This is a topic I've been anticipated writing a blog post on for some time. Long enough, in fact, that in March 2024 I created a text document in the OneDrive folder^[1] where I keep the text documents that will become my blog posts, titled "A Matter of Time.txt"—although until a week and a half ago the entire content of said text document was ".... timelines...".

But of course before getting into the actual purported topic of this blog post, I will engage in a few perdigressive paragraphs of introductory matter. Because that's what I do, apparently. But not before another paragraph stating that I'm going to do that. Because that's what I also do, apparently. I probably shouldn't, but I do. I should maybe think about training myself to stop doing that. But not today.

Anyway, as is unfortunately usual, I have not made much progress lately when it comes to updating the Wongery. I have had many other things I have been dealing with, not the least of which (but certainly not the only of which) is my oft-lamented difficult financial situation. That, at least, however, may be getting better soon. I am taking measures that will in the short term give me a very unpleasant month or so (a bit over a month, actually) but after that month (and a bit) is over will enable me to pay off most of my high-interest debt, put me on a much sounder financial footing, and alleviate much of the stress that's been a constant presence for me. Maybe then I'll be able to focus more on the Wongery. Or maybe I'm just an innately useless and nequient person and I'll find some other excuse for my unproductivity.

Nevertheless, while I haven't posted any new articles on the Central Wongery since the article on the Jinn's Palace three and a half weeks ago (yikes), I have been working on other articles; they're just not ready to post yet. The next article I intend to post will be about the City Proscribed, a strange, ancient city in the middle of the continent of Avelax on the world of Dadauar. But I said in a blog post at the beginning of the year that I was alternating writing new articles with rewriting old ones, and I've still been doing that (albeit at a much slower pace than I'd hoped). The rewrite for the article on the Soul War should in fact go up before the new article on the City Proscribed. And after that, the next article slated for a rewrite is the Free Republic of Avelax.

That one's going to be a chore... because that article needs a lot of expansion. It's the Free Republic that I want to concentrate on for now as the focal location for the world of Dadauar, so that article is one that I want to be especially sure is really complete and fleshed out... and right now, at fewer than eight hundred words, it's very much not. But furthermore, as I expand the article, I'll want to develop a good map of the nation and its surroundings so I can have a decent feel for its geography and how its sites and provinces all fit together—even if that map won't necessarily be initially presentable enough for me to want to immediately include it in the article. But there are more issues involved in creating that map—well, primarily the issue that a rough map may already exist. I've mentioned before that Dadauar is one of the oldest worlds in the Wongery. Not in the "in-universe" sense; not in the sense of how long Dadauar is supposed to have existed in the context of the fiction; but in the real-world sense of how long ago I created it. Dadauar, unlike Curcalen, Varra, and many (but by no means all) other worlds of the Wongery, long predates the Wongery itself; I started writing about it decades ago before I even knew what a wiki was, and long before I had ever conceived the idea of putting the information about my worlds into a wiki of my own.

This means I have a lot of years-old material I can draw on when expanding the article on the Free Republic of Avelax—and in fact I intend to draw on it, because I want to remain faithful to my younger self's work; I don't want to contradict my previous writing about the world without a very good reason for doing so. And while this may mean I have to expend slightly less effort in coming up with ideas—since there are a lot of old ideas I already had that are there for the taking—it presents a problem when some of that prior work isn't readily available. Which, alas, is the case for my original map of Avelax. Among the old documents I created years ago related to Dadauar are pencil-drawn maps, one of the world as a whole and a "zoomed-in" map of each of its five continents. Most of these maps I still have; the map currently shown in the article on Dadauar was in fact traced over a scan of my old paper plan. But the map of the continent of Avelax was long missing. Recently, I did finally find it—or fragments of it—but it had somehow become torn into pieces, and I'm not sure if I have the pieces I need to fully reconstruct my original plans for the continent. And I can't check right now, because, well, those fragments are at home, and I'm not, and won't be until late June, once this month-and-a-bit of profitable unpleasantness is over. (Tomorrow morning I'll be a third of the way through it.) Perhaps, if I do finish the Soul War and City Proscribed articles befor then (as I certainly hope I will!), I'll skip over the Free Republic rewrite till I can get home and check the map, or what's left of it. Even if the remaining fragments of the map do show parts of the continent covered by the Free Republic (which is not unlikely, as the Republic covers most of it), it may very well be that I never got around to detailing that map much and it doesn't show anything important that's not already evident from the world map—but I won't know until I see it.

