Is it possible to have truly "forgotten" history in D&D?

[heavyfuel]

Hello! This isn't pertinent to any particular D&D forum, but I am talking about D&D here

For a campaign, I'm thinking about having plenty of ruins of old and forgotten civilizations (groundbreaking stuff, I know) but I want these civilizations to be truly forgotten. Like, almost no record of their existance beyond the ruins.

In my head, I imagine something like a mass extinction event that caused these civilizations to disappear more or less all at once. Something like that would be something people would, at the very least, tell legends about, and I want none of that.

Specifically, elves are particularly problematic because 1 elf generation is like 5 human ones, so while something might have gotten lost after 20 human generations, elven elders would definitely still remember the stories their grandfathers told them.

While a few scholars might make some presumptions about these civilizations from the remains that are found, there should be near zero "common knowledge" about them.

So, how long ago does this catastrophe need to have happened?

[Mutazoia]

Hello! This isn't pertinent to any particular D&D forum, but I am talking about D&D here

For a campaign, I'm thinking about having plenty of ruins of old and forgotten civilizations (groundbreaking stuff, I know) but I want these civilizations to be truly forgotten. Like, almost no record of their existance beyond the ruins.

In my head, I imagine something like a mass extinction event that caused these civilizations to disappear more or less all at once. Something like that would be something people would, at the very least, tell legends about, and I want none of that.

Specifically, elves are particularly problematic because 1 elf generation is like 5 human ones, so while something might have gotten lost after 20 human generations, elven elders would definitely still remember the stories their grandfathers told them.

While a few scholars might make some presumptions about these civilizations from the remains that are found, there should be near zero "common knowledge" about them.

So, how long ago does this catastrophe need to have happened?

One answer to your elf conundrum is to change the geographic location of your fallen civilization to someplace nobody has been to yet.

"Hey look, there's a whole other continent over here! Nobody's sailed out this far before so this is the first time we're seeing it!"

or

"Hey look, there's this giant underground cave system that only opened up after a giant earthquake, and there's a whole undisturbed city down here!"

or

"Hey look, we just found this weird metal rod and it magically teleported us to some undiscovered ruins!"

Hell, your ancient civilization doesn't even have to have been on the same "plane" as the rest of your world. It's just slightly out of phase (think the Druids stronghold from the Shannara books). The magic that shifted it out of phase also interferes with people's memories of it. You know it existed while you are there but when you leave, you forget all about it.

Or you could just say it's so old that even the most ancient elven lore has no mention as it predates even the elves themselves. Take a look at the world of the aforementioned Shannara books. They take place in what is supposed to be our world thousands and thousands of years after some apocalypse. The elves hadn't even become elves yet when that happened.

[Lord Raziere]

Assuming a Forgotten Realms like setting with elves living as long as 700 years if I'm remembering correctly.....I dunno, long time ago I guess? an elf would experience a lot in their time.

but technically all that takes for a dark age to happen is for records not to be written down- or even for whatever language used to not have any key of translation. oral tradition can preserve stuff, but there is a reason why we switched to written text to preserve things, its easier.

perhaps think outside the box: what if whatever cataclysm simply wiped the memories of whoever survived it of whatever came before? tis probably magic and therefore can do anything you need it to. the elves would simply lose all memory of what civilization was like during that time as well as all memory of what all these strange runes say. without knowing the original meaning of any of it from someone that was taught it, its basically nigh impossible to tell what that language would mean and any use of it afterwards be repurposes without knowing the actual context, thus whatever gets passed would on be nothing but what the survivors thought the civilization was like at the time without any actual memories of it to back it up. thus there wouldn't be legends about it, because the cataclysm not only destroyed civilizations, but peoples memories of those civilizations among those who survived, and while scholars would care a lot about figuring out despite that, most people would go "yea even people back then didn't remember after that, so why should we care?"

[Onos]

Honestly, this is one aspect which you can probably lean fairly heavily on real-world examples. To the best of my knowledge the oldest reasonably intact ruins are Gobekli Tepe, clocking in at around 11'000 years old and only discovered by modern civilization in the sixties. You really don't even need a cataclysm - a climate shift causing rapid desertification could easy wipe out whole regions, then bury them in sand in a matter of years to decades.

The likes of the Pyramids and Stonehenge are about five thousand years old. Presumably they were massively culturally important and everyone knew about them. Yet in the modern day almost no information whatsoever has survived, even though these "ruins" have remained unhidden the entire time.

Of course, you could also just say "magic preserved the ruins" and make them absurdly old. Standard D&D practice has lots of "elder" races, and you could easily chuck in a couple more that have since vanished. If the ruins are actually older than elves as a species (or elven presence on the continent or such) then it stands to reason that elves won't have a clue about them.

Also, you could look at simply using a "longevity factor" when planning dungeons. Take the average lifespan of a long-lived race, divide it by human life expectancy, and multiply your result by the equivalent age of a real-world ruin. Like, if your dragons live about a hundred times as long as people, something half a million years old would be the draconic equivalent of Stonehenge.

[Anonymouswizard]

While an elf lives about 500 years on average (it'll vary due to disease and genetics), an elf generation doesn't have to be anywhere near that long. Humans' lives end sheet roughly a century (except for rate instances, and I don't know if any verified cases of people beating 140), but our generations are somewhere between 15 and 30 years, neglecting outliers.

And that's only in some settings, in others (at minimum Nentir Vale and Dark Sun) elf lifespans are much shorter.

So assuming that most elves who have children have them by 200 then we hit 20 generations after a mere 4000 years instead of 10,000. Knowing great-grandma and even great-great-grandma becomes common, Elven has shorter words for them, and so knowledge passes down via oral traditions a bit more...

