Setting Timeline Advice?

[MonkeySage]

I've divided my timeline into 6 Ages, beginning with the ancient Monthion historian, Abi-Eshu, who decided to track his King's legacy. He created the royal calendar, which is still in use today, and begins with Year 0 of the First Age.

At some point during this age, humans settle the western continent and clash with a powerful civilization of serpent folk for hundreds of years.

After 3456 years, the great blue wyrm Damak Mornikthur unites the island of Monthion and the western continent under his own rule, ushering in the Second Age.

Both humans and serpentfolk are enslaved by a dynasty of blue dragons for 2056 years, but eventually overthrow the last one together and bring about the First Collapse... and promptly resume their ancient enmity. During this 657 year period, the humans drive the serpentfolk off of the western continent, until a group of High Elves takes over and forms the Valleu Empire.

The fourth age begins with the birth of a new, incredibly shortlived Valleu Empire, which lasted for only 234 years... I actually don't know much about this, but it ends with the Second collapse.

[Everyl]

So what sort of advice are you seeking regarding this timeline?

[Yora]

My general advice for setting history is to not bother with any details more than 200 years ago or so. Players are only going to deal with current events in the setting, and these are usually affected most by the history of the last couple of decades. Go back further than that and all that is really relevant are very rough outlines, such as that at some point some great kingdom or empire existed in one place. What exactly happened in that kingdom at what points and the identity of individual rulers isn't really of any relevance. As a rule of thumb, every item on your history timeline should have a direct relevance to something that is happening now. Something like a tribe of barbarians keeps attacking from the west, because 300 years ago their ancestors were driven into the mountains and they still hope to reclaim their ancestral lands. "People defeated and driven into the mountains to become barbarians" would be a useful item on the timeline. But you wouldn't even need a specific date for that.

[GungHo]

If the only interaction most of your characters have with a statue is slamming an orc's head into it, they're not going to care that it was a statue of the Great Lord Ssslitheropertan. Archeology campaigns are great, but you gotta have some archeologists for all that work to mean anything.

[VoxRationis]

Regardless of what some may say, I am of the opinion that you can never have too much background information in a campaign setting (assuming it doesn't detract from making an enjoyable plot/adventure). Even if the players never come across the details of the history and background, the details will often have impacts on what gets told to the players that hint at the world you've made, and they'll love it.
My advice is this: Understand the timescale of civilization in the real world. You mention an empire as "short-lived" at 200-some years, but that's actually a significant stretch of time (not the longest, but still). That's the entire history of the United States (enough length of time to build up a national culture of sorts), or the length of the Pax Romana. Even for elves, that's two generations to settle in, enough time for linguistic shift and cultural change. 200 years isn't the longest period of time (the Byzantines lasted 1000 years after Rome fell), but it's significant.

[Sam113097]

You really only need general events. The fall of an Empire a couple hundred years ago matters, as characters spend a lot of time exploring old ruins, but the exact number of years the empire lasted will not affect gameplay in the slightest. In my own setting, information about ancient events is difficult to come by, both to save myself effort and to create a sense of mystery for the players. You might even hear ideas you like by listening to player speculation, and by just creating a framework of events, you can have room to work those in.

[MonkeySage]

Really, the only reason I listed exact dates like that is that I'm actually using a calendar to track events. ^_^ I'm actually not sure how to shave things so that I've got the calendar lined up right without listing such specific numbers of years. Because the currently existing empire had a definite start, the day one ambitious king declared himself emperor, etc.

[Yora]

Our point is that the players won't care about numbers. If you want to, you can put numbers of them, but it helps to understand that they won't matter in actual play. And the same goes for dates of birth, dates of death, and the years of reigns. All you really need to know is which major events happened in which order. Once you start applying numbers it's very easy to go overboard and write whole history books.That nobody will ever see. Try to keep it to the most important events that somehow are relevant to the world now. The births and deaths of princes or reigns of kings who never did anything important is just useless data. It's not information. And having useless data makes it more difficult to see the important pieces of relevant information. And I think that's what fantasy history is all about. Providing the important pieces free of distractions. Is a guy the 9th king or the 36th? By working out the dates of birth and death and the reigns of all kings between this one and the first, you can figure that out. But what has the setting gained from this work? Call him Hugo the Third and it doesn't matter who the other two Hugos where and how many Bobs and Rüdigers there were between them.

