Astarion's Gravestone is Wrong
I know a lot of people have seen this reddit post, translating the gravestone
The redditors translation looks correct, but the actual writing on the gravestone is contradictory to the in-world calendars.
DR or Dale Reckoning, the calendar supposedly being used on the gravestone, is the most commonly used calendar in-world. It's also the calendar that states BG3 occurs in the year 1492.
But looking at the translation, there's an immediate error here - the dates suggest that Astarion was born not 200-ish years ago, but 1200-ish years ago. And the date that Astarion adds to his grave also doesn't match the present year of 1492, instead reading as 1020 years ago.
There's nothing wrong with the translation, that's the matching letters alright, but the inscription itself is incorrect.
As pointed out by another Redditor, the most likely explanation for this, is that the devs accidentally used the wrong calendar. In the Forgotten Realms (the universe BG is set in) there are multiple calendars, and DR is just the most popular one to use. Another calendar is NR or North Reckoning, which states the current year for BG3 is 460, much closer to Astarion's date of 468 than any other calendar given.
I write this because I've seen a few people claim Astarion's birth year as 1229, just adding a 1 in front of the gravestone date to make it fit the DR calendar better. But this also doesn't work as that would make him 263 as of BG3, and Astarion repeatedly says that he was Cazador's slave for around 200 years (I believe he at one point specifies under 200, but I can't remember when), not 224 years or 2 and a quarter centuries.
It would also mean that the current year for BG3 is 1468, which is contradicted by multiple texts in the game that suggest the current year is 1492.
So, if we presume that the DR was a mistake, and this is actually meant to be NR, we can translate the dates this way:
Now there's another issue, in that the present day date still doesn't match the given one of 1492. It's 8 years later in 1500.
However, given that 1300 - 1492 is 192 years, and Astarion never gives a concrete timeline outside of around 200 years, I think the last date being wrong can be considered either another slip from the dev team, or an error on Astarion's part as he carves that date himself.
So, the real dates for Astarion's timeline should be:
1300 - turned into a vampire.
1492 - current date/escape from Cazador.
This still preserves him being turned at 39, but makes it so that he spent 192 years in slavery, and is 231 years old in total.
An in-universe reason for these errors could be that Astarion was originally from the Waterdeep area, where NR is more commonly used, and the Baldur's Gate carvers got confused when making his gravestone. Plus, Astarion has canonical issues with dissociation and memory loss, possibly causing him some confusion over the current year when he carves his addition.