Call it 5000 years. Now we just need to work out why all the stuff hasn't been nicked.

[King of Nowhere]

Keep in mind that magic may interfere with mistery. A first level spell may allow translating hieroglyphs. Divinations may solve old mysteries. Figure out limitations to prevent that

[SpyOne]

Are your elves very regional? Or were they, until recently?

What I mean is that if elves don't travel much, then what they know about distant cultures is what is relayed to them by peoples they border. If they never travelled outside Europe, for example, then their knowledge of Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas would mimic the knowledge of European humans.
And even if a few elves were Marco Polo, their stories would not nessicarily become common knowledge among the elves, just that a trip to an elven library might be productive.

[Kol Korran]

The above people allready gave plenty of good examples. I will add another idea:

Whatever the catastrophe was, it also held a big secret, one which the survivors decided should remain unknown, and so decided to hide the secret lore, and take it to the grave...

Perhaps even knowledge of the ruins might endanger the world to another catastrophe, perhaps there were some ideas/ ideologies/ belief/ technology which must never rise again, or... perhaps the surviving races (Such as the elves) had a part in it... a shameful part, a painful part, which they wish to erase...

This gives the opportunity to sometime in the course of adventure, find some hidden (and possibly shocking) info, and possibly be faced with the same dillema- to keep it hidden, or to reveal?

[Satinavian]

It is easy. Just have your cataclysm be thorough enough. Have your elfs have recorded history up to their creation by their gods. And have the very first elf ever encounter those ruins when he first walked the land. Have the gods be always been silent on it as if there was some divine pact to never speak of what came befor the current races and have no other sentient species exist long enough to answer as well.

You should also make sure to disable all divination that could help like spells that decipher those old texts. And don't forget all the ways to speak with dead people (corpse ghost, afterlife, whatever), those must not work for that time as well.

[Argis13]

Of course, if you want the ruins themselves to be recent and non-magical, you could always have the cataclysm itself make everyone magically forget the history.

Something like, they went too far in their research so the gods wiped them out and attached a mind-wipe to the cataclysm to make sure that no-one remembers the forbidden knowledge, and all records were wiped away.

[Martin Greywolf]

For a campaign, I'm thinking about having plenty of ruins of old and forgotten civilizations (groundbreaking stuff, I know) but I want these civilizations to be truly forgotten. Like, almost no record of their existance beyond the ruins.

This goal as stated is almost impossible. THere are plenty of civilizations we have no written records of, but they fall into two categories:

The written records weren't invented yet - stone age and some of the bronze age falls here, as well as Australia and Americas
While the written records were around, all the civilizations that had them were too far away from them or going through a crisis at the time - Sea peoples, numerous Eurasian nomadic groups etc

You do have a lot of civilizations that we have very spotty records on, the various European tribes during Roman times being an excellent example (Gauls, Celts, Slavs etc), but we do have some records.

To get complete erasure of them, you'd need something that broke the records continuity completely in every nation that had records, and it's hard to imagine something of this scale that wouldn't wipe out most if not all of human population, especially with pre-modern tech. A CD or a flash drive will fall apart pretty quickly, but we still have clay tablets from Mesopotamia on which customers complain about Ea-nasir selling really bad copper. Seriously. Don't buy copper from Ea-nasir.

About the only thing I can think of that would achieve this reliably is some kind of magical plague that would cause every bit of writing to turn into explosive runes and detonate immediately, lasting for a few canturies so that all writing is forgotten completely.

[MrStabby]

well just have a planet with a very short orbital period. 500 years takes you till about lunchtime... well maybe not that extreme. But A life span of 500 years needn't be that long if a year isn't that long either.

[Psyren]

Starfinder has a phenomenon called The Gap (https://starfinderwiki.com/sf/Gap) - a period of history that separates Pathfinder from Starfinder essentially - and which no divination, deity, nor even memories of species long-lived enough to have been present during it are able to (or perhaps choose to, in the gods' case) give precise/accurate answers about, not even about what caused it or how long it lasted. Ruins, records, and other evidence of places and events from during the Gap abounds, but quite a bit of it is contradictory or otherwise difficult to reconcile. If you want a true historical mystery in your setting that is beyond the reach of divinations or elven eyewitnesses, cribbing some notes from that might prove helpful.

[gijoemike]

Instead of having the various civilizations get wiped from the world have something radically change them.

Like have a plague that affects each race differently? Each race has to deal with its own mess.
Have a massive earthquake or spell suddenly rearrange the land and shift geographical borders.
Have a casting of giant growth going horribly horribly wrong creating a massive dessert or jungle destroying an entire country
Have a cult/secret org destroy all the history books. (like in Pat Rothfuss Wise Man's Fear)

Just because an elf lives for 700 years doesn't mean they remember what happened 50 years back. Eye witness accounts are actually some of the worst evidence in investigations.

The anime One piece has a 100 year long period set a few centuries back that if you even ATTEMPT to study it the world government puts a massive bounty on them and issues kill on sight orders (NICO ROBIN).

I like The Gap from star finder.

But the opposite can be true as well. Have there be so much info from a give time period and conflict the info so no one really agrees on what happened.

[JeenLeen]

I think the answers you have are sufficient to have a lot of ideas to pull from, but I'll add another to stop divinations. Borrowing a concept from World of Darkness Mage's Time magic.

Divination spells, including things like Legend Lore, make some things tricky.
Having times that magic can't divine works, but let's add some rules to this.

