Haakon_val'Ishi wrote:
One thing that might help put things into perspective is to compare Arcanis to the real world. For instance Paul mentioned a date that was 8000 years ago. That puts it at 5984 BCE, back in the Stone Age. What do we know of that period? Not a lot all things considered. Sort of puts things into perspective. Just sayin
See, I disagree with that premise for several reasons
1. During the stone age, and even little art/construction. There was no writing, whereas there appears to have been a written language that far back (though what language has varied). This dramatically increases the longevity of data. We've found numerous ruins with material from that long ago in Arcanis, whereas there are essentially none in the real world.
2. Secondly, there have been effective immortals or verrrrry long lived individuals (2,000 year old Ssanu, undead, planar beings, etc) back that far as well as a lot more (Elorii, Valinor), more recently. While information coming from those sources might be rare, and biased, all it takes is for it to happen occasionally and be recorded in writing for it to be sustained much longer.
3. Everything seems to last longer in Arcanis. The Coryani Empire is 1,000 years old, which is huge, and it is short lived compared to the first empire or Ssethric empire. Long, stable governments lead to the survival of data better than the chaos of the middle ages, say
4. Magic can do a lot to reveal data. talking to ancient souls, time travel, psychometry, memory storage devices, statis devices, etc. there are innumberable amounts of ways magic can preserve data that doesn't exist in reality
Now, that said, I think information from long ago should be iffy, rarely known, etc., but I think it is virtually impossible to compare it to real world long term data propagation.