Here’s the Shadowrun Prehistory Timeline, including a quick summary of the Earthdawn period. It’s generally compatible with real-world history, but it certainly isn’t common knowlege. In fact, most of it isn’t known to anyone at this point. There are some indications though: minor traces of some of the later “ages” – principally the Earthdawn Age (circa 13,000 BC) and Metahuman Age (circa 18,000 BC) – are available. In the light of modern knowledge of magic, Archeologists have re-interpreted these discoveries; the fact that there were previous ages of magic, which supported their own civilizations, has been amply confirmed since Dunkelzahn’s discussion of the magic cycle on WyrmTalk. There are even ominous hints that the human race was forced to hide in caves and magical fortresses during the high points of the magic cycle, but little is known on the subject – although speculation is rife.
For those who need names of some sort, we have the “Golden Age” (circa 39,000 BC), the “Dragon Age” (circa 29,000 BC), the “Metahuman Age” (Circa 18,000 BC), the “Earthdawn Age” (circa 13,000 BC), and the “Shadowrun Age” (2011 AD).
Shadowrun-Earthdawn Prehistory:
65,589 BC: The usual minor geological disturbances as the magic level drops below zero triggers the Toba Catastrophe – a supervolcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia that reduces the homid population in Africa to somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 breeding pairs. The environmental changes, genetic drift, and the sudden need for improved pattern-recognition and communication abilities, push several recessive gene combinations into prominence. Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and modern linguistic capabilities, are born.
60,389 BC: Magic returns to the world. Homo Sapiens Sapiens discovers that the ability to form complex linguistic constructs and abstractions can also be used to form mental constructs for channeling mana. With that level of flexibility, modern man spreads out across the world, easily exterminating the other branches of homid evolution.
55,189 BC: Magic drops below zero again. For Homo Neanderthalis and the other relatives of the primary Homo Sapiens Sapiens line it is far too late. Modern Humans now dominate to the point where the last homid rivals are readily exterminated. Absorbed in wandering, settling, and taking over now-vacant ecological slots, humans do not develop much of any civilization this time around.
49,989 BC: Magic returns once again. Now competing against each other, human magicians seek deeper magical secrets, eventually discovering both Initiation and the Metaplanes. Unfortunately, accessing the Metaplanes breaches the natural precambrian astral barrier left over from the sterile epochs before life erose on earth, allowing the creatures of the metaplanes access to the planet. Fortunately, the development comes too late in the magic cycle for any to actually do so.
44,789 BC: The overall magic level drops below zero. Human civilization reverts to reliance on trivial personal magics and links with those few power-sites which have been directly linked to the stable energies of the metaplanes. Technology remains virtually non-existent.
39,589 BC: The general magic level rises to useful levels once again. Used to working with only a trickle of magic, human magicians exploit this new resource with great enthusiasm. Magical settlements and constructs arise, in a period that will enter later mythologies as a golden age – a comfortable hunter-gatherer paradise augmented with easy magic. The good times draw to an end in approximately
37,489 through 36,489 BC: The first scourge. The magic level becomes high enough for the Insect Spirits – and, roughly a hundred years later, the true Horrors – to exploit the disruption of the precambrian astral barrier and manifest themselves on earth. Early attempts at protection against the Insect Spirits result in the creation of the Shapeshifters, as well as several types of magical guardbeasts. None of the experiments are truly effective against the Horrors. As the most intelligent, and thus most vulnerable, species, humans survive in scattered groups and in a few heavily-protected areas. Civilization will partially rebuild afterwards, but – in the waning of magic – does not reach it’s original heights again. Overall, the Scourge lasts for almost a thousand years, although the first and last hundred are pretty much restricted to being harassed by insect spirits.
34,389 BC: Magic fails once again, save for the megalithic power-sites set up during the waning days of the age of magic. Humans finish repopulating the globe, but continue to rely on what little magic is still possible rather than technological innovations.