One easy way is: the further back you scry*, the harder. So it's essentially impossible to look back that far.
A trickier, neater way is, and this it the borrow from Mage: looking into the past is generally safe, but messing with the past isn't. And, during THIS TIME IN THE PAST, people had a now-forgotten technique to tell when they were looked at from the future. And, if they saw that, they'd react and thus the past gets changed--which harms the person in the future scrying them. The bigger the change, the bigger the harm.
So, for anyone from the present looking back that far into the past, the butterfly effect effectively makes it suicide. The moment a scry attempt starts, the person dies, and is unable to relay any information about it.
*using scry loosely here. Includes things like Legend Lore pulling up old details.

The downside of this is the possibility for temporal paradoxes. In Mage, a big enough change causes the change to be unmade AND kills the scryer. So maybe you have that as a theory for why the past is never significantly changed, despite it should only kill the scryer if the past were changed significantly. Or maybe it was changed and everyone's memories were altered accordingly, but nobody can tell. Something fun for scholars to debate in-universe, while the OOC answer is "too hard to figure out, it doesn't really matter, and do not try to scry this time period"

We can also add that the current pantheon of gods is a newer one, made during or after the Cataclysm. Or they were altered, or made some oath, to not speak about the time before. Like, they literally can't talk about it without it shredding their godhood or causing a second Cataclysm. (Don't pick the latter if evil gods might want a second one.)

[Jay R]

You don't need to have no knowledge of it. It's good enough for there to be many conflicting stories about lost civilizations.

The introduction to my last game included the following:

"You have heard many mutually conflicting tales of all kinds of marvelous heroes. You may assume that you have heard of any story of any hero you like – Gilgamesh, Oddysseus, Sigurd, Taliesin, Charlemagne, Lancelot, Robin Hood, Aragorn, Prester John, Baba Yaga, Prince Ōkuninushi, Br’er Rabbit, anyone."

Imagine a party that finds a ruined city. I tell the bard it reminds her of Troy. It feels like Jerusalem to the cleric. The rogue is reminded of Agrabah, and the fighter is thinking about Sparta. The sailor wonders if it is Atlantis, and the wizard is pondering everything he remembers about Scholomance.

This is exactly the same as having no information. [Literally no information, since they are actually in the ruins of El Dorado.]


If I ever get back to that game, I intend to give each player separately some background information about the tomb of the greatest wizard who ever lived. Each story will have one true fact about the tomb, and four or five false ones, including who the wizard is. One player will hear about the tomb of Merlin. Another will know the story of the tomb of Olorin. Others will have heard of Archimago, Sheelba, Nabonidus, Yen Sid, Rasputin, Melisandre, Baba Yaga, Nicholas Flamel, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, maybe even Oz or Shazam. All of these stories come from the true one, and have been falsely associated with other wizards over the centuries.

When they find the tomb, there will be no indication of who the wizard really is, unless they open the coffin, and see an old, rotting skeleton missing one forearm and hand, and with a glass eye in the skull.

[Xuc Xac]

Just because the ruins are ancient, that doesn't mean they've always been there.

A generation ship drifted through space for 10,000 years before its autopilot landed it (or crashed it) in your world's version of Tunguska.

Or a 30 mile diameter circle of deserted land suddenly swaps places with another patch of dirt on another planet and now there's a dead Martian city covered in red dust in the middle of the white sandy desert.

Or it suddenly shifted in from another plane.

Or it's 10,000 years old but nobody knows anything about it because it will be built 10,000 years in the future then travel back in time 20,000 after it's been aged and abandoned.

There are a lot of ways to have something really old and mysterious that "isn't from around here".

[Democratus]

Magic in a fantasy world makes things like this easy.


"Time Crash": An event occured that erased an entire civilization from the flow of time. Somehow their monuments and ruins remain. But no one remembers them because they were erased from existence.
"A collision of Worlds": A 'copy' of the prime world from another dimension merged with the dimension your campaign takes place. No one knows how the ruins suddenly appeared or where they come from.
"By the Will of the Gods": The denizens of a civilization offended the gods so much that they killed all of them and erased all mortal memory of them from the world.

[Mutazoia]

This goal as stated is almost impossible. THere are plenty of civilizations we have no written records of, but they fall into two categories:

The written records weren't invented yet - stone age and some of the bronze age falls here, as well as Australia and Americas
While the written records were around, all the civilizations that had them were too far away from them or going through a crisis at the time - Sea peoples, numerous Eurasian nomadic groups etc

You do have a lot of civilizations that we have very spotty records on, the various European tribes during Roman times being an excellent example (Gauls, Celts, Slavs etc), but we do have some records.

To get complete erasure of them, you'd need something that broke the records continuity completely in every nation that had records, and it's hard to imagine something of this scale that wouldn't wipe out most if not all of human population, especially with pre-modern tech. A CD or a flash drive will fall apart pretty quickly, but we still have clay tablets from Mesopotamia on which customers complain about Ea-nasir selling really bad copper. Seriously. Don't buy copper from Ea-nasir.

About the only thing I can think of that would achieve this reliably is some kind of magical plague that would cause every bit of writing to turn into explosive runes and detonate immediately, lasting for a few canturies so that all writing is forgotten completely.

Not really. If a global cataclysm occurred that brought the total sentient population of the world down to just a few hundred thousand, people would be too busy trying to survive to keep accurate historical records. They would most likely move away from the affected areas and start life anew wherever they could. They would take what they needed to survive and little else. I promise you, if the Super Volcano that is Yellowstone erupts, I'm not bothering to take a history textbook with me as I pull stakes and find someplace to survive. Give it a few generations of trying to eke out a meager living just to keep from starving and freezing to death and you'll forget about that fancy city you used to live in within a few generations, even if you live for 500 years on average.

Books rot, stone crumbles, etc. Even magic can fade over time.

