DShomshak

The only published Fantasy setting I can ever imagine using is Exalted, because the setting of Creation is so tied to everything else in the game. But Creation has seen significant changes over the centuries. The history that matters starts with the Primordial War, when the Exalted were given power so they could overthrow the world's creators. Then came the millennia of the Old Realm, also called the High First Age. That ended with the Usurpation, when two kinds of Exalted overthrew two of the others, establishing the Shogunate of the Low First Age. The Shogunate sort of limped along for several centuries until the plague called the Great Contagion killed 90% of the world's population. It was not a natural disaster: It was created by the ghosts of some of the Exalted murdered in the Usurpation, who had gained new power from the ghosts of some of the world's slain creators. Then things got even worse when the Fair Folk invaded from the primal chaos outside the world in an attempt to unmake it all. Their literally infinite hordes were stopped only when a young officer somehow found a way to activate the ultimate weapon of the Old Realm. She then founded a new Scarlet Empire with herself as its Empress, beginning the Second Age. She has ruled most of the world, to varying degrees, for more than 700 years since then. Five years ago, she vanished. All the conflicts she kept in check are starting up again -- and the power of the Exalted slain long ago now seeks new mortal hosts. Though some of these new Exalted are different in ominous ways. The Time of Tumult is at hand.
 
That's the history of the world as a whole. Every country has its own history too, in some cases reaching back to the Old Realm.
 
The way to keep a setting from seeming static is to begin with the premise that things will change, and some of those changes and events will matter for current people. A lot.
 
Dean Shomshak
(Full disclosure: Though I was not part of the initial design for Exalted and Creation, I did a lot of work on the Second Edition. A few things, I even think I did well.)
 

The high school parts were challenging in part because my own high school experience was trying to avoid any contact with my classmates, as this was rarely pleasant. Not a milieu for which I have a natural feel. I solved this in part by taking a cue from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game and saying that the campaign was emulating a TV series, a la Buffy, Vampire Diaries, etc. So I only had to get in the head of TV versions of teens instead of actual teens.
 
It was still challenging to give each PC their own ongoing subplot, and to tie everything back to high school activities.Like, dating across rival cliques? Jaeda Magdalena, bad girl scion of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl, gets involved with Gary/Geirrod Vetterson, football hero and frost giant from Crosstown High. Fortunate;ly, I have good players who were willing to carry some of the load.
 
Dean Shomshak

Incidentally: I never ran a Ravenswood campaign, but I sorta did Teen Supers with my "Scion High" campaign. White Wolf's Scion game uses the premise that gods of myth still have semi-mortal by-blows who are destined for lives of adventure. Influence of the "Percy Jackston" stories should be obvious. Though I hadn't read those stories at the time, I sort of went back to the source by having teenage children of the gods attending a modern American high school. They were asked to keep the Mythic World secret, as their divine parents preferred. Various troubles came looking for them. They had rivalries with the Titanspawn students at Crosstown High. Romantic troubles. Afterschool jobs. The challenge was to try interweaving the mortal and divine: the giant talking wolf crashes the Homecoming Dance to deliver its ultimatum, the plain girl who became a hottie over the summer doesn't know she was turned into a monster (but might be cured), etc. It was probably the hardest campaign I ever ran -- for the high school parts, not the mythic parts, or even for wrestling with the typically clunky WW game mechanics. But it turned out really well.
 
Dean Shomshak

The closest comic-book parallel I can think of is the New Mutants, from Marvel. And no, their adventures did not involve responding to bank robberies or the like. A lot of times, the action came to them: Living in the X-Mansion, they were targets for all the X-Men's enemies.  (The Hellfire Club even had its own junior auxiliary, the Hellions, going to its own private school nearby.) Several characters had extensive baggage from their prior lives that came looking for them, or that they had to leave the school to deal with and the whole class came along.
 
Though it helped that this was late '80s/early '90s Marvel plotting, where no story could be completed in less than 4 issues, so in a year of comics there weren't actually that many stories. Especially given the teen angst for padding. Even still, you are quite right: Many of the situations were contrived, to put it mildly.
 