29,189 BC: Magic returns, and another magical civilization rises, weaving homes from trees, air, and magic, storing knowledge in chunks of crystal, and bringing bounty to the earth. Sadly, the feral descendants of the ancient guardbeasts join the other dangers of the awakened world to make things more difficult than they used to be. With the rise of the Horrors, a new solution is attempted: the most powerful mages of the world reach back into the depths of the memory of the earth to call forth the forms of the most terrible warrior-beasts that have ever lived (now known as dinosaurs), weave those forms from magic, will, imagination, and not a little creative license, and transmigrate their souls into them. The first Great Dragons – while forgetful of much of their true origin – rise to war with the Horrors. Unfortunately, even the Dragons are not a match for the Horrors, although they do allow the survival of considerably greater numbers of humans.
23,989 BC: The magic level drops to zero again, forcing the surviving Dragons into hibernation. Humans are tolerably well prepared for the low-magic period this time, once again using various methods of keeping limited amounts of magic working. In addition, the notion of alternative methods of doing things has taken firm root: basic “technologies”, such as ceramics and similar simple developments, make life a little easier.
18,789 BC: Magic – and the Dragons – return to the world. As the scourge approaches, the wiser Dragons and human magicians attempt other routes – reawakening some of the ancient magical channels which once granted inherent abilities to various members of the pre-human homid lines. Among other variants, Orks, Trolls, Elves, Dwarves, Obsidiman, Windlings, and their “Physical Adept” variants are created. The Adepts, at least, are moderately successful against the Horrors. Various techniques for building refuges and fortifications are, however, at least as useful; civilization is badly damaged and there are numerous casualties, but it could have been a lot worse. Towards the end of the age, certain dragons also sire Dragonkin and T’Skrang on various humans and variant humans. A very few elven crossbreeds seem to inherit undistorted forms and natural draconic near-immortality, the first of the “Immortal Elves” (there are other, but difficult, routes to near-immortality).
13,589 BC: Magic again drops below the zero point. The surviving dragons and their progeny enter hibernation. Without magic to power their innate channels and enhancements, metahuman children begin to be born as normal humans. Nevertheless, persistent – if uninformed – selective breeding has now resulted in the reliable domestication of various animals. An assortment of non-magical weapons, basic hide armor, and various other simple technologies, are in common use. Even so, however, technology is no match for the magic which can be kept working, and is never seriously developed.
8389 BC: Magic once again reaches usable levels. The Dragons re-awaken – but with the last of the original dragons long gone, the younger lesser dragons soon begin to chafe under the domination of their elders. This results in the Dragonwars – a conflict between the elder dragons and their younger progeny (with the Dragonkin mostly siding with the younger dragons). This isn’t good for anyone, and eats up a good deal of the time and resources that might have been used to prepare against the return of the Horrors. Several of the surviving Immortal Elves, however, create the “Books of Harrow” and begin to prepare to exploit the arrival of the Horrors for their own ends – collecting vast amounts of orichalcum, turning Thera / Atlantis into a magical fortress, exaggerating the dangers of the Scourge, and arranging for everyone else to seal themselves away in magical fortresses to be opened when the magic level dropped below the point that would force the Horrors back into the metaplanes. They then used their orichalcum reserves to construct a magic-focusing network designed to stabilize magic on a global scale, allowing them to emerge and take over enormous territories while everyone else was still in hiding. Thanks to this meddling, some minor Horrors are able to remain in residence until the end of the age when the scourge proper normally would only have lasted from 6369-5369 BC. The Dragons decide that the Immortal Elves are a bigger pain than they’re worth, forbid the siring of Dragonkin, and start creating Drakes to serve their purposes instead.
3189 BC: The magic level hits zero again – and the Theran planetary magical amplifier overloads and explodes. Thera is destroyed. Across the world, the magic level drops from a level high enough to sustain an advanced magical civilization to zero within hours. Without time to prepare, without metaplanar power sites primed, and without decades of adaption to using tiny personal magics, all magic save that of a few of the greatest masters (who still have some minor tricks to call upon) abruptly ceases to work. Unprepared magical beings, including some foolish young dragons, and most of the Obsidiman and T’Skrang, die. The Windlings – unable to remain sentient at their brain size without magic – are deprived of the time needed to gradually grow larger as magic fades, and become near-extinct save for a few recessive genes. Civilization undergoes an unparalleled collapse.