[LordCdrMilitant]

You can also just decide that elves and dwarves have normal length lifespans. I've yet to see a player or GM actually seriously consider or portray what the implications of the existing long lifespan are or engage with it; almost always it's like "my elf character is supposed to be 25, so she's 250 and behaves exactly like an 18 year old leaving her nuclear family of 2.5 children and 1.5 automobileshorses to go to college for the first time." so there's no harm done with ditching the lengthened lifespans.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You can also just decide that elves and dwarves have normal length lifespans. I've yet to see a player or GM actually seriously consider or portray what the implications of the existing long lifespan are or engage with it; almost always it's like "my elf character is supposed to be 25, so she's 250 and behaves exactly like an 18 year old leaving her nuclear family of 2.5 children and 1.5 automobileshorses to go to college for the first time." so there's no harm done with ditching the lengthened lifespans.

Yeah. I cut back the humanoid lifespans tremendously. High elves get 200 max, wood elves get 120 or so, dwarves 150.

200 was chosen because I was taking a 200 year time skip and didn't want many "ordinary" people to remember those events. But I've liked it a lot.

[Kane0]

For a campaign, I'm thinking about having plenty of ruins of old and forgotten civilizations (groundbreaking stuff, I know) but I want these civilizations to be truly forgotten. Like, almost no record of their existance beyond the ruins.

In my head, I imagine something like a mass extinction event that caused these civilizations to disappear more or less all at once. Something like that would be something people would, at the very least, tell legends about, and I want none of that.

So, how long ago does this catastrophe need to have happened?

Well, you can always magic it up and combine multiple factors together.

Say for example you have a meteor shower. Those affected by the blasts and fallout are obviously affected but the event was also foretold by some prophecy or other and caused quite a bit of warring on top of its actual effects.
To make matters worse, the meteorite material messed with magic somewhat which complicates all sorts of things, or opened the way for other parties to come in and override history with their own version (because it’s written by the winners).
Then just throw in some smaller items and add time to taste. For example survivors deciding things were best left forgotten, told to move on by the powers that be or not in a position where it could be properly relayed (eg a non-written tradition suddenly missing a generation or two to pass verbal history).

There you go, one potent cocktail of historic inaccuracy.

[LibraryOgre]

I'd note that, just because you live a long time, doesn't mean

a) You remember absolutely everyone and everything
b) You were aware of it in the first place

Forgotten Realms (since that's a useful baseline) has had great strides in magic since Netheril, which fell in -339 DR (so almost 1700 years before the Time of Troubles). So, the idea of a world-spanning, magically enabled, cosmopolitan society is a relatively new phenomenon, especially by elven standards. Sure, the elves may have heard rumors of your civilization, but they never saw it themselves. Lost gnomish city in the Storm Horns? No one remembers it, since all the gnomes were wiped out by <insert disaster here>. The ruins above your town in the High Forest? No one really knows, because it's some sub-sect of Uthgardt that were doing weird things and so the barbarians didn't like to talk about it when they still remembered. And they invented their own alphabet, which is completely forgotten, so anything written in the ruins is unintelligible.

Time and distance can conceal a lot of things. Some old documents or the like may reference them, but it doesn't mean those documents are accurate or that the characters will have access. Basically, these are problems that stymie modern historians, just on a longer timescale.

[False God]

Maybe the extinction event applied to everyone. 90% of your population gets wiped out, the people who survive may not be familiar with the history. They weren't historians, they didn't have direct, indirect or social exposure to the events and places that were lost. There are lots of reasons why history gets "forgotten".

Perhaps the elves forgot these societies on purpose. As a take on the phrase "The worst thing you can do to your enemy is ignore them." Maybe these "lost" civilizations caused the cataclysm, so information about them was purposefully erased to prevent it from repeating.

IMO, a good "cataclym" should be 5000-10000 years ago anyway. Assuming an elven generation is 500 years or so (it would probably be around 300 but whatever) you'd be 10-20 generations back. Lets say the MAX elf lifespan is 1000, but the average is only 700. You'd have generations around every 300 years, putting even a "close" cataclysm of 5000 years ago almost 15 elven generations back.

That's plenty of time for a society to "forget". Remember: elves may live for a thousand years, but books may not, and stories will change.

Even still, having knowledge isn't the same as sharing knowledge. Just because the Elven Illuminati know about The Lost Civilization, doesn't mean they tell everyone about it. Maybe the Drow know all about this place, but nobody likes them and they don't like anyone either.

---
Or, as the first post suggested: perhaps the elves (and other long-lived races with notable populations) were simply unaware of this society to begin with.

[Vahnavoi]

One thing to remember is that records do not directly scale with lifespans. For example, an elf's body may renew itself and live to be centuries old, but the bark, papyrus or paper they write on won't.

If anything, continuous life may even be detrimental to information remaining for extended periods. Something etched in stone may be able to survive for thousands of years, but only if those stones aren't being broken down and reused for new constructions. Many artifacts from the past have only been available to us in the real world because, by accident or design, they ended up in places where no-one would or could disturb them for ages. Now that we've recovered them, they are that much more vulnerable to being lost and creating gaps in records.

Extreme lifespans may even de-incentivize keeping records or developing long-lasting recording formats, because you have people who can remember things - leading to irreversible information loss when a war or cataclysm causes one of the memorizers to die.

[dafrca]

This was a great thread to read. Lots of interesting observations.

I think those who brought up the written records are on the right track. Life span of elves is not as important as the life span of stone tablets or gold or silver or other written records that will far outlast the normal paper/reed/papyrus books.

If you really want no record then I expect it is the written record you must destroy. The ability to learn and explore texts must be removed. Look how our understanding of the Egyptian culture exploded once they found the Rosetta Stone. If you can read the left over records and other written records you can't learn about the race/culture/builders of the ruins.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck.

[jedipilot24]

Just skimmed through "Races of the Wild".
Recorded Elven history begins with the Sundering and the Fall of Lolth, and even that is only known to the elves through legend and myth. What records exist from before that time are fragmented and contradictory.

So although the Elves claim to be the first mortal race, they could be wrong. You could have this "ancient lost civilization" rise and fall to some cataclysm that predates the Sundering.

For example:

In the ancient past of the Forgotten Realms Setting there was a time known as the Days of Thunder where Toril was a single continent ruled by snake people; the elves of Faerun have no records of this time because they wouldn't even arrive on Toril for another 8,000 years, at a time when it was being ruled by dragons

[Jay R]

The best way to have forgotten all the history is for that civilization to have been the focus of a huge number of stories and legends. There may be a germ of truth in each story (the king's name was Arthur, he united many small kingdoms, etc.), but what "everybody knows" is the stories and songs that the bards have made up about that land.

They've discovered Troy -- but there was never a real Paris, Helen, or Achilles.

The Seven Cities of Cibola never had streets paved with gold.

The PCs have found Atlantis -- which never sank into the sea.

They sailed to the lost island of Themiscyra -- which never had Amazons.

The ruins of Agrabah have no magic lamp. Valyria has no dragons or special steel. Moria is an abandoned iron mine. Opar never had beautiful priestesses or hoarded jewels. Skartaris is just a large cavern complex. Skull Island has no dinosaurs or giant apes.

The party's bard should probably know that all they have are legends. That way the players don't feel mistreated.

Then make one crucial fact that was the basis of the legend, twisted but recognizable. In Troy they find a powerful mechanical horse. Themiscyra was the home of the Drow. They find a small store of Ioun stones in Opar.

Have something that will make the legends seem meaningful after the fact, while not giving them any inside information to start with.

[snowblizz]

This was a great thread to read. Lots of interesting observations.

I think those who brought up the written records are on the right track. Life span of elves is not as important as the life span of stone tablets or gold or silver or other written records that will far outlast the normal paper/reed/papyrus books.

If you really want no record then I expect it is the written record you must destroy. The ability to learn and explore texts must be removed. Look how our understanding of the Egyptian culture exploded once they found the Rosetta Stone. If you can read the left over records and other written records you can't learn about the race/culture/builders of the ruins.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck.

You don't have to remove all writing. It takes quite advanced linguistics effort to crack ancient languages. The Rosetta stone was shall we say something of a lucky outlier.

We have a bunch of Etruscan writing but no one can say what it says. Because there's not enough and it's not really related to anything we know. There's just not enough of it. And the Etruscans didn't get cataclysmed, they just sort of merged into Romans. Similarly Linear A hasn't been decoded either. The Rosetta stone was special in that it contained the same text 3 times in 3 different languages one of which could be read.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You don't have to remove all writing. It takes quite advanced linguistics effort to crack ancient languages. The Rosetta stone was shall we say something of a lucky outlier.

We have a bunch of Etruscan writing but no one can say what it says. Because there's not enough and it's not really related to anything we know. There's just not enough of it. And the Etruscans didn't get cataclysmed, they just sort of merged into Romans. Similarly Linear A hasn't been decoded either. The Rosetta stone was special in that it contained the same text 3 times in 3 different languages one of which could be read.

Sadly, in D&D-land, that doesn't work. There's a (5e) warlock invocation that lets you read any form of writing. Period. And several (relatively low level) spells that produce the same effect.

[Mutazoia]

This was a great thread to read. Lots of interesting observations.

I think those who brought up the written records are on the right track. Life span of elves is not as important as the life span of stone tablets or gold or silver or other written records that will far outlast the normal paper/reed/papyrus books.

If you really want no record then I expect it is the written record you must destroy. The ability to learn and explore texts must be removed. Look how our understanding of the Egyptian culture exploded once they found the Rosetta Stone. If you can read the left over records and other written records you can't learn about the race/culture/builders of the ruins.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck.

In our modern world, etching words onto non-ferrous metals is child's play. Yet, you can't go down to the public library and check out a copy of "To Kill A Mockingbird" that has been etched onto copper tablets. Stone crumbles which is why we only have part of a Rosetta Stone. An that is less than 2k years old.

You can't count on a civilization taking the time to record everything about itself onto indestructible materials "Just in case".

Maybe the OPs ancient civilization used a (mundane) device to store information into diamonds and all of the tools necessary to read that data has long since crumbled to dust. Any diamonds found would not be magical in nature and anybody finding them wouldn't know there was information in them, let alone how to retrieve it.

[Vahnavoi]

Sadly, in D&D-land, that doesn't work. There's a (5e) warlock invocation that lets you read any form of writing. Period. And several (relatively low level) spells that produce the same effect.

The solution to that is to go above and beyond written rules of individual spelms and ask yourself "what allows these spells to do this in my setting? How are they accessing this information?"

Once you have the answers, you can find boundary conditions beyond which those spells do not work. For one obvious example, most (all?) forms of magic require the Grand Excuse for magic (in 5e's case, I believe that's the Weave, from Forgotten Realms) to be in place. So no magical decoding in absence of the Weave (dead magic zones etc.)

Finnish RPG Praedor has the nuclear solution to this problem: wizards cannot go to the ruins of their own dead mega-civilization. At all. The effect that makes them immortal and allows them to work magic goes haywire in those ruins and they'll die. Not that you ever get to play a wizard in Praedor. :smallamused:

[wilphe]

Specifically, elves are particularly problematic because 1 elf generation is like 5 human ones, so while something might have gotten lost after 20 human generations, elven elders would definitely still remember the stories their grandfathers told them.


