Timeline

How do you manage your timeline? If your story covers several days, as most stories do, keeping track of timeline is pretty important – there’s only so many things you can do during the course of a day. Everything we do takes an allotted number of seconds, minutes, or hours.

Keeping track of some kind of timeline is even more important if your character is out and about, traversing the world in some way shape or form. Most of the time, my characters live in a relatively non-mechanized world. If your character gets around by car, Google maps helps by telling how long it takes to get from point A to point B at the applicable speed limit.

During my time as a dungeon master, playing the game, Dungeons and Dragons, there were times when we needed to calculate how long it took to get to and from the dungeon. Though there were not a lot of things to worry about during such a journey, things did need to be marked off and accounted for. Supplies were consumed and monsters were checked for day and night. Higher level dungeons always had a map to follow, and even in my writing I go by some kind of map, even if it isn't published along with the book. This is the chart and rules I followed then, and I use it now for my books; it's close enough for what I need, and it helps me keep things consistent.

Travel Rates per Day

                                                            Miles Covered per Day
Travel Mode                        Trail     Clear     Hills     Mountains     Desert
Foot, no encumbrance*         36         24         16            12               16
Foot, light encumbrance**    24         12          8               6                8
Foot, heavy encumbrance†    12           8          6               4                6
Camel                                     48         32        24            16               32
Elephant                                 36         24        12              8                 8
Riding horse††                       72         48        36            24              16
Donkey or Mule                     36         24        16            12              16
War horse                               36         24        16            12                8
Draft horse                             24         16        12              8                8
Ox                                          16         12        10              8                6

*This is a character with a 120’ normal speed; he can carry no more than 40 lb.
**This is a character with a 90’ normal speed; he can carry between 41 and 80 lb.
† This is a character with a 60’ normal speed; he can carry between 81 and 120 lb.
†† The travel rates listed here are possible, but it will kill the horse if only one is used for the entire trip. Typically, a rider only manages to achieve these rates by riding one-third the distance listed and trading his horse in twice at way stations for fresh mounts. At the end of the day, he and the three horses are exhausted, but all are alive. If a rider does not intend to kill or exhaust his horse, he should use the travel rates listed for the warhorse instead.
Characters and mounts must rest one full day for every six days they spend traveling. Those who do not rest suffer a -1 penalty on attack rolls and damage rolls until they do rest. If they go more than six days without resting, they suffer an additional -1 penalty per six days until they do rest, and they must rest one full day for each six days they spent traveling if they are to lose the penalty.

Why do I talk about timeline? I'm reading a book where at one point the timeline seems to have not been carefully thought through. For most of the book chunks of time are simply skipped over and days are not counted. Weather comes and goes, and for the most part that is just fine. It makes it hard to judge the changing of the seasons or guess at the time past, but such is only background and not important to the story. However, at one point they are sailing across either an ocean or a vast lake, the journey takes days and days, and they get caught in at least a couple nasty storms. The last storm comes near to sinking the ship, but just as it blows off, they see the shore they're heading for so they make for the closest beach. Now here's where the timeline goes a little wonky. After a night or two camping on the beach, men step out of the jumble, and you all have seen enough movies, you know how jungles can be, so understandably they need to hack a path back to where they are going.

Problem #1: How did these men know where to find them? I'm still working on this one. Maybe there's an explanation in the book, but she hasn't had a chance to speak to another character who'll answer her questions. As it is, I seriously doubt she'll ask though. It's one of those insignificant things she won't think of, I'm sure.

Problem #2: They had the girl (the main character) riding in a wagon, which is fine for what it's worth, but moving a wagon through the jungle would be a logistical nightmare. Now apparently this was done from time to time because they ended up on a road, but this was a terribly overgrown road and they still had to hack their way along. Have you spotted the anomaly yet? If they came this way, with a wagon, to find them, why do they need to work so hard to hack their way back? And if they came by another route, initiated by the need to do some kind of search by chance, why didn't they return by the already cleared route? Even if the miles were longer, the time needed to cover the distance might have been shorter.

And here is problem #3: They were camped, waiting for someone to come find them, for two nights - it says so in the book. Their journey to where they were headed took days, maybe even a couple weeks, or at least something of a dreary eternity - in other words, much longer than two days. Let's do the math. For the sake of argument, let's say it took two weeks to make this one-way trip. If it took two weeks to go one way, it needs to take two weeks for the party to make the first trip to find them - at the very least - not counting the randomness necessary to conduct a search, unless they knew exactly where to look - still the distance covered would be the same, and just from the tone of what was written, even though no clear count of days was given, it had to be much longer than the two days they'd waited on the beach. Let's even give them a little advantage. Let's say some alert someone on some high tower spotted the ship out to sea. Since they just came out of the storm and land was this obscure cloud on the low horizon, that would still only give the search party three, maybe three and a half days to find them. Why would they take so long to return with their finds?

