Moving the RL Timeline back

[Jeremy16]

Hi All,

I'm gearing up for an extended campaign and have been thinking alot about my story background when this thought crossed my mind:

What if some of the more recently created domains (such as Sithicus, Hazlan, and Richemulot) had their "birth" dates pushed back a century?

That way, discerning what is true and what is false history wouldn't be such an issue. Enough time would pass for things to actually happen. It would also get rid of the issue of having people in a particular domain older than the domain itself!

Of course, this scheme can work both ways. If you don't want there to be a lot of momentous events in a domain's history, you can just say nothing has changed much in the intervening years.

This is all pretty much rhetorical, anyway, since it won't come up in sessions, but I just wanted to see what others thought about it.

[The Wannabe]

Here several years ago when I was seriously involved in D&D and DMing and all that jazz, I ran a campaign which took place in "modern" Ravenloft but where the Grand Conjunction had taken place roughly a century earlier. So, taking the unofficial timeline, I had a 100 years where nothing major occured, but where I could toss in a few changes if I needed to. It also allowed me to insert a brief mini-GC campaign into the mix, where the PC's traveled back to "classic" Ravenloft in an attempt to stop a campaign-something that has just slipped my mind.

I seem to recall that when this topic last came up (I should say when it last came up when I was still an active poster) the objection raised was that things would develop and change and not stay stagnant. Methinks the best argument to that would be a situation similar to that established by David Eddings in the Belgariad and Mallorean, where the universe CANNOT move forward until the cosmic mistake was corrected. In Ravenloft, it would be situation of the Dark Powers not allowing their playthings to change too much of the gameboard. And let's face it, considering how many doman lords are either undead or sorcerous, how many would find it odd that they hadn't died of old age yet?

Timewannabe

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I did extend "real" history back a hundred years or so in my campaign. I did some other tweaks to the timeline too, to suit my purposes. Mainly because I wanted:

1) To be post-conjunction but pre-mallochio and pre-requiem
2) To have Van Richten alive
and yet:
3) to have the pc's following the trail of an NPC who travelled the core, starting in 650BC

The real benefit of extending it back is not just turning false history into real history, but allowing more inter-domain history.

[Ronia Sun]

I, too, have moved the histories back a bit, partly because I wanted to add my own domain to the Core and wished it to have some better interaction with the other domains, but also because I felt that RL ought to be older than four centuries... I'm the only one in my group who has obsessively read everything about RL I can get my hands on, so what my players don't know won't hurt them...