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So we're finding it a bit difficult to determine what parts of the month are each moon phase. I don't need something assigned to a real world calendar, just something that tells what each day in the 28 day cycle is what phase of the moon.
I don't need the lunar calendar to correspond to any real date. All I'm looking for is when the phases change and how long each lasts for the purpose of defining when each werewolf's auspice moon is in the sky.
For the benefit of balance when playing Apocalypse games I've worked on the theory that for auspices and such like each of the phases should be roughly the same size. To this end to get the five auspices roughly equal time you need to have five or six days per phase.
The way I've always done that is as follows assumin Day 0 is the new moon:
As you can see this gives 5 days for the new and full moon and 6 days total for the intermediate three (in groups of three days wwaxing and three days waning). Lunar cycles are funny things so these might be a bit fuzzy but this I think is a good rule of thumb.
To the best of my knowledge I don't recall ever having seen this clearly defined in any literature, hence the need to make it up ourselves.
As a final note the reason I've attempted to make each of the phases roughyl the same length is because if birth time is random then if half moon was only two days (once each way) then only about 7% (2/28) of werewolves would come under that auspice compared to the crescent which if correspondingly larger might be 10/28 = 35% of werewolves, five times as many proportionally. I've always assumed the auspices are balanced, hence this plan.
Note: This answer describes the real world phases, and assumes that Werewolf: The Forsaken is intending to correspond with our actual moon.
Each moon phase lasts about 7 days (properly, 7.4). Therefore, you can assume the moon is new on day 0, waxing for fourteen days (reaching half-moon at day 7), full, then waning for fourteen days (reaching half-moon again at day 21). Full and new moons are usually considered either one day (with the day after beginning the waxing/waning period) or three days (with the day before and after the properly full moon counting as "full enough").
So you'd have either:
Or, more typical when werewolves are involved:
