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Author Topic: Sundaland - Bronze to Classical Age in Southeast Asia during the last Ice Age.  (Read 884 times)

TimothyWestwind

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    • https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/
For the past two years I've been putting together a set of sandbox tools for a Bronze to Classical Age / Sword & Sorcery setting.

I'd like to invited people to ask questions, discuss and contribute.

My intention from the start was to create content that invites people to create their own version, there is no canon and no 'right' way to do it.

I've created a world workbook to help you get your own setting up and running as well as tables to help you generate cities, cultures and factions. I've also written articles about topics ranging from the availability of certain spices to adventure ideas.

Here's a short intro:

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Sundaland is the name for the Southeast Asian subcontinent that lay between current day Java, Sumatra, Thailand, Malaysia and Borneo. This area was flooded between 15,000 to 5000 BCE* as the last ice age came to an end.

Archeologists and historians working outside or on the fringes of mainstream academia hypothesise that this area could have been an early cradle of civilisation and perhaps even the real location of the fabled Atlantis.

Imagine a setting where the ancestors of the Egyptians, Sumerians, Harappan as well as the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec came from.


You can find out more here: https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/
Sword & Sorcery in Southeast Asia during the last Ice Age: https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/ Lots of tools and resources to build your own setting.

Chris24601

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In addition to Sundaland you might want to take a look at Dogerland in what is now the Baltic Sea.

There's lots of theories surrounding some of these now flooded regions and their associations with various lost civilizations like Atlantis. Indeed, I've seen some pretty solid arguments that the story of Atlantis and the Biblical Flood might have originated with the dislocations of populations in Sundaland due to the sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age.

Mitochondrial DNA tracking indicates that much of the Middle East (including Egypt) was settled by peoples from the region that included Sundaland after the end of the Ice Age. Throw in the Biblical exile from the Garden into the lands east of Eden and you actually have what looks like fragments truth behind the oral histories eventually written down...

Mankind leaves its ancestral home in Africa and travels east, settling the lands of SE Asia (including Sundaland) and reaching as far as Australia. Then the end of the Ice Age floods the lands they'd occupied and the population is pushed back west back into the Near East carrying stories of past migrations with them as part of their oral history (that later men relegated to myths).

Throw in a dash of "Life After People" knowledge about how little evidence of human activity remains after just a few centuries and you could easily justify an ancient advanced civilization whose collapse left behind ruins and "magic" in addition to various megafauna monsters and archaic near humans that are lost completely to human memory as the sea levels rise 300 feet in just a few years at the end of the age; surviving only in the myths of civilizations so old we modern humans can't even contemplate the truth (as has been pointed out, Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first McDonald's than to the building of the Great Pyramids and those were comparatively new in terms of ancient megalithic structures; including that the Sphinx itself might be a few thousand years older at the point when the Sahara was a fertile land covered in lakes and rivers... and whales... you can find whale bones in parts of the Sahara that were underwater just 10k years ago).

Recorded history is such a tiny blip in the span of time humans have occupied the Earth that you could have several civilizations rise from stone age to modern age and collapse back to dust again in the spans we know nothing about.

TimothyWestwind

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    • https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/
Yes, that's pretty much my thinking. I was inspired by two books Magicians of the Gods by Graham Hancock and Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer.

A mixture of real world (pseudo) history with a dash of Sword & Sorcery.
Sword & Sorcery in Southeast Asia during the last Ice Age: https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/ Lots of tools and resources to build your own setting.