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Deep time and young gods
Aug. 4th, 2024 08:38 pmSo in Runescape canon, Amascut and Icthlarin are young gods. Not the youngest, but still, young. Working from their established mythologies, they are maybe 8,000 years old. They may be much older than that, existing as divine beasts native to the world or Colossi for millennia before being "lifted" by Tumeken, a god from another world and commonly viewed as their father, which is from where my 8,000 year guess comes.
Funny thing that I realized today – 12,000 years is about half of a certain Milankovitch cycle here on Earth, specifically the cycle of axial precession. 12,000 years ago, the Sahara was a green savanna which experienced torrential seasonal rains. By that time, humans were living in the area, living near sources of water that flooded every year and hunting abundant game. They developed complex cultures and learned to work with the seasonal floods, but as the African Humid Period ended around 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, those cultures had to shift from from hunter-gather cultures to pastoral cultures. As the Garden of Eden faded away, the memory of those seasonal floods served those humans that retreated to the now less swampy Nile well, as the Nile continued to flood, year after year, though in a greatly diminished manner.
I wonder if the story writers for Runescape had this in mind when coming up with the lore for the game. Much of it was developed in a piecemeal fashion, quest by quest. The overall skeleton may have been established in at least this much detail by Paul Gower decades ago, however. I used to think that the lore timeline was absurdly long. But in light of this, the timeline of the desertification of the Kharid fits almost too well with timeline of the desertification of North Africa. I also used to think it was too short of a timeline for non-anthropic climate change, but nope.
Hell, we are seeing so much climate change happening now, in the span of our relatively short lifetimes.
It's something to keep in mind when writing a character as old as even a few millennia. Or even as young as a few millennia – That timespan could be a significant portion of a planet's axial precession period. It's not long enough for the continents to drift but it is long enough for climates to shift. And long enough to watch culture adapt in response.
Wild to think how much the African Humid Period affected us as a species. The glacial period just before it was another very dry period for north Africa, which was a great impassible desert. Almost like the Sahara's ancestor.
Funny thing that I realized today – 12,000 years is about half of a certain Milankovitch cycle here on Earth, specifically the cycle of axial precession. 12,000 years ago, the Sahara was a green savanna which experienced torrential seasonal rains. By that time, humans were living in the area, living near sources of water that flooded every year and hunting abundant game. They developed complex cultures and learned to work with the seasonal floods, but as the African Humid Period ended around 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, those cultures had to shift from from hunter-gather cultures to pastoral cultures. As the Garden of Eden faded away, the memory of those seasonal floods served those humans that retreated to the now less swampy Nile well, as the Nile continued to flood, year after year, though in a greatly diminished manner.
I wonder if the story writers for Runescape had this in mind when coming up with the lore for the game. Much of it was developed in a piecemeal fashion, quest by quest. The overall skeleton may have been established in at least this much detail by Paul Gower decades ago, however. I used to think that the lore timeline was absurdly long. But in light of this, the timeline of the desertification of the Kharid fits almost too well with timeline of the desertification of North Africa. I also used to think it was too short of a timeline for non-anthropic climate change, but nope.
Hell, we are seeing so much climate change happening now, in the span of our relatively short lifetimes.
It's something to keep in mind when writing a character as old as even a few millennia. Or even as young as a few millennia – That timespan could be a significant portion of a planet's axial precession period. It's not long enough for the continents to drift but it is long enough for climates to shift. And long enough to watch culture adapt in response.
Wild to think how much the African Humid Period affected us as a species. The glacial period just before it was another very dry period for north Africa, which was a great impassible desert. Almost like the Sahara's ancestor.