What are some examples of events that mark the end of an era?
What sort of event would have people begin a new age and start counting years at 0 again? It doesn't have to be super apocalyptic but significant enough for people to mark a new period of time as beginning.
This is high fantasy, btw. And I already have the one about the "fall of a massive empire"
>prophet dies
>moon changes colors
>sea god washes up on shore
>all of the elves die
> Major Cosmological Event: Number/color of sun(s)/moon(s) change, planetary auroras appear, constellations appear/disappear/change
> Major Geographical Event: Continent splits, new seas form, old seas drain, etc.
> Major Meteorological Event: Significant, long-term or permanent changes in weather patterns, such as century-long winters or droughts.
> Major Political Event: Massive continent-spanning governments form/collapse, significant rival nations end ancient war, significant reforms in average government systems for all nations
Major Technological Change: introduction of groundbreaking technology that causes a paradigm shift, ie. agriculture, metallurgy, gunpowder, steam engines
Major Magical Change: Significant alteration in the abundance, reliability or accessibility of magic and magical creatures.
Dragons going extinct is a good one I've seen.
Also discovery of the setting's "New World"
Let's look to the real world for inspiration.
The birth of Christ - 0 AD. So a major religious event like the birth of a demigod, prophet, or perhaps the death of one. Or a miraculous, tumultuous event.
A disaster. An earthquake, firestorm, or hurricane. To go back to the biblical references, the great flood. A famine.
A paradigm shift. Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Manhattan Project, changing our ideas of how wars are waged. The invention of something. A massive change in infrastructure-- the building of a monument or other landmark, or the institution of a new system, like the telegraph or electricity.
>A leader of a great civilization did something very good and memorable
>A leader of a great civilization did something very bad and memorable
>A leader of a great civilization unwittingly cursed the entire age
>A deity ascends into the heavens
>Deities have a war
>Deities made peace after a long war in heaven
>A deity dies
>A deity gets sealed for reasons
>Several deities form a breakaway heaven
>A hero slays a deity
>A hero revives a deity
>The deity of time gets born
>The deity of time dies
>The deity of time rolls over in their sleep
>The era's deity gets born
>Magic suddenly stops
>Magic suddenly emerged from having a long time of nonmagic
>An ancient evil awakes
>An ancient good awakes
>Old year-counting system found to be flawed
>New historical facts emerge that disputes current year-counting system's basis
>The magic time-people from behind the moon makes their once-an-era visit and tells us it's time to change eras
>humans go into space
>new orbit patterns and day times confuse the date for colonies
>new calander made to represent all of humanity rather than just ebing based on earth time and dates
The Islamic calendar officially began when Muhammad migrated (hegira) from Mecca to Medina, founding the first Islamic nation there. Thus, the Islamic calendar is known as the Hijraiah calendar. Later he went back and conquered Mecca. You may be aware of this is you played Homeworld (Higaraans story arc).
>The God of Thievery returns the End of the World to its proper place.
>Anything called 'The All Devourer' awakening.
>Aliens.
Open borders and mass immigration.
>a setting in which the calendar is actually a countdown
Important thing to note is that a calender should not really start at 0 in a contemporary time period. In the people will start using that event as year 0 long after the fact. The people living through it are likely just going to keep using their current calender.
Unless of course there's some prophecy or the like and people are expecting the event and planning to change their calenders then.
>a setting with an enormous divine hourglass, that marks how much time has passed since the last era shift, and how much time is left until the next one. without fail, every time the hourglass runs out of sand and flips, some world-changing event happens. The hourglass is common knowledge, and everyone knows about it, and how much time is left.
>In one exceptionally boring era, the hourglass flip alone is enough change to start a new one.
>the era of boringness
>The 'Meh' Dynasty
An agreed upon new year 0 by all major powers of the world for the purpose of cosmopolitan and international solidarity.
A eccentric elven king declares an arbitrary date as the beginning of a new Era. After reigning for 400+ years, everyone has gotten too used to it to bother changing back to the old calendar.
>What sort of event would have people begin a new age and start counting years at 0 again?
well, birth of a messiah-figure for one,
some kind of epic disaster,
or the end of a particularly shitty era.
>Let's look to the real world for inspiration.
Yeah, let's ACTUALLY look at the real world.
The only time people at the time restarted the calendar started counting years at 0 was when a new king, emperor, etc. was crowned, anointed, etc. Classical, medieval, Asian, etc. texts are full of passages like "In the 3rd year of the reign of X..."
All the other times calendars were "restarted" events far in the past were selected. No one was using AD in 1 AD (there's no zero in the BC/AD system) Instead the change occurred centuries later. Ditto dating systems based on Mohammed, Buddha, and other such figures.
Melkor dies, Sauron dies, Shai'tan dies, Voldemort dies., BBEG dies, à god dies.
To really answer this, you have to think about when a civilization resists naming a new age, despite something huge happening. Pretty much no civilization wants to be forced to call a new age because that usually means that they were so defeated that others are forcing their historians to write their own history the way the invaders want it.
A new age is always a call for instability. It doesn't immediately destabilize the realm, but it could, so it shouldn't be used lightly.
>The God of Thievery returns the End of the World to its proper place.
I might steal this plot...
Why did he steal it and better yet why did he return it?
It took almost 900 years after year 0 before the year 0 was considered to be year 0 in our real life equivalent so nothing, OP. Nothing would make a whole world/culture start counting again from 0, unless it's a common thing in a culture, like in old Japan, they would count years in terms of each emperor's rule.
Or maybe something like a worldwide disaster, and they'd start calling it AD (after disaster)