Cthalendar Setup
 26Mb Windows
 6th September 2006

New: The Keep!


Cthalendar is still available, and if all you want is a calendar and note-taking tool then it's probably going to be just right. If you fancy some help juggling character sheets while Keeping though, you should check out The Keep! It includes the whole of Cthalendar (and adds some new features to that) but can also load, display and edit COC character sheets generated by Byakhee in a quick-to-access and easy-to-use interface.

About Cthalendar

Cthalendar is Donationware! You may distribute it freely so long as you do not make any charge for doing so.

If you find the program useful, please consider making a small donation!

What is Cthalendar?

Cthalendar is a calendaring and note-taking tool mainly intended for Keepers running Call Of Cthulhu RPG games, but could be of use to any DM/GM running games based in worlds that use the Gregorian calendar.

The program is intended to solve two problems.

1) Your campaign notes say its the 27th of March 1928... your players ask, "So what day of the week is it?"... YARGH! The display calendar to the left should make it very easy to answer that question.

2) Your handwriting is awful (like mine!), you keep losing scraps of paper (like me!) and you're generally disorganized (guess who!). The note area here stores whatever you type in a text file named for the Month and Year currently showing on the calendar. There's no need to "load" or "save", it all happens quickly and automatically.

In addition to this, Cthalendar also comes bundled with several extensive sets of pre-built dated information. The "Exotic" data set covers bizarre, unexplained, occult and otherwise Fortean events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The "Disasters" data set includes dates and information about a huge variety of horrible disasters - natural and man-made - during the same period. Also, the "Mythos" data set covers the same time period and features dated references to over 200 events in the history of the Mythos - referring to Lovecraft and other authors' works.

Using Cthalendar

Navigating through dates is easy. The single arrow buttons under the calendar view move forward/back by one month at a time. Note also that there is an additional "month" before January, called "year". This gives you a convenient slot to place notes that refer to a given year but for which no particular date is meaningful. See the Mythos, Disasters and Exotic sets for examples.

The three-arrow buttons move back/forward one Year at a time, preserving your current selected Month.

Clicking the central button below the calendar allows you to enter a Year to jump to.

Click any of the named month buttons at the far left to jump straight to that month. Any month (including the abstract "year" month at the top) for which some notes are recorded will be lit yellow, while others will just show gray or white.

The final method of calendar navigation is the "Next" and "Previous" buttons directly below this box. They'll advance or retreat through time to the very next month for which you have any notes recorded, regardless of how few or how many months and years may lie in between.

Using Data Sets

Check the Menu at the top left. You should see a number of Data Sets, eg "Mythos", "Disasters", "Notes".

Each of these represents a folder in Cthalendar's program directory in which one complete set of dated notes is stored. Using the Data Sets system you can separate your notes conveniently by topic, perhaps keeping prepared campaign notes in one Data Set and your actual Keepers journal of play in another. You can create as many Data Sets as you like.

The Create Set button will prompt you for a name for your new set. Best to keep it reasonably short and remember that since this will be used as a folder name, you can't have any slashes or other naughty-filename type characters in there.

Lastly, the Export option will prompt you for a filename which will become a new textfile containing the entire contents of a single Data Set pasted into a one large file. This can be useful if you want to print out your notes.

Provided Data Sets

The "Exotic" (over 100 entries) and "Disasters" (also over 100 entries) data sets are expansions upon the "Timelines" pages that appear towards the back of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu 5th edition rulebook. For many of the entries, accurate dates have been found and are noted. Some entries have been corrected for names, spelling and dates. Other entries are new to the list, but all draw on genuine news reports of their day.

The "Mythos" (over 200 entries) data set is an extract of James "JEB" Bowman's fantastic Cthulhu Mythos Timeline, corrected here and there for spelling. The Data Set covers the period 1880 to 1940.

The data sets, as presented here, are all constrained to a range of around 100 years surrounding 1900 as this covers the years that I use in my own games. You can, of course, expand upon the data into the past or the future as you see fit.

Acknowledgements

Much of the Information in the included data sets, draws on source material listed below:

Thanks folks!

 

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