Thread 96198767

Why do so many historical timelines in fantasy span over a thousands years or more, why can't they just be condensed to 300-500 years? Makes the setting feel less stagnant and artificial

>>96198767 (OP)
So you can make this thread asking this question bi-weekly

>>96198767 (OP)
That's to much. They should stick to three months maximum.

>>96198767 (OP)
I blame elves.
people keep making their elves live to be 1000 with the average elf PC being 500, and this just utterly fucks on the timescale that's useable without compromising the playability of these fucking timesink elves.

Honestly, I just have my settings start with the Finno-Korean Hyperwar. It explains all the dungeons and magic bullshit.

>>96199460
Hey nice, we've surpassed the Phaetan and we're almost at the level of the Centaurians and Mu

>>96198767 (OP)
idk what you're referring to specifically, but large expanses of time usually indicate a period of tranquility and peace

>>96198767 (OP)
>>96198767 (OP)
People have a shitty sense of scale. Also, shitty history education means that they don't understand how different Ancient times were from Medieval (still got swords and kings, so it's basically the same, right?). Also, "Ancient" covering a huge swath of time being compressed i to one thing, ignoring stuff like the development of iron working or horseback riding.

So they think that thousands of years sounds way more epic than hundreds.

>>96198767 (OP)
The Bronze age lasted several thousand years, the Iron age around 600. How much progress do you want from a pre-industrial fantasy world?

>>96198767 (OP)
big number feelz like big dealz.

>>96198767 (OP)
Bigger number more impressive. That said, it's also worth remembering that we are today still closer in time to Cleopatra's reign (~2050 years ago) than she was to the building of the Great Pyramid (~2500 years before her birth).

The greater sin is honestly how perfect historical records in fantasy tend to be. I'd believe that an ancient evil was imprisoned five thousand years ago, but not that we're able to find any accurate records of it. We should have to piece together and reconstruct the truth from dozens of wildly divergent mythohistorical texts from different cultures of the area.

>>96201983
>after 1000 years the ancient evil wizard wakes
>a young girl is found who fulfills the prophecy of the divine warrioress who sealed away the evil wizard a millennia ago returning
>she and her plucky band set off to seal the evil wizard once more
>after a series of adventures they come face to face with the evil wizard
>he has no idea what they're talking about
>everything they believed was a post hoc fabrication created several hundred years after the events in question
>the prophecy itself only dates a back a couple of generations
>he's not even a wizard
>the cleric has to translate for everyone because his liturgical language is a bastard derivation of the not wizard's language and is mutually intelligible 80% of the time

>>96201983
Love how in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf came to Middle Earth to fight Sauron but Sauron was in hiding so long that Gandalf just fucked around smoking weed with Hobbits and basically forgot he was supposed to be looking for Sauron and forgot what the One Ring looked like.

>>96202147
And he's still the most mission focused of the other Istari.

>>96202157
Lol
>two blue wizards just wander off and are never heard from again
>Radagast runs into the woods and becomes a hippy
>Saruman turns evil and starts dressing in rainbows
Valinor isn't sending their best

>>96198767 (OP)
The game of telephone isn't fun with only three people, you need at least 10.

>>96202166
And you can easily get there with 500 or 700 years. Don't forget that your lifespan overlaps with your antecedents and your descendants

>>96198767 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96198767 (OP)
Why does it matter what "so many historical timelines in fantasy do", why can't you just run your games how you want? That way you can get things that don't make you feel like "the setting" is "stagnant and artificial".

Cutting in on this topic, what do you feel is the bare minimum amount of time before history becomes "forgotten"? Most fantasy stories put it at several centuries, but post-apocalypse settings like Mad Max have everything forgotten/rewritten within half a human lifetime.

>>96198767 (OP)
because of long lived races and immortal ones

>>96202527
As a rule, anything that requires specialized knowledge but isn't practiced anymore will die out with the lifespan of its former practitioners. Keep in mind that the preservation/loss/regaining of knowledge will be uneven and driven heavily by economics and transit capabilities. Take concrete for example. We never actually lost the ability to make concrete as a whole. Areas lost the ability to make concrete because they couldn't get all the materials needed and thus the information on how to make it was useless, others were able to figure out substitutes and make new forms of concrete while forgetting the original recipe, and in other areas they never actually knew how to make it in the first place as they imported it from concrete-producing areas. Irrelevant, hyperspecific, and non-local knowledge dies first while what is retained is based on practical needs, environment, economics, and the ability to exchange information.

