"Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found."

How deep does time go in your game-world? Do you have twenty-six thousand year-old ivory sculptures for your characters to find?

Depends on the setting. If it was a CoC scenario then it would be feasible to find a Stone Age artefact that is an important clue.

For SciFi games, it is quite reasonable to find some ancient artefact that is hundreds of thousands of years old, but is of a higher technological level than the finder.

Possibly, but "Ancient" is about as old as any character in any recent campaign I've run or played in could hope to understand. It's more a question of the depths of a character's understanding of time than of actual time itself.

The human past of Fomalhaut goes back 4000 years, when the planet's terraforming was started by executive order of Archon Solon. Approximately 2000 years ago, that civilisation was destroyed in an interstellar conflict of its own making.

This means most "modern" civilisations tend to go back 1500-2000 years, to an age of great chaos and warring city states. From before that come the remains of a high-tech civilisation, less common, but in evidence. A few enigmatic ruins predate that time still: immense emerald-coloured idols rising from the sea, and other time-worn structures, which the planet's initial explorers found frozen under the cold of an ice age.

I've not found it especially worthwhile.  Exalted's setting has something like five thousand years of (linear, comprehensible) time, and it's overstuffed and underpopulated and utterly meaningless as it is.  (It's a different, but related, issue to geography: modern Halta is stupid because the authors had a big section of the map to fill, while the timeline is terrible because they had like twenty Events that dominate everything).  Even Continuum, where jumping through the real world's timeline is kinda the core concept to the game, futzing around with Inheritor Space-time or even stuff around the Ante-Desertum is best handled like a different land with very strict rules, rather than history, simply because it's too difficult to do anything entertaining in any way but the Scooby Doo sorta thing.  In Dungeons and Dragons, there are ancient tombs and long-forgotten buried halls, and either they're things that are a couple thousand years old at most with corresponding ancient languages, or they might as well always have been there.

On the other hand, history is up there with football and religion in 'things that don't resonate' for me.  I don't like a static world, which is pretty much what you need for even a specialist to start reading through ten-thousand-year-old writings, if you're in an ISO standard medieval fantasy society. So mileage might vary.

Oh yeah, buried in layers of the hundreds of meters of benthic mud covering the continental shelves (which were exposed during the last ice age(s)) are four seperate depths of civilisation. The oldest of these goes back almost a hundred thousand years, now deep in the freezing black oceanic depths. There are roads, artifacts, villages, fortresses, whole cities down there, well preserved too, echoes from the age before legends.

Collecting such artifacts, or even taking photos of layouts (which can give indicators as to the locations of land based sites) etc can be a very rewarding if hazardous venture, for various reasons, and an entire branch of technology with it's own attendant subculture has arisen to deal with the challenges of mud mining among the cavities and sedimentary layers.

And of course there is the inevitable 'ancients possibly wielding weird secret powers' aspect, but with a quirky twist, and I have a semi plausible explanation for those.

My homebrew fantasy setting only goes back about 700 years for the humans and that bit is fairly well documented... but there's older non-human stuff around and the realms the humans came from have much older history that comes in to play sometimes.  
I try not to yammer on about history in-game but it's there if a player asks... not that the answer he gets will be all that precise or accurate.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;622401"Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found."

Isn't that just absolutely fucking astounding?

Heh, that figurine was an insinuated prop "created" during a moving departure of Ayla and company in "Plains of Passage" from Jean M. Auel's Earth Children series. Brings back memories. Ah speculative romance, even the Ice Age makes good copy for tumescent prose.

As for what I run? Completely depends on game setting, and what the players come across. One I place directly in a 11th Cen French fantasia, so it's as old as Earth, but only understood to be much less than that. Another is Birthright, which has an involved timeline, but doesn't smother the setting with a timeline on mythological history. And another is In Nomine where there's characters that were with God before the Big Bang and then helped Him build the universe (or is the fevered dreamings of an Ethereal who rose into global dominance around 6000 years ago and that is its current creation story).

What I make available or essential to players are two wholly different questions atop that.

Is there something more specific you wanted to enquire about this?

My LotFP campaign went back 16,000 years.

Quote from: RPGPundit;622726Isn't that just absolutely fucking astounding?

Yeah, it truly is.

I keep my FRPG world historical timelines to an imaginable distance back in time from the present for a human population with no archaeology or what have you. So it's a little over 1,200 years, anything earlier than that is lost in the mists of time and not relevant. Most history that matters - that shapes contemporary ideas, ideals, emnities and politics in the game world goes back no more than 300 years. There are some exceptions.

Of course there might be stuff that happened 10,000 years ago, and it might be the source of some lost city, ruin or artefact. But nobody knows anything about it and it may as well come from an alternative dimension.

I think the timeline for Tekumel goes back 30,000 years or so, with the current nations and cultures remaining somewhat recognisable for the last 10,000 years.
For a long time that broke my suspension of disbelief, but now I think it's kind of cool in an eerie way, like looking at that real-world 26,000 year old bone artifact is eerie.

I think most fantasy settings have a timeline that's too long. A vast amount of history happens in a century. A thousand years is enough for entire civilizations to rise, fall, and vanish. 10,000 years takes you from the modern day to before writing existed.

In my Auran Empire campaign setting:
- There is a detailed timeline extending back 2,000 years which represents the known history of mankind.
- There is an approximate timeline extending back another 2,400 years. This is the age of elves and other pre-humans, only approximately understood.  
- There are alleged mythical ages that supposedly extend back another 120,000 years.

Because my campaign is set in 17th century Europe, the history is as deep as our own.

There are glimpses of deep time - smugglers using a cave with Ice Age artwork adorning the walls, f'rinstance - but the most relevant history are the centuries-old echoes of the Crusades and the Cathars which can still be felt in parts of the game-world.