However…
With the complete collapse of magic, technological innovation begins in earnest. Over the next few millennia, history takes a familiar course – culminating in modern human civilization.
2011 AD: The Awakening.
There are some major problems with the Earthdawn-Shadowrun history: the human lineage goes back a long way in the fossil record, there’s no explanation of why Shapeshifters all take human form, there’s no way at all in which Dragons can be made to fit into the evolutionary tree of vertebrate life, there’s no way in which a prior technological civilization would not have left obvious traces all over the world, and so on. This version doesn’t match up with the draconic creation myth – but few actual histories match up with ANYONE’s creation myth. On the other hand, it does account for most of the known details of human history tolerably well, as well as most of the definite items from Earthdawns history.
Filed under: Background | Tagged: Role Playing Game, RPG, Shadowrun |
Emergence Campaign Weblog 
Nice encapsulation of the time line.I am starting a new Shadowrun game and as usual I will be working in some Earthdawn era items into the flow of it.
I hope you’ll find it useful. There’s a lot of other shadowrun material over on the Shadowrun Tab –
https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/shadowrun/ – and some items put up since the last major index updates on the main page.
If you like Earthdawn-Shadowrun crossovers, you might be interested in the Dust of Ages sequence. that’s indexed here – https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/latest-material-index-16/ – although you’d have to scroll down past the d20 and d6 indexes for the month to get to Shadowrun.
Integrating the fossil record into the cycle of magic is really a clever idea – and it’s very much in the chrome-and-spells spirit of Shadowrun. I came to Shadowrun very late but have been really interested in the backstory and its connects with Earthdawn. It’s unfortunate that we’ll probably never see a comprehensive unified backstory for ED/SR – not only do different companies own the franchises, but since the Awakening is scheduled for next year, newcomers might feel weird about playing a game set in a near-future that seems less probable.
Have you considered sending this to FASA or Redbrick? This might provide material for the cryptic hints in the source material – perhaps Humanis hires some runners to protect an archaeological dig, while immortal elves and dragons keep trying to interrupt it, because the results can be skewed into suggest (as Humanis does) that metahumans are aberrations in the evolutionary process? But the information gets leaked to the immortal “players” – Harlequin, the dragons, the Tirs – and even they get chastened?
Sadly, the Shadowrun line started to quietly shove those connections out of sight some time ago. To be blunt, they weren’t well received by most gamers – mostly because the writers insisted on treating the elder dragons and immortal elves and horrors as plot devices which the player characters could never have much effect on – ignoring the fact that people tend to stop improving after they hit the point of diminishing returns and stop being challenged. In fact, a lot of the time they get rusty; you can only maintain so many skills.
Fundamentally, it’s always a bad idea to push the players out of the spotlight during the actual session. It was bad for sales.
The sour taste has lingered to some extent, and helped push the jump futurewards to Shadowrun IV – where the Horrors are generally presumed stopped, the character power level is generally too low for immortal elves and dragons to get involved with, and the entire set of Earthdawn links can safely be ignored. That decision extended to dropping major chunks of completed material. I have a players guide preview PDF in the old files which listed statistics for most of the Earthdawn races – all of which were dropped from the eventual published version.
That is kind of disappointing of course. I like a well-developed background.
There’s a lot more material over on the Shadowrun page of course. If you’re interested in a Shadowrun-Earthdawn crossover, there’s the Dust of Ages subcampaign (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Mapping Interlude, Part IX, Part X, and Part XI – Aftermath.
There’s a somewhat-updated timeline HERE.
It is amusing to note that the first edition writers knew their technology – but their grasp of things like the role of the US Supreme Court and Diplomatic Immunity were pretty shaky. The current writers are a bit shaky on a lot of things…
Well, do you mind if I send the link to Catalyst or the owners of Earthdawn? It’d be interesting to see the idea of a dragon cover-up and see how the shared humanity of all the races – even dragons – could play out in a society still struggling with prejudice ;)
Sorry about the delay here: this month I mostly haven’t even gotten to look at the blog – but if you want to send a link, you’re entirely welcome. It would indeed be interesting to look at how a the world of Shadowrun might develop under those conditions!