One of the best examples of very efficient worldbuilding that led to amazing results in recent years is the videogame series Mass Effect. The entire history timeline is very short:
A few thousand years ago: The Asari discover the Citadel space station and make it the center of their network of colonies.
Some time later: The Salarians also find the Citadel and the Asari agree to share it.
About a thousand years ago: The Citadel races have a war with the Rachni and need some superweapon to win. They find the Krogan and give them space ships and lots of weapons, and the Krogan wipe all the Rachni out.
Shortly after: The Krogan want to keep the ships and weapons and want to keep conquering planets and start attacking Asari and Salarians. The two Citadel races get the Turians to join them and the Salarians develop a bioweapon that drives and keeps the Krogan population so low that the Turians can defeat them. Krogan now hate Salarians and Turians.
300 years ago: In another corner of the galaxy the Quarians build a race of robot servants which unfortunately revolt and force all the Quarians to flee and live on spaceships from that on. Quarians now hate robots and everyone else is a bit creeped out by them.
150 years ago: Humans find an ancient alien base on Mars and figure out the technology to send spaceships to other planets.
30 years ago: The humans encountet the Turians and they start shooting at each other. A few months later the Asari and the Salarians arrange a peace and invite the humans to join their alliance. Old humans have bad memories of Turians, but young humans get along with them swimmingly.
A bit later: A transport ship carrying magic spaceship fuel for hyperjumps crashes and spills the cargo over a whole city. That stuff gets into the cells of unborn babies and they grow up with psicic powers that work similar to energy reactors and levitation vehicles.
10 or so years ago: Human colonies are getting too close to Batarian colonies and they get in a really brutal war. Since the Citadel races told them not to build colonies next to the Batarians, it's the humans personal problem. Humans and Batarians now really hate each other.
That is really all the history the setting has and it's still one of the most complex ones I'e come across. There is not a single name of any ruler or general or any specific city, only two known battles (the biggest ones humans had in the last 30 years), and the dates of anything before the memory of living humans are completely irrelevant. All the events that are important are those that tell us who is enemy or allies with who and who gets really touchy about which topics. That is stuff that matters to the players, because it helps them to understand what is going on right before their eyes right now.
Those are the things the history of a setting should focus on and the types of events that actually make a setting richer.

[VoxRationis]

Our point is that the players won't care about numbers. If you want to, you can put numbers of them, but it helps to understand that they won't matter in actual play. And the same goes for dates of birth, dates of death, and the years of reigns. All you really need to know is which major events happened in which order. Once you start applying numbers it's very easy to go overboard and write whole history books.That nobody will ever see. Try to keep it to the most important events that somehow are relevant to the world now. The births and deaths of princes or reigns of kings who never did anything important is just useless data. It's not information. And having useless data makes it more difficult to see the important pieces of relevant information. And I think that's what fantasy history is all about. Providing the important pieces free of distractions. Is a guy the 9th king or the 36th? By working out the dates of birth and death and the reigns of all kings between this one and the first, you can figure that out. But what has the setting gained from this work? Call him Hugo the Third and it doesn't matter who the other two Hugos where and how many Bobs and Rüdigers there were between them.

You clearly don't give your players very much credit. Surely they should be able to tell on their own what information is and is not relevant? Do your players really hear you give information on the etymology of a local word and say "Well, that settles it. We're going to have to kill the Linguist Lich who's trying to replace all the Latin-root names with Celtic-root ones"? Distractions help establish the world as real and believable, a place which can be immersed in rather than just blundered through from plot point to plot point, each of which corresponds to a historical note on a 1:1 basis.
Besides, information which is not relevant to the plot at first can become important later.



One of the best examples of very efficient worldbuilding that led to amazing results in recent years is the videogame series Mass Effect. The entire history timeline is very short:

The actual timeline that appears in the Codex from the first game onwards is considerably more detailed than this.



That is really all the history the setting has and it's still one of the most complex ones I'e come across. There is not a single name of any ruler or general or any specific city, only two known battles (the biggest ones humans had in the last 30 years), and the dates of anything before the memory of living humans are completely irrelevant. All the events that are important are those that tell us who is enemy or allies with who and who gets really touchy about which topics. That is stuff that matters to the players, because it helps them to understand what is going on right before their eyes right now.
Those are the things the history of a setting should focus on and the types of events that actually make a setting richer.

If by "richer," you mean "have it so that when you visit tribe X, all they ever do is refer to historical event 2B, or expound upon social condition C." In the words of a different Bioware character: "People are not simple. They cannot be summed up for easy reference in the manner of 'The elves are a lithe, pointy-eared people who excel at poverty.'" The world is cluttered with detail that's fundamentally irrelevant to what one is doing at any particular time. Putting that kind of detail, or even half of it, into a fictional setting makes it seem believable.

[B9anders]

My general advice for setting history is to not bother with any details more than 200 years ago or so. Players are only going to deal with current events in the setting, and these are usually affected most by the history of the last couple of decades. Go back further than that and all that is really relevant are very rough outlines, such as that at some point some great kingdom or empire existed in one place. What exactly happened in that kingdom at what points and the identity of individual rulers isn't really of any relevance. As a rule of thumb, every item on your history timeline should have a direct relevance to something that is happening now. Something like a tribe of barbarians keeps attacking from the west, because 300 years ago their ancestors were driven into the mountains and they still hope to reclaim their ancestral lands. "People defeated and driven into the mountains to become barbarians" would be a useful item on the timeline. But you wouldn't even need a specific date for that.