>>96202135
This just sounds like riffs on mistborne trilogy

>>96202724
A good example of that is actually Egyptian Hieroglyphs. It took less than a century after the non-Christian Temples of Egypt were closed for the meanings of the symbols to become lost.

>>96198767 (OP)
>why do they have history to give themselves context?

>>96202852
Sorta. Hieroglyphs have multiple child systems with the oldest examples of Hieratic contemporaneous to the oldest examples of hieroglyphs. Hieratic died out before hieroglyphs though. Languages and writing systems are tricky examples due to constant changes over time. Just look at Old English, Middle English, and Modern English.

>>96198767 (OP)
>500
is that a real hard limit on your imagination? what

>>96200959
During the "how often do you think about the Roman empire" meme, the amount of people who think that Alexander the Great had anything to do with the Roman Empire truly drove me up a wall. For most people everything before maybe the American civil war and probably actually the sixties is just a contemporaneous blob of "ancient times."

>>96202964
I wasn't referring to the Egyptian language that more or less survived until the 17th century as the Coptic language. I was referring to the script of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Egyptian Hieroglyphs was the (almost) exclusive formal writing system of the temple priesthood. After the temples were closed by imperial order in 391 AD, the last confirmed inscription dates to 394 AD. Even a text on Hieroglyphs dated to the 5th century shows that the ability to read them was being lost at a rapid pace as symbolic meanings were attributed to the gylphs when it was a phonetic+ideographic writing system built on rebuses.

>>96202147
>Gondor had been without a king for 969 years, and Numenor had been gone for a full 3141 by the time Aragorn returns, and let me tell you that is literally, and not figuratively, the equivalent of some rando showing up in London, tomorrow, proclaiming that he's the king of England because he's a descendant of Edward the Confessor, and then trying to reclaim the glory of Mycenaean Greece.

>It's one of those cases (as so often happens in fantasy), where not providing hard numbers would have eliminated the problem entirely. Gondor hasn't had a king in A Long While. The Numenorians collapsed a Long Long Time Ago. Let the reader fill in gaps and make it work in a way that's appropriate to them.
https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2021/05/lord-of-rings-reread-post.html

>>96198767 (OP)
>his setting doesn't take place over the span of a weekend

>>96198767 (OP)
We have about five to six thousand years of recorded history and ruins dating back 12,000 years and people living back than likely had their stories of ancient times from their perspective.
If you want to stick to a timeline of a few hundred years you'd have to either stick to a very small scale or artificially omit things.

>>96199460
I will never forgive the destruction of Maldek.

>>96202165
>Radagast runs into the woods and becomes a hippy

Didn't Radagast only go because he wanted to go into the woods in Middle Earth and become a hippy?
Like, wasn't the original plan to only send Saruman, Gandalf one of the blue wizard? But then the other blue wizard wanted to go with his bro and Radagast wanted to fuck around in nature, so they went along too?

>>96202273
Mod status?

>>96204570
We also keep having to set the advent of civilization back over and over. Just in recent years, archeologists and historians were forced to admit something the Spanish discovered half a millennia ago, that central South America was not old growth and contained the ruins of civilizations — major ones, not eek-eek-ook-ook monkeys living in huts — that had been gone for centuries.

Time is deep and it keeps getting deeper.

>>96204869
kinda like how when I was kid, Abos had been in Australia for 10k years, then while I was in my 20s, they'd been here for between 30-50k years and now that I'm in my 30s, they've been here for "more then 65k years".

>>96204761
Yavanna basically forced Saruman to take Radagast with him to middle-earth.

Why does it matter what "so many historical timelines in fantasy do", why can't you just run your games how you want? That way you can get things that don't make you feel like "the setting" is "stagnant and artificial".

>>96204897
When you get down go it, it's far more anomalous how one obscure region populated by people subsisting on the worst cereal on the planet managed to quantum leap from the same basic level of development that had persisted for millennia to outer space in give or take 4, 500 years.

>>96200959
Came here to say this. Fantasy writers fuck up history the same way that Sci Fi writers fuck up distance.

