timeline question

[doomhamster]

Does anybody know what year it is in SWTOR, as it were? Or what the in-universe reference would be for e.g. the Sacking of Coruscant? Because it's all well and good to know that happened in 3653 before the battle of Yavin, but I have a sneaking suspicion that's not the dating system the characters use... or dating systems, really, because the Empire probably feels it's the year thirtysomething after the Glorious Reconquest of Korriban, or similar.

(Yeah, I could probably just elide the dates stuff anyway, but. I have a Thing.)

Comments

[nebelstreif]

I can't believe that the matter of TOR timekeeping had never occurred to me before! (As an honest-to-goodness professional historian who likes his fictional universes to be internally consistent, you could probably say I have a Thing, too.)

Unnecessary background: According to Wookieepedia, time in the Star Wars universe tends to be measured by the number of years before or since a major historical event; different epochs tend to be marked by different "anchoring" points. In the early Extended Universe material, time was measured using the Battle of Endor as Year 0. However, the timeline is now pretty much anchored around using the Battle of Yavin as Year 0. (This standardization is explained in-universe as the work of the Historical Council, who thought the destruction of the first Death Star to be more historical significant. Historians -- go figure.)

In the time of The Old Republic, the anchoring event appears to be the Treaty of Coruscant (which happens to correspond to the Sacking of Coruscant); in his holorecordings, Master Gnost-Dural refers to the Treaty as "the singular defining event of recent years." However, it should be pointed out that "Before Treaty of Coruscant" and "After Treaty of Coruscant" may only exist in the work of one (admittedly very skilled) historian; the Empire almost certainly has its own time system ("Before/After Return" would make a pretty awesome anchor), and the Republic must have had a different time notion less than a generation ago. After all, the Treaty is only a decade or so old, and with the Republic being so large and so inefficient (and having just been engaged in a decades-long war), any sort of time-measuring changes are almost certainly very slow to disseminate and often only half-heartedly adopted. And we've not even talked about the Tion Hegemony, the Chiss Ascendency, or any number of non-aligned/semi-autonomous worlds that have their own calendars.

Short answer: the game seems to be taking place in 3643 BBY, or 10 ATC. The Treaty of Coruscant has held for about a decade, but we players (starting roughly with the Black Talon/Brentaal Star Incident) witness the rapid breakdown of the Treaty and the resumption of semi-official open conflict.

[virtualvoyages]

Nebel's got it covered. And, like both of you, I suspect that in-universe there are many different calendars being used. On the bright side, that means we're all pretty free to make those up, since we've got nothing canon to use.

SW:TOR is just a bit vaguer than it could be when it comes to these things. I really wish they'd thrown in more backgroundy stuff. We do get fragments here and there, but a whole lot of things that would be very nice to know seem not to be found anywhere.

I suppose we could try to gather what background info the game does give us here somewhere. I don't know of any other repository of SW:TOR background data.