Meme Monday: Lore Memes

Typically this would cover World of Warcraft, but really it can cover RPG game (or non-game) world you want to cover.

If there's one thing that drives me absolutely crazy about the lore in game worlds, it's that we --as campaign DMs-- or a dev company as an RPG designer or an MMO designer-- don't think much at all of creating a game world with a history 10,000 or more years old.

(See: Middle-earth and Azeroth for two well known examples.)

Think about that for a minute.

What do we know of our human history from 10,000 years ago, or 8,000 BCE?

Well, we were just beginning the warming from the last ice age. There were neolithic settlements around the Fertile Crescent, such as Jehrico and Çatal Hüyük, and most of the rest of the world had paleolithic settlements. In the Americas, there's evidence of the beginning of agriculture. And... not much else.

It's not that we as a people don't want to know more of what's going on from 10,000 years ago, it's that we only have what we can find via archaeology, and that's not a helluva lot. 

But to a fantasy world, 10,000 years ago isn't a big deal: War of the Ancients. The Elder Days. The Crown Wars.* It's quite amazing just how much a fantasy world can stuff into such a time as if it were a short bit ago. 

For a semi-historical reference, the period of time generally associated with The Trojan War is 1300-1200 BCE, at the end of the Bronze Age. In an RPG, that's the blink of an eye.

I suppose we tend to forget just how compressed history can truly be, particularly how the acceleration of the pace of technology was in the past 200 years. My great aunt was born the year before the Wright brothers from Dayton flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and she lived to see the first landing on the Moon and the first space probes reach Neptune. 

So, keep all this in mind when designing your RPG, I suppose.

Yeah, kinda like that. And that's not
even covering what I mentioned above.
From 9gag.com.

If you're gonna go bonkers on lore, then
you'd better remember to tie up the
not-so-subtle loose ends.
From pinterest.

Yeah yeah yeah.
For some reason, Jupiter from Holst's
The Planets just started playing in my head.
From DnDMemes.

Then again, Azeroth has no monopoly
on bonkers lore. From ifunny.co.

And one bonus pic, if you think that the RPGs mentioned above have some bonkers lore/backstory, let me introduce you to Runequest's Glorantha...

From basicroleplaying.com.

*From D&D's Forgotten Realms setting.