Date and Time Conventions

It's difficult to objectively date events in Eona's world. Timekeeping became decentralized with the loss of most technological infrastructure, so towns often have their own calendar systems. These systems aren't easily combined or coordinated. Travel is dangerous enough to discourage long trips between regions, which keeps timekeeping systems mostly confined to their original area. While some regions are beginning to surmount travel difficulties and coordinate calendar systems, regional differences still gum up the works. It's hard to reconcile large time gaps. It's even harder to justify such large changes when trade still works out well enough.

Timekeeping is similarly uncoordinated. Most towns go by the position of the sun, often making use of sundials and similar devices. Social norms have changed accordingly. Given times tend to be more imprecise, and people often rely on the rhythms of their hometown to coordinate meetings. It's easy to tell someone to meet you when the baker opens for the day.

It's a rare few cities that have more precise timekeeping devices, usually those that are able to fabricate metals and create simple machinery. These cities usually lie near the mountain range in the center of the continent. One or two cities elsewhere have more unorthodox solutions based on non-mechanical technology. Biotech still has a foothold in a few sheltered areas, and engineered circadian rhythms can work as a makeshift clock.

Much further north, timekeeping has survived mostly unchanged in a few bastion cities near the coast. These cities tend to be heavily isolationist, so very few outsiders will ever know what year it is according to their pre-disaster ancestors.

Because I'd like to dig a little into the history of Eona, I'm going to set Year 0 as the year that everything began to fall apart. All other dates will be calculated from this reference point.