As you can see, this timeline anomaly fairly jumped out at me and slapped me in the face. Be careful with your timeline, and remember that it affects everyone in your world, even if you know absolutely nothing about them until after they stumble across your path. It still takes them X amount of time to cover Y distance, and they'll be restricted to when they can start.

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DRUID DERRICK - How it came to be

Most of the time when I start a book, I have an idea or a scene in mind. I then create a character and give him or her a goal where the book can end. At that point, it's like getting in the car and driving across the country - you know where you want to end up, but the trip, the places you might pull aside to visit, are completely impromptu. You gotta love that kind of journey, especially if there is no real deadline to worry about.

DRUID DERRICK came about in much the same way and it yet was very different. Growing up, I was never much of a game playing person, meaning board games then, though I do enjoy playing monopoly from time to time. I have the game on my computer but I haven't played it in ages. When I came online and discovered Facebook, as what I think of as a natural progression of the discovery, I tried out a few of the games I found there. In favor of my writing I have blocked whatever games I've been invited to, keeping my distractions down to only three and maybe soon just two. Outside of that, my most favorite of all games I have EVER played is Dungeons & Dragons. Never before or since have I had so much fun or laughed so much during a game. I still have all the books though I no longer play because there's no one around to play with and it is really difficult to play with only two people. Plus, just like all my other games, I'd rather write.

So the next best thing is to mix the two. Here's how I started. Following the rules of the game I rolled up a Druid. Now according to the rules that I had (the rules are constantly evolving so I know what I have is rather archaic), a player character couldn't become a druid until he was already a level nine Cleric. Then I had to determine some sort of timeline. Out of curiosity, I figured I'd take my druid all the way to the highest level. Now how can I determine how long that would take?

From time to time, as Dungeon Master, I have been asked how long a character needs to spend on studying a spell, thus giving the rest of the characters in the party the problem of what to do in the mean time. So I decided to give spell study a time value. I figured a level one spell would take a month to learn, a level two spell, two months, and so on, so a level seven spell would take seven months.

By the D&D rules, each character advances in level when they acquire a certain number of experience points, and with each level came a certain number of new spells. There is a different list of spells for Wizards and Druids or Clerics just as there is different rules involved with these characters and how many of what level of spells they get, but how many spells a character can use per day is handled the same way - this is one rule that always bothered me, but the rules were the rules and at the time I had no idea what to do about it.

Wizards went off to school or to some higher wizard to learn their new spells (all behind the scenes) - hence the need for a time span, but Clerics, Druids, Paladins and I think one or two other character were bestowed their spells by their god(s). Because of this major difference I wanted there to be a difference between how spells are recalled and used. I was okay with Wizards being able to memorize only so many spells per day, and as they gained experience, they became better at this and could therefore be able to memorize more spells per day.

According to the D&D rules, Druids' spell casting was handled the same. I suppose, in the interest of simplicity, that was best, but it never settled well with me. Recently (long after I no longer played) I decided to make another small change to the rules. Just as I assigned a time span to learning a spell, I assigned an energy value to those spells bestowed by the gods. Now there's a little difference here because there are level zero spells so I assigned them one point, level one spells got two points, and so on, so level seven spells got eight points. Using these points, my character had 41 energy points as a level nine Cleric turned level one Druid, and he could spend these point rather like hit points on any spell he has been given. That means he could cast up to eight level four spells or forty-one level zero spells before needing to rest and reconnect with his god (meditate). I stay with the rest of the spell restrictions when it comes to acquiring a new level of spells. So as a level one druid he can only cast up to level four spells. At level two he can cast level five spells. At level four he can cast level six spells. And at level nine he can cast level seven spells. He reaches Grand Druid before he can cast level eight spells, and since that is where my book ends I didn't take my table any further.

Enough of that - back to my timeline

Going back to the need for time to pass, especially since I didn't have experience points to go by, I went back to what I gave a Wizard to learn a new spell. I also went back to the original table listing how many of what level spells a Druid gets when he advances a level. Using this information I determined that it would take an average of 7.6 months (sometimes seven, eight, or nine months) to advance a level. That was the backbone of my timeline. Now it was time to fill in some details. How many and of what level spells he gained determined how many spell energy points he gained.

