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PostRoll Help

Cycles overview

A world cycle in PostRoll is a recurring world state with named phases: moons waxing and waning, tides rising and falling, seasons turning, festival rings rotating. Cycles let your world have texture — “the players arrive in Vael during the Festival of Lanterns, on a falling tide, under a waxing gibbous moon”.

Cycles are defined once with a period and an anchor. Every view works out “what phase are we in right now” on the fly — nothing is stored ahead of time. This means you can change a cycle’s anchor or phase definitions and every view updates instantly.

What you can model

Section titled “What you can model”
Cycle kind Examples
moon The classic Standard Moon (28-day, 8 phases). Fantasy worlds with multiple moons add one cycle per moon.
tide A 12-hour two-tide cycle, or 6-hour for fast tidal worlds.
season 365-day Four Seasons, or unequal seasons in non-Earth settings.
festival A festival ring with one named festival per month / season.
custom Anything else periodic — magical storms, ghost tides, mana cycles, monster migrations, portal alignments.

A world can have any number of cycles, each independent. They all overlay on the Calendar grid as small chips per day.

How a cycle is defined

Section titled “How a cycle is defined”

Three core numbers + a phase list:

  • Period — the cycle length in minutes. A 28-day moon is 28 × 24 × 60 = 40,320. A 12-hour tide is 12 × 60 = 720.
  • Anchor point — the master timeline position the cycle is pinned to. At this position, the cycle is at the phase you set below.
  • Phase index — which phase the cycle sits at, at the anchor point. Defaults to 0 (the first phase).
  • Phases — ordered list of named phases, each with a fraction of the cycle. Fractions sum to ≈1.0.

Once defined, every view (Cycles dashboard, Calendar phase chips, wiki embed) works out the current phase from the period and the anchor point on the fly.

Where cycles appear

Section titled “Where cycles appear”
  • Cycles tab — phase ring + “next 30 days” strip per cycle, with a date scrubber for time-travel browsing.
  • Calendar tab — small phase emoji chips in each day cell’s top-right.
  • Wiki embeds — the World cycles block shows a card grid with current phases.

Visibility

Section titled “Visibility”

A cycle has its own Visibility setting:

  • World (default) — visible to anyone with read access.
  • GM only — hidden from player-facing views (Calendar chips, the wiki embed, the Cycles dashboard for viewers). Useful for hidden cycles like a curse cycle that the players haven’t discovered.

GM only cycles still apply to the world — the GM can see them on their dashboard and use them for planning — they just don’t surface on player views.

How to start

Section titled “How to start”

For the common workflows:

  1. Just want a moon — clone Standard Moon, name it (“Sister”, “Selûne”, whatever), edit its anchor point to line up a known phase with a known date.
  2. Want tides for a coastal campaign — clone Twice-Daily Tide, anchor it. Tides feel right with the asymmetric default phase fractions (low/high short, rising/falling longer).
  3. Want seasons in a non-Earth setting — clone Four Seasons, override the period to your world’s year length, edit the season names.
  4. Want a festival calendar — clone 12-Month Festival Ring, rename each phase to your festival.
Section titled “Related”