" Dear passengers. Thank you for flying Galacticorp Interplanetary Cruises. Please note that current ship-board time is fourteen hours fifteen, and we will arrive right on schedule at the planet Grrhuk. Passengers willing to take a shuttle to Grrhuk's surface, do mind to adjust your personal chronometers to the local standard of seventeen-decimal-eight hours per rotation, as opposed to the ship-wide twenty-five hours standard 'day'. Those persons wanting to visit the galactically famous Rutan Monastery on Grrhuk need either wait for a few more hours or accept that the Rutan Monastery is currently closed as it is on the night side of the planet and there is no round-the-clock economy. We hope you had a pleasant flight so far, and stand ready to be of more service. Thank you very much. "

Every now and then, not too often but just enough, I like to play with the fact that the Star Wars galaxy is big. It has billions of trillions of planets, moons, stations, and what not, each with its own rotation speed, standard day, length of year, and many more differences. I like to make certain such occurrences fit the story in most cases, instead of just messing with the players. However, just messing with them a few times can be fun, if not done too often it can be fun for the players as well, providing that slightly more realistic feel to the setting. What if their characters are used to a 25-hour standard day on one planet, and they go to another planet that has far shorter days locally? Do they remain wide awake during the local night, only to fall asleep, exhausted, some time during the next day?

I can't recall seeing any of this in the movies. It would not serve the plot of the movie, and just slow down the pacing unneccesarily. Imagine if Obi-Wan arrived on Kamino, and everything was closed off, with just a Kaminoan night shift in a flight control tower to allow him to land, and remain in or near his ship until Taun We had woken up, got dressed, and enjoyed breakfast before meeting him and discussing the Clone Army. Like wizards, in the movies they always arrive exactly when they want to arrive. they are never late. Or early, depending on your certain point of view.

That said, I was wondering if any of you have used this (deliberately) in your games? If so, how? What did you do to drive home the feeling of jetlag and general disorientation a character has when he is suddenly on a planet with a lower gravity and faster days? Or a planet that rotates signifficantly slower. Simply a Setback Die for a local day or two as the biological rythms reset in the character? Something else? How about a planet that has two suns? Or even more? Slow rotation and multiple suns causing 46 hours of daylight out of 49, in local summer?

On a general note, it's easy enough to use it as an excuse for applying setback. Anything that adds variation to the common environmental factors like temperature and lighting is welcome imho.

However, I have done it a couple times more blatantly, but only when it was a function of the plot. Once was when I tilted the axis of the planet to around 80 degrees, and "civilization" was only possible in a narrow band around the equator, with access to other parts of the planet varying based on equipment, seasonality, etc. It was kind of fun to adapt some lifeforms to this kind of environment which provided unique puzzles or challenges, and in my case the rational for the location of an archeological ruin.

Another was just making the day-night cycle only a few hours long, which meant the colonists worked a few "days" in a row...I really only did it to add colour and confusion to the NPC dialogue, which created some useful opportunities for "misunderstandings".

I've done this a couple of times, but for narrative flavor. I'll mention that they step off the ship, where it's evening, into the planet's sunrise. It's pretty good for reminding the PCs that the galaxy is big and that not everybody operates on the same schedule. I've never given anybody a Setback die for it, though.

I have, on occasion, imposed Setbacks or added Boost dice to certain checks depending on other planetary conditions, like low/high gravity or atmosphere. On a high-oxygen world, I gave everyone a Boost to physical checks but added a Setback to social checks, since they were all a little high on the extra oxygen available.

It got mentioned in Knight Errant that Darknell has a 32 hour day, which made for much longer work days. (24 hours minimum) That’s the only instance of time oddities that I remember off the top of my head.

But for the most part, I think that space travel being so common has meant that:

• Things are much more likely to be open all the time, especially tourist attractions or things near spaceports.
• Spacers get used to extremely unpredictable sleep schedules and adapt to jetlag quite quickly.

It's also possible that arriving spacecraft - assuming that they know to which planet they're travelling - adjust their on-board clocks* gradually and time their arrival to coincide with local morning at the destination. Cruise ships here on Earth do things like that.

* By which I mean the ones that the passengers use to control their daily circadian rhythms. Naturally all ship-board electronic systems are running on a standardised Galactic Time (probably based on Triple-Zero/Coruscant/Imperial Centre), or else the computers would go haywire.

Nar Shadda is a pretty prime real estate for EotE based jetlag considering the planet has a 87 hour night-and-day cycle to go with a 413 days year. I assume the years are based on the local days. So in essence, a manure cart load of time differential. The place is also a moon, so gravity should be a bit lower than the standard. Although it's probably a pretty **** big moon considering there is 85 billion people living on it.

This is a galaxy where the vast majority of the species can breathe the same atmospheres, eat the same foods, and (apparently as of TCW & Rebels) interbreed. I don't think that adjusting sleep schedules is going to be at all difficult for them, especially if they use a little bit of their advanced medical tech (and drugs, legal or otherwise).