I have had trouble a long time with keeping time in my setting till I came up with a better, but more imprecise way of tracking it.  Throughout history, the church has been a primary keeper of time, so have ships for they needed it for navigation, setting of watches et all.  The problem is, clocks were expensive and generally not available.  Most people relied on sundials, hourglasses, water clocks, candle clocks and a variety of other time keeping elements.  This lead to a lot of imprecise understandings of time.  That needed to have some reflection in the setting.  So how to keep time in an organized manner and from a medieval mindset.  I settled on  the use of church Canonical Hours as a compromise.

 

Canonical Hours

This is how time is kept in Akiniwazi on land in three hour blocks. If time is specifically known, it will be referred to as either the 1st, 2nd or 3rd hour or minor of the period.

• Nocturnes: Midnight-2am
• Matins: 3am-5am
• Primae: 6am-8am
• Terce: 9am-11am
• Sexte: Noon-2pm
• Nonae: 3pm to 5pm
• Vespers: 6pm-8pm
• Compline: 9pm-11pm

Now time throughout the day is broken into eight three hour blocks which flows more with the rhythm of the setting.  So when you want to say what we recognize as 1200/12pm… aka noon, That is now First Sexte.  Dinner time?  First Vespers or Third Nonae if you meant 1700/5pm.  You see how it flows.  It works well when considering hourly progressions.

The finest reliable method of time keeping I have is by half and quarter hours.  Rarely will they have (or need) a piece of time keeping equipment with fine enough precision for single minutes or less.  Very few mechanical clocks exist in Akiniwazi, Most of the technology did not make the trip over.

Needless to say, it has not been without its own challenges, but it adds a nice flavor in the end.. in my opinion.  Then again, I’m the author, so I’m biased.