Just because the elves were around doesn't mean they were paying attention to whatever the "lesser" races were up to

And even if they were paying attention doesn't necessarily follow that they are freely going to share that information

[Clistenes]

About elves: In my games elves are very unreliable narrators. You can sorta believe what an old elf tells you about things they have experienced themselves, but not what they tell about previous generations.

The root of the problem is, elves care more about the beauty of the narration than about historical veracity, so the coolest, most beautiful, most epic song or poem is quickly accepted as the "truth".

So all those super-advanced ancient magocracies that left behind artifacts of awesome power? None of them were as wise and powerful as present elves! Also, elves taught them everything they knew!

[Spore]

I always loved Elder Scrolls' dwarven lore for that. Dwarves there basically vanished, without any explanation on why or how. All that remains is their ruins, and their automatons. Even the oldest most advanced scholars can just guesstimate stuff, because their vanishing simply rewrote time and history itself, deleting themselves from existence and history.

[Morgaln]

There is certainly precedence for cultures like that in our world.
For example, we know pretty much nothing about the culture of Teotihuacan, except what can be inferred from the ruins. Mesoamerican cultures didn't have writing the way we have, so no records from that time exists. If your civilization was highly advanced, they might also have had a way of keeping record that no one can translate today because it isn't writing. Something like the Incan quipus.

As for the elves, did they care about that civilization? Did they even have contact?

[Tvtyrant]

Also in a lot of settings stuff made with magic lasts longer, so erosion might not be a concern. Stuff like adamantium and riverine lasts literally forever, magic items don't degrade, etc.

One example of this is the cold iron fortresses in the Abyss, which are likely older then the planet a mortal came to view them from is.

[Telwar]

I LOVE forgotten history. One of my absolute favorite settings, Shadowrun, has a mostly-forgotten/suppressed history going back at least 12000 years. That, in turn, led me to digging into quackery about lost histories/civilizations. Whether or not that was fun is...well, choose your quacks carefully.

If you are trying to make "forgotten" history a thing for your campaign, you'll need to think about things and maybe communicate a few updates in your Session 0. Not necessarily everything communicated, but in the back of your mind.

Suggestions:

The universe is old. The deities are not actually omniscient, and have had significant turnover; maybe they've overthrown their predecessors with extreme prejudice, who overthrew their predecessors with extreme prejudice, and so on...or maybe the previous cultures' deities withered and died out before a new culture's set forth onto apotheosis. They may not even known their own full origins, and even if they did may not answer questions about those, you little mortal pipsqueaks, so stop asking. Same for the fiends of the Lower Planes; the idea of types of fiends overthrowing and exterminating to the best of their ability the previous types has been in D&D for at least 15 years.

The world wasn't spun on a potter's wheel by the gods (or sung into existence by couatl, or some other manufactured-by-specialness), but experiences normal physics, with tectonic drift, erosion, and other natural forces. Then consider that in a world where individual mortals can summon tsunamis, earthquakes, and comets if sufficiently powerful and motivated, catastrophism will make far more, faster changes than we would normally consider plausible in our world. Or hell, the world was begun as a corroded dinner plate by the Dragons' campfire, and destroyed almost everything that came before the Creator(or Creators')'s current vision, leaving bits of trash or qlippoth wandering around. You know, like where some of the 3e binder's vestiges come from.

Consider how information is stored. Writing is very common in history, but requires something to allow you to translate it (and see below). Maybe the previous cultures' writing was rarely or never on imperishable materials, like the Neolithic villages drowned by a jokulhaups at the end of the previous Ice Age. Or it's not something you would necessarily realize is writing; the aforementioned quipu are a very good example. Maybe the Elder Things recorded information that can only be read by touch by something that has infinitely divisible tendrils to stick into the holes they record it in. Perhaps the Antecedents only wrote down business transactions, and the Important Things were not written down, but were instead communicated via an oral initiatory tradition. Or...perhaps they didn't even develop writing, and just relied on an oral tradition?

Also consider how the players obtain information. Eyes of the Runekeeper was mentioned above as a particular problem in 5e D&D, since as written it allows the warlock to read all writing. But think...how does it work? Maybe it only lets what the *patron* understands as writing, and if it's something the patron doesn't recognize*, the warlock won't be able to read it. Do your divinations go to the deities, spirits, the general zeitgeist, or the world's equivalent of the Aakashic Records?

* - "Wait, I can't read any of this writing? Even the writing I'm literate in? WTH, DM?" "Well, your patron did say something about how they'd drifted in the Astral for untold eons..."

Your culture's age doesn't have to be measured in kiloyears to be forgotten or lost, either. All of the above applies, but as mentioned upthread, long-lived races may not give a flying fish about every emergent mayfly culture unless they have semi-direct contact, so they won't remember anything or have records; they'll know more about the berserker horde that nearly broke through the gates than they would the islander civilization they never traded with or came across before the islanders were wiped out when the dwarves' telluric experiments caused something like the Deccan Traps to open up underneath the islanders' now-former homeland. Or, the natives' great civilization collapsed for Any Reason At All, and the time and tumult means no one now there remembers how they built Great Zimbabwe or Nan Madol, even if some of the nearby residents are actually descendants of the builders...and all the writing was burned for fuel, or dumped in the river as an affront to the culture's gods.

...and maybe someone's suppressing information about those previous cultures, like the Immortal Elves in Shadowrun try to do. Why? That's up to you, though general jerkishness and spite never goes out of style. Maybe shame?

