Moving Onward -- with Timelines

Recently, I've been doing a lot of work over on the Ae'rinus Wiki. And in doing so, I found myself updating the Running Timeline for Ae'rinus from about 1609 into the 1660s. Granted, adventures have pretty much littered bits of that timeline up into the early 1650s, but adding additional years, for me, felt pretty liberating. I guess this needs a little more backstory to make sense.

When I first Built Ae'rinus, it was under a different name, Nedidith (we're skipping the Meredridith part, since that map was about as horrible as my DMing at the time). I started adventures on Nedidith in the 1450s I think. Back then, adventures really didn't follow the timeline, and we didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the months, but we gamed on that version of the world for about 4 game years, while I worked on the revision of the map. Originally, I had wanted to hold off on releasing the new map until it was finished, but that was a silly idea from the get go, so once Ae'rinus got released, it came with a new timeline, which jumped into the late 1580s. The time jump here was mainly inserted to give the continent a sufficient amount of time to recover from its crash landing onto a new prime.

With the new world and the new timeline, I began working far mor dilligently in fleshing out the countries and lands of Ae'rinus. Histories were fleshed out, and I began looking at the polotics of everything in addition to just adventuring. Everything began to fit into a global perspective, so I began taking more careful note of the progression of time.

We probably ran seven or eight campaigns that started in 1593 and advanced onward. The two most successful of them eventually dovetailed together to form the world changing events of 1600, as they documented the Rise and fall of two great villains: Drevissh and Tokogau Ito.

Once 1600 hit and had passed, campaign start times became more erratic. I took the characters' backgrounds into account and tried to decide whether having them live through the fall of magic would be more impacting to the world than living through its aftermath.

When I began playing with starting timelines in this manner, I started to realise that knowing what's going to happen on a global scale ahead of things is a pretty nice thing. Granted, your players will also know what will happen, but all my players are vetran role players, and none of them use metagaming tactics to benefit their characters.

So when I was updating the timeline yesterday, I put in a few extra years worth of world activities, and I'm sure in the upcoming campaigns, this extra bit of history will prove to develop quite a nice world story.