timeline
Timeline v2.1
Maintain a coherent chronology without over-tracking irrelevant minutiae. A timeline that records every meal is a timeline nobody maintains, and an unmaintained timeline is worse than none.
What to track
Dates, durations, ages, sequencing, travel time where it is consequential, flashbacks, simultaneous events, and branch-specific events. Prioritise anything a character could notice, a plot turn could depend on, or a contradiction could hide behind.
Age and duration
Record ages explicitly. A character's age at the time of an event, not merely at the present, because age limits and maturation are easy to break silently across long novels.
Travel time is consequential when the story depends on arrival, pursuit, message timing, or resource decay. If it matters, record it; if it does not, leave it loose.
Record
Maintain events in timeline/EVENT.md with date or range, duration, participants and their ages at the time, causal position, and the effects owed. Record chronology and presentation order separately — they are different facts, and conflating them produces false continuity errors.