The Age of the World

Time isn’t just about holidays, calendars, and politics. On a more cosmic level, the tone of the campaign may depend on how old or young the world is, and what this means to the people, places, and plots that play out upon it. While the standard fantasy world assumes such things as ancient empires and lost races as an explanation for the many dungeons, artifacts, and legends that feature in adventures, this is merely a default. Consider these other options.

Youthful Worlds

A young world is one that has only recently given rise to a civilized society, one in which many races are in their infancy or have yet to achieve cultural maturity. There are no ruined remnants of a lost age (or they may be buried so deep as to be yet undiscovered by the current residents). In such a world, magic may feel raw and untamed. The gods may yet walk the earth, or they have only recently inspired the creation of cults and churches. Military orders have yet to be founded. Races have not been divided by civil war or strife. The player characters are the heroes that future generations will tell stories about. Depending on how young the world is, you might decide some rules elements may be entirely absent—no iron weapons, no spells greater than 3rd level in power, and so on.

Ancient Worlds

In contrast to a young world, an ancient world has already hit the peak of its civilizations and is fast approaching

Traps and Opportunities

While creating calendars and timelines is a lot of fun, it also carries with it a few design risks that can end up coming back to haunt you if you don’t take care.

Dates: Fantasy naturally lends itself to epic adventures, and the temptation with dates is to make the numbers large and sweeping—cities 10,000 years old, legends stretching back a hundred generations. Avoid this impulse! History is a lot shorter than you might think, and it doesn’t take long for people and legends to rise and disappear again. The United States itself is barely over 200 years old. Christianity has only seen 2 millennia. Ten thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were just starting to think about planting crops. And if it only took the march of technological process 150 years to go from the first internal combustion engine to a man on the moon, how come nobody’s invented a better plow in the 7 millennia the serfs have been tilling your kingdom’s fields? While of course a fantasy world doesn’t need to correspond to the real world, there is still physics to consider. How old can your ruins really be, when stone and metal degrade without magical protection? For reference, scholars believe it would only take a thousand years without human upkeep for plant life and the elements to erase almost all trace of modern New York City.

Names: When writing up their worlds’ calendars, many GMs realize that our own calendar (with both months and days named after historical and mythological figures) seems out of place in-game. While making up your own names for the months or days of the week seems like the obvious solution, it can also be aggravating to players trying to keep track of time when the adventure begins on the third Blargday of Skurbgin. If you want to create new names, it might help to have the definitions readily available, to name them after your own gods or historical figures, or cheat a little and have the first letters stay the same (such as a work- week running from Mournday through Fireday).

its end. In the twilight of this setting, some races have been lost to history or have moved on to other shores in the multiverse. Technology may have come and gone, giving the setting either a dystopian, post-apocalyptic theme or a pastoral, back-to-nature aesthetic. Or it may have advanced to a truly astounding level, marrying the traditional fantasy elements to steampunk or cyberpunk tropes. If the world is ancient, tradition might be even more dominant over the lives of individuals. Sorcerers may no longer exist, having had their magical traits codified into the power of wizards. Barbarians and druids might no longer have a place, or perhaps their role is changed to that of degenerate savages.