I presume a Ravenswood Academy campaign would operate similarly.
 
Dean Shomshak

As has been alluded to, not all change is equally meaningful. A lot of RL history is what I call "churn": Borders change, one dynasty succeeds another, kingdoms appear and disappear, but the events don't change the social pattern.
 
It's the difference between coup and revolution. A country can have a dozen coups and change not a bit. Violent overthrows of government can even be one of the chief enduring elements. (And as assault's link shows, that's nothing new, either.) Real revolutions that change the political and cultural order are far more rare.
 
What's that line from Somtow Sucharitkul's "Inquestor" series? "History there is, and no history." Apparent change that maintains a greater stability.
 
So in designing a setting's history, what events will actually still matter? And which are just churn?
 
Dean Shomshak

As has been alluded to, not all change is equally meaningful. A lot of RL history is what I call "churn": Borders change, one dynasty succeeds another, kingdoms appear and disappear, but the events don't change the social pattern.
 
It's the difference between coup and revolution. A country can have a dozen coups and change not a bit. Violent overthrows of government can even be one of the chief enduring elements. (And as assault's link shows, that's nothing new, either.) Real revolutions that change the political and cultural order are far more rare.
 
What's that line from Somtow Sucharitkul's "Inquestor" series? "History there is, and no history." Apparent change that maintains a greater stability.
 
So in designing a setting's history, what events will actually still matter? And which are just churn?
 
Dean Shomshak

As has been alluded to, not all change is equally meaningful. A lot of RL history is what I call "churn": Borders change, one dynasty succeeds another, kingdoms appear and disappear, but the events don't change the social pattern.
 
It's the difference between coup and revolution. A country can have a dozen coups and change not a bit. Violent overthrows of government can even be one of the chief enduring elements. (And as assault's link shows, that's nothing new, either.) Real revolutions that change the political and cultural order are far more rare.
 
What's that line from Somtow Sucharitkul's "Inquestor" series? "History there is, and no history." Apparent change that maintains a greater stability.
 
So in designing a setting's history, what events will actually still matter? And which are just churn?
 
Dean Shomshak

Incidentally, the thread title reminds me of the ancient Greek meaning of Stasis.

Its more than a jillion but less than a gazillion

Incidentally: I never ran a Ravenswood campaign, but I sorta did Teen Supers with my "Scion High" campaign. White Wolf's Scion game uses the premise that gods of myth still have semi-mortal by-blows who are destined for lives of adventure. Influence of the "Percy Jackston" stories should be obvious. Though I hadn't read those stories at the time, I sort of went back to the source by having teenage children of the gods attending a modern American high school. They were asked to keep the Mythic World secret, as their divine parents preferred. Various troubles came looking for them. They had rivalries with the Titanspawn students at Crosstown High. Romantic troubles. Afterschool jobs. The challenge was to try interweaving the mortal and divine: the giant talking wolf crashes the Homecoming Dance to deliver its ultimatum, the plain girl who became a hottie over the summer doesn't know she was turned into a monster (but might be cured), etc. It was probably the hardest campaign I ever ran -- for the high school parts, not the mythic parts, or even for wrestling with the typically clunky WW game mechanics. But it turned out really well.
 
Dean Shomshak

Why is the solar corona so hot?
 
I don't think there's anything really new here, but it's a solid discussion.  And, I got acquainted with the author at a scientific meeting back in 1988, where he gave a talk after he slept under a bridge after being too inebriated to find his lodgings.  It was a good talk, too.

Anyway... Just as you don't need to create an entire world if the campaign happens in only one or a few countries, you don't need to create millennia of history that won't be relevant to current events. In which case, questions of "stasis" don't arise.
 
