Timelines?

[jjordan]

My wife says I'm going overboard, but I've always done timelines for my settings. Usually these are fairly simple but they occasionally get big (my steampunk setting timeline is way too big).

Do you do timelines for your settings? How much detail do you put in?

[LibraryOgre]

Always; it helps me keep things straight.

I tend to keep it to points relevant to the campaign. Sure, there's probably battles and scandals and such that I don't mention, but they're not relevant to the game we're playing right now, so I don't deal with them. If they become relevant, they get viewed in light of what's going on around them (i.e. established events)

[LordEntrails]

imo, without a timeline or history, a setting is incomplete. Level of detail only needs to be that which a character would know. But needs to develop more than that as lore is learned, adventure is had, and things happen.

Some specific events, but in general eras or periods is all that is needed.

[GrayDeath]

imo, without a timeline or history, a setting is incomplete. Level of detail only needs to be that which a character would know. But needs to develop more than that as lore is learned, adventure is had, and things happen.

Some specific events, but in general eras or periods is all that is needed.

I wholeheartedly agree.

[redwizard007]

A living world needs a history. It helps establish ancient foes and recent animosities. Having said that, I use broad strokes initially. Having a full timeline is as bad as having a full map. I need space to add and adapt as necessary for my campaign as the players interact with the world.

[tomandtish]

Agree with what was said above, and an addition...

Timelines can also be future as well as past, and if you are running a game where things occur even when characters aren;t present thenthe future timeline may be even more important.

In a game I ran a while ago, PCs were working out of a hiring hall. There would be job lists. Easy jobs disappeared and new easy jobs appeared almost daily. The harder the job, the longer it was likely to stay, but even those could disappear in a couple of weeks. So they had to decide which job they wanted, knowing the others might not be there when they got back.

[Zhorn]

Gotta have some basics bits in there, enough to have the world feel like there's more going on for the players to explore

It's been so many generations since the "great war"
There's still scars on the land from the "calamity" that brought down the old empire
There's been X number years of peace in the region
The dungeon has been sealed off for so many centuries
... etc

Depending on your setting you can get away with vague concepts of time for some things, having only certain folk know the precise dates. In a fantasy setting you can have dwarves and elves still living from the great war, but none of the short lived races have living experience from that time. In turn only ancient creatures like dragons will recall the calamity and such.

[King of Nowhere]

i only use broad strokes, but i tend to know when important events shaping the world took place. as others mentioned, it may also be important because the oldest elves may remember very old times, and the oldest dragons even older.
it's small enough that i can commit it to memory, though. i don't have extensive broadsheets

[False God]

I tend to treat "timelines" like real history. The immediate history is fairly detailed, from a certain point of view, usually the winner. The further back you go the less detailed history becomes until all you've got is some big "general points" that are only detailed as myth and legend. That way I'm not real tied to events in the distant past if the players happen to pull time-travel shenanigans.

[MoiMagnus]

Without a timeline, a setting is incomplete.
But that doesn't mean you need a timeline.

Incomplete settings are great too. They allow to integrate more ideas from your players. They give you more time to maturate the universe (your PCs will live in it and the players question your choices), as you postpone some fundamental choices about the past of the universe to "after you've seen how things work".

In some sense, I consider a RPG setting is not complete as long as one full RPG campaign happened in it. So it doesn't really shock me for the timeline to progressively be set up and change along the first campaign within the universe.