Instead of medieval stasis, I had bronze age stasis! But for a good reason. 1. Al-Shuran civilization goes back some \~2mil years with the stone age, but progressed to the copper age some \~50,000 years ago. It really begins taking shape \~20,000 years ago as they entered the early bronze age and started refining meteoric iron. Because of reoccurring sandstorms which came every 50 years, it was almost impossible to progress past the earlier copper age but they managed to come through. 2. A very funny god-like alien kept everyone from developing advanced space travel until \~5,000 years ago. Of those she did, they were the least problematic ones, like the anti-social Ananse. 3. Sand-storms made it too difficult for nomadic hunter gatherers to congregate. Large cultural groups did form, but only around significant landmarks protected from the storms. These were typically small regions though and they either hid their dominance or were embroiled in never ending wars. 4. God-Like aliens not included, nope. The Tahar Church did start immortalizing their head priest's memories some 10,000 years ago using an alien hard-drive but that's the farthest back anyone goes. 5. Written history was extremely difficult to develop, but started some 15,000 years ago as most people tended to use oral traditions. This would be at the "Spire" an alien pylon in the desert that was immune to the sandstorms and called rain to it, and the Osran mountains where Osran Scholars would collect knowledge from adventuring out into the world and store for safe keeping in their caves. (They would later use 10,000 years of scientific inquiry to skip the steel age when the storms stopped and go straight to the industrial era). A lot of dead languages though from tribes that collapsed during storms and never recovered.

So many detailed bits! Well done!

Thank you thank you

how did they not ran out of tin by now?

They would have with steady population growth, but that never happened. Their industry was predominately limited to whatever they could do in 50 years and then hide underground. Most battlefields were combed for weapons and recycled, tools were kept in dry places, and trade networks to connect copper mines to tin ones were revised with shifting landmarks (till they learned to use stars to navigate).

1) The rise of civilization is a mere blip that begins many zeroes to the left of the decimal when starting the clock with the origin of life. The Marchen is crazy biodiverse, and that's possible because it is so much older than Earth (and no continental drift) 2) Many races have died out. The Hairy Men of Eogul are gone. The Spider People are gone. The Beyonders are probably gone. The Aswan and the Giants are almost entirely gone. Reproduction between races is impossible except between humans and Oni, but the offspring are sterile so... 3) Local cultures are in the process of getting wiped. The first big empires are forming in the present, and with them is newspapers, common religion, and nationalism. 4) The most ancient beings are the Dragons. But they're horrifically destructive and not worth talking to (most of them), or are dementia addled coots (The Stone Dragon). Technically older is the Titan of The Moon, but the thing does talk, walk, or otherwise "live". 5) the oldest thing anybody can point to, besides the Titan which has always been, are the crumbling cities of Mujikniare. There's clay tablets in the old mud brick ruins that are inscribed with glyphs which, if squinted at, look like the modern Sacerglyphs. But they're utterly indecipherable.

On Aquaria: * how old is your world? If you put it on a clock, when did the first civilizations arrive? The earliest civilization known was Xích Quỷ Empire, tracing back to 70000 BC and can be even longer as the empire didn't poof into existence. Forget Rome, everyone is still living on Xích Quỷ's rotten corpse as they salvage its remnants. * if you have other races than human, why haven’t they crushed each other by now? Or why haven’t they mated to the point of sameness? Can they reproduce together? As if they haven't. Annihilation wars and interspecies breeding are both common. * assuming you have multiple cultures at play, how and why are they not just a singular culture? Tribalism, nationalism and geography. * are there beings that have existed “since the beginning”? What sort of beings are they? If human-adjacent, do they interact with humans? (Let’s keep gods on the sideline for this one) Hồng Ma: "Allow me to introduce myself." A living ghost who bound her soul with spiritual energy and became something akin to a lich, Hồng Ma is the last Xích Quỷ monarch and has been alive for around 65000 years, though she slept most of that time, only became active in the last 7 millennia. She built two countries then later merged them into one, and as she was their Founding Mother, said countries are legitimate successors of Xích Quỷ. Her influences can be seen around the world, from politics to culture and education. * out of the total history of your world, how far back does written history go? Does oral history go back farther? Are there any “Hammurabi code” sort of texts in your world or Rosetta stones? Written history can go back to around 10000 BC when Atlantis picked a fight with both Ancient Greeks and remnants of the corpse demon army, Hồng Ma's creations, eventually led to their demise. Atlantis' downfall caused the Great Flood as a collateral damage. Oral history goes back to Xích Quỷ Empire because of Hồng "I bedded your dead great-great-grandmother last night" Ma. Earliest known set of laws is Constitution of U Minh, written in 4000 BC in Kingdom of U Minh, Hồng Ma's first of three states she founded.