[Segev]

1000 years is actually enough as long as there is no surviving written record. No living elf would remember it, on y stories from their parents or grandparents of the before-time and the apocalyptic calamity. The oldest elves would only remember the beginnings of rebuilding civilization.

[Mutazoia]

So what if your forgotten civilization pre-dated the elves. Maybe it was there before they were. "Traditional" elves of real-world mythology actually live in a completely separate dimension from the "real" one. What happens if civilization falls before the elves decide to migrate out of their own realm? When they get there, it's already long dead. Would they care enough to try to learn about it, or would they just shrug and carry on carrying on and ignore it?

[Telonius]

One idea for a "lost" civilization: hiding in plain sight. It really doesn't take all that long for an abandoned structure to become covered by dirt. If the new residents didn't dig too deeply, they could be on top of an ancient city without even knowing it.

A city might shift location over time. Say a river starts changing course (through natural erosion) towards the west. The city might gradually drift to the west along with it. with older buildings getting buried or covered in undergrowth. If this happens slowly enough, people might not even know that the city used to be 5 miles east of where it is now. You could have a whole bunch of ruins just sitting there, that nobody would ever think to look for, because there's never been any record of a city to the east.

[Segev]

and glass eye in its skull.

Archdirector Wizard Nick Fury!?

[Calthropstu]

So you hace a much bigger problem than elves. Dragons. You can bet your ass a dragon somewhere knows all about it. A 5000 year old Wyrm? Yeah, it's got all the info. Oh yeah, and IMMORTAL outsiders? If an ancient civilization existed, you can bet your ass some outaider contracted with someone from there.

[Segev]

So you hace a much bigger problem than elves. Dragons. You can bet your ass a dragon somewhere knows all about it. A 5000 year old Wyrm? Yeah, it's got all the info. Oh yeah, and IMMORTAL outsiders? If an ancient civilization existed, you can bet your ass some outaider contracted with someone from there.

Such beings are subjects of quests to find and question, let alone to get a straight answer out of.

[SpoonR]

There is a difference between forgotten except for legends that don’t give useable place or date references, and this place is a blank slate that literally no one has any info on and the PCs might be the first one to encounter. A few ideas for one or the other case.

Wibbly-Wobbly TARDIS stuff. Aka it is only recently that this happened in the past. Whether through breaking time, alternate dimensions, or even a Wish creatin long-dead kingdoms from scratch. In the main world timeline, this kingdom didn’t exist, and suddenly it did exist very long ago.

Tardis variations could be “only the present is fixed” or “sometimes realities collide”. What makes this different is you have multiple pasts. Time Travel and you end up in one past, other people end up somewhen else. Scry and you might be able to see dozens of conflicting timelimes. If there are enough variations, then no one can figure out how all these timelimes/realities interact, and any “fact” could be true, false, or true occasionally

You can’t identify the remains. I think Earthdawn and some parts of earth in Rifts did this. You build your civilization out of magic. Buildings are magically held up, some use magical force fields as decorative floors. Writing is so outdated, it’s a trivial spell to record everything in a small crystal. Then magic stops working. Buildings collapse, magic items break into unrecognizable pieces, memory crystals become nonmagical crystals. There might be a few written records or “antique” artifacts, but those could have been wiped out by time. For sci-fi, one possible dark age has us forget the details of all our file formats. Even when you can make computers again, you can’t read the format the document used (ASCII potentially reconstructable, Word files or zipped archives not so much)

one old standard is “a mist descends on the land/marks the border, anyone passing through the mist forgets”.

Maruts or other Inevitables target any records and anyone who remembers. This also lets you have a “forgotten age” with history before & after. Documents and monuments get the Egyptian “forget that pharaoh “ treatment, where only info related to that kingdom is precisely erased, sometimes midsentence.

Real world, there are catastrophes that hide any traces of a civilization. Long period underwater. Volcanic eruption that covers Herculaneum with so much ash that no one knows it is there. Certain types of soil that quickly destroy all organic materials (paper, parchment, papyrus all).

Oh, a general version of one mentioned above. Elves were created from some shortlived race after the forgotten events. Their memories, at most, can only go back to when they were created.

[Bohandas]

I was going to suggest wibbly wobbly time stuff too. If I recall correctly, the leshys, the spellweavers, and possibly the mindflayers come from timelines that were destroyed and history was rewritten

[Witty Username]

Short answer, yes.
Longer answer, climatic events can create mystery around them and distort the knowledge base surrounding them, and elves may operate on a longer time scale but not an infinite one.
For the game I am running, I have a history I want the players to discover overtime, why elves don't remember it? the oldest elves are only 2 generations ago because of an event that wiped out almost all life. What is known about before that, hard to say because of the destruction caused, no one has a complete record of what has happened and most don't have a record of it at all.

[Bohandas]

A bigger problem than elves is divination magic, especially spells like Legend Lore, Comprehend Languages, Speak With Dead, Contact Other Plane, and Hindsight

[Alcore]

So, how long ago does this catastrophe need to have happened?so long there might not be any ruins...

Did you know there were wooden castles in medieval times? Probably. Did you know that they were often just as common as stone? Especially in places that had little stone/wealth/manpower just lying around. Not one survived into modern times. Untreated wood at the best of times lasts only about 50 years. I am still being quite generous there. Treated wood can last a little longer at about a century before large parts needs to be replaced (if times were good it was stone and brick that replaced it).



Stone castles haven't fared much better. A good number look like giant lumps of clay left out in the sun. Those that don't are not quite the original castle. Assuming no wars they too need heavy maintenance between centuries.