>>96203187
Eh, that's not THAT bad. Rome was already busy conquering their Italian neighbours during Alexander's campaigns. Obviously Alexander personally has nothing to do with Rome but the Phyrric war was less than 50 years after Alexander's death and was the first major clash between the Roman and Hellenic worlds. Phyrrus was a contemporary of the Diadochi and was supported in his campaign by Ptolemy I, one of Alexander's most trusted generals.

>>96205274
>invent agriculture
>population booms
>invent sanitation
>population booms
>invent explosives
>population booms (in a bad way)
>now with so much population to take care of basic needs you are left with a surplus of people who can sit around and design things
>put explosives on metal tube and boom people up to space

This is why I hate immortals, unless they themselves are stagnant and unchanging and cursed never to diverge. Why do the elves have to be a thousand years old? Why not just 200? 300? We can’t really assume reliably how a thousand year old would act and behave, so why push it?

In my games, the average lifespans are:

Goblins = 30-40
Orcs = 50-60
Human = 65-85 (some human wizards extend their lives drastically; or are no longer human; 200-300+)
Halflings = 75-95
Dwarves = 115-145 (some turn to stone and live a lot longer; 200-300+)
Half-elves = 90 - 125
Elves = 150-175 (some turn into trees and live a lot longer; 200-300+)
High elves = 200-220 (incapable of producing with non-elves)
Gnomes = 300+ (they’re always humble old little people; like miniature wizards, and have acted as sages in the past)
Trolls = unknown (they sleep as stone to, and accumulate vast knowledge listening in on the land; seemingly 300+)
Dragons = unknown (like the trolls, the dragons can accumulate fast knowledge and fortunes and sleep for long periods; seemingly 300+)

Some forgotten inhuman beings tend to masquerade as sages or wizards to get across their age and wisdom. The most powerful wizards typically aren’t human, or elf, and are things like alien or angelic travellers from the stars, or dragons and other fae creatures like gnomes or trolls taking on the shape of wisemen.

>Makes the setting feel less stagnant and artificial
All fiction/fantasy is art/artificial at the end of the day. It’s always much too convenient for the sake of the story, the narrative. 99.99% of magic systems would never come about naturally. The fantasy world is some sort of pet project or simulation of some kind. All religion is like this, even; closer to a game.

In that sense, perhaps stagnation is the true intent of the world’s powers-that-be.

>>96203511
iirc Aragorn had a lot of prophesies line up with his arrival and Gondor is a society that actually gives a shit about that. He's also from a line of very long lived people so he isn't nearly as generationally disconnected as the random guy.

>>96206332
>We can’t really assume reliably how a thousand year old would act and behave, so why push it?
We can't really assume how a giant flying lizard that breathes fire would behave either, so why have dragons in the game? Maybe use your fucking imagination.

>>96203511
Except the real world doesn't have a race of people who were alive at the time of Edward the Confessor that can say, with authority, that the rando is indeed the King of England.

>>96206332
There is a valid argument to make that long-lived races don't have an innate drive to finish things quickly unless absolutely necessary.

>>96205783
That's another thing, people are really bad at recognizing events in different cultures happening at the same time.

https://youtu.be/mxjL6X4vZHklpj2em2fCoUUK945
>MY SENSE OF IMMERSION IS GREATER THAN YOURS

>>96198767 (OP)
I can't be bothered to read the other replies, but I doubt I'm repeating anything: fantasy works best with longer timelines because it allows for enough temporal distance between ancient and forgotten civilisations to leave enough ruins, monsters, mystery, and artifacts behind to be appealling to explore.

>>96206292
That's not what I mean. What I mean is for at least 5000 years (and definitely more, someone will have to correct me), humans had states consisting of cities supported by agriculture and animal husbandry with sophisticated religion, functioning bureaucracy, and prizing scholarship, but in the span of 500 years they went from a cycle of that booming and busting to what we have now. The pace in the last 100, 150 years alone in particular makes most of human history look like we literally sat around playing with our pud.

>>96206403
>Except the real world doesn't have a race
*that we know of

>>96206348
>being this defeatist

>>96206517
Keep in mind that the concept of scientific progress is a rather recent invention.
Also with certain advancements facilitating new discoveries, inventions and advancement it's only natural that we experience exponential development.

