Hey, it’s Heather! My player role is keeping the timeline. Luckily Paizo made keeping track of the dates their modules and Adventure Paths take place very easy. The Golarion calendar matches up with ours. Check out the tables for an easy reference. 

[table id=1 /]

[table id=2 /]

Also, it’s important to know that the year 2000 CE in our world is the year 4700 AR (Absalom Reckoning) in Pathfinder. With this information, it’s super easy to change a date from our calendar to Golarion’s.

Monday, 1 October, 2018 translates in Golarion as Moonday, 1 Lamashan, 4718.

Now that you know how to convert the date, you’re probably wondering how we determine when a module or AP book takes place. If the book doesn’t tell you, look at the publication date. For example, the first Paizo Adventure Path book, Rise of the Runelords — Book One, Burnt Offerings, was published in October of 2007. The book tells you it starts during a festival that takes place in Desnus. So it gives you the month, but not the year. Since the book was published in 2007 CE, you know the year in Golarion is 4707 AR.

If you want to know what day it is, the easiest thing to do is find a calendar app or website where you can change the date and see. I usually just do a web search. In the above example I would search “May 2007 calendar.” Keeping track of the date is important because often times there can be consequences in the story depending on how long it took the characters to accomplish a goal or reach a location.

Other than keeping track of what the date is, keeping the timeline for your group is about writing down notes about what happens during the session. I use a spiral notebook. I can usually fit two Adventure Paths in a 3 subject college ruled spiral. On the first page for an AP, I write the name of the AP and the title of book one. I also make a list of the players’ names with their character names beside it so I know how to spell them and can remember who’s who.

I always write the date first, and start the first sentence with a slight indent on the line under it. I also skip a line between dates so I can easily flip through and find the last date in case a day takes us several sessions to play through. When we started doing our Mummy’s Mask recordings, I started using a different color ink for each recording session, just so I could look and see which episodes were recorded together. I’ve started doing this in the games that we don’t record so I can see what happened in each individual session.

What you write, and how much, is up to you. Some sessions I write more than others. I try to write down NPC names, which is why you might hear me asking Rick “how do you spell that” or “can you repeat their name” sometimes in the Mummy’s Mask episodes. I try to write down anything that seems like it might be important, and just general details of what we’re doing, that way if we need a recap, when we check the timeline it’s detailed enough so we can remember what happened.

Here’s a quick example:

 

Heather: Tera

Jordan: Sherbert

Jessica: Zola

Rachel: Viorica

 

1 Lamashan, 4718 (Moonday)

 

The party buys/sells stuff in the morning. Meet back at the inn afterwards. Sherbert tells the party he talked with bookstore owner about the missing people, and she told him about the creepy creature in the woods that spirits people away after stalking them.

The party decides to search the forest. After exploring for awhile, they find a creepy tree. Tera detects an evil presence in the area. They are attacked by a strange creature that looks like a man with tentacles on his back and elongated limbs with no face.

During the fight, Viorica sees a young boy. He runs when the creature is defeated. Zola starts to track him.

 

I hope that helps give you a good idea of how to keep track of your party’s adventuring timeline. Hopefully you now know how to find and keep track of dates in Golorion, and what kind of information you might want to write down!