Excellent job! It’s a really nice alternate view on things, that really seems to explain, why everybody is so protective about the past. Especially dragons!
I believe I’m entitled to judge that because I’ve invested quite some thought into the crossovers myself, as I’m playing one historical SR-campaign centred around immortal players and ‘sometimes’ use Earthdawn stuff as campaign background in the 2060s-campaign.
Another one I missed while ill… sorry about that.
I think that it is always more fun to have a coherent background that’s still having consequences; it adds a lot more depth to things – and makes it easier to manage when the players go haring off in some random direction on you.
What is the most profound sourcebook in ed for the previous ages? Dragons? Thanks
Profound? Most of them don’t contain anything even slightly profound; they’re game sourcebooks. The most “profound” bit I can think of for Earthdawn was the bit about Slavery always being theft because you were stealing the body from the control of the soul that owned it – and no, I don’t remember which book it was in.
Now, the biggest constraint on Earthdawn/Shadowrun as a setting is the conceit that the history of the last 5000 years or so matches the history of the real world precisely enough to have matching people and names up until magic rose. Every reference to the names of countries, their systems of government, and more tells us THAT.
That also tells us that we have a matching fossil history of life on earth covering millions of years, that the earth is indeed billions of years old, that continents drift, that the universe is immense, and so on – because matching histories calls for many millions of matching observations and facts to keep history on track. Any “origin story” that can be taken seriously in the setting has to account for the rest of the universe, for that fossil history, for radioactive decay rates, and for all the rest of those observations.
Against those thousands of stated facts in various sourcebooks the Dragons book presents a couple of pages of origin myth, provided by one “Talespeaker” in a stated attempt to manipulate the other namegiver races by presenting them with selected information. The tale itself provides no references and no supporting evidence. That story – not too surprisingly – stresses the unique nature of dragons, their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy of races, and their “perfection”.
On the other hand, it also states that “In the beginning, when the world was young and dragons first flew in the skies… we were without the culture we have today. Dragons were little more than savages, more like mindless adolescents that civilized adults”.
In other words, dragons were savages at one point – and weren’t focusing on preserving lore. Even if their origin story was relayed accurately to the scribe, there’s no reason to believe that it’s any more accurate than any other origin myth.
Thus, when you have tremendous amounts of objective, out-of-character material stating one thing, and a single, in-character, source telling a story that says something else… I’ll stick with the out-of-character material. That’s not particularly profound, but I think it’s fairly practical.
[…] where you can see various connections such as listed here or here and there is a great detailed historical timeline, so you can see how maybe your world could have times where things were fantastical and then they […]
I’ve created an updated and expanded version of this timeline. Would you be interested in looking at it? Email me if you’re interested.
It’s at the link below if you’d like to have a look at it. In fact, FastJack from the official SR forums would like to see it published on Holostreets. Please contact me.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=42484
Ah, now that goes back a while!
This timeline is from the mid-1990’s. (An earlier timeline for first edition involved several prehuman civilizations thanks to magic greatly increasing the survival value of intelligence and a far less benign explanation for why all shapeshifters took human form, but was entirely incompatible with material published later on). This one was set up for second edition Shadowrun / first edition Earthdawn, with a few updates for third edition Shadowrun – and so has some edition artifacts compared to later editions.
