Custom Calendar
When Earth's calendar doesn't fit your world (a fantasy realm with three moons, a generation ship's onboard timekeeping, an alien planet with a 28-hour day), Custom mode lets you redesign every part of the calendar from the ground up. You can rename time units, set how many months are in a year, build your own week, define leap days, and label whole eras with whatever names suit your story.
To enable Custom mode, head to Settings > Calendar and pick "Custom Calendar" from the menu at the top of the Calendar Settings page. Penpoint will pop up a confirmation box before switching. Only the dates inside Calendar blocks (small date markers you place in scenes) get cleared; your characters, chapters, notes, moons, and everything else stay safe.
Tip: Don't feel like you need to fill in every option. The defaults already match a real-world calendar: start by changing only the parts that matter to your story. You can always come back later.
Time Units
Time Units lets you give every unit of time its own vocabulary. The defaults (Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute) work for most worlds, but you can rename any of them. Keep names short so they fit cleanly on date displays.
- A fantasy world might call them Cycles, Moons, Suns, Bells, and Ticks
- A space station might use Standard Years, Mission Months, Watches
- An ancient setting might use the original real-world Latin names
Below the names, two more fields control the length of a day:
- Hours per day: Default 24. Set to 28 for a longer day, 16 for a shorter one, or whatever your world demands.
- Minutes per hour: Default 60. Set to 100 for a decimal-hour world, 50 for shorter hours, etc.
Tip: Renaming units only changes labels on date fields and Calendar blocks. The underlying date data stays the same, so you can rename freely without breaking any existing dates you've already entered.
Week Structure
Week Structure controls how many days are in your week, what each weekday is called, and which weekday Day 1, Year 1 falls on. Everything else flows from there.
Days per week
Set anywhere from 1 day per week up. Most fantasy calendars use somewhere between 5 and 10. As you change the number, weekday name fields appear and disappear to match.
Note: Past 14 days per week, the calendar grid in the Calendar block gets cramped on narrow screens. A heads-up warning shows up at this threshold. Your dates still work normally; only the visual layout is affected.
Weekday Names
Each weekday gets a name field. Keep names short: each one fits on the same line as the day count. The first weekday in the list is "weekday 1": the default weekday Day 1 of Year 1 lands on (you can change which weekday it lands on with the Anchor Day setting below), and the day every month begins on if you turn off continuous weeks (more on that below).
Anchor Day
Day 1, Year 1 has to fall on SOME weekday: pick which one. Penpoint calculates every other weekday in your calendar from this starting point. So if your weekdays are named, say, "Firstday" through "Seventhday", and you anchor Day 1, Year 1 to "Firstday", then Day 2 is "Secondday", and so on.
Continuous Weeks
The Weeks flow continuously across month boundaries switch (continuous weeks) is on by default, just like Earth's calendar, where the last day of January and the first day of February are consecutive weekdays.
Turn continuous weeks off for stylized fantasy calendars where every month starts on the same weekday (a per-month reset). This is useful for ritual calendars, where (for example) every month begins on "Firstday" and ends on "Lastday" regardless of where in the year you are.
Note: When you turn continuous weeks off, the Anchor Day setting doesn't apply: every month starts on the first weekday in your list automatically. Penpoint dims the Anchor Day picker as a reminder.
Months
Months is where you shape your year. Add as many months as you need, name each one, and set how many days each runs. The total adds up to your year length, displayed in a summary row at the bottom of the section.
For each month you can set:
- Name: Keep names short so they fit cleanly on the calendar grid. Numbered defaults like "Month 1" appear if you don't pick a name.
- Day count: How many days in the month. Use the up/down arrows or type a number directly.
- Intercalary (festival-style days that sit outside the normal week): A button that marks the month as a festival period outside the normal weekday cycle (more below).
Intercalary Months
An intercalary month is a stretch of days that sits outside the normal weekday count. Their days don't shift the weekday cycle: a 5-day intercalary festival doesn't push the next month's weekdays five steps ahead. They're a real-world feature too: the Mayan Wayeb (5 unlucky days at the end of the year), the French Revolutionary calendar's "Sansculottides" (festival days outside the normal months). They make a great place for fantasy festivals, mourning periods, or "days out of time."
Click the Intercalary button on a month to mark it. Intercalary months are highlighted with a tinted left border and a subtle background so you can spot them at a glance.
Showing Intercalary Months Separately
When at least one intercalary month exists, an extra switch appears at the bottom of the section: Show intercalary months as separate calendar pages.
- On: Each intercalary (festival) period gets its own page in the Calendar block's grid view. Useful when the festival is a distinct thing readers should think about as separate from the surrounding months.
- Off: Intercalary days are appended to the previous month's grid. Useful for short festivals that feel attached to the month before them.
Leap Days
Calendars drift if your year length doesn't match your world's actual orbit. Leap days fix that. Penpoint supports anything from a single extra day every few years to the full real-world Gregorian rule set.
