Spiral Worlds Timeline - 13.8 Billion Years Ago - Today Timeline

History from Before Creation to the Campaign Present

The Spiral Worlds Timeline is the binding history of the campaign setting: a mythic Earth where gods, titans, spirits, monsters, lost peoples, mortal kingdoms, plague, empire, magic and ancient law belong to one continuous past.

Myth is not merely a story invented after an event. Myths preserve encounters, migrations, wars, catastrophes and divine interventions that happened in the world, although poetry, damaged records, political propaganda, rival calendars and the passage of time often distort the surviving account.

A monster remembered in legend may have walked the Earth. A divine quarrel may have changed a coastline. A royal genealogy may preserve a real descent from a god, giant, spirit, dragon, Fey visitor or planar power.

This page is the setting’s single master chronology. Major transformations appear here in their proper order. Detailed regional events belong on the relevant God, Bestiary, Plane, people, kingdom, city or historical-age page.

Campaign Present: 1454 CE

The default campaign present is 1454 CE, one year after the fall of Constantinople and the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War.

The Black Death has emptied settlements, broken households, transformed labour and inheritance, and left burial grounds that local communities cannot always maintain. The rarer Red Death has produced failed burials, corpse hazards, revenants and disputes over the lawful treatment of the dead.

Cannon and gunpowder are changing siegecraft. Mercenary companies seek new employers. Steppe khanates remain dangerous. Maritime powers test longer African and Atlantic routes. Temples, courts, guilds and royal houses preserve immense authority, but none can pretend that rank, wealth or sacred office guarantees protection.

This is not the modern world waiting to happen. Gods still answer. Spirits still claim rivers, mountains, houses, graves, roads, storms, forests and bloodlines. Monsters may hold inherited territories, recognised customs or political relationships. Law depends upon realm, office, status, oath, personhood, local authority and the power able to enforce judgement.

The campaign present is the point at which every earlier age becomes playable. Ruins retain ownership claims. Ancient treaties remain binding. Relics return. Dead rulers demand recognition. Families inherit divine debts. Roads cross land whose older inhabitants never accepted conquest.

Dating and Canon

Exact dates are used where the setting accepts a firm chronology.
Approximate dates are marked with “c.”
Traditional dates identify widely remembered dates that may combine history and legend.
Mythic sequences preserve a binding order even where no reliable mortal date survives.
Formation, stabilisation and settlement are different events. A plane may exist long before its characteristic civilisation develops.
Divine realms are territories within older planes. Later gods establish courts, palaces, afterlives and prison-domains within planes they did not create.
Peoples do not share one developmental timetable. Technology, settlement, law, magic, political organisation and urbanisation develop differently by region and community.
Mixed settlements are specific political arrangements. They arise through treaties, ports, mines, sanctuaries, conquest, refuge or shared danger rather than being the assumed condition of the world.

Timeline Navigation

Cosmic History

Earth and Deep Time

Ages of Mortal Civilisation

Pre-Time and the Void

Before the first measurable instant, ordered reality does not exist. Mortal concepts such as distance, duration, identity and cause cannot describe this condition safely.

The remnants of prior creation survive only as impossible memory, Qlippothic persistence and things that refused to end when their universe ended. The Void Between Universes is not an empty region inside the present cosmos. It is the failure of the present cosmos to apply.

The first Eon begins when undivided possibility acquires the capacity to become distinct.

Cosmic Eons I–XVII

Mortal dates cannot measure the earliest Eons. Their sequence is binding: Positive and Negative Energy precede the Astral Plane; the Astral precedes the Elder Gods; the Outer and Elemental Planes precede their later outsider civilisations; and later pantheons establish realms inside planes they did not create.

Eon I — Primordial Thought: Before Time

Existence is an undivided possibility: a single unexpressed Idea containing every future distinction. There are no planes, gods, elements, worlds, distances, separate beings or measurable time.

Eon II — The Great Collision: First Polarity

Opposed possibilities collide. Matter, energy, space, duration and consequence become possible. The Positive Energy Plane and Negative Energy Plane form as the first enduring cosmic realities.

The Great Collision releases raw elemental potential, but the completed Elemental Planes do not yet exist.

Eon III — The Astral Awakening: The Moment of Reflection

The opposed Energy Planes begin to recognise and define one another. Relationship, separation, distance and reflection become possible. The Astral Plane awakens.

Sentient ripples and proto-minds arise within the Astral, but no true gods yet exist.