But anyway, as I've been revising the articles on the Soul War and the Free Republic of Avelax, that means grappling with the history of Dadauar, and that means, I decided, finally dealing with something I've known for a long time—at least since March 2024—I'd eventually have to deal with. That being... the history of Dadauar needs some revision. I never developed it in a huge amount of detail, but those old documents from decades ago do include timelines of significant historical events—and those timelines are... rather needlessly protracted. That is to say, Dadauar's history is much longer than it has any good reason to be, or that it particularly makes sense for it to be. Recorded history on Dadauar began, according to those old timelines, about fifty-seven thousand years ago. There were multiple empires that each lasted thousands of years. The modern government of the nation of Drithidiach is 2800 years old. I guess those numbers must have seemed reasonable to me at the time, but they seem considerable less so to me now.

Yes, I just said a few paragraphs ago that I don't want to contradict my previous writing about the world without a good reason... but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to contradict it if there is a good reason. I'm mostly staying faithful to what my younger self wrote, but I'm not entirely averse to making changes if necessary. And I think this is a change there's a good reason to make^[2]. Should I have tackled this issue back when I rewrote the main article on Dadauar? Yeah, probably, but apparently I didn't. Well, I'm tackling it now.

Okay, let's start by taking a look at those multimillenial empires—by which I mean, let's compare them to the protensions of great empires on Earth. The Roman Empire existed as a unified whole for just over four hundred years. Its eastern successor the Byzantine Empire was around for about a thousand. Even if you count the two as one continuous empire and add the two durations together, that still makes less than 1500 years. And this was unusually long-lived; other empires rarely lasted more than a few centuries. Some sources list the "Pandyan Empire" as having lasted even longer, but while the Pandya dynasty of southern India and northern Sri Lanka was certainly enduring, persisting for about two thousand years, its status as an empire is more debatable, it covering at its largest extent a only about half a million square kilometers, about the area of modern Spain or Baffin Island—respectably sized, certainly, but hardly a sprawling empire, especially since it claimed no far-flung colonies or any land more than six hundred kilometers from its center of power. Still, even if one does count the Pandyan Kingdom as an empire, this still puts a ceiling of two millennia on the lifespan of real-world empires—and most empires were much shorter-lived than this outlier. Venerable empires that perdure for several millennia weren't really a historical thing.

Now, of course, fantasy worlds aren't the real world, and one can come up with rationales why fantasy empires could last much longer. immortal or undead rulers, magical law enforcement, divine favor, stabilizing enchantments, and so on and so forth. But that doesn't mean every empire in a fantasy setting should deviate so much from real-world examples. I don't think a fantasy empire sticking around for tens of thousands of years is necessarily out of the question. But I also don't think it should be the norm. To be fair (to myself?), I didn't go quite that far in my original Dadauar timeline; I had multiple empires lasting three thousand years, but none longer than that. Still, even three thousand years should be exceptional, not routine.

And then there's the long-ago start of written history as a whole. Now, Dadauar, at least, has an excuse for a long history and a mysterious past in the Great Plague, which killed off the vast majority of its populace and forced civilization to restart almost from scratch. And honestly, looking at my original timeline, most of the time scales after the Great Plague aren't too bad. They could maybe stand to be cut in half or so (as it stands, the Great Plague was nine thousand years ago; four or five thousand might be more reasonable), but at least they're not off by an order of magnitude. And I don't have any post-Plague empire lasting more than 1,500 years (though I have multiple empires lasting that long). It's before the Plague that things get inflated; as I said, I have recorded history beginning 57,000 years ago, and even granted that the Great Plague reset everything, that leaves 48,000 years between the beginning of recorded history and the Plague, and... that may be a bit much.

