"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." (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2013/01/worlds-oldest-portrait.html)
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." (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2013/01/worlds-oldest-portrait.html)
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.
My campaign is set 3,000+ years in the future. Their ancient artifacts were created right about now, or in the next 50 years.
The oldest artifact I have used in game was in Traveller and the Players never figured it out.
An older race (no, not the Ancients, but they could have been) were using artificially created quantum black holes as the key component for their jump drives. A supply of these were found in an abandoned/wrecked orbital starport construction yard. They were found by the gamma and x-ray emissions of infalling matter and the occasional large burst energy of one decaying. Whole thing was between 300,000 and 500,000 years old.
The Players never figured out what it was they had encountered, but the Imperial Navy and Scout Service did. The world was Red Zoned within weeks of being reported found. The Players were given large sums of money and secured (yet dangerous) alternate employment to forget they were ever there.
My albion campaign technically stretches back some 20000 years to when the Elves ruled albion and humans were only their slaves.
RPGPundit
I think one of the big drivers towards extremely lengthy campaign timelines is the notion of immortal or near-immortal elves. If you consider that humanity has respectable written records dating back to at least 500 BC, that's about 2,500 years, or 50 human lifespans (@50 years each). If elves on average live 500 years, then you need 25,000 years of history to achieve a similar effect. Otherwise, either (a) the elves simply know a lot more than everybody else (as in Lord of the Rings), or (b) something really weird happens to them that makes them lose their memory (as in Prince of Nothing).
Quote from: amacris;623067I think one of the big drivers towards extremely lengthy campaign timelines is the notion of immortal or near-immortal elves. If you consider that humanity has respectable written records dating back to at least 500 BC, that's about 2,500 years, or 50 human lifespans (@50 years each). If elves on average live 500 years, then you need 25,000 years of history to achieve a similar effect. Otherwise, either (a) the elves simply know a lot more than everybody else (as in Lord of the Rings), or (b) something really weird happens to them that makes them lose their memory (as in Prince of Nothing).
Out of curiosity, how'd you handle this in the Auran Empire campaign?
In my D&D games, I usually take option (c): elves are self-important, isolationist assholes who spend centuries contemplating fine points of philosophy or whittling away at a wrinkle in the toga of a statue carved out of a magically conjured, 1-ton block of real, honest-to-God ruby, inside the safety of their magically hidden kingdom. It is only "young adult" elves, between 30 and 100 years, that are expected to leave Elfland to get to know the world, and those are the elves the PCs are likely to engage. The sensible ones return, properly jaded and persuaded that "ephemerals" like humans have nothing to offer them, and live out the rest of their centuries in Elfland dedicated to esoteric pursuits. Maybe one in a thousand gives Elfland the finger and decides to live out his or her days amongst flawed yet vibrant humans.
I shortened their lifespan to 180 years.
"Dragon Age adopted a wonderful notion that elves once had nigh-immortal lifespans, but through interaction with humans had lost this gift. But why even claim that? There's no particular reason elves have to have 2,000 year lifespans except insofar as "Tolkien said so. What if elves have a lifespan of around 180 years - three times human - but with ageless bodies? Once an elf reaches adulthood, he looks more or less the same throughout his adult life; death comes to elves because their spirits grow weary, not because their bodies age. From the perspective of humans, an elf who looks the same for 180 years is going to *seem* immortal. An elf will look the same for three entire human lifespans - he could have been photographed with Robert E Lee in 1865 and with Paris Hilton in 2010 and look just as chipper.
Also consider that children tend to look very much like their parents, particularly if both parents are of the same race. (Because nowadays we see more TV families than real families, TV fools us into thinking families don't look as much alike as they really do; in real life, children can be virtually identical to their same-sex parent, as my brother Theo is to my late father). If you remove the age difference between, e.g. father and son, because both are ageless elves, this resemblance would be even greater! Further consider that humans tend to be less discerning of appearance differences in people of other races, and it's virtually certain that humans would think, e.g., an elf and the elf's son were the same being. If elven society is distinct from human society, with interaction limited, humans could almost certainly believe that elves are "immortal", even if in fact their lifespans were not even two centuries. Thus peasants folk lore speaks of the immortal fey, but the learned know better.
Note that agelessness rather than longevity solves a few other problems as well. First, it explains why elves might adventure. It's very hard to understand why an elf with a thousand or two thousands years of life ahead of him might throw it away on a reckless adventure. But the same being enjoying endless youth for a limited time might very well be an adventuresome sort, particularly if he's growing weary of life and needs to find some justification to keep going. Second, it makes human-elf marriage far more plausible, as they can share at least some portion of a life together, while retaining the inherent tragedy of the relationship, that one will age and the other will not.
This is the route we adopted in the rules. Elves in ACKS are assumed have more-or-less ageless bodies, but lifespans of two centuries or less. It's easy enough to change if you prefer your elves to be of the immortal variety, of course, but we think it makes more sense from a world-building viewpoint."
From an essay, "The Trouble With Elves"
http://www.autarch.co/blog/trouble-elves
I don't think I've ever had a campaign with noticeable history (buildings, key items, or established traditions) past 1500 years.
I find that much past 1,000 years doesn't really seem to register, and that it's very helpful to have some sort of apocalypse in the somewhat distant past (before which little is known), so that players can more credibly explore and find things.
I'm fond of rise-and-fall civilization cycles in fantasy worlds, so I like to have things go pretty far back, 20,000 years or so. But as far as known history is concerned, unless I've got some magical sentinels or fuckin' elves to maintain a timeline, that stays around 1000 years tops before events fade into legend.
Quote from: Thalaba;622413Possibly, 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.
Agree here. I have Ancient History which the PCs may know of but is unreliable, and Recent History. The former contains a few facts, the latter some cause and effect. But I am a bit lazy these days so rarely colour in between dates unless I have to.
One game went back 9000 years to creation with Ahriman being trapped in creation 6000 years ago. Since the PCs couldn't get evidence to the contrary, they took my word for it.