Eon IV — The Elder Gods: Foundations of Order

Great concentrations of Astral awareness become the first true gods. These Elder Gods begin the Cosmic Codices, establishing dependable principles of identity, cause, form, limit and consequence.

The Elder Gods remain active throughout the following Eons. Their Great Retreat does not occur until Eon XV.

Eon V — The First Cosmic Schism

Qlippothic powers and remnants of uncreation attack the developing order. The Astral Beacon hardens the distinction between ordered reality and what lies beyond it. The first Abyssal wound-prison opens, and the Qlippoths are driven into it.

Qlippoths predate demons. Demons do not yet exist.

Eon VI — The Forging of Cosmic Law

The Elder Gods complete the first dependable laws of name, matter, form, causality, fate, magic and repeatable consequence. Elder wardens and law-constructs serve the developing order.

Later outsider peoples such as celestials, devils, demons, yugoloths and modrons do not yet exist.

Eon VII — The Formation of the Outer Planes

Enduring principles become self-sustaining realities. The Outer Planes form. The Abyss becomes an anchored Outer Plane. Hell exists as a latent reality of tyranny, ownership, punishment and constraint without devils.

Later gods establish courts and territories within the Outer Planes. They do not create the planes themselves.

Eon VIII — Stars and Galaxies

The measurable physical cosmos receives large-scale structure. Stars, galaxies and the first material scaffolding form beneath the laws established during the earlier Eons.

Eon IX — The Primal Threads of Magic

Magic becomes a universal and repeatable medium rather than an isolated act of divine will. Living spell-patterns, dream-seeds and the earliest junctions of future Cosmic Leylines appear.

Eon X — The Elemental Foundations and Proto-Worlds

Raw elemental potential separates into the coherent Elemental Plane of Air, Elemental Plane of Earth, Elemental Plane of Fire and Elemental Plane of Water.

Their collisions generate unstable proto-world shells and begin the long formation of material worlds. Primal elementals and Elemental Princes arise. Later genie civilisations do not yet exist.

Eon XI — The Mirror Veils

Nascent material creation casts living reflections. The Fey World and Shadow Plane form, while the Ethereal Plane crystallises as a boundary-medium around material and inner reality.

Firstborn, proto-fey, proto-shadow beings and early Ethereal intelligences awaken. The Fey World does not need to be created again in a later Eon.

Eon XII — The Weeping Wound

Strain within ordered reality opens a wound towards the Unfathomable Beyond. The wound does not create the Beyond; it allows ordered reality to encounter it.

Elder Abominations and alien intelligences begin pressing against the cosmos.

Eon XIII — Reality’s Reckoning: The Elder Wars

The Elder Gods, Primal Titans, ancient elementals and cosmic engines fight breaches, Qlippothic powers and Elder Abominations. Planes are scarred, routes rupture and portions of ordered reality nearly fail.

Demons, devils, celestials, yugoloths and modrons do not participate because their peoples have not yet arisen.

Eon XIV — Cosmic Leylines and Planar Stabilisation

The surviving powers bind reality through Cosmic Leylines, runic anchors and fixed correspondences. Astral routes, Outer Planes, Elemental Planes, Mirror Veils and proto-material worlds become more dependable.

Leywardens, Runic Wardens and Arcane Heralds maintain the new anchors. The Abyssal prison is reinforced.

Eon XV — The Great Retreat

With the cosmos stabilised, the Elder Gods withdraw, slumber, vanish, fracture or become remote principles. Direct Elder governance ends. Abandoned divine works, surviving Primal Titans and ancient servitors inherit an ordered cosmos without its first rulers.

Eon XVI — The Outsider Dawn

The stabilised planes generate or mature their characteristic sapient peoples. Demons, devils, celestials, modrons, inevitables, genies, daemons, yugoloths, azatas, agathions, asuras and many other outsider lineages arise according to their parent planes.

Hell predates devils. The Abyss predates demons. Primal elementals predate genie civilisation. Qlippoths remain older than all of them.

Eon XVII — Toward Earth and Beyond: Divine Successions

Later divine generations, pantheons, world spirits, ascended beings and inherited divine lineages emerge. They establish palaces, courts, sacred estates, afterlife districts and prison-domains within older planes.

The Hellenic Titans and Olympians, northern divine houses, Pharaonic pantheon and other later pantheons belong to these divine successions rather than to the first Elder generation.

Gods and Pantheons develop separate histories, alliances and territorial claims. Similar portfolios do not automatically make gods from different traditions the same being.

