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I'm willing to try making a Phanterran timeline if people are willing to help provide information. So here's an initial poll to see if anyone's interested in making this happen.

With the altering of timelines through many means in Final Haven, there is the history that was, the history that wasn't, and the history that will be...

Now that I've blown your mind... *snicker* ... keep your eyes and ears open in the near future for something that this may have some relevancy to.

However, I do agree that a timeline would be helpful for players (new and old alike) to help everyone better understand the setting as a player, and for playing their characters as well. It may also be required to mark what is known by the masses, and what is kept hidden or lost to the knowledge of the general public.[/i]

While a timeline might be useful for the GMs, I don't think PCs should have a ready-made one they can easily reference. All but the most intellectual characters should have almost no sense of history, and even the scholarly would have only incomplete and conflicting references.

exactly. The GMs don't put up timelines cuz your supposed to find out IN game.

But there's all sorts of reasons why these people *could* know these major events and have a grasp of the time between them. Not everyone is playing character with short life-spans - some of these characters are 100s of years old, and have lived the majority of their lives through the times of the great human cities with their accessible libraries and the libraries of their respective race.

And then there's the fact that things haven't, actually, been all that long since the Cataclysm - it's only been merely a decade since. While the human children during the event are now young adults, the first generation with no memory of what was are now children, and if history is anything to go by, they've been raised on the folk stories of what was.

It's not that I think people shouldn't *still* be learning things In-Game -- just that if they believe their character would have had access prior to that information due to their background, they should be able to have it readily accessible to help tie it into their Roleplay and Background creation without having to consult the GM staff or somebody else, and be able to get a sense of the geological time between the major events so they can get a degree of what they'd know from folk-stories, books, or first-hand observation. (And really, it would help tremendously if anyone wanted to play a time-traveler, which I'm sure is a character concept many people have wanted to try at some point but have never had enough grasp on the game's history to try seriously.)

And like any other resource on this website, it's not like it would be a *must read*. If you think your character wouldn't know it, then you don't have to look at it, or (more likely) you would play your character as if s/he didn't know until someone in-game told you.

In truth, this is something I *wanted* every time I opened the word document when I was working on Happy's background, and now that I'm creating a background for another character, it's something I still want.

There is a book in game with tons of the info that you want. It has over 300 pages of FH & WH lore, history, and racial info in it. It took me a little over a year to make. And I barely wrote anything in it. It was just a lot of copy and paste and sorting. I can send it to you if you would like. I quick skim through would give you an idea as to what happened before the cataclysm. After the cataclysm means searching through forums and reading old journals, which can also be found in game. Dallid and Donovans journals were very helpful when it came to defining the begining years of FH. Past that you would need to talk to some of the PC's that have been around since then. A difficult task because there are very few PC's alive from that era. But there are ways to get the info...

I'll help with the timeline but I think we should make an effort to keep it vauge yet helpful. Just things that you may have heard through the grapevine mixed with rumors. You'll also need to have a sit down with Taki. He kept a really good record of what was going on when he was playing Donovan.

But then there's another issue...Is it OK to use information from dead PC's? All my Zeira stuff is written in a giant book, but what about other people who had no such things?

PC backgrounds and historical knowledge are as individual as the characters, themselves, and are best handled on a case-by-case basis. An Elf who grew up in Sil'van'dar could PM the GMs for pre-cataclysmic info on the last 200 years of the world, as well as Sil'van'dar lore. The GMs would then likely respond with detailed Sil'van'dar info - in which would be an explaination that such High Elves had almost no knowledge of what went on beyond their own closely guarded borders.

And this would be the truth of most people. Most Silverthorne peasants probably knew the Kings name, but may never have seen a Silverthorne nobel or soldier save maybe the local Thane or Baron - and them only a couple times in thier lives. ('Course, they were all familiar with the local Mandalor tax collectors and enforcers ) Few would know what went on outside their villages.

Of course you've got your traders, bards, adventurers, and the like, but they mostly have to compile their own lore - as nearly everyone they meet know nothing of the world beyond thier village limits.

So it's probably best to PM the GMs with your character concept and ask them to foward you the appropriate historical lore.

A general knowledge "historical timeline" wouldn't be bad, in my opinion.

Basic dates of great events of history (old and new) could be given. It doesn't have to be TOO specific (King Rodrick's 3rd son's birthday doesn't need to be on it, but some of the significant events that changed the world that most folks could/should know would be, such as Night of Burning Skulls, Signing of the new Haven charter, and the likes in modern history would help new and old players know their setting, while a more broad historical timeline that included things like unification and division of the Magics, creation or fall of certain empires, or the "believed" dates of some other things [whether true or not] could be included), and leave it to the players to roleplay what their characters know and don't know of history.

Characters that have existed for 20-30 years (not to mention longer) in the game shouldn't go from person to person to find the basic information about the world they grew up in. People who come into the game shouldn't be forced to either A) Have amnesia of their own world's past, or the events they've been through, or B) be forced to create their own history outside of the Phanteran history because they were given nothing to work from.

Characters can come in knowing how to speak their own language, and have basic skills and abilities. They don't come in as blank character sheets and have to learn everything one bit at a time. And just like a character must learn how to better use their weapons and skills (through mechanical advancement), there will be PLENTY of information available through roleplaying that probably won't be (or will conflict with) on the timeline, and even if it is, they can learn this stuff through roleplaying anyways.

The kicker, of course, is that the cataclysm, and the magical clock (to name just two) have altered history in many ways. For instance, the time of Quen's origins (50 years before the Cataclysm) and the date of the Cataclysm were mashed into one another. What the history to one person might be might not be what happened to another.

However, there are likely to be some events that are universally acknowledged and accepted. If the information is not "secret", then I say make it public and let the players handle it appropriately.