A problem I sense with any fantasy ttrpg setting that includes ancestries with vastly different life spans: how the hell is “a thing that hasn’t been seen in centuries” supposed to work? I imagine an elf always sitting in the corner talking about how they remember those good old days. Are we playing with millennia instead? That seems wild. Do long-lived folk just forget their whole youths? My pedantic side needs answers.
#ttrpg #WorldBuilding
@anderstallvik Memory and the deliberate reauthoring of history is one of the core themes of my current world and basically, the species with long memories face vile antipathy, with a steady stream of lies to discredit and demonize them.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Conversely, played straight this one of the only ways I've seen the 'fantasy world in eternal tech stasis' trope work; if you assume scientific progress is hard for some reason (maybe physics/chemistry work just slightly differently) then it begins to make sense that religions, nations, and schools of magic can persist for enormous spans of time when you have people living for hundreds or thousands of years holding it together by just remembering stuff. Of course, if you then try and add 'hasn't been seen for centuries' at the same time the whole thing falls flat on its face.
@mavnn @anderstallvik My current project doesn't do the tech-stasis thing, but, yeah.
Of course, everything about my project ... and all of my projects ... and my entire life as a feeling human being ... is designed to be richly offensive to pedants, so this is probably the wrong crowd to cite it to. 😆
@[email protected] @[email protected] Oh, I like your idea too. Looking at my own education in the UK and seeing how much about British colonial history I would have missed without first hand commentary from family members because school just happened not to mention those parts, I can't help feeling that human governments would really not like elves in a politically realistic setting...
@mavnn Ha, I imagine they would not.
@SJohnRoss I always appreciate your perspective and approach!
My un-serious approach has been to establish a top-down culture in which the past is considered boring and “ew” and instead we should all “live in the ✨moment✨” and be lazy, which has rendered most (but not all) of the populace a bit stupid and willfully forgetful.
@anderstallvik It kind of works when they are marginalised / semi-mythical groups that don't integrate much with the short-lived mainstream. That's the default in the German The Dark Eye game. Of course it means the world is terribly anthropocentric and the other ancestries are PC fantasies 90% of the time - so not the greatest solution.
if you have only one ancestry with long lifespans, you might go the cultural route and have them mostly shut up and roll their eyes when the younger folk talk about how unprecedented sth. is.
Also worlds should be big. The fact that one thing happened three hundred years ago two continents over might not be known to even a handful of folks from million strong ancestry that doesn't live there.
Also worlds should be big. The fact that one thing happened three hundred years ago two continents over might not be known to even a handful of folks from million strong ancestry that doesn’t live there.
This. We can’t even get people today, with instant global communication, to pay attention to things that are going on a few cities over, let alone on the other side of the globe. People focus on the problems they have, not the events going on outside their own bubbles.
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