My first "Magozoic" campaign was an exercise in such focus. Setting: Earth, 250 million years in the future and gone magical, a la Dying Earth, Gondwane or Zothique. Or, no... It's the northeastern quarter of a region called Zilaya, and every country that will be involved fits on a single 8 1/2 x 11 map (scale of 1 inch = 64 miles, same as the Goode's World Atlas from which I cut-and-pasted my geography). About equal to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and a bit of Northern California. The little country of Aleiros (I did this before Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera, so don't snip at me for that) is under attack by the new and rapidly expanding empire of Shavos. Some other smallish countries nearby, some already conquered. On the western edge, the duchy of Stimroth, vassal to the ancient and decadent empire of Zaav, which I didn't expect to get involved.
 
Now the history. I decided there were only six points of history that needed addressing. In order, going back in time:
1) How the dilettante prince of a Shavan city-state turned into a genius tyrant conqueror.
2) How the current royal family of Aleiros obtained the throne, to the annoyance of an older noble family that expected to take it.
3) How a dragon created a zone of wilderness between Aleiros and another country, that has lasted even though the dragon was killed some decades back. Because it mattered that that wilderness area was there.
4) The archmage Sith Korosh, whose descendants are now a whole family of wizards ruling a pocket palatine from their magic-soaked mansion.
5) Skipping back several centuries, the swift rise and catastrophic fall of the short-lived Medusa Empire that once ruled the whole region.
6) And a couple millennia before that, how the demigod Zaav founded the empire named for him, and established the divine covenant that let its emperor of the time destroy the Medusa Empire. (And that one sentence is actually all I wrote for this bit. It didn't matter how; he just did, okay?)
 
How did the present countries arise after the destruction of the Medusa Ampire? What wars and changes of border and dynasty happened among them? Didn't matter, so I didn't bother. No need to write the history of the royal family of Voysos, when the only point that mattered is that one princess maybe escaped the massacre following the country's conquest.
 
It was actually a bit refreshing *not* to go spinning off into irrelevant tangents. And nobody ever asked for more information.
 
My current Magozoic campaign is a bit more involved, both geographically and historically, and I don't yet know which parts will matter. I am writing timelines. But that's just to keep things straight for myself: I expect that most of it will never matter to the PCs, and so will remain unknown to the players. But if something does come up, I'll be ready.
 
Dean Shomshak

Apropos of this, my experience writing and developing for Exalted suggests to me that some game writers -- though quite bright in other ways -- have a dubious grasp of geography and scale. Like, one writer who was creating a new country described it both as "small" and "a thousand miles wide." I reminded him that 1,000 miles is the distance between Chicago and New Orleans. This may be "small" compared to some countries in the setting, but it's a bit large and spread-out for some of the institutions he wanted the country to have.
 
Part of the problem, I think, is that Exalted started with a world map and design went down from there -- and when you start sketching borders on a mpa whose scale is 1 inch = 800 miles, you tend to get pretty big countries.
 
Discussing this on White Wolf's forum, I came up with this comparison for people who think you need big places for big stories. On the Exalted map, Ireland would fit within a quarter-inch square. Ireland, with all its weight of history, from the Tuatha de Danaan to the Troubles. Is Ireland too small for a Fantasy epic?
 
Okay, you say it is. Half an inch on the map can include most of the Ancient Greek world. Most of the Greek myths and epics happen within a half inch square, with a few excursions B eyond the Fields We Know such as the Argonautica or Odysseus sailing to the Underworld.
 
The Biblical Middle East fits within a one inch square. And all of China fits within a two inch square.
 
Now, Exalted campaigns are supposed to operate on a hyperbolic scale. Threats to the entire world are a thing. But that doesn't mean that everything needs to be gigantic. (And indeed, every place that isn't sprawling is a city-state, because then you just put a dot on the map.)
 
I also suspect that some cases where settings have huge spans of time but not much seems to be happening within them derive from a similar top-down approach, and would benefit from more bottom-up design. Like, don't start with 6,000 years or whatever and try to fill it. Start with now, decide what incidents are absolutely needed to explain current conditions (or to plant as story seeds, ore just as bits of atmosphere to help show what kind of setting this is), and figure out how much time you actually need to fit it in. Like, if the kingdom's leaders seethe in anger for a past military defeat and want to start a new war to avenge it, does the defeat need to be from a thousand years ago? When 10 or 20 would work as well? Or if the defeats did happen centuries ago, is it a point of the adventure that someone is deliberately dragging up and inflaming old grievances because they really really want a war?
 