The early editions of Shadowrun had their problems, what with the writers complete ignorance as to how things like the supreme court, extraterritoriality, national sovereignty, and diplomatic immunity worked – but at least they had some idea of how computers worked (later third edition introduced things like “one way datalines” – completely forgetting their own rules about how cyberdecks worked). Later third and fourth edition writers didn’t seem to understand how anything at all worked – or what the consequences would be for a world operating under the rules they wrote. Thus the local games stopped at early third edition, and later changes to the backstory were never incorporated in it. To consider some of those items…
The presence of an astral barrier dating back to before the origin of life on earth was noted in canon. It apparently barred access to and from the metaplanes and thus protected the earth from the Horrors (which were apparently Lovecraftian problems for many worlds across the universe) until the magical activities of Earth’s intelligent life broke the barrier. Evidently it was fragile from the inside. The Insect Spirits hailed from their own metaplane; which could be visited if you were crazy enough. Their exact origin was never specified, but they did seem to be tied to earthly insects in some fashion. That made them a local problem in contrast to the universal problem of the Horrors. “Behavioral modernity” – a theory that mostly emerged later on – was not really relevant; humans developed magic, some early magician self-initiated and poked his or her nose into the Metaplanes, the barrier was broken, and the horrors were unleashed. Thus is was not behavior; in this context “modernity” was defined by awakened magical potential.
Ergo, a reason was needed for the abrupt emergence of magical adepts – a notable evolutionary event involving radically new capabilities rather than gradual change. The most reasonable candidate was a a genetic bottleneck and associated speciation event. I tied the emergence of magic to the emergence of modern linguistic adaptions for several reasons – because classical magic depends fairly heavily on symbology, because it could fairly readily be taken as an emergent effect after a particular threshold was crossed, and because the development of languages including abstract symbology is very difficult to establish hard facts about – allowing me to place it as needed.
Earthdawn loosely tied changes in the magic level – particularly the moments when the baseline was crossed to major geological events and other disasters. The Toba Catastrophe was considerably less well dated at the time (although the date I used was still a bit of a stretch) – but the hypothesis offered a reasonable way to tie together the abrupt emergence of conscious magical ability in Homids with a geological disaster to mark the change in magic levels. The rules at that time also noted that the rise and fall of magic was a universal phenomena, affecting the entire universe – thus affecting magic use in space if you could get around the horrible background count.
Sadly, of course, if examined in detail there simply is no way to fully reconcile Shadowrun history and real-world history. You can get close enough for suspension of disbelief to take over – but the number of changes that having a prior civilization would have created would wildly alter history. Thus there are places where real-world history is tweaked to fit in with events specified in Shadowrun or Earthdawn, and places where Earthdawn and Shadowrun events are tweaked to fit in with real-world history.
The original Shadowrun rules actually offered several different dates for the beginning of the new age of magic (based on various in-setting observed events) and – very reasonably – indicated that the Mayan calendar wasn’t quite right, if only because it’s current form doesn’t date nearly far enough back for its creators to have any detailed information on what they were talking about. Ergo, I used one of the figures given as a near-enough approximation.
Homo Neanderthalensis is, of course, still extant in the genetic sense, since modern humans (especially those of European descent) carry enough neanderthal DNA to demonstrate that Homo Sapiens Sapiens interbred successfully, just as the Denisovans did. This means that their “extinction” is a matter of definition; both of distinctive genetic differences and of the population being considered. I could argue for it being the date on which the last “purebred” neanderthal passed away, or when their genetic contribution to the population throughout their maximum range dropped below some threshold, or for some other standard. The timeline does not, however, specify when they went extinct. What it says is
“55,189 BC: Magic drops below zero again. For Homo Neanderthalis and the other relatives of the primary Homo Sapiens Sapiens line it is far too late. Modern Humans now dominate to the point where the last homid rivals are readily exterminated.”
It doesn’t give a date for when the last relict populations were eliminated – although the timeline does implicitly acknowledge that giving Homo Sapiens access to magic would have sped up the replacement process.
Now, on yours…
The Ancient Past section is probably more trouble than it’s worth; Anyone who actually wants to play is generally willing to leave the “underlying explanations” at “magic exists”. Most of the small remainder will know why it’s almost impossible to have a universe with magic look anything like the real world* and will find attempts at justification laughable at best, which means that you’re probably going to annoy more people than you’ll entertain.