Skip this section entirely if your calendar doesn't need leap days (many fantasy calendars don't). But if you have a specific orbital cycle in mind, this is where you encode it.
Adding a Leap Day
Click Add leap day to create a new leap day row. Each leap day has these settings:
- Name: How the leap day appears in scenes (e.g., "Festival Day", "Mid-Summer", "Leap Day").
- Attached to: Which month the leap day belongs to. Pick from a dropdown of your existing months.
- After day: Which day of the month the leap day sits after. Set to 0 to put it BEFORE day 1 of the month.
- Type: The Intercalary button works the same way as for months: turn it on if the leap day shouldn't shift the weekday cycle.
- Year offset: Tells Penpoint where your world is in the leap-day cycle. If your last leap day fell three years before your story starts, type -3 here so future leap days fall on the right years.
Simple Rules: "Every N Years"
Under Fires when, every leap day has at least one rule. The default is "Every 4 years": a simple cycle that fires the leap day every fourth year. You can change the number to anything (every 5, every 10, every 1000).
Advanced Rules: Adding Exceptions
Click + Add exception to layer additional rules. The conditions are evaluated together to decide whether the leap day fires in any given year:
- Every: A regular firing rule. The leap day fires on these years.
- Except every: An exception rule. These years cancel out a regular rule. Combine them to get Earth's "every 4, except 100, every 400" pattern.
The classic real-world example is three rules together: every 4 years fires the leap day; every 100 years cancels it; every 400 years reinstates it. That gives you Earth's actual leap-year rules.
Tip: Don't want to set those three rules by hand? The Use Gregorian preset button at the bottom of the section seeds the full real-world leap-year rule set in one click (every 4 years fires the leap day, every 100 years cancels it, every 400 years reinstates it), attached to your second month after day 28.
Intercalary Leap Days
Like intercalary months, intercalary leap days don't shift the weekday cycle. Useful for festivals that only happen on leap years (a once-every-four-years celebration, a centennial rite) where you don't want the rest of your weekday math to budge.
Date Labels and Eras
The Eras section is where you decide how dates read in your story. Just numbers? A founding-event split like BCE/CE? Full named periods like "Reign of King Valdris"? Pick whichever fits your world. The setting in this section applies to every Calendar Block in the book at once.
At the top of the section is a Display style picker with three choices:
- Plain years: Just numbers, no labels. "Year 5025" or "5025" depending on context.
- BCE/CE-style: A single before/after split anchored at year 0. You type your own labels: "Pre-Dragon" / "Post-Dragon", "Before the Calling" / "After the Calling", or any other pair you like.
- Named eras: Full reigns, ages, or epochs. Each era has its own name and start year, and dates inside that era read as "Year 3, Reign of King Valdris" (or one of three other phrasings).
Tip: Switching between styles never deletes your work. If you build a list of named eras, then switch to Plain years to see how it reads, your eras stay safely saved; switch back to Named eras to see them again. Same for BCE/CE labels.
BCE/CE-style: A Single Before/After Split
BCE/CE means Before Common Era / Common Era, and it works for any one-event split. Use this when your world has one big anchor event that everything else dates from (a founding, a calamity, a deity's arrival). Pick the BCE/CE-style option, then fill in the "before" and "after" names. Keep them short so they fit on date displays. Negative years get the before-label, positive years get the after-label, so "-50" might read as "50 BD" and "100" might read as "100 AD", whatever your world calls them.
Named Eras: Reigns, Ages, and Epochs
Use Named eras when your world tracks time inside named periods: the reigns of monarchs, mythic ages, scholarly epochs. Each era has a name (like "Age of Wonder" or "Reign of King Valdris"), a start year, and an optional duration in years.
Every Named eras setup includes a Base era at the top: Penpoint creates it for you and it can't be deleted. The base era is the safety net: any date that doesn't fall inside one of your other eras is labeled with the base era's name. So if your first defined era starts in year 1500, a date in year 200 will read with the base era's name. Rename it to whatever fits your world ("Age of Wonder", "Pre-History", etc.).
To add a new era, click + Add era at the bottom of the section. Each new era gets:
- Name: How the era appears on dates. Up to 28 characters: Penpoint stops you from typing more so date displays don't get cramped.
- Starts: The year (and optionally month and day) the era begins.
- Duration: How many years the era lasts. Optional. If you skip this, the era runs until your next era starts (or forever, if it's the last one). Set a duration when you want a defined end, for example a 42-year reign that ends in a known year.
Tip: Changing an era's start year shifts its end year along with it, so the duration stays the same. So if you set up "Reign of Valdris" starting in year 1500 with a duration of 42, then later realize it should start in 1490 instead, just change the start year; the duration stays at 42 and the end year shifts to match.
Tip: Building a run of consecutive reigns? Once you've set a duration on an era, an Add next era button appears beneath it. Click it and Penpoint creates a new era that starts exactly one year after this one ends, with no arithmetic needed. If you haven't set a duration yet, the button still appears and inserts a new era right after this one in the list; just fill in the start year yourself.
