J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarilion set a fashion for fictional civilizations lasting many millennia without much technological or social change. This worked for the literature, but rarely makes sense for games.
One of the things Tolkien did with Middle Earth has encouraged an unbelievable view of history as something that very slowly changes over millennia. Perhaps one reason was that in Middle Earth there were people who remembered the First Age. They were alive then, a consequence of the practical immortality of the elves (and some half-elves). If your world doesn’t have the continuity of immortality then barely-changing history stretching thousands of years makes even less sense.
What I’m trying to do is point out why these fictional civilizations that last for millennia don’t make sense. Why is this important? One word, immersion. People who know much about history will probably see your worlds very long history-without-much-change as unbelievable, thus destroying the immersion in the world that’s so important to engaging play. Though those who don’t know much history may not find it distracting at all.
Often, the very long histories are a form of self-indulgence, the writer writes what he wants even though it is hardly necessary to the game.
The funny thing is, it’s not necessary to have thousands of years of history to do what you want; a few hundreds of years will be just fine. What was our world like 500 years ago? The end of the Middle Ages, the recent discovery of the New World, the beginning of the end for Mesoamerican civilizations, China drawing back into isolation, the Ottoman Empire growing into Europe as it was no longer opposed by the no-longer-extant Byzantines, Russia still a benighted land fighting the Tartars, India dominated by Muslims, and so forth. Armies still included pikemen and others not yet armed with gunpowder weapons. The first circumnavigation of the world was being accomplished.
And that’s only 500 years ago.
Now if we go back 5,000 years there were nascent civilizations only in Mesopotamia and Egypt (China and Harappa (India) came later), and technological change was slow (though faster than we may think today because the changes were so fundamental, such as the development of writing). Iron-working had not yet been developed, bronze was very expensive, and horses were much too small to pull chariots, let alone to ride. When iron-working was developed it took many centuries to spread throughout the Old World.
Furthermore, a civilization with iron or steel armor and weapons, with well-developed ships, is not going to sit in stasis unless someone is deliberately trying to suppress change, as we see in some fantasy and science fiction stories (see David Weber’s Safehold series).
There are lots of reasons why civilizations cannot remain static - which is the primary way you’re likely to have histories thousands of years long, civilization in stasis. There are resource limitations: if you use iron for many centuries you’re going to use up easily accessible sources, and have to develop new technology to be able to continue to obtain iron ore. That’s true for many other resources, even renewable ones such as timber. If you irrigate land long enough (as in Mesopotamia), it begins to deteriorate from salt deposits. You can’t continue doing things the old way because the resources change.
And the longer your civilization goes on, the more you must change.
If you’re writing a separate setting, one that is not part of a particular game, then circumstances are somewhat different. There are so many supplements available, whether world settings or adventures, that you can’t really expect many people to use them directly in games even if they read them. In other words, many people are reading them for the story more than for their utility in a game. That’s compounded perhaps by the people whose RPGs are primarily storytelling machines and not opposed games. (There’s no possibility of failure.) Those folks are naturally going to read settings and adventures more as story than as game.
In these cases, indulging your storytelling bent at the expense of game makes perfect sense. So those long histories, if they are relevant to the stories, are no longer self-indulgence.
Rome (kingdom, republic, and empire) had a history approaching 1,000 years - more if you include another thousand for the Byzantine Empire that succeeded Rome, and called itself Roman. China has a history more than 2,000 years long. There were empires in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago - but they were lost to memory until archaeologists excavated ancient mounds that turned out to have been great cities, that used fired-clay tablets to record information. A 3,000 year history is a very long time.
Of course, if YOU want to write thousands of years of history for your campaign or your RPG rules, that's your choice. It may help you create your game. But do you want to inflict all that history on the gamer? I enjoy history (that’s what my Ph.D. is in), but very long histories for games are not my preference. Your mileage may vary.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!
“It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.” Carl Sagan
One of the things Tolkien did with Middle Earth has encouraged an unbelievable view of history as something that very slowly changes over millennia. Perhaps one reason was that in Middle Earth there were people who remembered the First Age. They were alive then, a consequence of the practical immortality of the elves (and some half-elves). If your world doesn’t have the continuity of immortality then barely-changing history stretching thousands of years makes even less sense.
