What the title says, basically.
What year is the default campaign start as presented in the setting?
817.M41
I am hoping someone can help with this as I am confused by the timelines for OW. I don't have most of the books but I saw the following:
Duke Severus XIII took control of his house in 779.M41 and came to power as Lord Sub-Sector in 799.M41. It says it took him a little more than a standard decade to consolidate power (put loyal people into roles). Then at some point the orks came. He eventually asked for help, eventually got it, but not enough and he seceded. It says under Kulth that the war on the planet has been raging for 83 years.
If the start date is 817.M41 then those dates don't jive, unless I am missing something or got them screwed up.
~ alemander
If the start date is 817.M41 then those dates don't jive, unless I am missing something or got them screwed up.
Welcome to the dating systems in the 40k universe. Some date's recording are less viable or verifiable than another's.
Yeah, it's sort of like Star Trek was, in the beginning; the numbers didn't matter. In the case of 40K, sometimes something like "817.M41" does NOT just mean "the year 817, in the 41st Millennium of our God-Emperor". Sometimes, those digits denote a distance, or an accuracy quotient from Holy Terra, to where you are. It's especially fun when "a day", or "a year", might only matter ON Terra; even other planets in our own solar system can vary wildly, and these poor sods are, at least partially, trying to measure time based both on where they are, in the galaxy, (is your world big? Small? Fast? Slow? How much of your day do people work, and how do your seasons pass?), and how that compares to time on Holy Terra, where all the top gov't clocks are. This doesn't even begin to grab onto time dilation, in warp travel, and such, while ships can waste huge portions of a year just traveling from system edge to planet, and/or back to the system edge, before they can warp jump, again.
As a side note, this is why, if I were running RT, if the Navigator, or the Astropath, opened themselves up, after their ship translated back to realspace, they'd hear this constant, sonorous chant of the psykers, powering the Astronomicon, tolling out the time, so they could check their chronometers against at least what Holy Terra decrees the date is, at present. Star charts, and measuring drift are fine, but there are parts of the galaxy you'll be the first to visit, so this is a nice, little, home-brew bonus.
Look up how Imperial time measurements work, sometimes, and it might make more sense, though, as with everything 40k, it might not stay consistent, and is subject to change, on a whim. These are the same people who have several worlds erroneously named the same things, who can lose track of these worlds, and posthumously declare them all traitors, 100 years later, for not mustering, when they were wiped out by a warp storm, or gene-stealer cult, and run by the same company who lets anyone write pretty much anything, with no fact-checks.