Timelines in your Setting

[Voi_D_ragon]

Alright, so I'm writing down a rough timeline for my campaign right now and right now:
-All the races available to PCs and big bad races (orcs, goblinoids, Yuan-Ti) have been created (the others just pop up in the background at some time, I don't really care)
-The elder races (Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, Giants to a lesser extent) have fallen from power
-Humans have taken over most of the world
-Devils and Demons have rebelled and been defeated
Most of the big things have happened, now it's all just "normal" history until the era the PCs currently play in

And in all this only 16100 years have passed since the creation of the multiverse. Is this too little, should I just inflate the times to add more time for civilizations to rise and fall?
How are the timelines in your campaign, did you take a more realistic approach (evolution and whatnot) or did you just do the "gods made the races" thing?

Also, since I like hearing history/worldbuilding stuff, what are the big, world shaking events of the past that gave birth to legends and ancient heroes/splits in the driving forces of the universe?

 

[Bawylie]

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but...

Any history or backstory in my games have to be explainable in three or fewer sentences. In fact, the less I explain the better. And I don’t use precise timelines either - it’s always “aeons ago” or “in the elder days” or “in the beginning.”

Even recent history is “some few years ago.”

And if I’m naming historical events, I try to pick something evocative that is light on specifics. So you’ll hear something like “In the years after the Heavensfall wars, the demon rebellion spilled across the mortal realm like a bloodstain.” That’s the opener, then I outline some of the color to give a sense of what things were like. Then I hit the conflict or situation that relates to the players’ current situation.

Essentially I’m relying or storytelling conventions to relay history. One, because it’s more interesting and memorable that way. Two, because a history can over-explain something and suck all the romantic mystery and nostalgia out of it. (Consider literally any prequel).

If I end up needing a timeline, there aren’t dates per se. Just these sorts of events laid out in basic chronological order. Doing it this way leaves me space to fill in other stuff I might want or need, or to explore any given time in greater detail. Sort of like saving a seat for later.

I don’t like spending too much time on background or backstory because I prefer to spend my time and efforts mostly on playable content instead.

 

[Voi_D_ragon]

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but...

Any history or backstory in my games have to be explainable in three or fewer sentences. In fact, the less I explain the better. And I don’t use precise timelines either - it’s always “aeons ago” or “in the elder days” or “in the beginning.”

Even recent history is “some few years ago.”

And if I’m naming historical events, I try to pick something evocative that is light on specifics. So you’ll hear something like “In the years after the Heavensfall wars, the demon rebellion spilled across the mortal realm like a bloodstain.” That’s the opener, then I outline some of the color to give a sense of what things were like. Then I hit the conflict or situation that relates to the players’ current situation.

Essentially I’m relying or storytelling conventions to relay history. One, because it’s more interesting and memorable that way. Two, because a history can over-explain something and suck all the romantic mystery and nostalgia out of it. (Consider literally any prequel).

If I end up needing a timeline, there aren’t dates per se. Just these sorts of events laid out in basic chronological order. Doing it this way leaves me space to fill in other stuff I might want or need, or to explore any given time in greater detail. Sort of like saving a seat for later.

I don’t like spending too much time on background or backstory because I prefer to spend my time and efforts mostly on playable content instead.

Makes sense. I myself enjoy thinking about exactly what happened and then deciding what filtered through the ages to become common knowledge, what is know only to a few, and what is known only to the gods (or maybe not even to them). Obviously, I don't like swamping my characters with info, firstly because they might get bored, secondly because I think they need to earn the right to know all the obscure things that happened way in the past.

 

[Vymair]

I tend to be quite specific in timelines for recent events and things that happen during the campaign itself. I usually sketch out pretty specifically what has happened over the past 100 years and give a short summary to characters with the history skill. In my current game, I played an earlier campaign in this same setting but advance the timeline 350 years so the past characters are part of older history now. I have a pretty good idea of the past 500 years in the immediate area for that reason, but I usually just lay out a very broad past sequence of events and don't bother assigning specific years. The time of the great famine is the trigger point for my modern timeline, before that it gets pretty hazy on specifics.

