Erik Mona said:
1. Assuming you use the Blood War and essentially the "ancient" history of the D&D multiverse, how old does that make the war between Law and Chaos? My temptation is to say "several thousand years" (probably tens of thousands), but then we've also got dinosaurs, and my temptation there is to imagine that the "world" of D&D (Oerth, for my purposes) is thus millions of years old, just like Earth. How do you guys square the apparent contradiction?
I go for the more ancient explanation. I mean, you say you want the Law/Chaos war to predate the Blood War, which is fine...so the Blood War itself only began a few thousand years ago? That doesn't make sense to me. Outsiders are beings that essentially live forever, and the Blood War began before many gods were around. Heck, we're talking about before mortals existed on the Prime at all...isn't that worth several million years?
Oerth has a history that stretches back more than just a few thousand years. Go back a few millenia, and the humans and such were still there. They were just disorganized tribes, but they were there. So were other races, such as the faranth (who dominated most of the Flanaess several millenia back; see "Deep Freeze" in
Dungeon #83), and that seems to have been long before the Twin Cataclysms.
Or has the Blood War been going on for millions of years? Are folks like Orcus and Demogorgon millions of years old? Really? Isn't that a bit lame?
How exactly is that lame? For planar lords, "eons" is a term that gets tossed around quite a lot (though not in its literal billion-year definition...usually). These beings are archetypal, and older than most recorded history (though Orcus himself was a mortal once). Is it that much of a stretch to go back more than a few thousand years?
If you take the D&D multiverse as one cosmology (as I do), then you need much more than a few thousand years to fit in all the history. Jazirian and Ahriman, the ancient war with the Far Realm, the Law/Chaos War, the Blood War, the advent of mortals, the faranth empire on Oerth, the thri-kreen dominance of wildspace, the Twin Cataclysms, etc., all paint a picture of epic scope. Canonically, there's no reason you couldn't have all this take place in, say, a hundred thousand years, but that just seems to take some of the truly ancient, epic feel out of it.
I'm struggling with this stuff in my own campaign, and am curious to hear from other DMs who take their D&D nerdery as seriously as I do.
I guess I just don't see the problem with having the ancient history of the D&D universe being, well, ancient.