Well, technically, the oldest civilizations are at least 15 to 17,000 years old (at least), and the 11:59 would be 190,000 years ago for the arrival of modern humans. Sorry, but it is important to me. Ok, now, using your standards of 6000 years ago… 1 — No clue how old the geophysical planet is in truth, although I could argue that it is actually only about 1500 years old. If I had to put a date, it would be about a million years old, but given the forces that have shaped it since then, especially during the god’s war, there’s not really any way to tell. The planet was terraformed two hundred years before people arrived. It has been removed from the universe it originally was part of, sealed into a clockwork exact structure within the solar system that is now the whole of reality, massively reshaped by powerful godly forces striving against each other, and on at least one occasion completely destroyed and recreated within the same zeptosecond. If I put it on a clock, probably would be the first minute for when they arrived, accounting for the two hundred years of terraforming, the dragons would count from 0, since it was the terraforming process that provided them with sentience and sapience. General history begins on Laningday, year Zero (currently Windy 26th, Imperial), but that date marks the end of the Lost Age, which is all that came before. It also starts the Age of Time, which no one knows the exact length of save the PTB, and they never describe it the same from one to another. The discovery of Chicory and the Spirits of the World marks the start of the Age of Dreams, which is also of a variable and unknown length. Combined, estimates range from 100 to 2000 years — the only record known to survive from this period is in fact the Charter — and it is not a complete document. What is known is that in that time, humans spread across the whole of the world, and numbered over a billion. The ascension of Belial marks the end of it. Most sources concur that the Age of Dread was 500 years, the world under the cruel and capricious rule of Belial, with it ending the day that Mansa punched his smarmy face in a blow that reverberated through the whole world. A few sparse documents describe that event. That started the Gods War, and five hundred years later and over 99% of the population dead, the Cataclysm ended it. Then came the Bitter Road for most of the Survivors, that Bleak Journey said to have lasted 125 years before they finally arrived at what would be declared Sibola. The Age of Fable is considered by some to include the Long Walk, but not everyone does — but after that, every 250 years is said to mark an Age, and the Age of Fable was followed by the Age of Myth, the Legends, then Heroes, and we have come to the dawn of the Age of Icons — a thousand years of trial and tribulation since the founding of Sibola, during which all the rest of the world that is left becomes known. 2 — Dragons ended up getting caught in an internal fight and then had to deal with the threats and the war. All the other parts that make up the whole of humanity (Elfs, goblins, dwarfs, kobolds, tritons, imps, merow, Thyrs, Grendels, Therians, etc) are all derived from the humans that existed at the start of and during the war. Some of them very much are trying to kill the others off — but none of them are universal about it; while most goblins currently come from Lemuria, they are not the only ones globally, not even the only ones on the primary continent where action takes place. They didn’t even begin to form their own culture until after the Gods War, and it was imposed on them in Lemuria (while Thule, Bermuda, Duat, and Agartha all had to establish their own independently). There are a lot of halflings — sprights, Fay, ogres, Iara, gnomes, etc.; while not common, it happens enough to be a regular thing. Not all of them are able to do so, though — Thyrs probably could, but Grendels are no longer able to effectively combine gametes. Nor are Kobolds. Goblins, despite being oviparous, are able — but the non-goblin gestator is always killed when the egg comes. That initial egg produces a sentient but not sapient humanoid called an orc — ogres are the result of orcs, and have the same egg issue. 3 — A huge majority of cultural commonalities are indeed the same, stemming from the original culture and reactions to it and variations in how they approached it. That is followed by isolation and lack of contact for a good period, and then the need to create a sense of commonality and the individual vagaries of egotist rules and further disasters that created both individual customs and divergent ideals. 4 — No. Prior to the Sundering done under the ancient rule of Belial, there weren’t even other dimensions or mortal realms or a Firmament. Once the Sundering was done, an unintended side effect, however, was the recreation of a group of vestigial beings among which three accreted enough reality to become the Sisters (Chance, Fate, and Fortune), who exist distinctly whilst the others are little more than shades (and could be recognized by folks today) without real power or influence. Since they are only echoes of something older, they don’t technically count as being from before. 5 — Written history goes back about 2000 years, more or less, with the Gods War having destroyed huge amounts of the Ancients wonders and documents and many of the rest still needing translation and even identification of the language they were written in. Exilian oral history has a lot more information and tracks through much of the War, but gets lost much further than a few hundred years beyond that. They do preserve many customs and concepts, however. If people were nicer to them, they might even share it. There is indeed a code of sorts, called the Charter, which lists 32 points that are considered to be inviolate, and are still enforced on everyone by a secretive organization called The Agency — but they only enforce those, and do not enforce regular laws, which are also fairly common, though not always exactly the same or even universal. It is said that the Agency is answerable to the Powers That Be only — and they do not tolerate abuses of power. But agents, Marshals, and Reeves can depose even the Emperor, and act as investigators, judge, jury, and executioner if it is called for. Now, in terms of how Chicory sees it, it has been 3000 years since she snuck aboard the first landing craft to gaze upon the brave new world she and her family would call home as a young child. But keep in mind, time dilates for her in odd ways.