Here was the beginning of my biggest problem. My timeline would cover ten years. But what did I know at the time - onward with my planning.

According to the rules, there were special skills acquired as time went on so those had to be added in, and there was what was called feats where over time he becomes better at some skill or another. There was also set times when he is can figure out how to use a new weapon or he has managed to get better with one he already has. The best is the special skills, the most notable of which is his ability to change shape, but there is something to go with every level.

Okay, so that is the meat and bones of my timeline, but that is by no means the end. According to D&D rules, I'm supposed to roll the dice for wandering monsters every day, and twice during the night; it served to fill the game day, as the character party was going to or from some dungeon, or even within a dungeon for that matter. Now here's another thing I changed in the game. I figured in the 'real' world, a level nine character stood just as good a chance of finding a level one monster as anything, but since I didn't want my level one characters to be immediately squished by some level nine monster, I figured they weren't really going where the big monsters were anyway, however, I was rather more brutal than the game rules called for, meaning level nine characters could meet level nine monsters. The pesky rats and bats might annoy a level 36 player but I figured if they ever existed in their world, they would always exist in their world, so why not include them. If any of you gamers out there would like any of my lists and tables just shoot me an email and I'll send it to you. As you might have guessed by now, I've spent a lot of time thinking on this game even though I no longer play it.

I didn't want to clutter up my book with wandering monsters on every page so I altered the world. Since my druid was walking around in USA today, I put the recognized D&D history, battles and most of their monsters and magics into a carefully hidden past. The war was ultimately won and most of the monsters were wiped out. Much of the magics that enabled extra-planier monsters to come over was outlawed along with any magic involving animating the dead. Also in some great council of magic users, everyone agreed that humans could no longer be trusted with the skill - yes even the human Wizards agreed, besides by then they were likely in a minority. At any rate, because of all this, and what with a little extinction along the way, my list of monsters narrowed down to something far more manageable. So, to free up the pages of my book, I decided to roll for 'monsters' only twice a month, once for sentients and once for animals.

Now I had my timeline. Now I could start my book.

Now I needed an event, a trauma, a reason for my character to turn druid being as he's only a normal fifteen year old American kid. To sculpt this, I gave my character an unpleasant home life - not so bad that he was driven from his home, allowing enough ties to keep him home (his friends and perhaps his mother) with enough enticements to wish for things to be different (the D&D game he played with his friends). The trauma I picked was a rape, something I figured would be particularly traumatic for a boy. I've been told from a couple different sources that this is way too cliche, but I can't think of anything better. At any rate, I used that to tip the scale, that and a little magic to hide his memories, not that he wanted to remember his life, and my character was heading into his life as a Druid.

Now you might think that an average American boy taking up the life of a Druid, no matter how close to a D&D Druid he wanted to be, would be little more than a hermit, but not only did he have help during his first few steps, but there was a reason he had help, that reason being rather sinister, after a fashion, and planned since before his very conception, believe it or not. Ah but now I'm getting into some of the threads I've woven in since I started the story. Always a puzzle - the whys of the things that happen, and the stumbling upon the clues as we go along. Also, if he was only a hermit, no matter how glorified, there would be no dryads in the grove, no Chrystal Palace somewhere in the Rockies full of elves, no pixies living under his bed, no centaurs, halflings or dwarves either.

This is the foundation of this book. In another month (book time) year seven will begin, so in book time I'm a little over 2/3rds of the way to the end. Here is where the problem with my ten-year time span comes in. As of today, my document is 793 pages long and the last month of my timeline is on page 818. Those last 25 pages is not all simple timeline with small notes to tell me who or what he meets, there's also notes on ideas for parts here and there. Though not many, they can be anywhere from a paragraph or two to a page or two. In most of my timeline, each month takes up only from say 4 lines to around 8 lines. Then there is section breaks for when a new 'level' is reached - these levels are the only place where I start the chapter on the next page.

This book is the only book where I constructed any kind of an outline. Notes like what creature he meets or what skill he learns all need a plausible reason to occur, therein is the text of my book. I hope to finish it this year, or rather by this time next year, but there is no real hurry. Like I said I really love the impromptu journey to a known end. I figure when Derrick takes his seat as the youngest Grand Druid in centuries, at age 25, he's going to outline some drastic changes that will change the entire druid society.

I'll have to get there though. You never know what might happen along the way. I certainly don't.

Mmuahahahahaha