For a "generic" fantasy setting: an old world or a new one?

[matt_s]

Many fantasy stories (Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, ASOIAF, Malazan, etc.) feature a fairly old world where they has been considerable amounts of history with often a major thread of how the High Magic and wonder of the past is faded, gone, or outright forgotten entire.

I suppose many other stories feature ruins and relics of the past even when more grounded e.g. the Pyramids were ancient history in the time of Caesar and Cleopatra and in absolute terms more ancient than Caesar is relative to the present day.

"New world' (not in the 1492 sense but in a more literal meaning) is closer to stuff like swords and sandals perhaps or just more general bronze age. Basically heroes trying to hew out a space to live and thrive in a tumultuous world still in infancy.

What are people's thoughts on the one or the other? I am planning on running a classic fantasy game (or generic fantasy if you wish to be less charitable) in the near future sort of, interested to hear thoughts either way.

 

[Vladim]

I think with LotR, since it's very much inspired by English history, the 'old world' feel is perhaps inspired by the impressive Roman ruins left behind. In actuality, I think it didn't take much time for everything to fall into disuse. The Old English poem The Ruin captures this feeling of the old being better and greater (and ephemeral).

But fantasy somehow likes everything to be big so there's often quite insane amounts of time like millennia between ages of the world... which is actually not needed for societal / civilizational collapse, I think. A few generations and a few calamities could do it just as well :)

No thoughts otherwise!

[cailano]

All I'll suggest is to keep perspective on time. Stuff that happened in the last 20 years is relevant. 50 years is getting pretty old. 100 years is mostly out of living memory but people know about it. 200 years and people know some vague details. 500 years and it's almost always forgotten.

A lot changes in 500 years. Kingdoms rise and fall, invaders invade, languages change, entire peoples can be wiped off the map.

The world 1000 years ago might not even be recognizable.

And don't make the One Ring mistake where a certain key event 1000 years ago is the only historical event that matters. 1000 years is a long time.

I look as history like a world map. The regional map is far more important to your game.

[TheFred]

It's interesting because, you are right, there's a whole trope around ancient artifacts and relics of the past that's common in the fantasy genre. It's possibly derived from all the mythological stuff we see in the real world which kind of gives rise to the idea that perhaps there did used to be magic in medieval times or Ancient Egypt or whatever and it's just been forgotten. It's also I think reinforced by the trope of older things just being more powerful, perhaps because they've had longer to grow over time.

However, it strikes me that it's not really that realistic. In our world, technology has definitely taken a bit of a circuitous route now and then but mostly trends upwards. Perhaps the construction of the pyramids was ahead of its time and later civilisations didn't quite have that capability. Certainly post-Roman Britain felt like a bit of a step back; even if "the Dark Ages" is a slightly unfair term, they did lack things like Roman construction. However, we don't live in a world where there are loads of lost and forgotten secrets that we no longer have understanding of; history is patchy, but for the most part it's not like we can't do anything that our ancestors could do.

A post-apocalyptic setting is probably the one where this makes the most sense. If all of civilisation got destroyed it's quite likely that a lot would be lost; people would be forced to focus on their immediate survival rather than the preservation of knowledge. This is actually not that uncommon in fantasy settings; the "ancients" kinda ruined their own civilisation or blew themselves up with their hubris, and the civilisations that have followed after just don't have the kind of power that they had.

Note that dodging this trope doesn't mean that your world has to be technologically early - that's kind of my point. A more modern-feeling world might just have surpassed all the civilisations of its past in terms of technology (which could be magic, too, of course). Perhaps all the ancient relics people find are just trinkets by modern-day standards and only really fit for museums?

[Suzuki Stumpy]

Don't forget the famous quote from Arthur C. Clarke:

Quote

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

So it may well be that some 'ancient artifact', rather than being inherently 'magic' in the sense of the supernatural, is, in fact, simply a piece of technology, the knowledge of which has been lost over time...

[Powderhorn]

I personally like the idea of an "Old" World. It gives the whole place depth, I think, and as someone running the game it gives a lot of options for those neat and interesting storylines that people like. The way you describe a "New" world in a sort of man versus nature way just feels a bit sterile to me.

[Lord Foul]

I think if you are going for 'generic' fantasy, then a lot depends on the 'generic' fantasy races that you are going to build your world around.

A 'new world' setting is all well and good in a place where everyone has a human-sized lifespan, but as soon as you introduce long-lived races, like elves and even dwarves, that brings with it a need for a much longer history. Otherwise, where did these people come from and why can't they remember their grandparents?

It's an aspect that has bothered me about many games. Everybody behaves like they are human, with a human lifespan and the sense of urgency that comes with it. If you really did live for hundreds, or thousands of years, that ought to give you a totally different perspective on time. Important things deserve to have years, or decades spent on them. And so, older settlements, buildings, artifacts etc would all be the result of aeons of careful development by people who are really not in a hurry.

Of course, it's entirely possible, essential even, to have some kind of mix of the two styles, as you equally cannot expect the short-lived races to behave like their longer-lived neighbours. And the inevitable conflicts between the differring styles would add unique texture to each setting's history.

[Chaz Hoosier]

An issue with some fantasy settings is how they are stuck at a medieval level of technology for way too long. In the real world, the pyramids were built around 4,600 years ago, but in Forgotten Realms civilization goes back over 35,000 years!

I can accept that elves and dwarves, with their long lives and general lack of interest in change, could remain at this medieval level for so long. So in my generic fantasy realm, I have humans coming from somewhere else in an unknown event just a few thousand years ago. At first they were primitive savages, and the story takes place when humans have reached a medieval level of technology. This event also caused the collapse of elven and dwarven civilization, which left plenty of their former outposts for humans to discover before either of these slow-growing civilizations could recover.

This also results in humans having completely different religious ideas from other races, but that's another thing.

Edited April 27 by Chaz Hoosier (see edit history)

[TheFred]

I have a concept for a setting that I keep meaning to try out sometime that's essentially medieval in terms of technology but modern in terms of sensibilities. It annoys me a bit in game that are meant to be quasi-medieval when people don't act medievally or use modern slang or whatever (I'm not expecting proper Old English, but there's a level at which it just breaks immersion for me)... but this would be embracing that. We might, for example, have some democracies or human rights, and we'd be able to quit with fantasy racism (or at least have it be an acknowledged point of contention). However my concept was that magic takes the role of technology so we wouldn't actually have TVs and cars and electricity, but we might have scrying dishes on people's walls that can be tuned to different channels, self-driving horse-skeletons or devices that conjure up magical food and go "ding!" when they're done. An obvious comparison is a more "magitech" setting like Eberron with which I'm envisaging some similarities, but quite a different overall vibe.

[Powderhorn]

I, for one, hate how long lives break history, and generally every time I get too annoyed by them I slash the life expectancy of the races again I don't think any of mine live past 100 anymore, and if they do, I'll probably slash them again!

That said, @TheFred - I think you could very easily accomplish what you want where the conditions for coal and oil just didn't exist. All that ancient plant and animal matter just got processed / digested / recycled however, but it didn't turn into fossil fuels. Without that, no industrial revolution, no plastics, etc. etc.

[TheFred]

We had coal before the industrial revolution; what we didn't have was the agricultural revolution. But in a fantasy world, we've got magic. In D&D, Plant Growth is a L3 spell. However, why would you need a coal-powered engine when you have magical means of travelling. Phantom Steeds probably beat early mechanised transport, undead horses never tire, and anyway we have actual teleportation.