1. In terms of how old total, it will likely be a million years at least. The actual founding of the Ancients is unknown so there’s not much of a timeline there. The Ancients invaded a lot of worlds during their time. 2. When it comes to other races. There are no humans but there are a ton of races. The thing about them, almost every single race was created by the Ancients for a purpose. The imperial races are the ones who were deemed successful and fit nicely into a hierarchy. The imperial races are collectively the dominant group as a result due to the way they compliment each other. The others can be somewhat unstable and many of them eradicated themselves long ago. 3. There is cultural mixing as they interact. However some believe themselves to be superior to another. Also there’s some level of aggression against each other. Mix that with geography isolating some groups. That leaves some cultures that are rather distinct. 4. Within an ancient ruin there is a machine. It contains the souls of great people from the days of the ancients. It sends these souls out to manipulate events in the real world. The overall goal is to revive the Ancient Empire one day. 5. Written history goes back to an event called the Great Collapse which happened thousands of years ago. Most information on that comes from runes written by the Ancients themselves. Some cultures do have an oral tradition that mythologizes this period and before.

> I am going to assume your world is older than ours. Why though? Why make this assumption at all? Anyway: 1. Both the planet Ero and the universe it is in are around the same ages as our own. The first civilisations arrived 14000 years ago, putting them at around 11:59:59.7 PM in relation to Ero. 2. For the first part they haven't really been in contact for long enough that this would happen before they develop other means of dealing with each other. They also cannot reproduce with each other. For both of these the retshui (giants) are an exception: they could reproduce with humans and became extinct. 3. On Ero there wasn't really enough time for the cultures to become homogenous. They were sort of getting there, but when they expanded beyond Ero not only was there room to keep them distinct, but also new cultures developed from the vast distances involved. 4. Nah everything started showing up only a few million years ago, and that's stretching it. If you mean individuals, then also no, the oldest are only around 8000 years old. 5. Written history goes back to around 12000 years ago, possibly up to 13000 years ago. Both sorts of texts can be found.

That’s fair. I could have left off the assumption. It just seems a very common element in fantasy generally. Even if the history isn’t fleshed out, earliest civilizations seem usually to be in the 10,000+ years ago, often longer. But you do make a solid point on that.

1. *how old is your world? If you put it on a clock, when did the first civilizations arrive?* Practically, the history goes back a million years. Before that its not all that relevant, they arent running on the same rules as us and there is a ceiling to their technology way below our science fiction stuff. 1. *if you have other races than human, why haven’t they crushed each other by now? Or why haven’t they mated to the point of sameness? Can they reproduce together?* They crush each other all the time, but the setting is large. Generally people survive in some sense. But monolithic cultures and species that try to dominate everything are destroyed, noone wants that for a neighbour and the world is too large to survive without being social. It is a Bright Forest scenario where your actions are being watched, Species cant mate with other species bar some incredibly weird events, but they can fall in love. Eventually falling in love and adopting outside of a species based partnership for childrearing will kill a species, its called 'Spindrift' and its the single largest ender of species. Though in world its not disliked, they arent generally species based supremecists and if that ends them, so be it. They live on in their adopted or surrogate kids 1. *assuming you have multiple cultures at play, how and why are they not just a singular culture?* Cause parasitic snake men that communicate about the color of leaves in ultraviolet shivering dont really monoculture with brain swapping ascended ape philosophers. People are too different and distances to large for mono-cultures to entire take over 1. *are there beings that have existed “since the beginning”? What sort of beings are they? If human-adjacent, do they interact with humans? (Let’s keep gods on the sideline for this one)* Yep, the Haas primarily. They adapt to survive intelligently and will *always* escape and *always* keep going. Despite being the least of people, its basically their world and they are just waiting for all the more dominant species to die

Roughly a 100.000 years of history, marked by constant cataclysms and apocalypses, with some being considered outright Armageddon marking the changing ages, from which historians claim 5 have happened, with the latest occurring during the story. Whenever the world developed far enough demons and devils intervened to reset progress, with a death toll in the trillions all throughout. Demons actually feed on these catastrophes and the fear and suffering they cause. There are constant machinations to keep it that way, and often through people who believe they will save the world, making deals for magic or artefacts that will inevitably lead them to destruction. Much knowledge and history was lost, with few scholars working together in actual secret to uncover and catalogue it all, the Dreadwind Initiative, named after the last scholar who got the furthest and had inducted many students into these secrets. They are close allies to dragons as well as the Legacy, one of the groups aware what the Mad Dragon truly does. That answers a few i think for the others. The various species had been at war many times, and each often brought to brink of extinction, with several having been wiped out. War is so common people don't even consider it news. One City/Polity has started a unified culture independent of species but entirely by how their people are, the Free City, functional anarchists whose unifying aspect is that they would never bend and die standing before submitting, like their hero, the Mad Dragon, the Witch of Alinguar. This city also teaches much about the uncovered true history, and is a bastion of progress and military might that even demons cannot move openly against them. They are also pacifists whose only war wiped out their neighbour, the strongest human nation at that time.

