The First 196,000 Years

Now and then I feel a compulsion to write a "world history" of my game world, that of course is based on actual world history.  This makes the project dubious, to say the least.  Yet I enjoy dabbling in history.  And there are fantastical elements to be incorporated in the story of time that focus on elements like the invention and pursuit of magic, the influence of religion in a world where gods actually exist, the movement of non-human peoples who must have come from somewhere, and must have something that explains the nuts and bolts of their present-day, game world existent culture, the one that players bump into.

And so, from time to time, I go at it.  Much of it ends up being repeat work, as organising historical events is an enormous headache, no less so when the events are described briefly.  There's so much of it, and what there is overlaps and remains geographically tied together, that making sense of sweeping time periods for people who know nothing about history is a trial.

My latest impetus is that I've been addressing the neverending work of moving the old wiki's material to the new wiki ... which as I do it, requires editing in process.  When I first launched the Authentic wiki, I had the help of a number of well-meaning people who, unfortunately, simply moved the material as is from old to new.  That created a headache of hundreds of pages without proper links, and which were as page entries only half written and not well-written at that.  Which pages need attention are mixed hopelessly into the great pile ... and I'm not always interested in correcting the content found in them, even when I stumble across one that needs honest work.

Nonetheless, I've reshaped three pages on the old wiki that I'm glad were not simply copied, since it gave me an opportunity to purposefully rebuild them.  I think the content is clearer, more interesting to read and most important of all, easy to build upon.

These three pages cover the palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic periods of my game world's history.  Their value for the reader, and for my players, is the explanation of how non-human races came to find their way into a human world, what happened in broad strokes after they came here, and where geographically they came to settle by about 4,500 BC.  In the format given, it should be a quick, elementary read.

My challenge is to continue forward in time in the same straightforward manner.