Problem with the Alphatian Calendar
by Thorfinn TaitI’ve been working on the Alphatian calendar — hopefully you’ll see why in a few days’ time — and came up against this problem. I actually noticed it some time ago, but this is the first time I’ve brought it up here. I’ve searched for prior discussions, but came up blank, although I’m sure others have noticed this over the past 30-something years, too.
What am I talking about?
Well, the Alphatian calendar, as presented in Dawn of the Emperors, is actually full of problems. The main one I want to discuss is the name of one of the months, so let’s start with that.
Tslamir, Islamir, or Tsalmir?
Dawn of the Emperors book 3 page 20 presents the Alphatian calendar for the first time. But this month actually gets two completely different spellings on the same page: Islamir in the text (the first word of the first paragraph), but Tslamir in the chart below.
One of these is clearly a typo, and author Aaron Allston provides his opinion implicitly in the first Poor Wizard’s Almanac, where he uses the spelling “Islamir”.
However... in the meantime, the Alphatian calendar was used extensively in Bruce Heard’s Voyage of the Princess Ark series. There, Bruce used the spelling “Tslamir” numerous times throughout the series.
Since the Alphatian calendar was used little elsewhere, we’re left wondering which source to believe.
Even further complicating things, different fans have used different spellings over the years. Islamir seems the least popular, but some very authoritative sources used it, including Marco’s Codex Immortalis. It also appears in various projects that presented the calendar, such as most recently Glenn’s Player’s Handbook. This isn’t too surprising, as most of the official sources for festivals and such (the Almanacs) use this spelling.
Meanwhile, the Mystaran Almanacs seem to have settled on Tslamir, and this spelling also appeared in non-Almanac official products such as Champions of Mystara. Again, not too surprising, since it was based on the Princess Ark series.
Finally, over the years fans have misread or more likely misremembered it as Tsalmir, and this spelling appears scattered across various threads and fan productions. I must admit, before looking into this I thought the correct form was Tsalmir. Having TSL all together at the start of a syllable is pretty rare, not to mention hard to say.
Conclusion
I’m inclined to go with the one with the most uses, and assume that Haldemar (the fictional writer of those logs) knew his own country’s calendar best. A secondary issue is that “Islamir” is less unique, since it unwittingly contains the word “Islam” inside it.
Alphatian Years are out of sync
Another huge issue presented in Dawn of the Emperors is that the Alphatian Year apparently begins with Alphamir/Thaumont — the third month of the Thyatian calendar. This... is just a massive headache, to be honest. I can’t find any mention of it in official products after Dawn of the Emperors, although fan products including the Mystaran Almanacs do sometimes note it.
In terms of timelines and such, it seems like an awfully bad idea, best forgotten altogether.
But to play devil’s advocate, it does perhaps give a nice bit of flavour to the culture.
Conclusion
No thank you. This introduces too much confusion for it to be worth implementing. Even if I did implement it, I’d likely stick to Thyatian years for clarity, and assume all references to Alphatian years everywhere did not take the two month fast thing into account, and were just equivalent to Thyatian years.
On the other hand, having Alphatians celebrate New Year at a different time of year is no problem at all to implement in a game.
Seasons
This is another weird one. Which month represents which season seems to change from product to product.
For example, “Islamir” is noted in Dawn of the Emperor’s text as mid summer. But TM1 has this two months further on, calling it “early fall”. On this scale, Kaldmont, the final month of the year, varies between early and late winter, and Nuwmont is either mid winter or early spring.
Ann Dupuis brought up this very issue on Facebook last year (If you’re not a member of the Mystara Reborn group you won’t be able to see this, since unfortunately the admin changed the group to private. Sorry.) There wasn’t really a conclusion there.
Conclusion
If Nuwmont is intended to be January, surely mid winter is the better choice.
Summing Up
I haven’t looked at all the problems, and my conclusions may not be satisfactory to all of you.
What do you think?