>>96199248
I agree, we should only have endless general-wank with half of them being dnd and warhammer focused with the same tires discussions happening every day for years.

>>96206614
reductio ad absurdum, genius

>>96198767 (OP)
Why would it only be 300-500 years? Our own history spans a long time like tens of thousands of years. The bronze age was like 2000 years. The iron age is close to like 600 years.

>>96207426
>reductio ad absurdum
What Harry Potter spell is that

>>96208084
I'm not allowed to tell rhetorical muggles about it, sorry

>>96203187
I've noticed that people will often slip into a habit of assuming that the especially famous monarchs of a given country were all direct predecessors and successors. So eg Peter the Great was the father of Nicholas II, and Ivan the Terrible was maybe Peter's grandfather.

>>96209393
On the other hand, for some reason everyone I talk to is surprised by the fact that Queen Victoria was George III's granddaughter. I think it's because Americans don't realize how little time passed between the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (spoiler: Britain was already industrializing when the Americans declared independence).

>>96210342
To clarify, less that she's his granddaughter, more that there were 7 years between their reigns (RIP in peace Willy 4, you were too good for this world).

>>96204869
They've found sites older than Gobekli Tepe right next to Gobekli Tepe.
The foundation of the Olmec keeps getting pushed back, I think they found a three story structure that's pretty old
>Just in recent years, archeologists and historians were forced to admit something the Spanish discovered half a millennia ago, that central South America was not old growth and contained the ruins of civilizations
Ruins have been found in the Bolivian Amazon, like civilization tier ruins
That said, Spaniards did write about the deeper parts of the Amazon in Brazil being lively with settlements and villages as they sailed through the river. And now we're finding from LiDAR that there did used to be larger settlements than we originally assumed there, but they were made out of wood, so you know how good wood can survive.

>>96210518
There's definitely a tendency of Western writers (and especially English language writers) to assume that everything had always been exactly the way it was when white people first encountered them, going back forever.

>>96198767 (OP)
>Rise of Rome
>482 Years Pass
>Rise of Rome Part 2
>449 Years Pass
>Fall of Rome
>977 Years Pass
>Fall of Rome

I think the most significant part about /tg/'s decline as a board is that it has explicitly become a place where idiots can ask stupid questions over and over to no end. I have to assume that the moderation was infiltrated by people who actively hate it.

>>96206974
No. THIS is the wank ypu shitkissing cuckold. THIS is the spam that wastes board space that leads to repetitive discussion of nothing. And for even using the word Wank, confirming yourself a hideous inhabitant of KEK ISLAND I must ask how the fuck you are still on this site. I thought your feudal owners had banned you all as punishment for not liking the local rape gangs enough.

>>96210551
Nobody likes the implications of civilizations being able to simply die like that. It's basically ideologically unacceptable for civilization to be cyclical instead of a linear triumph of urbanism over nature.

>>96206348
Yes we can? Its a big bird that cooks things

>>96198767 (OP)
Because most fantasy writers are brainlets who think BIGGER NUMBER = COOLER
In case you haven't noticed entire genres of videogame exploit this vulnerability

>>96206517
Very importantly, the advances in metallurgy made throughout the middle ages and into the renaissance and beyond were all necesarry steps for the industrial revolution to start. Without high quality steel those boilers could not be made to withstand the pressure required to run machinery at the scale that was made possible during the IR. And that goes for a host of other innovations as well as the other anon mentioned.
Those 500 years of progress built on the 500 years of progress before them, which built on the 500 years of progress before them etc etc and the rapid pace of those past 100 to 150 years would not have been possible without the centuries leading up to it. It's actually really interesting to learn about the history of these innovations and how they built onto eachother!

>>96198767 (OP)
So how long does a civilization typically last? Rome was around for some 1900 years.

>>96198767 (OP)
>why can't they just be condensed to 300-500 years?
You are too used to modern technology and information speed.

>>96198767 (OP)
Elves tend to live for 100s of years and they rather not say this Elf here was around before the empire and all. Well till they bring out a dragon or other supernatural being to do just that. Now if they do it like real life with ups and downs or the Kingdom/Empire is only the same in name only. Look at the many nations that try to say they were the Roman Empire and all.