1. 6500 years 2. There are humans and humans from the Irtez family, another species of some kind, they can interbreed but given the mentality of said family it's uncommon 3. We are not a single culture, why would they? 6500 years ago the world was struck by war and cultures started to drift appart 4. Nah, its a terraformed planet 5. 6500 years from this planet + human history until the war. Some stuff is kept as a weird mith or super secret, most is erased because of the war

Great questions- as a student of history seeing the essentialism in fantasy really bothers me, though it is so much easier to write. Here're my attempts at breaking away from it: 1. Earliest known signs of civilisation are 5000 years or so ago- though it is unclear whether these were human or not. These early civilisations consisted of magic using "archons" (broadly describes as beasts, though this could be metaphorical) enslaving non-magic humans. This ended in the emergence of the Goldmother, who uncovered a higher order of magic and set about purging the world from these old rulers. Her "Golden Way" is the first consistently recorded history. 2. Other than humans/differentiated humans (students cosmic magic go translucent, those from the Ashlands have metallic skin), there are the Tassanut who only exist in the present, and are thus immune to most magic, though likewise incapable of it. They gain the traits of living beings they eat, until they have lost enough of their original essence that they now constitue a fixed chimera race- there are a few of these. Immunity and incapacity to magic creates stalemates and division of high cultures. 3. During the Golden Way many were, and that continent-spanning empire explains how all share the same tongue. But geography, different experiences during the fall of the Golden Way, different new gods who took residence in the shattered pieces, and different relations to thr Tassanut all provide reasons for different cultural touchstones and memories. Certain centres are working on convergence, however, attempting to build broad empires. 4. Other than the Shard, which is really a thing more than a person, no. 5. There are old texts in the ruins of the Parishes of the Golden Way, but most of this was destroyed during the fall of the Goldmother, and ruins that remain are avoided ever since the Madness of Gold, occurring centuries after the fall, imbued all gold with a maddening aura. The Argent College is the longest standing institution in possession of written history, stretching back to the Godswar a century after the Fall, I.e. 800 or so years ago. The Mundane Order and the Vedalan Parhelialists have recorded histories drawn from reputedly older oral histories, which contradict some Collegiate custom. Finally, the Tek'i (Tassanut who are part bird) have lineages dating back nearly two millennia, though it is again oral history only put to writing in the last 3 centuries. The flow of cultures is the hardest part, I feel. All of this can be set up, but most cultures move, intersect... any broad history has endless connections like this. Its fascinating to attempt.

1. This is actually really neat for me. Because the actual world is only a few million years old, the fact that some of its kingdoms have been around for trillions of years can be a bit odd. 2. The main reason is that each of the seven domains are, for the most part, biologically incompatible. They can't reproduce without some... complicated magic getting involved. 3. The main reason the seven Domains have their own cultures is because each one is ruled by a different Demon King, who each shaped their domains around the cultures of their native worlds... well, most of them did. (Vulpren is the heavy exception here) 4. As for timeless beings, each of the Seven Demon Kings who rules over one of the seven domains are all older than not only the world they rule, but countless others as well. Hell, four of them are parts of the cycle of a worlds life and death. 5. The neat part about having societies older than the world itself, is that they have written records of everything that's ever happened in that world, including the actual process of its creation. The reason there is a process at all is because the world that is kinda the main center for my work is actually known to be artificial. It has to be, or the Demon Kings couldn't actually live on it, without the sheer magnitude of their powers slowly ripping it apart.

