31-JUL-2007

A Thousand Years Ago… Nothing Happened.

The world of IMPERIVM is only 693 years old. This seemingly random number was arrived at after painful historical searching, debates, and most importantly – an ardent desire to ban the phrase “A thousand years ago…”

Ancient societies used that phrase whenever they wanted to set something in the distant past, but didn’t want to specify a date. Therefore, every single event of import happened one millenia ago. In games that continue that practice, it really makes for difficult continuity control and doesn’t let the audience get a solid feel for the history of the world.

With IMPERIVM, we wanted a young setting. One that would have world changing events happen within memory of living characters. And one that would still have mythic adventures occuring from time to time. Take the myth of Phaethon, a classic tale of “Can I borrow the car?” gone horribly wrong.

Phaethon was Helius’ son – at least that’s what Phaethon’s mother told him. Push comes to shove, and Phaethon wants to drive his father’s chariot: the sun. The teenage boy wasn’t experienced enough to handle the four headstrong horses and plunged towards the earth, scorching the fields and drying up rivers and lakes. Yes, he died, but so did most characters in Greek myths, so that’s nothing special.

What would it be like to be out in the garden that day as the sun fell from the sky? How would that impacted your life? What would you tell your children about that day? In this world, that could have happened a mere 40 years ago as the gods themselves went to war. While we don’t have the Phaethon story in Imperivm, we do have many others that have happened recently and will happen over the course of the game. By the way, our sun is a bowl of golden fire carried in the talons of a giant bird.

So be prepared for a different setting – one that doesn’t have many of the standard fantasy touchstones embedded in its history. I’ll leave you with something to ponder: The skies have no stars and they never have had any.