My current game has a bunch of psions… so there’s wormholes and psychic communication all the time. Which got me to thinking after a recent encounter taking place early evening in Samarah and concurrently west of the Ringing Mountains.
In my game, the world is the same size as Earth. The Tablelands are but a small part of the world. But even at the original scale, there would probably be an hour time difference.
But that got me thinking. A lot of DM’s run Athas as smaller than Earth… which would mean the light difference would be greater.
And 4E scale further mucks that up. Has this ever come up in your games?
Time zones tend to vary between 1,035 miles and 675 miles wide depending on where you are. Time in my game tends to be more nebulous, days start at sunup, end at sundown. Horns are blown in the cities, but villages are slower paced and don’t usually keep that close a time. Since cities are islands and the land between tends to be a bit wild, there doesn’t need to be much in the way of coordination between them.
“Sunrise, Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Sundown, Night, Midnight, Before Sunrise” tends to work just fine outside of the cities.
It came into play more due to the specific time an enemy’s wormhole triggered (saving a fellow antagonist). An hour difference of light is a huge clue to the unknown distance and a PC poked their head through to see what was on the other side and if it was worth pursuing. It wasn’t… but it made me refer to the maps, distance and my projected distance fix to the canon maps, while reaffirming the size I have the planet in game.