Uptime

Question How much time passes in your chronicles? Do you give your players months or years or even decades of downtime to weave their Legends and allow for major, sweeping changes to the landscape of the world? Or does everything happen fast-fast-fast in just a few days?

Both and neither. We don't do "downtime"; there's no time happening between game sessions in which the players are not involved. Each game picks up exactly where the last one left off, meaning that whatever was happening then is still happening, and whatever the PCs want to do is accomplished during gametime. We've found that players are generally not interested in stuff happening offscreen without them (unless necessary to the plot, of course, in which case we just have it happen somewhere they aren't) and don't have any inclination to randomly go home for a few weeks in between adventures. There are worlds to save, people to influence, personal projects to complete and occult deadlines to meet. They have a lot of shit to do.

However, this also doesn't mean that our games only happen over the course of a few days. How much time passes in a game session varies wildly depending on what's happening and what the PCs decide to do. Some sessions span only a few hours of "in-game" time (ironically, they last for a shorter period than the time it took us in real life to play them); if there are a lot of combats going on, those can cause time to crawl, as the most protracted of combats usually doesn't last longer than three minutes or so of in-game time. Characters choosing to go on diplomatic or political missions that involve a lot of talking and meeting of other characters can also keep much time from passing in the game's world.

On the other hand, sometimes entire years pass in the span of a single game session. Geoff and his band once had to trek through a jungle Terra Incognita outside of Huitzilopochtli's personal Sanctum that took them just over fourteen months to navigate but which only took a session and a half to play through. Visits to the Deep Dark Forest of Norse myth or the Hedge outside the fairy realms often take weeks if not months in a single session, as the PCs wander around lost and get into various unforeseen scrapes.

And, of course, sometimes there are entirely alternate timestreams going on at the same time, such as when Goze was locked in a Psychic Prison and experienced thirty years while only ten seconds passed for everyone else in the real world.

So for us, everything happens in real-time within the game world; changes to the landscape and World occur exactly when they do, and PCs deal with them if they happen to be there (or discover what's left afterward if they weren't). We never saw much point in "downtime"; the PCs weave their Legends by being awesome and doing awesome things, after all, and that's what they do during game sessions. If Aiona decides she wants to take a week off to go to her Sanctum and build some kind of preposterous coal-powered monster machine, she does that in-game, and everybody else does other things for a week until she re-emerges. If Eztli has to go sequester herself during the nemontemi, everyone deals with her not being around right then and the ST keeps track of what's happening with each set of players. And if everyone decides to take a week-long vacation in Australia, they tell us so in game, tell us what they're doing, and then we continue on playing after that week of in-game time is over.

I believe a total of about five years has passed in-game for most of these kids now (inmates of Psychic Prison notwithstanding).