Exactly when and where civilization may have first begun on Earth may be open to some debate, but I doubt many historians would disagree that less than ten millennia passed between the dawn of civilization and the Middle Ages, the most common time period for fantasy worlds to be patterned after. And of course less than a thousand years more elapsed between the Middle Ages and the present time when I'm writing this. Now, obviously social and technological progress doesn't have to occur at the same rate on a fantasy world as it did on real-world Earth, and it's certainly possible that it could take more time to reach a similar level of development, but it taking almost an order of magnitude more time seems like a stretch.

Again, post-Plague Dadauar doesn't suffer from this problem too much, especially if I cut the times in half; it has undergone significant advancement, with the development of the onirarchies, and all the magical advancements they introduced. But that 48,000 years before the Plague raises the question of just what was happening during all that time. Sure, the distant past of Dadauar hasn't been developed in detail (and doing so isn't a priority, since much of the history from that time is supposed to have been lost anyway), but while I may not have explicitly written much down about it I think I had the general idea in my head that for most of that time it was just... well, much as it had been after the Plague but before the onirarchies. Which, again, doesn't really make sense; surely the people of Dadauar would have made new discoveries and developments over all that time—and if they were that highly developed, surely they would have left some ruins and relics showing their advancement that would have still been around even after the Plague. Instead, there were apparently tens of thousands of years of effective stasis.

Again, it's certainly not impossible to come up with reasons why fantasy worlds may be so static. Maybe the gods, or the fae, or some other magical beings for reasons of their own limit mortal advancement, removing those who threaten to change society too much. Maybe a reliance on magic inhibits the development of technology (but then why wouldn't there be developments in magic? Or if for some reason magic couldn't be developed further, surely people would look for other ways to improve their lives and end up developing more technology after all.) Maybe some subtle magical force inherent to the world suppresses any significant societal change—though that raises the question of what brought that force about, and whether it can, and should, be fought against. But it's more straightforward to just avoid the issue but not invoking such huge timescales in the first place. There rarely if ever seems to be any good reason why some empire has to be tens of thousands of years old other than some vague notion that bigger numbers are more impressive^[3].

Younger me is certainly not the first writer or worldbuilder to commit this error, if error it be; it's quite common for fantasy settings to have thousands of years of history where somehow apparently nothing of note changed. (And again, it can be justified, but it rarely is.) This blog post isn't intended to ridicule those who have had similarly prolonged timelines in their own settings... again, the whole point is that I've done it myself! (And I won't claim that present-day me is necessarily immune to it either, or that I won't make that mistake again.) But now that I've recognized the issue, it's something I'm going to work on. I've now created a spreadsheet where I intend to work out the timeline for Dadauar with more care than I had in the past, and that revised timeline will be reflected in relevant articles going forward—and of course in edits to old articles as well. As I rewrite the main articles for other worlds, or write further articles expanding on them, I'll add tabs to the spreadsheet to develop timelines for those worlds too.

There's another thing, too, this has made me consider. I've implemented subspaces in the Wongery wikis for tabletop game material, for video game assets, for models, and for citing sources—even if none of those subspaces have any content yet aside from some introductory pages. And I have plans for other subspaces I may create in the future, some higher priority than others. Would it perhaps make sense to have a subspace for timelines? Or if not an entire subspace, at least some sort of plugin to display timelines in articles? Other worldbuilding sites have a timeline feature, and while I feel that the Wongery serves a different purpose than those sites and I'm not trying to compete with them, still, yeah, that is a feature that might be worth having.

Not necessarily right away, though; I ought to add content to the existing subspaces first, and of the planned but unimplemented subspace probably the highest priority is the Atlasspace so the Wongery can have better, and interactive, maps. At some point in the future, though, yeah, I think I'll add that.

In the more immediate future, though... I'm just looking forward to getting home in late June after this month (and a bit) of unpleasantness is through.