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Timekeeping on Riven is a bit of a unique challenge due to the nature of the world. It is not a globe, nor does it rotate around the sun, therefore the sun is always overhead. The counting of hours and minutes, and even of days is therefore built on a different basis than that of our own world.

However, for simplicity of gameplay, I'll still be using the basic units of measure that we're all familiar with, including minutes, hours, days and weeks, and fitting them into a more Riven-suitable framework.

The main time-keeping "event" of Riven is Riven's own rotation around the gas giant Fallare. Riven is farther away from its sun than the Earth is, but recieves a fair amount of ambient light and heat from the highly compact gas giant which it orbits. What this causes is that the sun itself is smaller, dimmer and less hot, but an ambient "glow" of sorts from Fallare takes it's place, allowing for weather that is comparable (for the most part) with what we're used to. Fallare, being such a significant feature in the sky (occupying a good 15-25% of the sky, depending on where in the rotation it is) is the major building block of timekeeping.

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to refrain from calculating any rotational periods or anything that complex and present the following scale:

• Once a week the sun is obscured by the disk of Fallare as it goes through an ten to fourteen hour eclipse. The average time of darkness is twelve hours, which is thus the standard of measure.

• Despite lacking any astronomical ensignia, the remainder of the time is divided up into twelve hour blocks called "cycles." A cycle comes in two varieties, a "day" a "night" period, although except for cycles which correspond with the eclipse, they are all fully lighted.

• Two adjacent cycles are thus equivalent, more or less, to a "day" in our use of the word, and are seen as such on Riven as well. Fourteen adjacent cycles, or seven days, are thus a week. The fourtheenth cycle is the eclipse cycle, so the "nightfall" actually only occurs on the weekend. Following the end of the eclipse cycle, the week resets.

• On Riven, the days of the week are not named, rather, the cycles are merely numbered one through fourteen. They are typically referred to simply as the ordinal adjective, in other words, "Let's meet on the seventh," would mean let's meet on the seventh cycle. All odd numbered cycles are considered "day" cycles while all even numbered cycles are considered "night" cycles. Weeks can also be numbered, and there are fifty two of them in the Rivenish year. So, referring to a date might sound like this, "We first met on the seventh of the 34^th week of 1246," including the cycle, the week and the year.

• The "year" in this regard is not the rotation around the sun, but the rotation around Fallare. Because of the proximity, this has a much greater effect on the climate than the rotation around the sun anyway. The orbit is somewhat eccentric, so that there is a very noticable difference in the size and proximity of Fallare at different points in the year. Traditionally the New Year beings at aphelion, when Fallare is at it's smallest in the sky and the climate is at its coolest. In an interesting reversal from our own world, of course, this is also when the darkness of the nights is at its shortest, since the disc of Fallare which eclipses the sun is at its smallest.

• Riven does experience a solar year once every 21 years. However, this period is not exact, and once every 80 solar years (1680 Fallaren years) there would need to be a "leap day" to account for this. However, this would throw off the Fallaren based calendar, so this leap day is little more than an astronomical curiousity for the learned. There are a number of rumors and fringe beliefs, though, that this phantom "leap day" is a day in which a number of supernatural cataclysms can happen. As a curiosity, the next "leap day" would occur about 20 weeks from the start of the current campaign.