>>96198767 (OP)
>Why do so many historical timelines in fantasy span over a thousands years or more, why can't they just be condensed to 300-500 years? Makes the setting feel less stagnant and artificial
When the Roman Empire formed, the Great Pyramid was 2,600 years old.

The Vikings conquered Normandy more than 3,000 years after Sargon the Great formed the Akkadian Empire.

The British began using gas lighting to illuminate their streets 1,000 years after the practice first started in Baghdad.

History is long.

>>96198767 (OP)
Lack of historical culture (not just game designers - the general audience as well).
History does not work like that, if you have opened at least one history book in your life you instantly know something is wrong with most modern fantasy settings.

>>96227274
>the British invented gaslighting
That tracks.

>>96202527
20 years. Before 2000 there used to be these mattresses made of small wooden pearls on strings that people hung on the backrest of their car seats. Now they’re forgotten. Lost technology.

>>96228277
Anon, you can buy beaded car-seat covers on Amazon.

But generally speaking to anon's question, I think 3 generations is prolly the minimum requirement. The people in power have to be those who have no living memory of contradictions. That takes 3 generations, because the powerful's parents might still be alive, but the chance that their grandparents are is so close to nil that the one or two still poking around can dismissed as crazy old loons.

Depending on the available historical and material evidence for the thing you want to have forgotten.

>>96203511
People today constantly invoke Roman symbolism, it's everywhere across Europe and usa. That's about 1500+ years old. People still follow religions 3000+ years old. I think 3000 years is not that much of a stretch, especially if the race lives some 500 years on average.

>>96203511
>and let me tell you that is literally, and not figuratively, the equivalent of some rando showing up in London, tomorrow, proclaiming that he's the king of England because he's a descendant of Edward the Confessor, and then trying to reclaim the glory of Mycenaean Greece.
Also this king sounds based beyond belief and would have my vote

>>96199276
Elves are pointless like most non-human races in general

>>96206517
Protestantism explains much of the last 500y
Yeah yeah I know Catholics made reasonably many scientific advancements but generally they were all too happy to eliminate all threats to the Pope's authoritah

>>96218674
This, development is iterative and it also takes time for things to be produced and be generally available.

Also look at the man hours available for designing and producing machinery. A small rural town today might have 100,000 people but that is bigger than many capital cities back 1000 years ago. Battles which decided the course of history might have been 20,000 soldiers on both sides and this was considered impressive.

>>96228641
The Catholics invented the university system and never had a problem with scientific advancement at all. The issue was that the Catholic Church, as a direct continuation of the Roman Empire's last remaining institution, was inseparable from the HRE and Spanish Empires, and further impossible to distangle from the fallen Empire in the Levant, North Africa and of course Greece.

While many will point to the excesses of the Church for Protestantism this really isn't what happened. You can draw the lines of who became Protestants almost 1:1 with the historic limits of the Roman Empire, with Poland being the one heroic exception. The 30 Years War basically involved protestant mercenaries burning Germany down for decades.

This is why God now punishes the Protestant by giving their country to foreigners.

>>96228568
One of their big problems comes from making them too much like humans.
I prefer making them more like hive-minded faeries who are pieces of the source of their power. Makes them more ephemeral; they feel more like supernatural beings that way, than just "like human but live long and pointy eared".

>>96236292
So much falsehood and ignorance. But let's correct the most glaringly dumb parts, first:
1. The Catholic Church headed by the Bishop of Rome didn't come into existence until it broke away from the church of the Roman Empire during the great schism in 1054. Up until then, the Bishop of Rome was one of the 5 patriarchs who jointly oversaw the religion of the entire Roman Empire (with the other four in Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jeruselum).
2. The Catholic Church was in absolutely no way the "last remaining institution" of the Roman Empire, which did not fall until 1453. The notion that a "Western Roman Empire" evere existed was invented in the 16th century by a german named Heironymus Wolf who was writing propaganda to deny that the Ottomans had conquered the Roman Empire. What happened in 476 CE is that Romulus Augustus wrote a letter to Zeno (the emperor in Constantinople) in which the last Western emperor resigned. He told Zeno that there was no longer a need for two emperors, and that Zeno was now emperor of the entire Roman Empire. Odoacer was named a patrician and ruled the Italian province as a subject of the Roman Empire.

>>96198767 (OP)
Because long-lived races would have histories of tens of thousands of years.