 

[Sadras]

I don’t like spending too much time on background or backstory because I prefer to spend my time and efforts mostly on playable content instead.

That is a fair point except in the instance where the background/backstory starts rising to the fore and becomes part of the playable content, which is common enough in campaigns as the characters rise in level.

 

[the Jester]

My campaign's timeline is very complicated and extends over billions of years, but to most people, the relevant stuff starts with the ignition of the Sun approximately a million years ago. The ensuing epochs are largely only known in the vaguest of terms, until you get to the last few tens of thousands of years.

 

[Oofta]

In my campaign world I have two distinct time frames, before and after the Great Destruction. The world was nearly destroyed some unknown number of years ago in an apocalypse of epic proportions when mortals tried to gain the power of the gods. The entire world order was disrupted, only a tiny fraction of life on the planet survived, etc. There are rumors of what came before the destruction, but those immortal beings that know do not discuss it. What little is known is that occasionally artifacts of great power will surface from this forgotten time which tend to be as dangerous as they are powerful.

While it is generally assumed that the mortals that caused the destruction were human, that has never been verified.

Civilization and "history" in the world as people know it started about 1200 years ago. There have been upheavals and disasters since, but nothing quite on the scale of the Great Destruction. Around 500 years ago, a cabal of wizards tried to recreate the power of the ancients and the gods destroyed the region they were based in. The potential damage they could have wrought was simply too great.

In more recent times Loki escaped his prison and started the world on the path towards Ragnarok (end of the world). Fortunately with the assistance of some epic level adventurers, he was re-imprisoned before the world was destroyed, although the population reduction would make Thanos proud and entire cities were wiped out.

I created this campaign world a long time ago, the idea behind having a big reset in the past was to have a time of true legend, a time lost to those still living. That way I didn't have to have a "where did everything come from" story; people know there was something before and that people back then had magic much more powerful than what they have now but that's it. It also gave me a way of explaining why some powerful artifacts exist even though no one knows how to create them any more. While the gods occasionally create artifacts, others are more alien.

The occasional massive events are an excuse to have lots of dungeons and ancient ruins to explore.

 

[Bitbrain]

The gods created the Cosmos and everything in it about 13 million years ago.

After 12 million years they shifted their focus from the Prime Material Plane over to the Parallel Universes, which the gods refer to as "Secondary Material Planes".

No Player will ever learn this, however. The only thing they know about the situation is that 1,000,000 years ago the gods abandoned the world, and nothing has really gone right ever since.

 

[Mercurius]

Bawylie gave good advice on how to actually bring this stuff into game play. But assuming you are asking for your own enjoyment of worldbuilding and/or as background for game play, I think it really depends upon what sort of feeling you want to evoke.

A longer history allows for a feeling of age - that there have been waves of civilization, many of which are forgotten. I personally like this feeling in a fantasy setting.

On the other hand, then there's a setting like Dawnforge, which takes place in the "elder days" when civilization was just getting started. This evokes a different feel, perhaps one that is more mythic.

I personally like to give myself wiggle room, with gaps that I intentionally don't fill. Why? Because it helps me feel that sense of mystery and the unknown that I would want my players to experience. This is similar to map-making: if you detail every continent and island, there is no Terra Incognita - everything is known, mapped. To me this takes away from that tingling feeling that I so enjoy when I'm world-building: it feels like I am not making something, but rather discovering a world that already exists and is forever beyond my full comprehension.

So if you want that feeling, I would leave parts undefined. You could still give time periods times, like the "Lost Ages," but perhaps scholars in your world argue over the length of time.

That's another thing. RPG worlds tend towards an unquestioned objectivist assumption. The reality of our world is that there are different views on just about everything, including history and the origins of civilization. Sure, we have the scientific timeline which is as close to "objective truth" as we have, but even that is in question and always changing and any good scientist knows it is just a best estimate. The point being, it could be interesting to have different timelines, or rather different cultural takes on your world's back-story. In this approach you wouldn't need to define the "true history of the world" - just outline the views of different cultures. More work, yes, but also more interesting (imo).