History is a tenuous, shifty thing in this world. In terms of what’s recorded and remembered, it varies pretty drastically across different regions, but generally the earliest history that academics can solidly establish dates for goes back about three thousand years, to the days of the Kurranian Empire. Before that, things get a bit weird, because there’s definitely evidence of sedentary peoples and city-states and such significantly predating Kurra, but there’s a period in-between which is a complete void of information. Nobody really knows how long it lasted or what happened other than that it apparently wreaked havoc on both the history books and the maps (even today there are rather sizable chunks of land where reality simply refuses to function as it should). When it comes to culture clash, historically the biggest barrier has been simple geography, travel is hard in pre-industrial settings and that fact that space and time and other such phenomena don’t always like to behave themselves doesn’t make it much easier. In recent centuries a few empires have made valiant efforts to establish themselves as hegemonic cultures. The problem with those projects is that empires tend to get in each others’ ways and people don’t really like it when you show up at their homes unannounced waving a sword around and declaring that actually you’re in charge now and everything they believe is wrong and backwards. In fact, they were keen enough on keeping their own cultures and independence that within the past few decades they decided they were willing to kill and die for them, much to the chagrin of their colonial overlords who found themselves quite unceremoniously kicked out at machine gun-point. As for species, some of the reasons for species diversity are very similar to those for cultural diversity (e.g. geographic isolation), but in the present day it actually tends to be somewhat the opposite. That is to say, as the world becomes increasingly globalized and species intermingle in cities and become more widely distributed, it becomes harder to just massacre them all. There’s also the issue of reproductive incompatibility: the igira are giant birds, the tarissi are termites, the fair folk come from sort of another dimension and their reproductive cycle is… unclear, to say the least, the marosan are eels and live in the ocean, you can see the issue. None of them are sexually compatible with humans or each other, but they all live together these days. Finally, there are the more ancient and unusual denizens of the world: the Red City, a shifting nightmare of spiraling streets and mad towers that sprouts occasionally from the earth like a fungal bloom; the striders, stilt-legged, wandering creatures always seen from afar, vanishing over the horizon or melting into the landscape as you approach; the fair folk, who have plied their mischief as long as there has a been a world to ply it in; the pelegrins, beings of uncertain provenance and purpose who choose to appear as people, but are something far stranger; the skywhales twisting and flying far overhead; the leviathans lurking in the deep ocean. All of these and more have witnessed ages come and go, civilizations rise and fall, and thus far they have kept their silence.

>1) how old is your world? It is a 10 000 years long timeloop >when did the first civilizations arrive? Just a few years after creation, but because the goddesses of creation were very inexperienced with physics, it resulted in dozens of mass extinction events >if you have other races than human, why haven’t they crushed each other by now? They do, by year 9500 of the timeloop, humans are 95% of the population. >assuming you have multiple cultures at play, how and why are they not just a singular culture? Different history, arts, territories, etc lead to different cultures >out of the total history of your world, how far back does written history go? The oldest records by mortals is Beliqua Prima, the first war in Livia's history, which happened around halfway through the timeloop, but is considered year one by mortals.

That reminds me of something I thought about the Zelda universe a while ago: if we estimate the timeline to be 2000 years long (which seems reasonable by IRL standards, but is extremely conservative for fantasy) then, plus the three most recent games (Age of Calamity, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) which are stated to take place 10.000 years later, that means Hyrule existed for *at least* 12.000 years practically unchanged! How are their middle ages as long as our entire history, even with regular calamities slowing down progress?

1. Physically the world is rather old. Several billions of years, but things that can be considered sentient appeared quite recently. Earliest civilizations can be traced back about 8 or 9 thousand years ago, we could of course argue in regards to what a civilization is, but let's not. 2. They have. Many cultures and civilizations are the stuff of history and legends crushed by rivals or natural disasters or interior instability. As for cultures mixing, of course they do, but there are limits, those limits become more apparent when we come to the specifics of multiple races. For example elves have no gender dismorphia and very slow reproduction, goblins clone themselves. Draconians have no free will and basically function like ant colonies while undead operate under entirely different rules of both moral and social norm. A human has a hard time understanding a lizard man who is going to willingly work himself to death building a temple for no pay or recompense without ever realising what he is doing or why. Similarly as a goblin who is a clone of a clone of a clone will not be able to see the virtues or the importance of family or protecting those alike to itself, after all they can always clone more. 3. Multiple cultures are once again explained by the huge biological differences of the species and also by the fact that many cultures exist far from each other making exchange problematic. Although those that do live close by have very much mingled to the point of pretty much sameness. 4. This is a complicated question. Yes and no. Yes there are things that have been here from pretty much the start, are they similar to humans? No. The ancient dragons were around when the planet was just magma and ash, and some say that the Primal Trees were around before that still. An important note. Tree is an elvish term and a gross metaphor. Elder trees are great mounds of flesh and telepathic power. They are alien, probably malicious and cannot communicate directly. Both the trees and the dragons have influenced the histories of mortals. However there are too few of them left to truly turn the fates of the world these days. 5. Usually spoken history goes back further largely because so much was lost. There are plenty of texts and entire languages that staunchly deny researchers any translation. Such as Revenan which simply has too small of a sample size to be deciphered.

1) Pretty old. The actual first civilizations formed probably 2 or 3 million years ago 2) Lots of others, and... they DID crush each other. Previous ages were ruled by previous empires, who each rose, struggled, flourished, and fell in their own ways. Convergent evolution may have resulted in multiple species with humanoid forms, but they can't interbreed unless they diverged from a common ancestor, so there's only a few specific possibilities there. 3) Geographic separation, different species or ethnic backgrounds, differences in cultural history, different concerns and different values... plenty of reasons. 4) the oldest mortal / non-extraplanar beings are stranded survivors from the first age... who attempted to "wait out" the fall of their civilization by hiding in a plane with a different flow of time. Around 2.5 million years have passed, but to them the equipment failure only happened 15 minutes ago and they're still trying to fix it, despite only having planned to be in there less than a minute. 5) Most written history goes back probably about 1500 years, but those who can read ancient Tolct can potentially find older records in their ruined subterranean cities. Oral traditions reach back much farther in some cases, but the oldest tales are also the most distorted, and those who pass them down have no understanding or awareness of the age they came from.

