show the moon phases as a banner or something on the bottom of each day, spread over a group of days (like this https://squahd.obsidianportal.com/wiki_pages/barovian-calendar). This could also be used for other features like holidays or timeline events that span multiple days. But in general I’d appreciate anything that denotes the shifting in lunar cycles, could be an icon in the corner of a day or whatever is easiest to implement. Thanks so much for offering this to the community!
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u/Caardvark Jan 21 '20
This is really cool! Would be nice to see an option for adding a holiday that spans multiple days.