The pyramids you might ask are in a perfect location; water is a big fector in erosion and they exist in a desert. Wind and sand is still taking its toll. Then comes technology; the Egyptians had much better cement than we do with a freakishly low water content.


Your answer? Never until nothing remains. We know Egypt as it is still around, it's people are still here and during it's hay day was a powerhouse. Three thousand years from now people will know America. They will know Egypt.

They have to be isolated and there has to be no survivors...

[Justanotherhero]

How about this :

The day Levistus kept his word.

Long long time our ancestors almost perished . A threat like none known before piece by piece death destruction and war swallowed all the world. Maybe the Blood Wars? Maybe a magical plague? Maybe environmental destruction?
In desperation our ancestors trained to any power that would listen any power willing to help.
A handsome human/elf/gnome whatever appeared and offered a whole world ... All he wanted was slot of souls now or souls over time .

And the man kept his promise portals opened to a new world the great migration worked and many many people had been saved. To look around and realise the devil had given them a world he had cleansed before hand. Maybe using magic gained through the souls offered? Maybe some people had to finish the cleansing as part of the compact with the devil?

A decision was made : The blame , the shame should begin and end with the generation that commited the vile act.

It is not that the oldest dragons do not know. The truth is they know in desperation they made a deal to kill one world to take it as a new home.
That knowledge should not burden new generations.
The god of secrets is a mayor mayor Diety in this world and is held in very high esteem , because that Diety keeps the spells maintained that prevent anyone from finding the truth.

[tomandtish]

Are your elves very regional? Or were they, until recently?

What I mean is that if elves don't travel much, then what they know about distant cultures is what is relayed to them by peoples they border. If they never travelled outside Europe, for example, then their knowledge of Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas would mimic the knowledge of European humans.
And even if a few elves were Marco Polo, their stories would not nessicarily become common knowledge among the elves, just that a trip to an elven library might be productive.

Along with regionalism, don't forget that the spread of news is probably vastly slower even with magic. If you have culture A wiped out 3000 years ago, depending on how far away it was from others no one in the area the players started in may ever have heard of it.

There's a default assumption that magic takes care of everything in D&D. But that still only applies to things the spell casters care about.

In the FR, there's probably only a few 100 people who have a reasonable idea of everything major going on on their continent, and probably only a handful who have a reasonable idea of everything going on in other continents. It's not like real life today. 99.999 percent of people probably never get more history than major events that happened in their area.

[Ettina]

A bigger problem than elves is divination magic, especially spells like Legend Lore, Comprehend Languages, Speak With Dead, Contact Other Plane, and Hindsight

Legend Lore requires there to be legends about the thing. If it's truly forgotten, legend lore will fail.

Contact Other Plane is limited by the knowledge of the extraplanar being you contact.

Hindsight is limited in how far it can look back based on caster level, so you could simply make the ruins older than that.

Comprehend Languages requires exposure to text or speech about the thing, and Speak With Dead requires a "mostly intact" corpse. If they were a non-literate society or a society using perishable materials to write on, there'll be nothing to read. And if whatever wiped them out didn't leave corpses behind, or the corpses haven't weathered the rigors of time intact enough, Speak with Dead will fail. (Of course, if they have Speak with Dead and not Comprehend Languages, it's likely they won't know what the corpse is saying, either. And you'd also need Tongues to ask it questions, since Comprehend Languages is receptive-only.)

[Frogreaver]

There’s always the option of an epic spell being cast to wipe the memories of the whole world regarding what happened.

[Calthropstu]

There’s always the option of an epic spell being cast to wipe the memories of the whole world regarding what happened.

I actually like this.

And someone who was plane shifted at the time and later came back was the only person who remembered. He recorded the events, but it is treated as "a fictional work to delight children." The events' participants insist it never happened.

[LibraryOgre]

There’s always the option of an epic spell being cast to wipe the memories of the whole world regarding what happened.


I actually like this.

And someone who was plane shifted at the time and later came back was the only person who remembered. He recorded the events, but it is treated as "a fictional work to delight children." The events' participants insist it never happened.

I'm thinking of Yagrum Bagarn, last of the Dwemer (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Yagrum_Bagarn) from Morrowind.

[Tvtyrant]

A Practical Guide to Evil has a good one, where the titular Evil Empire invades the Undead Kingdom and starts losing bad. So they use demonic magic to alter the timeline and make it so they never invaded in the first place, seems very in line with this idea.

"There was a civilization that was destroyed so thoroughly it never existed."

[denthor]

They are adventuring. This was a no go zone over run with orcs and the like. An ancient treaty says so. Recently the orvs asked for help from the other races. Your group is one of many that are going in. The orcs or kobolds or goblins owners are guides. Until there is a conflict then deep inside the no go zone they must find a way out or set up for life.

[Ettina]

I actually like this.

And someone who was plane shifted at the time and later came back was the only person who remembered. He recorded the events, but it is treated as "a fictional work to delight children." The events' participants insist it never happened.

Reminds me of the Adventure Zone.

[Time Troll]

Yes.

First off whatever got rid of your lost place could have also hit the surrounding places. This nicely takes care of the elves, for example. The local elves were experts, but the only ones that lived were the ones 1,000 miles away. Like say the apocalypse hits the whole world...except the island Fiji. How much does anyone there know most of the rest of the world?

Just like aboe you do have the extreme distance, or even isolation. Go to Japan in say 1700, and just about no one on the island could tell you anything about any place in the world.

People could have destroyed all the history

Though for D&D you might need to go with magic. Like a Forget Living Spell Storm. The storm simply erased everyone's knowledge. The storm, or similar creatures could even destroy books and such.

Ever read the Xanth novels about the Forgotten Great Gap ? The massive Grand Canyon that everyone forgets about?