My Grandfather's Grandfather

A few years ago, my grandfather was persuaded to write his family story. This was largely intended as an exercise to help keep his mind sharp, but the end result made for interesting reading for a number of reasons. In the context of this post, however, it's worth noting that the earliest parts of the story contained some discussion of even earlier generations of the family history - and, notably, they began with my grandfather's grandfather.

This largely tallies with my own experiences - I have fairly extensive memories of my own grandparents, but almost no recollection of great-grandparents. I did meet both my mother's grandmother and my father's grandmother, but in both cases they died when I was still young. Similarly, it is likely that my oldest nephew will just about remember his great-grandfather, with those memories becoming much less pronounced as we step through the cousins - as they get younger, the memory they have will be less.

What I'm getting at here is that "living memory" probably extents, at the very most, to the time of my grandfather's grandfather. Allowing for very a small number of very long-lived people, that probably means about 150 years at the very most.

For that reason, when codifying the history of an RPG setting, I'm inclined to think that the multi-thousand year history is probably the wrong approach. Rather, a setting should probably include:

• About fifty years of fairly well understood recent history.
  
• A further hundred years or so of less well understood, but not totally obscure, history.
  
• A very brief sketch of known history before that. But it shouldn't be detailed, may very well be inaccurate, incomplete, and even contradictory. People probably know about the equivalent of the Roman Empire, but probably don't know much about it.
  
• A whole bunch of myths, legends, and other stories that may or may not be true, stand at odds with actual history, and that are more widely accepted than the truth - King Arthur, Atlantis, and so forth.

And, crucially, the last two items probably shouldn't have dates associated with them, or even be placed into a particular order. The past is another country. Of course, it's also worth considering how this interfaces with other, potentially very long-lived races. If an elf lives ten times as long as a human on average, does that then multiply the "50 years" and "100 years" by a factor of ten? Well, perhaps. Alternately, you could take the view (as I do) that elves are generally much less bound by time, and so don't bother with keeping detailed histories in the same way. Dwarves tend towards oral histories, and so although their histories are much longer, they are also more error prone (and, indeed, focus very much on the stories rather than the facts - hence tending towards myths and legends anyway). Besides, I quite like the notion that dwarves maintain a lot of feuds but have, very often, forgotten quite why they bear those grudges.

And, of course, it's worth considering that just because a dragon knows exactly what happened 4,000 years ago, it doesn't follow that you can just go and ask, or that the dragon would tell you!

In other words, I'm inclined to largely ignore the longer-lived races when composing the history of the setting. If nothing else, it's not like the players are going to read it anyway.