My campaign is set 3,000+ years in the future. Their ancient artifacts were created right about now, or in the next 50 years.

The oldest artifact I have used in game was in Traveller and the Players never figured it out.

An older race (no, not the Ancients, but they could have been) were using artificially created quantum black holes as the key component for their jump drives. A supply of these were found in an abandoned/wrecked orbital starport construction yard. They were found by the gamma and x-ray emissions of infalling matter and the occasional large burst energy of one decaying. Whole thing was between 300,000 and 500,000 years old.

The Players never figured out what it was they had encountered, but the Imperial Navy and Scout Service did. The world was Red Zoned within weeks of being reported found. The Players were given large sums of money and secured (yet dangerous) alternate employment to forget they were ever there.

My albion campaign technically stretches back some 20000 years to when the Elves ruled albion and humans were only their slaves.

RPGPundit

I think one of the big drivers towards extremely lengthy campaign timelines is the notion of immortal or near-immortal elves. If you consider that humanity has respectable written records dating back to at least 500 BC, that's about 2,500 years, or 50 human lifespans (@50 years each). If elves on average live 500 years, then you need 25,000 years of history to achieve a similar effect. Otherwise, either (a) the elves simply know a lot more than everybody else (as in Lord of the Rings), or (b) something really weird happens to them that makes them lose their memory (as in Prince of Nothing).

Quote from: amacris;623067I think one of the big drivers towards extremely lengthy campaign timelines is the notion of immortal or near-immortal elves. If you consider that humanity has respectable written records dating back to at least 500 BC, that's about 2,500 years, or 50 human lifespans (@50 years each). If elves on average live 500 years, then you need 25,000 years of history to achieve a similar effect. Otherwise, either (a) the elves simply know a lot more than everybody else (as in Lord of the Rings), or (b) something really weird happens to them that makes them lose their memory (as in Prince of Nothing).

Out of curiosity, how'd you handle this in the Auran Empire campaign?

In my D&D games, I usually take option (c): elves are self-important, isolationist assholes who spend centuries contemplating fine points of philosophy or whittling away at a wrinkle in the toga of a statue carved out of a magically conjured, 1-ton block of real, honest-to-God ruby, inside the safety of their magically hidden kingdom. It is only "young adult" elves, between 30 and 100 years, that are expected to leave Elfland to get to know the world, and those are the elves the PCs are likely to engage. The sensible ones return, properly jaded and persuaded that "ephemerals" like humans have nothing to offer them, and live out the rest of their centuries in Elfland dedicated to esoteric pursuits. Maybe one in a thousand gives Elfland the finger and decides to live out his or her days amongst flawed yet vibrant humans.

I shortened their lifespan to 180 years.

"Dragon Age adopted a wonderful notion that elves once had nigh-immortal lifespans, but through interaction with humans had lost this gift. But why even claim that? There's no particular reason elves have to have 2,000 year lifespans except insofar as "Tolkien said so. What if elves have a lifespan of around 180 years - three times human - but with ageless bodies? Once an elf reaches adulthood, he looks more or less the same throughout his adult life; death comes to elves because their spirits grow weary, not because their bodies age. From the perspective of humans, an elf who looks the same for 180 years is going to *seem* immortal. An elf will look the same for three entire human lifespans - he could have been photographed with Robert E Lee in 1865 and with Paris Hilton in 2010 and look just as chipper.

Also consider that children tend to look very much like their parents, particularly if both parents are of the same race. (Because nowadays we see more TV families than real families, TV fools us into thinking families don't look as much alike as they really do; in real life, children can be virtually identical to their same-sex parent, as my brother Theo is to my late father). If you remove the age difference between, e.g. father and son, because both are ageless elves, this resemblance would be even greater! Further consider that humans tend to be less discerning of appearance differences in people of other races, and it's virtually certain that humans would think, e.g., an elf and the elf's son were the same being. If elven society is distinct from human society, with interaction limited, humans could almost certainly believe that elves are "immortal", even if in fact their lifespans were not even two centuries. Thus peasants folk lore speaks of the immortal fey, but the learned know better.

Note that agelessness rather than longevity solves a few other problems as well. First, it explains why elves might adventure. It's very hard to understand why an elf with a thousand or two thousands years of life ahead of him might throw it away on a reckless adventure. But the same being enjoying endless youth for a limited time might very well be an adventuresome sort, particularly if he's growing weary of life and needs to find some justification to keep going. Second, it makes human-elf marriage far more plausible, as they can share at least some portion of a life together, while retaining the inherent tragedy of the relationship, that one will age and the other will not.

This is the route we adopted in the rules. Elves in ACKS are assumed have more-or-less ageless bodies, but lifespans of two centuries or less. It's easy enough to change if you prefer your elves to be of the immortal variety, of course, but we think it makes more sense from a world-building viewpoint."

From an essay, "The Trouble With Elves"
http://www.autarch.co/blog/trouble-elves

I don't think I've ever had a campaign with noticeable history (buildings, key items, or established traditions) past 1500 years.

I find that much past 1,000 years doesn't really seem to register, and that it's very helpful to have some sort of apocalypse in the somewhat distant past (before which little is known), so that players can more credibly explore and find things.

I'm fond of rise-and-fall civilization cycles in fantasy worlds, so I like to have things go pretty far back, 20,000 years or so. But as far as known history is concerned, unless I've got some magical sentinels or fuckin' elves to maintain a timeline, that stays around 1000 years tops before events fade into legend.

Quote from: Thalaba;622413Possibly, but "Ancient" is about as old as any character in any recent campaign I've run or played in could hope to understand. It's more a question of the depths of a character's understanding of time than of actual time itself.

Agree here. I have Ancient History which the PCs may know of but is unreliable, and Recent History. The former contains a few facts, the latter some cause and effect. But I am a bit lazy these days so rarely colour in between dates unless I have to.

One game went back 9000 years to creation with Ahriman being trapped in creation 6000 years ago. Since the PCs couldn't get evidence to the contrary, they took my word for it.