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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 7909377" data-attributes="member: 6162">One thing I neglected to mention in my last post is how disappointed I am that the book never explores the possibilities inherent in Kuthite Nidalese dwarfs or orcs or giants coming from the Mindspin Mountains.  I imagine that anyone with the ability to drink so deep from the well of pain before being broken (read: Constitution bonus) would be greatly respected in this shadowed land!  And dwarfin takes on Nidalese Kuthite praxis, in particular, are fascinating to contemplate!  Sigh, another thing to add to my list of Nidalese writing projects.Anyway, the next thing we’re given is a short, one-page timeline of the past 10,000 years.  I have a strange love of timelines; just before they hit the point of trying to include way too much, they can end up helping one see some of the connections between events and trends.  They spawn historical hypotheses like few other tools, simply by bringing our awareness to certain things’ proximity to each other. Earthfall and the Black Triune’s meeting with Zon-Kuthon are the first two events on the timeline.  Both have perhaps longer descriptions than I feel is strictly warranted.  Chances are that readers of this book know what Earthfall is, and they certainly know the details about the Black Triune from elsewhere in the book.  My guess is they decided to flesh it out a bit more here because timelines are the sort of thing people look at to figure out how interested they are in a setting, but it still feels a bit like filler to me.It seems to have taken three years for surviving Azlanti and Thassilonian intellectuals to make it to Nidal.  This sort of thing is the kind more likely to be verisimilitudinous than it seems at first, as one thinks about how long it would take for news of Nidal’s relative prosperity to spread and then for people to make even seemingly short journeys to the realm.The Black Triune seems to have been trying to consolidate Nidalese government under their direct rule for about 18 years before they invented the Umbral Court, which was also the beginning of the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony and when their ageless immortality became known to their subjects.The Age of Darkness lasted a thousand years as Golarion’s sky shook itself clean of Azlant’s ash.  As I said before, I once calculated the approximate sociohistorical multiplier for a standard D&D world, based on the relative ages of maturity of the PHB races.  I might have weighted it according to the racial demographics from the DMG’s settlement rules, but I can’t remember.  Anyway, it came out to about 2.2, with elfs becoming adults at literally seven times the age of humans!  This means that Earthfall would have been about as distant to the average Avistani at the end of the Age of Darkness as 1565 is to us, and as distant to the average elf as 1877 is to us.  Expect more of these conversions as I discuss the timeline.8918 years ago (experienced as the equivalent of 4054 years ago to the general populace and 1274 years ago to the elfs) the holy city of Ridwan is begun with a shrine overlooking the site of the Black Triune’s bargain.  That makes it maybe as old as, like Damascus or Aleppo in Syria or Byblos in Lebanon or Kirkuk in Iraq, all of which are still inhabited.  Hell, in the cases of Damascus and Byblos, that might even be true from the human perspective, as those cities are around the 8-9000 year mark!Velstracs gave the Nidalese memory chains, allowing them to begin building the Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to house them, 8521 years ago (equivalent to 3873 or 1217 years ago).  Intriguingly, that’s only 491 years after the end of the Age of Darkness (or us to 1797, culturally and generally, or us to 1950 for an elf).  That . . . actually feels quite right, like just about the right amount of time for the Nidalese to start becoming concerned with losing knowledge of something important.Nisroch, the main port of Nidal and the most common place to encounter foreigners by far, began 7718 years ago as a simple fishing village.  That would be the cultural equivalent of about 3508 years ago, or 1102 if you’re an elf.5718 years ago (2599 or 817), Nidal became the center of a new type of philosophy, called “physical philosophy”.  It was developed by some qween by the name of Irogath of Ridwan, and was all about storing pain somatically in one’s own body so it can be then unleashed into another’s later.  This philosophy becomes the main teaching of the Irogath Monastery, and I think is the only specific datum given for the intellectual history of the monk class in Avistan, which is actually kind of exciting.  The monk has always been a bit of an odd fit ~ largely due to the Eurocentrism of the average D&D setting, I freely admit.  With polytheism reimagined as a bunch of mini-Catholic Churches, the Taoist- and Confucianist-inspired ways of the monk were rarely given the kind of grounding they needed to make sense in the setting.  I like this tiidbit, which can give us a jumping-off place to imagine the other monastic philosophies (at least until the Aganhei Pass gets going).Two entries tell the origin of the haunted place known as Edammera’s Folly (though we are not told why ~ it seems like it should be Mesandroth’s or Fiendlorn’s Folly…)  An “archnecromancer” spent 25 years, starting 5141 years ago (2337 or 734 years ago) trying to achieve immprtality before the Shadow Plane consumed the base of one of his towers, flooding it with shadow creatures and causing it to be abandoned.</blockquote>

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