Semi-sensible thousand-year plans?

[Quartz]

Keep them coming!

 

[aco175]

Bury some trinkets in out-of-the-way places, then dig them up a thousand years later and sell them as antiques.

• Belloq: [looking down at Indy in the Well of Souls] Hello! Hello! Why, Dr. Jones, whatever are you doing in such a nasty place?
• Indiana: Why don't you come on down here, and I'll show ya?
• Belloq: Thank you, my friend, but I think we are all very comfortable up here. Yes, indeed. We are all very quite comfortable up here. So once again, Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine. What a fitting end to your life's pursuits. You're about to become a permanent addition to this archaeological find. Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.
• Indiana: [laughs]
• [muttering]
• Indiana: Son of a bitch!

 

[Mad_Jack]

Start a religion. Done right, eventually your Church organization can leverage the donations of your followers into becoming one of the most monolithic financial and political entities in the world.
You would, of course, need to be able to "read the room", so to speak, of current and future societal/cultural trends and adapt your religion to allow for those changes. (Easier if you have some mechanism in place to steer those wanderings in the direction that benefits you.)

 

[Quartz]

One long term project that would be useful is the slow shift of a planetary body by way of gravity "tug boating."

That's the sort of thing that you'd schedule a million years for moving a planet.

In a fantasy world, perhaps a dragon sleeps for 1000 years and while it slumber kobolds mind its continuously growing scales.

That sort of falls into the astronomical event category.

 

[Reynard]

That sort of falls into the astronomical event category.

How so?

 

[Reynard]

That's the sort of thing that you'd schedule a million years for moving a planet.

Depends on the size of the tug boat.

 

[Stalker0]

It started out as an online joke but you could do it as a real plot: Open a decantur of endless water under an ocean and have it slowly flood the world over a few thousand years.

 

[Autumnal]

It started out as an online joke but you could do it as a real plot: Open a decantur of endless water under an ocean and have it slowly flood the world over a few thousand years.

Doing that in a society like ours would fiendish. You wouldn’t need to be a scientist to detect the changing salinity, nor the changing and devastated populations of marine life. But the odds of ever identifying the source are minuscule beyond belief. You could likely pin down which ocean it’s in - the one that gets less saline. But narrowing it down enough? Nah.

 

[Umbran]

Some things in RPGs are often very long-lived. What sort of very-long-term plans and efforts might they have?

The last time I thought about this, I steered away from the idea of super-long plans. I instead considered the idea that, for example, long-lived elves were "Chaotic Good" because incessant world changes made such ideas seem foolish - Like Hob Gadling from Sandman, their lives are not a serene steady state, but instead a roller-coaster ride of times of success and failure.

It makes no sense to plan to build a great tower over a thousand years, when in only 100, a horde or dragon or something is going to come along and bust that plan so smithers.

 

[Umbran]

Doing that in a society like ours would fiendish. You wouldn’t need to be a scientist to detect the changing salinity, nor the changing and devastated populations of marine life. But the odds of ever identifying the source are minuscule beyond belief. You could likely pin down which ocean it’s in - the one that gets less saline. But narrowing it down enough? Nah.

Change in salinity leads to change in water currents that should be measurable. Once you start narrowing it down, the rushing sound of the geyser should be findable by sonar.