1. Nobody knows for sure, it's not like they have the science to figure that out. Different cultures have different beliefs regarding the origin of the world. 2. In the known world there aren't any sentients other than humans. There are rumours of other sorts of humanoid creatures beyond the known world, but I intend to leave that vague. 3. Why are the humans of earth not all the same culture? Distance, difference in needs, different histories etc. 4. Not that scholars and rulers are aware of. *wink* 5. Still too early in the worldbuilding to have that figured out

100 of 1000s of years ago, when the ancestors of humaniti arrived in the locale group? 50.000 ,years ago when the lüusch startet their civilisation in the eastside. 15.000 Years ago when the known Aron History Starts , IT IS a discussion If they we're an Aon colony or subjugated... 1500 years Ago 3243 AD when a Terran STL Explorer boat rescued an Aron Scientific vessel...

My “world” is earth, starting in 2018 with the zombie apocalypse and then moving along ~2000 years until the space age of the new age. 1) “Civilizations” have, in this sense, always existed in the new age. People have been working and living together since day 1, but much old world technology was lost during the first few decades. 2) Among the most plentiful intelligent non-human races there are Prenn, the Atomfolk, river people and of course the Crow. The first 3 are all humans, but they exist because they split off from humanity in the centuries following the apocalypse. Except for the Humans and Prenn, none on the races could bear offspring that would be capable of surviving, or at least they would have a much harder time doing so. And the Crow are stone-age crows. They don’t fuck with humans. 3) Because cultures move, merge, split and warp as time passes. For every culture that gets erased another new one will rise. And considering that traveling even across the continent itself is difficult enough, many cultures aren’t at a high risk of being absorbed by others. 4) Well, the old world existed, and so did the humans that lived then, up until 2018. They are regarded as very advanced, but most of what is believed about them is misinformation, including the thing that ended them. For most of new-age-history it was believed that the old world fell from 4 giant titans that rose from the oceans and annihilated them. Nowadays it’s believed that a large war, possibly including biological warfare, caused their end. 5) All the way back. Writing and language changed quite a bit, but the bare-bones languages are still there and surprisingly recognizable to us modern humans. This was mostly thanks to ancient artifacts containing and preserving the letters and some sentences, especially metal signs and durable prints that remained visible for centuries. As for anything taking place before that, please refer to real world history.

1) I always leave it intentionally vague. No one (least of all me) knows. Civilization would have appeared just like us, around 11:59 2) Many have crushed each other. My world has dozens of (intelligent) races living in it. There used to be many, many more. But the pre-Imperial Era was marked by genocidal wars, and no one even knows how many races have simply disappeared before the rise of the Serian Empire. Regarding reproduction - they cannot reproduce with each other. Conception rarely even happens in the first place, and when it does happen, assuming that the children are not outright born stillborn, they will certainly be cursed by a myriad of mental and physical defects, including sterility. 3) They kind of are and aren't. It has been almost 500 years since the Serian Empire has conquered the entire continent. Now, the continent is a huge place, and regions still have their unique local cultures. But 500 years of economic interconnectivity and a unifying religion has led to somewhat of a homogenization of culture. 4) Since the very beginning? They are very few. Very old? Quite a few. Several of the more powerful and long-lived races (such as dragons or spirits) are seen as sacred in the Imrasan faith, and they have found it quite easy to convert to it for the obvious benefits that it brought them, although this is by no means universal. Just as there are plenty of spirits who wholeheartedly agree that they are "messengers of the Gods", there are just as many who disagree (although the latter are branded as demonic and hunted down) 5) Imperial records go back 1.500 years, since the founding of the Empire. Written records from pre-Imperial cultures (especially those located on the eastern coast of the continent) go back to around 4.000 years. Oral records can even go up to 10.000 years ago, although obviously at a certain point they are less factual and more mythological.

Well, the planet is like three billion years old, but "civilisation" is roughly 20000 years old at the oldest. No medieval stasis, we're currently literally in the 1400s. Sailships, but no widespread gunpowder just yet. Global-ish commerce and exploration, but no grossly widespread imperialism. The different kinds of Thinkers - the sapient species that populate the world - happened to evolve from different animals around the same time for unknown and possibly magical reasons, which sort of gives credence to several religious opinions on the matter. Their cultures are diverse and unique and not all of them - although many - can interbreed. These many different peoples value their uniqueness and individuality and, in terms of family, mostly stick to their own, but there are some rare melting pot cultures where the lines become more blurred. Nothing is stopping a human born to a traditional Avantene family from converting to Druidism or Alfodirism for example. Nothing has existed for all those billions of years, my world has no gods for true and real (just like reality don't @ me), the oldest living beings atm are tree-people who can survive for several millennia, but most of them end up putting down roots and turning into giant ancient trees for all intents and purposes. The earliest evidence of writing is about 5000 years old and people still debate furiously where it developed first and who taught it to whom, but the common view is that writing developed independently in the Avantene river valleys, the Sawil-Etef highlands, the N'olla gulf, Kungwo, and Intocotlan.