I agree. I have two timelines. One for my own amusement no one will ever see. The other, that others will read, gets shorter and shorter with time. All the ancient empire and such - they are footnotes. What is more important is telling the story of how the present came into being.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Ancient Empires can be great plot-points for those who remember, though. Again, the importance is in the rough ordering of events, not the exact dates. For example, in my world there is a Kingdom along an archipelago called Inseln. Or there was, because it is now split into many rival states, three of which claim to be Kings. It's meant to be the corner of the setting that combines political intrigue themes with themes of war. As such, the political inclinations of each person of import is of VAST importance, and it's important to note which families date back to when Inseln was whole, who claims what, and why. So it's important to note that, when two warring brothers split the Kingdom, it was the weaker side that, in the end, was able to keep the Uhren dynasty alive, even if they no longer claim to be King of Inseln, as the main line continued only through a bastard who took the name Nureisbein. It's important to note that the Weiss' of Dunn have historically played both the Uhren's and the Nureisbein's against each other. It's important to note that recently, the Edlen's have claimed the Kingdom of Nureis, and civil war has broken out between the Edlen-supporting Reds of the north, and the Nureisbein supporting Blues of the south. It's important to note that the Von Vorfahr's, the Counts of Gehort, claim to be the oldest family in the entire islands.

I don't need to track exactly when any of this happened, or how many Kings there were (though there have been at least 16 Count Karl von Vorfahr's, enough that their capital is called Karlingen), but it's important to know the order things happened in because it's relevant to the story.

Jump to the opposite side of the world, the part built for guiltless hack-and-slash dungeon-delving adventuring. There's very little history. Some time ago there was a gigantic empire, but it fell and orcs and goblins overran it's ruins, setting up various kingdoms. There are a handful of Adventurer Kingdoms set up by former adventurers near the old capital of the empire, but the capital itself is both flooded and demon-infested. One of my characters right now is a scion of the former empire looking for answers as to why it fell, because her religion demands that she furthers the remembrance of their god, or He will pass away. There is only one point in history that matters here, and that's the fall of the empire. Perhaps the various goblin kingdoms have been fighting and doing great things for ages, but it doesn't matter, because it's not in theme with this part of the setting.

[Mechalich]

Since this word appears to have standard D&D style conventions (great wyrm blue dragon, elves, serpentfolk, etc.) having some detail on the timeline to the last 1000 or so years is actually helpful because there will be people in the setting who were alive for all of it. It is entirely possible in D&D for a powerful elven wizard and a nasty red dragon to hold a grudge for 500 years even as empires rise and fall around them.

The example you gave of the elven Valleu Empire lasting only 234 years is indeed very short-lived, in elven terms. While that would be a significant chunk of time in human terms ~8 generations, it's not even 2 elven generations.

Having some level of detailed grasp of the history may also increase setting detail. While your players may not care, you can weave stories around things like important historical figures who still have modern relevance. For example: one steppe conqueror is likely to be compared by everyone in the setting to the last steppe conqueror (curse that Timur, he's worse than Chiggnis Khan ever was!), or the current royal dynasty to the last one. We do this sort of thing today with sports figures 'next Michael Jordan' is a popular one.

If you're structuring your history in a cyclical setup of periods of stability followed by a collapse and then a new period of stability, then the most important events are whatever happened since the last collapse, because those are the ones that will explain the present society. The nature of the collapse itself is also important: if a massive cult of demon summoners broke the country, there are probably a whole lot of demons still in various dungeons, but if it was necromancers, then undead are going to be more common instead.

[redwizard007]

Is history important? Well sure, but how much depends on your purposes and personal tastes. I would love to spend the next year writing a detailed genealogy with annotations and indexes for major noble houses and mercantile clans of my world, but does this matter to my players? Of course not. What does matter to them is that the world seems real, consistent and believable.

One of the ways that I attempt to achieve that goal is by having a rough idea of ancient history with notes about important events and personages becoming more common as we near the current date. If a PCs backstory involves his dwarven mentor fighting at the battle of Bullbridge in 863 and I drop a tapestry depicting the battle into a social encounter in a noble's villa it pulls the players further into the game and can have a huge influence on the attitudes of their characters. It also allows for consistently logical naming conventions, population patterns and is a never ending source of potential conflicts as old feuds resurface or oppressed groups form ever more desperate secret societies...

History is HUGE, but only when properly applied... Kind of like salt.

[BootStrapTommy]

It's strange to have a year 0. You start counting things at 1.