Earth and the Elder World

Earth forms within an already magical cosmos. Natural history is real, but it is not empty of spirits, elder peoples, hidden survivals or planar influence. Not every prehistoric creature is supernatural, and not every legendary monster belongs to ordinary evolution.

The Dawn of Earth

c. 13.8 billion–541 million years ago. The measurable universe expands, stars and galaxies develop, and Earth forms about 4.54 billion years ago through accretion, impact, heat and differentiation.

Life is established more than 3.5 billion years ago in seas already influenced by elemental forces and primal spirits. Single-celled life, photosynthesis and increasingly complex organisms prepare the world for the great diversification of animal life.

Natural processes shape the planet throughout this immense span. Magic and elder influence exist within those processes rather than replacing them.

The Age of Awakening

c. 541–359 million years ago. Complex animal life diversifies in the seas. Predators, armoured creatures, reefs and increasingly complex ecologies spread through the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian worlds.

Fungi, plants and arthropods establish themselves on land. Forests deepen, soils form and the first vertebrates test the shore. Fishes diversify dramatically while amphibious lineages begin crossing the boundary between water and land.

The age includes the first great terrestrial footholds of fungus, plant and animal life, alongside elder sea powers, alien survivors and prehistoric peoples whose histories remain only partly preserved.

Bugs, Amphibians and the Rise of Giants

c. 359–201 million years ago. Carboniferous swamp forests support giant arthropods and powerful amphibian lineages. Reptiles and synapsids spread as climates change and the old wet world fragments.

The Permian ends about 252 million years ago with the Great Dying, the greatest known mass extinction. Most marine species and many land lineages perish through volcanic upheaval, extreme heat, poisoned air and failing oceans.

During the Triassic recovery, early dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles and other archosaurs rise from damaged ecosystems. The first giant reptilian dominions prepare the world inherited by the Jurassic.

The Age of Giants

c. 201–145 million years ago. Great dinosaurs dominate many terrestrial environments while pterosaurs command the skies and marine reptiles rule extensive seas.

Birds and small mammals diversify around the giant reptilian worlds. Forests, river systems and continental movements create increasingly distinct regional ecologies.

Ancient intelligent peoples, buried kingdoms and supernatural powers survive beside the great animals without turning every dinosaur or prehistoric ecosystem into a magical creation.

The Flowering World

c. 145–66 million years ago. Flowering plants spread, new relationships with insects develop and the last great dinosaur ecosystems reach their height.

Continents continue separating. New coastlines, inland seas and isolated regions produce sharply different animal and plant communities.

The age ends 66 million years ago when a vast impact and its aftermath bring fire, darkness and collapsing food chains across the world.

The Ashen Dawn

c. 66–23 million years ago. The impact ends the dominion of most great land reptiles and opens ecological space for new lineages.

Mammals, birds and flowering ecosystems expand through recovering landscapes. Some older creatures and elder peoples survive in isolated refuges, hidden realms and magically protected territories, but the mass extinction remains a genuine global catastrophe.

The Age of Open Lands

c. 23–2.6 million years ago. Grasslands, savannahs and steppes spread across large parts of the world.

More familiar lines of horses, elephants, antelopes, cats, wolves, bears and other mammals develop. Apes diversify, and later hominin lineages begin adapting to changing forests and open country.

Climate, continental movement and regional isolation create the broad biological worlds inherited by the Ice Ages.

The Shattered Crown

c. 2.6 million years ago–11,700 years ago. Repeated glacial advances lower seas, expose land bridges and drive great migrations of beasts and peoples.

Homo sapiens appears about 300,000 years ago. Human communities develop increasingly complex tools, social memory, ritual behaviour and regional identities.

During the Late Ice Age, peoples spread across the inhabited world and adapt to coasts, forests, tundra, grasslands, mountains, deserts and islands. Migration does not imply that previously inhabited lands were empty or ownerless.

About 11,700 years ago, the present interglacial begins. Ice retreats, coastlines change and the landscapes of later mortal history emerge. This natural transition overlaps the catastrophes, migrations and elder survivals remembered at the beginning of the Dawning Age.

Ages of Mortal Civilisation

The Ages of Mortal Civilisation describe major transformations rather than a claim that every people changes at the same moment. A city-building society, pastoral confederation, island voyaging culture, hidden nonhuman kingdom and mobile hunting community may occupy the same century while following entirely different historical paths.

The Dawning Age

The post-glacial world emerges from flood, cold and the fall of elder kingdoms. Permanent settlement, agriculture, sacred burial, inherited land and early kingship become increasingly important in several regions. Surviving peoples carry older bloodlines, relics and divine conflicts into the new world.

