Genealogy Software for Fun and Weirdness

I’ve found yet another great class of software that makes writing
easier: Genealogy software. In the
stories, there’s a giant number of characters, and obviously, also a
giant number of relations between the characters.

One of the great big stumbling blocks of the real-world specialist
software is that it doesn’t really lend itself all too well on use with
fictional worlds. Luckily, the folks of Avarthrel have same number of
months per year and days per month as we here do, but how would the
calendar systems deal with years in four different ages of year-keeping?
(Look, I’m not a really gigantic Tolkien fan, but in every good fantasy
setting, people reset their calendars all the time when something big
happens. Or just if the King happens to walk over to the other side of
the river. =)

In this case, the software seems to work perfectly so far, however. The
software does, however, cause a few problems from the narrative point of
view. Consider, for example, how I started writing stuff about an
adventuring company based in Anchorfall…

Owned by four generations of Sandbrooks, a family of people with strong
innate magical abilities, usually inherited strongest on the maternal
side.

…and then I spend next eight hours (I think I’m not kidding) digging
through (read: coming up with) the Sandbrook family history. Well, we
may not know much yet about the famed long-standing mercenary company
with magical and mysterious founders and proprietors, but I sure as heck
know who the current owner’s great-grandmother was!

I currently have a rather vague idea on how to handle raw historical
data. I have a hand-edited master timeline, and I’m supposed to keep
together a small list of important dates for the character in question.
I may be able to solve a part of this mess through a mysterious
GEDCOM-to-MediaWiki-messuppery-bot, but I really need to figure out how
to handle historical references that don’t necessarily concern with any
people in the notes. Perhaps I’ll throw together a giant mess soon.