Dean Shomshak
 
 

In the far-future setting of my "Magozoic" campaign, Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper Belt Objects are collectively called the Palisade of Night. Mythically, the boundary between the sane and sunlit realm of mortals and the unknowable horrors of the Far Realms. The Palisade has its own spiritual realm in the mystical cosmology, and its own gods.
 
Dean Shomshak

In the far-future setting of my "Magozoic" campaign, Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper Belt Objects are collectively called the Palisade of Night. Mythically, the boundary between the sane and sunlit realm of mortals and the unknowable horrors of the Far Realms. The Palisade has its own spiritual realm in the mystical cosmology, and its own gods.
 
Dean Shomshak

Anyway... Just as you don't need to create an entire world if the campaign happens in only one or a few countries, you don't need to create millennia of history that won't be relevant to current events. In which case, questions of "stasis" don't arise.
 
My first "Magozoic" campaign was an exercise in such focus. Setting: Earth, 250 million years in the future and gone magical, a la Dying Earth, Gondwane or Zothique. Or, no... It's the northeastern quarter of a region called Zilaya, and every country that will be involved fits on a single 8 1/2 x 11 map (scale of 1 inch = 64 miles, same as the Goode's World Atlas from which I cut-and-pasted my geography). About equal to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and a bit of Northern California. The little country of Aleiros (I did this before Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera, so don't snip at me for that) is under attack by the new and rapidly expanding empire of Shavos. Some other smallish countries nearby, some already conquered. On the western edge, the duchy of Stimroth, vassal to the ancient and decadent empire of Zaav, which I didn't expect to get involved.
 
Now the history. I decided there were only six points of history that needed addressing. In order, going back in time:
1) How the dilettante prince of a Shavan city-state turned into a genius tyrant conqueror.
2) How the current royal family of Aleiros obtained the throne, to the annoyance of an older noble family that expected to take it.
3) How a dragon created a zone of wilderness between Aleiros and another country, that has lasted even though the dragon was killed some decades back. Because it mattered that that wilderness area was there.
4) The archmage Sith Korosh, whose descendants are now a whole family of wizards ruling a pocket palatine from their magic-soaked mansion.
5) Skipping back several centuries, the swift rise and catastrophic fall of the short-lived Medusa Empire that once ruled the whole region.
6) And a couple millennia before that, how the demigod Zaav founded the empire named for him, and established the divine covenant that let its emperor of the time destroy the Medusa Empire. (And that one sentence is actually all I wrote for this bit. It didn't matter how; he just did, okay?)
 
How did the present countries arise after the destruction of the Medusa Ampire? What wars and changes of border and dynasty happened among them? Didn't matter, so I didn't bother. No need to write the history of the royal family of Voysos, when the only point that mattered is that one princess maybe escaped the massacre following the country's conquest.
 
It was actually a bit refreshing *not* to go spinning off into irrelevant tangents. And nobody ever asked for more information.
 
My current Magozoic campaign is a bit more involved, both geographically and historically, and I don't yet know which parts will matter. I am writing timelines. But that's just to keep things straight for myself: I expect that most of it will never matter to the PCs, and so will remain unknown to the players. But if something does come up, I'll be ready.
 
Dean Shomshak

The closest comic-book parallel I can think of is the New Mutants, from Marvel. And no, their adventures did not involve responding to bank robberies or the like. A lot of times, the action came to them: Living in the X-Mansion, they were targets for all the X-Men's enemies.  (The Hellfire Club even had its own junior auxiliary, the Hellions, going to its own private school nearby.) Several characters had extensive baggage from their prior lives that came looking for them, or that they had to leave the school to deal with and the whole class came along.
 
Though it helped that this was late '80s/early '90s Marvel plotting, where no story could be completed in less than 4 issues, so in a year of comics there weren't actually that many stories. Especially given the teen angst for padding. Even still, you are quite right: Many of the situations were contrived, to put it mildly.
 
