TJ's Timeline Template

What you'll get:

• 📊 An interactive Google Sheet to create and organise your worldbuilding timeline
• 📝 10 new writing prompts to get you thinking about your world's history
• 💡 500 event ideas (organised by type) of things you can add to your timeline

Features:

Whether you're a writer and need to plot the story beats of your chapters, or a GM tracking the ongoing conflicts of a campaign, or even if you're just an enthusiastic hobbyist like me who loves to worldbuild - it's essential to have a place to keep track of historical events in your project!

After creating three award-winning timelines (check them out at the very bottom of this description) I thought I'd share my secrets to success and make my personal template available for you to use!

You can use this timeline template for:

• creating a main timeline-of-everything to write, track, and organise all events in your project
• super long timelines with A LOT of events (Google Sheets has a limit of 10 million cells) and you can use it for much shorter timelines, too!
• multiple timelines (just make an extra copy of the template!)
• searching your world's history (Ctrl/Cmd + F)
• sorting events by ascending/descending dates, sorting by event types or significance
• seeing how long ago an event took place based on the current date (or how far in the future an event will happen)
• knowing the duration of an event
• checking the stats tab to see how many events you have in total, plus a breakdown of how many events by type, significance, era, and timeline you have
• keeping everything private, or creating a view-only link, or sharing an edit link with your editors, co-writers, or team

What this template doesn't do:

• custom calendars
• generate stuff for you
  

And the best thing about it being in Google Sheets is that you can customise it to your heart's content! You're free to hide or remove things that you don't need, or add extra columns, event types, or your own fancy formulas to suit your needs!

Preview of event based prompts to inspire your worldbuilding!

Sneak peek of different ideas of things you could add to your timeline - check the list if you get stuck!

Find inspiration quickly by event type

Filling gaps in your worldbuilding timeline can be challenging, so I've included 10 writing prompts to inspire you, plus 500 event ideas to help you make rich and lively lore for your world's history.

The event types and significance are compatible with World Anvil's timeline and chronicles tools and this template serves as a great companion tool for it! The list is customisable and expandable too, so feel free to add to it or modify things to your liking.

Watch your timeline grow and check your stats page to see the composition of your world's history!

Create diverse and interesting history

The stats page automatically counts how many events you've made, including what types and they are. You can use this to easily see at a glance if you have too much emphasis on a certain topic (or not enough in others) to make a balanced and rich history.

For every event you add to your timeline, there are extra columns to get you thinking about what might have triggered the event to happen, what the result or consequences were, where it took place, and what other parts of your world are related to it!

As an extra way to see how impactful events are, cells in the event significance column matches the typical item rarity colours in many video games for easy recognition.

• ⬜ Events that are not significant are grey
• 🟩 Trivial/personal events are green
• 🟦 Minor/regional events are blue
• 🟪 Important/national events are purple
• 🟨 Major/global events are gold
• 🟥 Milestone / era changing events are red

Keep track of events and stay organised

How long ago was that big conflict? When was this character born? What events did this other character live through in their lifespan?
Find all the answers easily by using the built in tools in Google Sheets to find (Ctrl/Cmd + F), filter, or simply drag & drop event rows where you need them to be.

Create Award-winning Worldbuilding

Not sure where to start? I've written a blog post about how to make a worldbuilding timeline - I've listed some extra resources and inspirations there for you to check out, too 😀

Personally, I use this template for all of my timelines, three of which have won a worldbuilding award! If you'd like to have a look, you can check them out here:

• History of Anvil (Worldbuilding Awards 2022 - Time and Space Award)
• Rise of the Nurbotu Scarfolk (Worldbuilding Awards 2022 - History Award)
• Dynasties of the Empire (Worldbuilding Awards 2021 - Best Timeline Award)

I hope you find this template useful alongside your other favourite worldbuilding tools :D

TJ