How Dates Are Phrased
When Named eras is active, a Display style picker appears below the Style picker, with four phrasings to choose from. The picker shows each phrasing using your actual era names, so you can pick the one that reads best for your story:
- Year 3, Reign of King Valdris: Year first, then era name (the default).
- Reign of King Valdris, Year 3: Era name first, then year.
- Year 3 of the Reign of King Valdris: Connected with "of the".
- 3rd Year of the Reign of King Valdris: Ordinal year ("1st", "2nd", "3rd").
Below the Display style picker is a live Preview row that shows what one of your real eras looks like in the chosen format, so you can confirm it reads right before saving.
Sorting and Gaps
New eras get added in the order you create them. If you add them out of chronological order, click Sort by start date at the bottom of the section to put them in proper sequence. The Base era stays at the top; only the others reorder.
If two eras don't quite line up (say one era ends in year 550 and the next doesn't start until year 600), the 50-year gap shows up between the eras as a labeled divider ("50 Year Gap"). Dates in that gap fall back to the Base era automatically, so you don't need to define every period of unrecorded time as its own era. Useful for "the lost centuries" or any unrecorded stretch between known reigns.
Note: + Add era, Sort by start date, and Reset all eras all sit in a row at the bottom of the section. Add next era appears beneath each individual era. Reset all eras clears every era except the Base era. The change can't be undone, so Penpoint will ask you to confirm with a dialog before anything happens, and you can hit Cancel.
Picking an Era When Editing a Date
When Named eras is active, every Calendar Block date picker shows an Era: selector above the month and year. Click it to jump to a different era; Penpoint takes you to the start of that era so you can pick a date inside it. The year input shows era-relative numbers (Year 3 instead of Year 1503), so you can think in reign-relative years without doing math.
Calendar Blocks are the small date fields you drop into scenes. See Calendar Block for everything they can do.
Resetting to Gregorian Defaults
Note: At the bottom of the Calendar Settings page is a Reset to Gregorian defaults button. Your existing Calendar block dates stay put, but they'll read against the Gregorian structure afterward, so a date like "Stormwane 30" won't make sense once the months are renamed. Re-check existing dates after a reset. The button rebuilds every Custom-mode setting from a fresh real-world template: twelve months with their standard names and day counts, seven-day weeks named Monday through Sunday, 24-hour days with 60-minute hours, no leap rules, no era labels. A confirmation dialog asks before any of this happens, with a Cancel button if you change your mind.
Worked Example: A 13-Month Fantasy Calendar
Let's walk through building a calendar for a fantasy world: 13 months of 28 days each, plus one "Day Out of Time" intercalary day at year's end, 7-day weeks named after the seven gods of the realm, and a leap day every 4 years on the final festival.
- Switch to Custom mode. From the menu at the top of the Calendar Settings page, pick "Custom Calendar." Penpoint shows a confirmation dialog with a Cancel button before committing. Only dates inside Calendar blocks get cleared; your chapters, characters, notes, moons, and Custom calendar settings are all untouched.
- Set Time Units (optional). Leave Year/Month/Day as-is, or rename them. Hours per day: 24. Minutes per hour: 60.
- Build the week. In Week Structure, set Days per week to 7. Rename each weekday after a god (say, Solday, Lunaday, Marsday, Mercuriday, Jupiterday, Veneriday, Saturday). Pick the anchor weekday for Day 1, Year 1: Solday is a fitting choice.
- Build the months. In Months, set Months per year to 14. Name the first 13 with your world's month names, each with 28 days. Name month 14 "Day Out of Time" with 1 day, and click its Intercalary button. Total days in a year: 365 (13 × 28 = 364, plus 1).
- Add a leap day (optional). In Leap Days, click Add leap day. Name it "Long Festival." Attach it to month 14 (Day Out of Time), after day 1. Leave the default rule "Every 4 years."
- Pick a date-label style (optional). In the Eras section's Display style picker, choose BCE/CE-style if your world has one big founding event (then fill in your before/after labels, like "Pre-Sundering" / "Post-Sundering"). Choose Named eras if you'd rather track time inside named periods like "Reign of King Valdris" or "Age of Wonder." Or leave it on Plain years if you don't need labels at all.
- Check the preview pane. The right side of the page shows live Edit Mode (what you see when picking a date in a scene) and View Mode (what shows up afterward in your prose) examples using your new calendar. Pick a date in the preview to see how it formats.
Where Your Calendar Shows Up
Every Calendar block in every scene reads from your custom settings. Add a Calendar block to any scene, switch into Edit Mode, and writers will pick dates using YOUR weekdays, YOUR months, YOUR era labels. The grid picker (the calendar grid that pops up when picking a date) shows your week structure; the date displays use your unit names.
Ready to start designing? Head to Settings > Calendar and pick Custom Calendar from the menu at the top of the Calendar Settings page.
For a refresher on calendar modes, eras, and moons (which work the same way across all modes), see Calendar Settings.