Adventurers in my homebrew D&D world quite frequently find themselves exploring ancient ruins.
Over the decades I've been running campaigns in it, a rough outline has grown up in terms of timeline, a few key ancient civilisations, and a few key events. But it's been a bit of an organic process, with individual bits and pieces of lore created (sometimes on the fly) to fit with particular adventures.
I don't expect to be running any adventures "in the past" any time soon, but I think that it's worth putting a bit more structure around it.
That doesn't mean every detail written up and nailed down. The period I'm thinking of started 10,000 or more years before the "current" date in the world. It finished an unspecified time ago, but with a specific event somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years ago.
At that distance in time, there's room for the fine detail of events to be a bit vague, and for the older ones to be more legend than established fact. After all, think of the Trojan War, the founding of Rome, Xia and Shang Dynasty China. Lots of legends, a small amount of archaeology, and very few firm facts.
So this project has two main goals. The first is to come up with the beginnings of detailed maps for the period, and the second is to build up a body of lore and legends. Both will be an ongoing work in progress.
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
Maps
Starting with the maps.... the tool I use to create maps of the world is Wonderdraft. It's not a free tool, but has a one-off cost of $29.99 not an endless subscription. I like that, and I like even more that it's a download, not a cloud service which could be turned off at any time, with the maps held locally on your own PC. It's available from wonderdraft.net
The starting point for the project is my existing world map, which has grown over a period of time. It's not complete, because I tend to add areas as we run games in them. Below is a screenshot of the current state of development;
The shaded areas are the main nations; because it's a medieval style world, borders are relatively vague and porous and there are large areas between them that are occupied by monsters and savage tribes (often non-humans).
The first step is to remove most of the nations;
Two nations remain on the map, shown in mid-brown and green. One is the empire of Lymbrium Nomoth Klasmet, and the other is the elven kingdom of Sidhiara. Both still exist in the current timeline, although Lymbrium Nomoth Klasmet may disappear soon as a result of the undead invasion story arc that's been playing out.
I've left cities and other place names for now. An enjoyable part of the narrative process will be to determine which places are old enough to have been around in ancient times, and how the names may have changed over the centuries.
Legends and Lore
The other part of the project is to build up and organise the background material for the ancient period.
This is going to need a hybrid approach.
I need to work through all my material (posts on Hive, old D&D adventures, notes on ancient history in background material etc), and organise it by rough time and location.
At the same time, I plan to start creating new material to start filling the gaps. Crating Hive posts seems like an ideal way to do this ! I'll probably adopt an approach which mixes telling the story of key events (foundation myths, great heroic deeds, disasters, wars and calamities) with other posts which give a flavour of the daily lives of ordinary people.
Usefully, I made post in Hive ages ago which outlined what ended the ancient world and began the current one. It's a legend which tells how the old gods were slain and replaced by new ones. In my mind, it also symbolises a transition from bronze age technologies and societies to iron age ones. You can read the story HERE
This is one for the blooper reel. I told my AI art generator to give me an image of two Hittite-style chariots on a low grassy hill. I'm not sure it knows how many wheels a chariot is supposed to have, or where the horses go....