* Adding a new force that can interact with matter breaks the universe. Why? Because particles now have a new quantum value defining how they interact with “magic”. Suddenly electron orbitals can hold twice as many electrons. All of chemistry changes wildly. Atoms contract. Enormous amounts of energy are given off in the process. Neutron stars become black holes. Normal stars often undergo core collapse and many will undergo runaway fusion reactions. Lots of other dramatic physics will happen, along with some subtle stuff that no one will care about because they will already be dead. The only way around this is to have magic be a part of the universe from the very beginning – and to either handwave it or try to rewrite physics from the ground up while still getting the same results. Given that no game is worth that kind of time, I go with the handwave.
Updates to the Horrors and the Invae… well, I doubt that the visual manifestations matter. Most of the Horrors are more than powerful enough to appear however they want to, or possibly however an observers overloaded mind interprets something with no true physical form. But if they’re essentially local menaces, you might want to include some notes on what to expect on other planets or beyond the solar system. That isn’t important to most Shadowrun games, but I’ve seen it come up.
If you’d like to consult some more, why not? I cannot guarantee that I will remember all the reasons for things – it has been thirty years – but I can give it a try.
Hi, Thoth. Hadn’t heard back from you on my post below. Still out there?
Thank you for responding!
Do you have a reference for the astral barrier in canon? I would LOVE to pick that book up on DTRPG and read over the early setting material. I’m predominantly a 4th Edition gamer, but own many of the earlier edition books and I haven’t come across that reference yet.
It’s interesting seeing the background info for your timeline. I can tell you put a good deal of thought into it. I will say that it’s close to my motivations, as well. I, too, wanted to create a timeline that lined up with the current best picture of recorded planetary history. At least as much as I reasonably could, because you are quite correct that at some point suspension of disbelief has to take over. Still, I wanted to get as close as I could and hopefully I did a decent job.
As for my Ancient Past section, the Gatecrasher RPG inspired me and I wanted to come up with an explanation for how this whole thing started. Perhaps some people won’t like that level of detail, but I’m one of the people who does, so I guess we’ll see what the reception at large is.
Would you object to my putting up my version on Holostreets?
Well, this is a “when I happen to have a little time” sort of thing – one reason why I am trying to get back to putting something up at least once a month. For a while there there was no time for the blog at all.
It has been thirty years, but let me see… major sources for Shadowrun / Earthdawn crossover information included a couple of adventures (I do not recommend most of them. For example, “Bottled Demon” made no sense at all, while “Harlequin” and “Harlequin’s Back” tended to basically treat the Immortal Elves as gods – and casting the player characters as pawns never really goes over well, Harlequin’s Back did include a lot of metaplanar stuff though). Quite a few of the regional sourcebooks included references as well, tracing various groups back to Earthdawn precursors. A good chunk of material was included in the previews of an upcoming book which gave Shadowrun statistics for the various Earthdawn races and some stuff on conversions – but the game lines split before that book was ever released, and what eventually came out excised all of the Earthdawn stuff (which was quite disappointing, at least to me). The Dragons book was never fully completed (at least for that edition), but the mostly-done version was released as a free web supplement. Finally, of course, there were developers comments on the old boards, but whether or not any of that is recoverable is beyond me.
Now, as I recall the original reference was a “Prebiotic” astral barrier Now, it seemed fairly obvious that any such barrier had to be anchored to the Earth, simply because the
earth moves, and if it was “prebiotic”, that meant that every lump of rock in space ought to have such a barrier. That seemed awkward, because it meant that anywhere off-earth was pretty much safe from the horrors which gave them a considerably less “cosmic menace” feel. So I changed that to “precambrian”, which implied that life had some relationship to said barrier coming into existence.
If you want to get some more information on general thoughts about magic from the time, the Sparrowhawk Grimoire download on the Shadowrun tab has a lot of that kind of thing (The PDF is a lot easier to read and has an index and such).
Thank for the references. I’ll have a look at the Sparrowhawk Grimoire.
FastJack was interested in me publishing my version of the timeline up on Holostreets. Would you object to that?
Oh, I think the history of things is important – so I’d appreciate a link back noting that this was a previous edition version – but this is indeed some thirty years old and was posted almost fifteen years ago, so you want to refer to it post an update you are quite welcome to do so.