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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thommy H-H" data-source="post: 9799267" data-attributes="member: 6797019">It's really tricky to talk about conceptions of antiquity when you have characters that live for 750 years. We just don't have any kind of real-world basis for comparison. Do elves think of history differently to humans in D&D? Presumably if they don't live exclusively with their own kind, it must be kind of jarring to see the pace at which society evolved around them! Funnily enough, even Tolkien falls foul of this, despite his meticulous work elsewhere: he has his Elvish languages evolving realistically over realistic timescales...but the people using those languages are functionally immortal and presumably notice that they aren't speaking the same way they did in their own lifetimes. We all just agree to ignore it I guess.In my own settings, I generally take 2,000 years as the baseline for whatever civilisation is calling the shots. This conveniently means that I can say the year in the game is the same as the actual year. And, as our own civilisation and dating system demonstrates, two millennia is long enough ago (for humans) that it's not considered unreasonable to believe an incarnated god might have been wandering around the place at that time. I think any longer than that - as much as fantasy (and sufficiently worm-based or grimdark sci-fi) settings throw around tens of thousands of years of history - raises too many questions, sociologically and psychologically speaking. In theory there are in the order of 10,000 years of human history available to archaeology, but in practical terms we can't really grasp that span of time and what it means.A couple of thousand years is fine. You can do a lot in that time! Probably a lot more than you think, just like how a couple of hundred miles of landscape is more than enough space to fit in basically any campaign when you start drilling down into every little forest and valley.</blockquote>

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