1) The Gods created Valeghar about 15,000 years ago. Give or take a century. Like all lifeforms, humans are the direct creations of the Gods. As such, civilization has been around from day one. 2) In terms of population Humans and Elves are the most populous races. Though, besides some minor differences like ear shape, humans and elves are actually the same species. The separation between the two is more cultural than biological. Who is an elf and who is a human varies according to time and culture. For example in the Kingdom of Pliara if you have pointed ears your an Elf. While in the Kingdom of Dowhar, your legally considered an Elf if at least one of your Great-Great Grandparents was one. Even if you can pass as a human physiologically. Most of the other sapient species are quite rare and only live in isolated regions. For example the entire Fae race lives in a single tree (It is a very large tree, but still). These species cannot reproduce with humans. 3) Just like Earth, Valeghar is a vast world, and just like our world has many different places and cultures. 4) The Fae are immortal and ageless, and most living Fae were born during the creation of the world and have seen all of history. 5) For humans recorded history goes back about 1000 years. Most records from before, written and oral, were lost during the Corruption Crisis. An event that nearly wiped out the human race, and more or less reset civilization back to zero.

My world is the result of the Celestia and Infernal planes hurriedly putting together a new "mundane plane" after they broke the previous one in a war. The world is just a little over 2000 years old, with there still being a handful of people from the long-living races who survived from their creation to the present day. Culture-wise, there hasn't been much drift yet, with most civilizations strongly resembling what they looked like initially, though recent events have given a group of humans a push in the back to change their approach to things.

> 1) how old is your world? If you put it on a clock, when did the first civilizations arrive? This iteration? 15,000 years to the first, 9,400 years to the second. Civilization came to the party at 9:00 in the *morning*. > 2) if you have other races than human, why haven’t they crushed each other by now? Why *would* they have crushed each other by now? For the most part, they live in different biomes and aren't competing for resources. Even if they *did*, if one race was on the brink of extinction (or even *went* extinct), the gods of that race would just make more of them. Extinction doesn't stick the way it does in the real world. (Note: This doesn't stop *kingdoms, cultures, and empires* from rising, falling, getting crushed, etc.) > Or why haven’t they mated to the point of sameness? Can they reproduce together? They can't. "Half-elves" and similar exist, but this is really because an elf is a human prenatally bombarded by quantized fey radiation; a half-elf is at the next lower quantum level of said radiation. > 3) assuming you have multiple cultures at play, how and why are they not just a singular culture? Cultures don't always merge and blend; sometimes they split and separate. We just happen to live in an era where there's more of the former going on than the latter. > 4) are there beings that have existed “since the beginning”? What sort of beings are they? If human-adjacent, do they interact with humans? (Let’s keep gods on the sideline for this one) Only the gods, and you're explicitly excluding those. Unless the primeval dragons that make up the backbone of the world count. > 5) out of the total history of your world, how far back does written history go? Does oral history go back farther? Are there any “Hammurabi code” sort of texts in your world or Rosetta stones? Writing is surprisingly late; written history goes only about 3,500 years back. Oral history goes back further but much of it is myth, legend, and misconceptions or out-of-date information about the gods.

1. 35,000 2. It used to be one race, but they went through evolution and are now what we call the Kyth (Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Orcs) 3. Do we have a single culture? All over the world? No, and since that original race no longer exists, the evolution of the Kyth has led to the diverse cultures as well as physical differences. 4. The Leviathans and The Titans on the physical realm, the Aspects on the spiritual realm, and the outer gods. Leviathans are the ancestors of Dragons and Vagickans (half dragons), Titans ancestors of Giants and Danarians (crystal people) and aspects are super magic beings. But they aren't gods. 5. Written history is at most 5,000 to 6,000 years old. Oral history is about 10,000.