I presume a Ravenswood Academy campaign would operate similarly.
 
Dean Shomshak

In the far-future setting of my "Magozoic" campaign, Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper Belt Objects are collectively called the Palisade of Night. Mythically, the boundary between the sane and sunlit realm of mortals and the unknowable horrors of the Far Realms. The Palisade has its own spiritual realm in the mystical cosmology, and its own gods.
 
Dean Shomshak

Anyway... Just as you don't need to create an entire world if the campaign happens in only one or a few countries, you don't need to create millennia of history that won't be relevant to current events. In which case, questions of "stasis" don't arise.
 
My first "Magozoic" campaign was an exercise in such focus. Setting: Earth, 250 million years in the future and gone magical, a la Dying Earth, Gondwane or Zothique. Or, no... It's the northeastern quarter of a region called Zilaya, and every country that will be involved fits on a single 8 1/2 x 11 map (scale of 1 inch = 64 miles, same as the Goode's World Atlas from which I cut-and-pasted my geography). About equal to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and a bit of Northern California. The little country of Aleiros (I did this before Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera, so don't snip at me for that) is under attack by the new and rapidly expanding empire of Shavos. Some other smallish countries nearby, some already conquered. On the western edge, the duchy of Stimroth, vassal to the ancient and decadent empire of Zaav, which I didn't expect to get involved.
 
Now the history. I decided there were only six points of history that needed addressing. In order, going back in time:
1) How the dilettante prince of a Shavan city-state turned into a genius tyrant conqueror.
2) How the current royal family of Aleiros obtained the throne, to the annoyance of an older noble family that expected to take it.
3) How a dragon created a zone of wilderness between Aleiros and another country, that has lasted even though the dragon was killed some decades back. Because it mattered that that wilderness area was there.
4) The archmage Sith Korosh, whose descendants are now a whole family of wizards ruling a pocket palatine from their magic-soaked mansion.
5) Skipping back several centuries, the swift rise and catastrophic fall of the short-lived Medusa Empire that once ruled the whole region.
6) And a couple millennia before that, how the demigod Zaav founded the empire named for him, and established the divine covenant that let its emperor of the time destroy the Medusa Empire. (And that one sentence is actually all I wrote for this bit. It didn't matter how; he just did, okay?)
 
How did the present countries arise after the destruction of the Medusa Ampire? What wars and changes of border and dynasty happened among them? Didn't matter, so I didn't bother. No need to write the history of the royal family of Voysos, when the only point that mattered is that one princess maybe escaped the massacre following the country's conquest.
 
It was actually a bit refreshing *not* to go spinning off into irrelevant tangents. And nobody ever asked for more information.
 
My current Magozoic campaign is a bit more involved, both geographically and historically, and I don't yet know which parts will matter. I am writing timelines. But that's just to keep things straight for myself: I expect that most of it will never matter to the PCs, and so will remain unknown to the players. But if something does come up, I'll be ready.
 
Dean Shomshak

The closest comic-book parallel I can think of is the New Mutants, from Marvel. And no, their adventures did not involve responding to bank robberies or the like. A lot of times, the action came to them: Living in the X-Mansion, they were targets for all the X-Men's enemies.  (The Hellfire Club even had its own junior auxiliary, the Hellions, going to its own private school nearby.) Several characters had extensive baggage from their prior lives that came looking for them, or that they had to leave the school to deal with and the whole class came along.
 
Though it helped that this was late '80s/early '90s Marvel plotting, where no story could be completed in less than 4 issues, so in a year of comics there weren't actually that many stories. Especially given the teen angst for padding. Even still, you are quite right: Many of the situations were contrived, to put it mildly.
 
I presume a Ravenswood Academy campaign would operate similarly.
 
Dean Shomshak

In the far-future setting of my "Magozoic" campaign, Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper Belt Objects are collectively called the Palisade of Night. Mythically, the boundary between the sane and sunlit realm of mortals and the unknowable horrors of the Far Realms. The Palisade has its own spiritual realm in the mystical cosmology, and its own gods.
 
Dean Shomshak