Events & Recurring Patterns

MythTapestry gives you two ways to place things on a calendar timeline: one-time world events for things that happened once at a specific point, and recurring patterns for anything that repeats — whether every year, every week, every cycle of a moon, or every 3rd Fireday of the month.

Note

Earlier versions of MythTapestry had a separate “Holiday” type for annually-recurring observances. That role is now covered by recurring patterns, which can express both annual repeats (“Midsummer, every year on Day 45”) and cycle-based repeats (“Market Day, every 7 days”). One concept, fewer surprises.

World events

World events are one-time occurrences — battles, coronations, cataclysms, discoveries, anything that happened once at a specific point (or span) in your world’s history. You give each event a start date and an end date, even if the event lasted only a single day.

Note

Every event uses a start and end range. This lets a single event span days, months, or years — a war, a plague, a long journey can all have proper durations.

Event fields

Field	Description
Name	The primary name for this event (e.g. “The Great Fire”)
Aliases	Alternative names the event is known by (e.g. “Fire of 1523”, “The Burning”)
Description	What happened
Start / End dates	The date range the event occupies on the timeline
Time of day	Optional start and end times within a day, if you want sub-day precision
Precision	How accurate the date is (see below)
Precision unknown	Turn this on for legendary or pre-historical events where only rough placement is known
Calendar	Which calendar to use when displaying this event’s dates
Linked entity	Optional connection to an Event entity in your knowledge graph

Precision

The precision field tells MythTapestry how closely to trust the date you’ve entered. You pick from the temporal scales defined in your calendar — Year, Month, Day, Season, Age, or whatever your calendar has.

An event with precision set to “Year” means the year is accurate but the specific month and day may be approximate. An event with precision “Day” is known to the exact day. For events where even the rough timeframe is uncertain, turn on Precision unknown to flag it clearly throughout the app.

Precision carries through the system: the knowledge graph’s temporal filter can show events only at a given confidence level, and date references in your writing can carry their own precision independently.

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Recurring patterns

Recurring patterns are for anything that repeats. The pattern itself is a template; to use it as a specific date you pick the occurrence you mean.

Three common shapes:

Annual recurrence — “every year at the same calendar position”

Festivals, observances, commemorations. “Midsummer” falls on the same day of the same month every year. “The first day of the Season of Frost” falls at the same structural position in the calendar every year, however long that year is.

To define this you tie the pattern to a container scale that repeats every year (the Year scale itself, or a season inside the year) and pick a position within it.

Cycle recurrence — “every Nth day of a repeating cycle”

Market days, weekly meetings, moon-cycle observances. A market that happens every 7 days doesn’t care whether a new year has started — it just keeps counting on its overlay cycle. A festival that follows a 29-day moon cycle drifts through the calendar year and that’s fine.

To define this you tie the pattern to an overlay scale (the Week, the Moon Cycle, the 6-day Market Cycle) and pick which unit in that cycle the pattern lands on.

Compound recurrence — “the 3rd Fireday of every month”

A pattern that needs both a container and a cycle within it. “Council meets on the 3rd Fireday of each month” needs you to specify the month (container), the week within the month (cycle), and the 3rd Fireday in particular (ordinal + unit).

To define this you need:

• Container scale — the repeating container (e.g. Month)
• Overlay scale — the cycle to pick from within it (e.g. Week)
• Ordinal — which occurrence within the container (e.g. 3rd)
• Unit — which unit in the overlay cycle (e.g. Fireday)

Caution

A recurring pattern is a template, not a date. To place a pattern occurrence on the timeline you must pick a specific instance — “Midsummer of Year 1423” gives a precise point, “Midsummer” alone does not. The system lists upcoming instances when you reference a pattern in writing or on the timeline.

Pattern fields

Field	Description
Name	The pattern’s name (e.g. “Midsummer”, “Market Day”, “Council Meeting”)
Aliases	Other names this recurring date is known by — useful for regional variants
Description	What the pattern marks or celebrates
Pattern configuration	The scale, ordinal, and unit settings described above
Calendar	Which calendar this pattern belongs to

Tip

Events and patterns both support aliases. Use them when the same event or recurring date is known by different names in different regions or cultures of your world.

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Quick comparison

Type	Repeats?	Anchored to	Gives a specific date?
World event	No	A fixed date you enter	Always
Recurring pattern	Yes — annually, weekly, or on any cycle you define	A container scale, an overlay cycle, or both	Yes, once you pick an occurrence