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I like to have a lot of space to work with in my world design. I've seen too many fantasy settings where they put something exotic on the edge of the setting, and then expanded the setting until what was supposed to be the core of the setting became a speck surrounded by a whole world of other stuff they rarely did anything with, but made the core focus area feel less significant to me. Forgotten Realms is a great example of this. I'm a big picture thinker in a number of ways, and map space = importance in world design for me. The best way of avoiding such issues (assuming you dislike them), is to leave a lot of not yet defined space on your map. Don't put China adjacent to Germany just because your game is set in western Europe and you want to mention China. Say that it is in the far and mysterious east, past "the unknown lands" or such. Then you can fill them in as needed. You can leave distances vague or make them specific on your side of the screen ( maybe you decide you want 2500 miles to work with--now you have reserved space).

Timelines can be done exactly the same way. First, decide how you want the knowledge of the longer lived races to impact things. If you want a civilization to be unknown to the elves, it probably needs to be a long time ago. Put plenty of time between your major events. Feel free to arbitrarily decide that your "second empire" is actually the fourth or fifth empire. Leave vague time periods, making sure there is room for various feels at each time by location.

The way I did it is to make a world that is something like 64k miles across (it is flat). I vaguely specified where the ancient ethnic groupings traditionally have lived or migrated to, and what sorts of cultural milieus exist as of the main campaign's "present date", in very broad terms, like that this general area and that general area are both Viking kinds of places. That way if I make some stuff up for one of them that sees play, and later decide I wished I had done Viking lands different, I can do the other one differently. I also leave plenty of room for fitting extra space between the defined areas. So if I want another smaller third (or fourth) Viking land somewhere, I still have room to add that one in. The same applies to all the sorts of general cultural areas I thought of when creating the world. And I have room to add others.

The timeline has a few long ages (the more ancient ones were longer than the more recent ones). I decide what I want the general character of each to be like, how it started and how it ended. I think of movies and such for examples. Then, I divided each age up into a few smaller segments with their own general character. I haven't fleshed out details, and won't need to unless they get played in. But I said that one certain time is like Conan and Red Sonja in feel, another is like Legend (the old 80s movie), etc. I separated my ages with the rise and fall of world spanning civilizations, and/or cataclysmic destructions. Cataclysms are great for removing knowledge of the really ancient ages. My first age is so distant it doesn't even feel like the same world. It started out with the creation by the immortals, including the creation *of* the younger immortals in/on that world, passed through a stage a little like The Dark Crystal, and culminated in a civilization that's kind of a cross between Netheril, steampunk (or maybe "clockpunk") and some other things, where dragons and other powerful races shared in the same great civilization of science and magic and the planet was like those Star Trek multilevel chess boards. Suffice it say, about all that remains of that age is the equivalent of creation myths.

My current age is the fifth age and the last great empire of humanity dwindled only a few thousand years ago. That empire was sort of like if the Romans had been culturally English. The current age is mostly a traditional D&D style--very much like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. I made it to intentionally showcase a D&D baseline. The specific flavoring I gave it to make it unique was that there are two human pantheons with a complex relationship (it isn't as simple as saying they are opposed to each other, and different cultures view the pantheons themselves and their relationship differently). One is a very tight pantheon--essentially a single religion--with each god having a specific place, and the alignments and portfolios all designed to fit together and support a functioning society; while the other pantheon has a more emergent organic feel that more closely mirrors real world pantheons. I also am coming up with my own take on subraces that starts with the most iconic ones (essentially the Greyhawk presentation) and then makes them more like I would have done them.

That last paragraph was mostly irrelevant, but once I get talking about my world...

So the point is, make plenty of room. Then you don't have to create a new planet if you realize you want something you didn't initially stick on the map or timeline-but you can actually *have* a skeleton of a map and timeline too.