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There's The Songsparrow. Who is basically a modern day popstar who sings ballads for noble courts and peasant alike and dodges angry husbands.

One of the world-shaping events of my setting is an incredibly advanced pre-human civilization creating a machine that had to destroy all their enemies, on a metaphysical level.
This led to a last-ditch attack before it could be completed. In current version, the attack is performed by combined might of Angels and Demons, despite the whole setting revolving around the clash of Light and Dark.
I can't put a finger on it - would presenting a threat that made Angels and Demons work together, even if briefly, actually make for a cool moment in lore, or it would undermine the central conflict?

>>96743297
I have a setting with periodic cataclysms on a smaller time scale (basically the same as what you suggested initially, like a thousand years or less) so I can say what I've done at least.
I think it's a good way to make a setting dynamic and interesting.
>It feels stupid to fit multiple such cataclysms into a timeline measured in thousands of years. If a cataclysms destroys everything...
It doesn't have to destroy everything. Mine are usually strong enough to basically reset civilization back to a baseline, but it doesn't erase all the knowledge hoarded before the apocalypse. If any pockets survive, they pretty rapidly are able to resettle and it can mean a civilization/society in a bad spot at the end of an era that manages to survive all of a sudden ends up in a dominant position. Seers and prophets can also potentially foresee the disaster and prepare for it, making the position even more secure.
>why care about the struggle of good and evil if the slate will be wiped clean
The obvious answer would be to make the 'evil' responsible for the cataclysms, but either way focus on the continuity between eras too
>Not to mention forests and animal populations which just wouldn't have time to spread again.
Unless you're talking about something on the order of the dinosaur-killing asteroid, you'd be surprised. Some study said that life had returned to the literal Chicxulub crater within three years after impact. And that was just on an entirely different scale in terms of how destructive the event was. Treat the first couple hundreds years after the Cataclysm as a "recovery" phase, like forests are growing back, new animals are recolonizing the lands. It can be an interesting period to play around with as well for a setting.
>Plus for long-lived races, such as Dwarves and Elves, this would be stupid.
I personally cut the lifespans of my dwarves and elves, but I think playing with the idea of the "proud race perseveres through the cataclysm" is cool too.

>>96745477
Also to extend my reply a bit, I feel like fantasy doesn't really treat a thousand years as the massive amount of time it really is.
1000 BC was just after the bronze age collapse - a thousand years later Augustus was ruling the Roman Empire. A thousand years after that and William the Conqueror was invading England at the dawn of the High Middle Ages.
A thousand years ago for a premodern society is basically into the realm of legend or myth already.
A cataclysm every thousand years? Well shit, that means there would have only been 4 cataclysms since the Pyramids of Giza were built - which are constructs so ancient even the Ancient Greeks considered them to be basically straight out of the age of myth.

Is this the thread to discuss VTTs and map-making tools? I'm looking at RPTools' MapTool, free and open-source, not sure if anyone got any feedback. I want to playtest an rpg with my cousin and we live in 2 different cities so need VTT until we meet up again. Needs to support hex grids cause muh GURPS.

>>96745477
>>96745534
Those are fair points. Thank you. I think I'll compress the timeline to a more manageable level. 100k years since creation of the world, with most humanoids emerging just 10k years ago

Hi guys, I very infrequently visit /tg/ (like once or twice a year, if that)

Anyways, I want to make a game that's basically a dungeon crawler, that scales into party management and has 4X elements, with simulated economies and factions and stuff. I've been using ChatGPT to roughly hash out and refine ideas, since I can basically throw shit at it and it'll group things together and narrow down how I *actually* want to approach things. Anyone else doing that sort of thing?

Since I wanted to have a focus on deep finance (contracts, derivatives and the like), I figured the easiest way to have it mirror modern conventions was to just use magic... but if magic was so widespread, it would create other issues. So then my thought was to have some kind of extraplanar being manage stuff, so I ended up going with Djinn - they don't care about mortal politics, are very contract/oath oriented, powerful magicians, and being nonpartisan allows them to just build wealth up (as opposed to say, vampire lords or dragons or demons, though they might participate to an extent).

The other hurdle I need to clear conceptually is how to justify dungeons popping up everywhere and why collecting millions of gp in loot won't distort the economy. My thought here was that depending on local conditions (stability, religion, wealth) would affect the kind of dungeons that would appear, such as bandit dens appearing near borders with low stability, that sort of thing. And lairs would probably just have a ton of mundane crap in them (a few coins, art objects, weapons) and the wealth would come from fulfilling contracts or developing the player's own faction economy.

For magic, I'm leaning towards D&D sort of logic for now, having a discipline (transmutation) and a catalyst (divine, arcane) as a placeholder, until I get more of the fundamentals figured out. It's something I've just been sketching out on and off for a few years, but this is the first time I've really posted about it anywhere