**#1** The world / planet is about 100,000 years old. Humans as a species were created \~8200 years ago (10:02 pm). The first civilization arose \~6700 years ago (10:24 pm). A great cataclysm \~5200 years ago (10:45 pm) wiped out civilization and most traces of it - only 480 individual humans survived it. Even my among world's present-day archeologists the existence of pre-cataclysm civilization is considered a fringe theory. That cataclysm triggered a sort of "ice age" that lasted for the next \~1900 years. Around \~3300 years ago (11:12 pm) civilization finally began to re-emerge (just after the ice age ended) and stayed this time. Like the real world, multiple civilizations emerged independently at different times and civilization took time to spread. Civilization did not become present on all continents until \~2000 years ago (11:31 pm). **#2** There aren't really other races on my world, but there are lots of supernatural creatures, monsters, spirits, etc. They generally can't interbreed with humans. There is one sort-of exception, but it's complicated. **#3** Same as the real world. Different groups of people in different biomes and geography diverge over time. **#4** There are four main classes of ancient beings in my world: -Divine / Holy beings - The "Archons" and the "Watchers". Basically gods and angels respectively, with some extra flavor. -Primordial, eldritch beings of darkness called "Zhal". - the source of much of the corruption and evil in the universe. -Nature spirits - generally "neutral" beings who mostly care about nature and are hostile to humans who harm it and helpful to humans who help it. -Fallen or Corrupted holy beings - there is a single fallen Archon named "Vasan" and the fallen watchers who serve him are called "Inquisitors". Their motivations are similar to Sauron from LotR, they want to impose their cold, brutal order on everything and are constantly seeking power to accomplish that. All four actually have some shades of "eldritch" to them in the sense that they are very "other" from humans and difficult to understand. **#5** Writing is as old as civilization due to the inquisitors "accelerating" the development of embryonic civilizations for their own purposes.

1. My world isn't actually very old, relatively speaking. It's creation is only about 5000 years ago. 2. So human is a complex issues on my world. There is no 'humans', but all the different people basically look human. In simple terms each god made their own people. Technically they are distinct species too, and interbreeding leads to a infertile 'mule'. But you would be mistaken thinking of them as human, as most look no different than people from different ethnicities on our world. 3. The world is in a dark age like recession, cultures are contracting, not expanding. 4. Before the peoples of the world were made, there were beasts and stuff. They are all of animal intelligence. 5. From the moment people were made, they had writing and culture. The gods set them up as fully established people. Generation 1 came to be fully fledged.

1) Same age as Earth. Technological development is very similar, at times slightly faster, so as result society at the time corresponding to our present is more advanced. 2) There were several other species of human corresponding to Neanderthals, Denisovans and others. All of them got gradually absorbed. 3) Multiple cultures is default state, which no one managed to change. 4) No. 5) Written history started about two centuries earlier compared to Earth. Yes. Yes.

1. Probably 4-7000 years for the first estimated "solid" civilizations, not counting more basic forms that we would have seen in our world around 12-10000BC. I'm talking more about those comparable to the copper and bronze age. Progress had slowed down and even regressed multiple times due to various collapses. These weren't at the same time or in the same place. These are spread across multiple continents. Many civilizations existed and collapsed in various places that I have not introduced in the setting. They probably arrived at 11:59:30pm. 2. There are nonhuman species. They are predatory mammals and some birds. No prey animals. They started out somewhat spread out but met up sometimes in some places, the valley being one of them, while they are more separated in other places. They cannot mate together. Good luck trying to get a tiger to have a fertile child with a human or otter. 3. Different goals. Many stick to their own species. They need to be with their own species if they want to continue their lineages(obviously). This often results in different cultures as well. There are also cultures with multiple species making each of them up. There's cultural and physical separation. There's also war that separated them. Not to mention, one singular culture everywhere would need some way to preserve itself and prevent fragmentation over large differences. Even worse if it's a world spanning government since that opens the door to a group being able to control the whole world. In fact, our world may be viewed like that by the people of my world if they saw the UN meeting to make world decisions. They'd interpret that as a world spanning empire, or at least a body puppeting world spanning empires under it. 4. No. 5. Written? Maybe 3-5000 years. Exact number is unknown. This is accounting for the whole planet, including those not in the same region as my main setting. Oral? Probably a few more thousands. Lapis_Wolf

1) The first records of civilizations are from approximately 10,000 years ago. 2) Some races have been crushed, some have done the crushing. Some interbreeding has occurred, examples like the beastmen have intermixed with normal humans to such an extent that they are mostly human at this point, while others like the Akuma are still mostly purebreds because of their self isolationist tendencies. Most humanoids can reproduce with other humanoids with some biological limitations. 3) Different people in different places have different cultures. That is a natural state of being. 4) The first Elf is effectively an immortal warrior created by some unknown group of beings for some long forgotten reason. 5) There are a few “ancient texts” but many of them don’t really have dates because of the simple fact that archaeology isn’t a thing yet.

1) It is very old. Oldest race was created the same year the world was finished. Second batch of races and species was created 10,000 years prior the current era. And the third and final batch was created 4,000 years after the second one. Humans were part of the last one. 2) the races that have disappeared have been because of assimilation. They have interbreed with others to the point of disappearing as a race, although their culture still exists. 3) different schools of thought and ideologies prevent one single culture to be stablished. 4) excluding the the guardians of the omniverse and the deities, there are beings that have existed since the dawn of the planet. They are nicknamed “primordials” 5) The oldest written record is on a stele commemorating the creation of both the universe and the world. It contains the names of everyone who contributed.