What I’m trying to do is point out why these fictional civilizations that last for millennia don’t make sense. Why is this important? One word, immersion. People who know much about history will probably see your worlds very long history-without-much-change as unbelievable, thus destroying the immersion in the world that’s so important to engaging play. Though those who don’t know much history may not find it distracting at all.
Often, the very long histories are a form of self-indulgence, the writer writes what he wants even though it is hardly necessary to the game.
The funny thing is, it’s not necessary to have thousands of years of history to do what you want; a few hundreds of years will be just fine. What was our world like 500 years ago? The end of the Middle Ages, the recent discovery of the New World, the beginning of the end for Mesoamerican civilizations, China drawing back into isolation, the Ottoman Empire growing into Europe as it was no longer opposed by the no-longer-extant Byzantines, Russia still a benighted land fighting the Tartars, India dominated by Muslims, and so forth. Armies still included pikemen and others not yet armed with gunpowder weapons. The first circumnavigation of the world was being accomplished.
And that’s only 500 years ago.
Now if we go back 5,000 years there were nascent civilizations only in Mesopotamia and Egypt (China and Harappa (India) came later), and technological change was slow (though faster than we may think today because the changes were so fundamental, such as the development of writing). Iron-working had not yet been developed, bronze was very expensive, and horses were much too small to pull chariots, let alone to ride. When iron-working was developed it took many centuries to spread throughout the Old World.
Furthermore, a civilization with iron or steel armor and weapons, with well-developed ships, is not going to sit in stasis unless someone is deliberately trying to suppress change, as we see in some fantasy and science fiction stories (see David Weber’s Safehold series).
There are lots of reasons why civilizations cannot remain static - which is the primary way you’re likely to have histories thousands of years long, civilization in stasis. There are resource limitations: if you use iron for many centuries you’re going to use up easily accessible sources, and have to develop new technology to be able to continue to obtain iron ore. That’s true for many other resources, even renewable ones such as timber. If you irrigate land long enough (as in Mesopotamia), it begins to deteriorate from salt deposits. You can’t continue doing things the old way because the resources change.
And the longer your civilization goes on, the more you must change.
If you’re writing a separate setting, one that is not part of a particular game, then circumstances are somewhat different. There are so many supplements available, whether world settings or adventures, that you can’t really expect many people to use them directly in games even if they read them. In other words, many people are reading them for the story more than for their utility in a game. That’s compounded perhaps by the people whose RPGs are primarily storytelling machines and not opposed games. (There’s no possibility of failure.) Those folks are naturally going to read settings and adventures more as story than as game.
In these cases, indulging your storytelling bent at the expense of game makes perfect sense. So those long histories, if they are relevant to the stories, are no longer self-indulgence.
Rome (kingdom, republic, and empire) had a history approaching 1,000 years - more if you include another thousand for the Byzantine Empire that succeeded Rome, and called itself Roman. China has a history more than 2,000 years long. There were empires in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago - but they were lost to memory until archaeologists excavated ancient mounds that turned out to have been great cities, that used fired-clay tablets to record information. A 3,000 year history is a very long time.
Of course, if YOU want to write thousands of years of history for your campaign or your RPG rules, that's your choice. It may help you create your game. But do you want to inflict all that history on the gamer? I enjoy history (that’s what my Ph.D. is in), but very long histories for games are not my preference. Your mileage may vary.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!
There are a variety of reasons for the rate of progress in the periods of time he mentions. And sure extremely important things happened (agriculture is the single most important thing, everything else derives from the benefits of a steady expanding food supply, the resultant specialization it allows and the increasing complexity of society), but the rate of development was slower than in later eras. The foundations took a long time to establish and spread only slowly. Development ramps up slowly and speeds up as it builds on what came before. That's the nature of any complex system. The perception that nothing happened in the stone age, bronze age, and iron age is due to the limited amounts of information we have and the long time it took for innovations we do know about to occur. Stone age tools, for example, remained largely the same for thousands of years. Low population density and little or no specialization is are the reasons. As population density increases due to agriculture and specialization is established the rate and amount of innovation increases and the stone tools people used changed. 