The Rooting Age

Settlement deepens into durable territorial order. Irrigation, storage, specialised labour, priesthood, inheritance and control of water allow villages and regional centres to support larger populations and stronger hierarchies.

The Blooming Cities

Urban centres become engines of craft, administration, temple power, exchange and political memory. Writing, measurement and monumental construction allow authority to reach beyond the ruler’s immediate household.

The Breaking Paths

Migration, trade, war, exile and collapsing networks scatter peoples, technologies and sacred traditions. Older centres lose monopolies over knowledge while new kingdoms and frontier societies create separate regional paths.

The Rise of Kingdoms

c. 2000–1200 BCE. Bronze Age courts, dynasties, temple systems, palace economies and heroic lineages reach extraordinary power. Their interdependence creates both splendour and vulnerability, ending in widespread collapse, migration and successor states.

The Iron Ascendancies

c. 1200 BCE–300 CE. Iron, cavalry, coinage, written law, roads and imperial administration allow states to govern larger territories. Assyria, Persia, classical kingdoms, Rome, Maurya, Qin, Han and many independent regional powers create enduring classifications of citizen, subject, foreigner and slave.

The Wars of Dominion

300–1200 CE. Great imperial systems divide, successor kingdoms rise and sacred institutions harden. Aksum, Gupta and post-Gupta states, Tang and Song China, Angkor, Sahelian kingdoms, Norse expansions, Arthurian Britain and fortified societies reshape the world.

The Age of Severed Crowns

1200–1454 CE. Hobgoblin-led khanates, famine, plague, revolt, gunpowder and dynastic war break confidence in inherited rule. Mali, Yuan and Ming China, Ashikaga Japan, Great Zimbabwe, the Mexica alliance, Inca expansion and the fall of Constantinople create the immediate campaign world.

1454 CE — The Campaign Present

The campaign opens in a world that has survived conquest, plague, famine, dynastic war and supernatural crisis without returning to stability.

Plague survivors inherit abandoned land. Nobles inherit debts and disputed titles. Guilds and cities compete for depleted labour. Mercenary companies seek new employers. Artillery experts sell knowledge once guarded by royal courts. Steppe rulers demand tribute, while mariners test longer African and Atlantic routes.

Temples, shrines, sacred colleges and divine households struggle to maintain authority among communities that survived catastrophe without obvious protection. Ancient treaties, abandoned estates, Red Death sites, disputed successions and nonhuman territorial claims make every earlier age immediately relevant to play.

What Earlier History Leaves Behind

Ruins: fallen cities, Titan estates, drowned courts, abandoned roads, sealed libraries, lost palaces and monster fortresses.
Relics: crowns, weapons, tablets, masks, ships, idols, bells, bones, banners, keys and cursed heirlooms.
Bloodlines: families descended from gods, giants, dragons, heroes, monsters, traitors, Fey visitors and oath-breakers.
Law: ancient treaties, sacred debts, inherited offices, burial duties, monster boundaries, guild rights and planar contracts.
Gods and spirits: powers tied to cities, mountains, rivers, storms, forests, roads, houses, graves, herds and royal lines.
Monsters: beings that survived earlier ages, returned after confinement or gained power when an old boundary failed.
Plague memory: empty settlements, mass graves, Red Death sites, failed inheritances, labour disputes and haunted roads.
Unfinished conflict: succession wars, feuds, steppe tribute, displaced peoples, divine punishment, nonhuman claims and communities never lawfully conquered.

The past is not background. It is the source of present ownership, danger, obligation and adventure.

Using the Timeline in Play

Begin with a present-day place, person or problem and ask which earlier age still presses upon it.

A village may stand over a Titan grave.
A port may owe prosperity to a sea god’s treaty.
A royal line may descend from an elf, giant, dragon, hero, monster or oath-breaker.
A battlefield may still answer to the dead.
A forest may belong to a people never lawfully conquered.
A plague pit may be a legal dispute as well as a horror site.
A modern road may cross land governed by an older divine or nonhuman agreement.

A major historical entry earns its place on the master timeline when it changes power, law, geography, magic, personhood or the campaign present. Regional detail belongs on supporting pages where it can receive the depth it deserves.

Continue Exploring Spiral Worlds

Selected Historical and Scientific References

Spiral Worlds combines verified historical and archaeological chronology with explicit campaign canon. These external sources provide useful starting points for the historical framework: