[OB] I made a detailed Stormlight timeline! (Oathbringer version)

[Jofwu he/him]

I wanted to put together a detailed timeline for Stormlight. After a few weeks of lunch breaks, this is what I've got to show for it!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zq5bJoKE83ggDCjH43i1hZi0CIpB2iAx7v37zQPVFK0/edit#gid=856252766

There's a really good timeline for Words of Radiance out there, but nothing that pulled in events from ALL the books into one place. The main reason for this is simple... The Way of Kings chronology isn't nearly as detailed or ironed out! Many of the dates in this timeline are based on a LOT of assumptions. Don't take them at face value. I've done my best to speculate on how much error is possible, and you'll see that listed next to the dates. But those numbers could easily be wrong as well! The goal wasn't to figure everything out perfectly, however. That's just not going to happen. My real goal here was just to do the best I could with the information we've got. And if new information comes to light that paints a better picture we can incorporate that! Ultimately, my hope is that this is a fun and useful tool. For the most part, it will help you get a general idea of how events fit together.  Again, just be aware that it's probably got lots of errors.

It's still a work in progress. The whole thing needs to be reviewed and cleaned up. If you have comments or questions, please feel free to share them! If you'd like to help me check the whole thing over in detail then let me know. I'd like to add a bit more functionality as well, concerning dates that are dependent on one another. But this is more or less the final form.

Special thanks goes to @WeiryWriter. He put together the incredibly detailed timeline for Words of Radiance. A lot of that work is captured here and it was the basis for my own work. He also put together a list of TWoK timeline notes, which I used extensively. Other people may be have involved in that WoR timeline effort as well. Thanks to all of you!

[Shlee]

I'm frequently out of internet access for long periods of time due to my job so I actually have my own one of these (and my own WOB database for that matter haha). I'm very excited to be able to compare this one with mine over the next few weeks as I'm sure the collective knowledge here has caught many things that I probably missed. So much awesome!

[Jofwu he/him]

7 minutes ago, Shlee said:

I'm frequently out of internet access for long periods of time due to my job so I actually have my own one of these (and my own WOB database for that matter haha). I'm very excited to be able to compare this one with mine over the next few weeks as I'm sure the collective knowledge here has caught many things that I probably missed. So much awesome!

Yes! Please let me know if you see anything that looks different!

[Storyspren]

Thank you. Very useful and thorough.

[ccstat he/him]

Looks great, jofwu. I like the new format. 

How much detail are you looking to add? For example, in the most recent chapter we got time indications for the two murders (occuring one and two days prior to Shallan's visit). Are those things that should be included yet, or are we waiting to see how significant the event is?

[Jofwu he/him]

21 minutes ago, ccstat said:

Looks great, jofwu. I like the new format. 

How much detail are you looking to add? For example, in the most recent chapter we got time indications for the two murders (occuring one and two days prior to Shallan's visit). Are those things that should be included yet, or are we waiting to see how significant the event is?

Great question! 

I'm probably going to put those in. I almost did today, but I need to do a thorough scouring of the last 6 chapters anyways. So I figured I can pick those up when I get a chance to do that. Since there's so many other big things going on over the same days... I might leave out the first (less notable) murder, and just include the copycat case. Will have to think about that.

The first two books aren't quite that detailed yet, but one day I will probably add small things like this in those as well. (Those timelines aren't as compact as Oathbringer has been so far, so there's probably less of that kind of thing.)

I will say that I probably won't include small things like this if we don't have an exact day. For example, if the murder happened "several days ago" and it's not a significant plot point then I'd probably leave it out. Seems silly to put approximate dates for random events with little relevance. (especially if there's other meaningful stuff already on the same dates)

[ccstat he/him]

Sounds good. Does this replace your previous version? Should Everstorm tracking still go in that thread?

[Jofwu he/him]

Yeah, it can still go there. I do have a separate spreadsheet for that.

Though, I'm also not sure how much further that can go. When I get a chance to look closer at this new map inside the Oathbringer cover I may compare that with the map I was using. I suspect what I had was pretty close. Which is to say that there's some unknowns concerning the Everstorm path/speed that we just can't answer yet. 

[Pattern he/him]

Entries 143, 176: Szeth assassinates King Hanavanar two times.

[Jofwu he/him]

5 hours ago, Pattern said:

Entries 143, 176: Szeth assassinates King Hanavanar two times.

Thanks! The first was supposed to be the interlude before. Just forgot to update the text.

[DiamondMind he/him]

I might do a writeup later to put things in a easier to follow format. Otherwise, this is amazing! Hopefully Oathbringer makes it as easy to follow the days as WoR did. The only issue I see is that event errors overlap.

[Jofwu he/him]

30 minutes ago, DiamondMind said:

Hopefully Oathbringer makes it as easy to follow the days as WoR did. The only issue I see is that event errors overlap.

So far it's been pretty good. Shallan and Dalinar have been a little vague, but not terribly so.

And yep. I mean, some of that is intentional. If event X could be moved 5 days later and event Y is one day after X, then it can also move 5 days later from where it is. Someone might think X can shift while Y stays in place, putting them out of order. But that's their fault for misinterpreting.

The problem comes when, for example, there's a fixed event Z a few days after X which we know happens after Y. This throws an extra limit on Y's error (or even on the date itself). This isn't terribly difficult to handle, if I write the error range as a function so that it automatically adjusts. I did this on a few occasions. But that limit also flows uphill back to X's error, and that's not an easy thing to pick up. I'll get to it eventually.

[DiamondMind he/him]

@jofwu I meant that if two different events are on the same day, then the one with a greater error range seems to be displayed. Like on 10/8/5, the error is -3 weeks which probably refers to Eshonai's interlude, since Dalinar has to leave that day.

[Jofwu he/him]

7 hours ago, DiamondMind said:

@jofwu I meant that if two different events are on the same day, then the one with a greater error range seems to be displayed. Like on 10/8/5, the error is -3 weeks which probably refers to Eshonai's interlude, since Dalinar has to leave that day.

Oh oh! Yeah... I'm not sure of there's a better solution in this format. Problem is you'd need to tie the error to each event rather than next to the date...

Hmm... I couldn't think of a good way to do that before, but now I'm wondering... I could insert a carriage return between events, references, etc. rather than spaces/commas. That would visually separate them. Then I could do the same for errors. I'll test this out. Might not be so hard to implement.

Edit:

@DiamondMind What do you (or others) think about this? I made it put blank lines between separate events. If nothing else I really like this because it reveals which event(s) are connected to which chapter(s) and reference(s). And then it also let's put multiple error numbers in. The alignment isn't perfect. Don't know if it can be done better this way. Turning off line wrap would fix it, but then event info would have to be limited in length or the cell would be impractically wide. The error numbers are particularly out of alignment because I have them a smaller font size... but it would take some convincing for me to make them bigger. They look too distracting to me otherwise. I could, alternatively, move the error columns further to the right I suppose. But I think I'm happy with this?

Edited October 8, 2017 by jofwu