Quote Originally Posted by Falcos View Post
...Does all of this make sense?
Quote Originally Posted by the_david View Post
I heard of someone doing this by picturing a room. I never heard about somebody doing this with music. There's probably a name for this, but I just don't remember.
Memory Palace.

You can certainly get better at recalling lots of information that way, especially how things are connected. I haven't really seen this brought up as a DM thing, since the DMs of old found note taking to be sufficient and never really tried to transcend it, but if this fits your expectation for how much prep work to do and you're only fleshing things out with the kinds of details you know how to encode into your memory palace, then there shouldn't be any major problems there.

Quote Originally Posted by jqavins View Post
Post apocalyptic, post-post apocalyptic, or post-post-post-post-post apocalyptic, it still assumes some sort of apocalypse in the past, which has never been the way in any of my settings. And they are not in some golden age, either. They are in an age of slow but steady progress, with new spells, new items, better metallurgy, etc. It's not a golden age now any more than it ever was. Powerful magic items are scarce now and always have been because the super powerful mages who create them are scarce and are not all interested in crafting anyway. "Artifacts" are creations of the gods who don't give them to the mortal realm more then once every century or two (or are made by people and creatures of similar power who don't coma along often and see above about the mages.) So things are largely as they've been for centuries, with a bit of progress here and there. And over millennia the progress adds up, to leave the inventor of arcane magic behind.
That's really weird. How do you get a Medieval Europe without without there having been a Roman empire? How do you get into an iron age without there having been a bronze age?

If there's no collapse then the setting should have civilization basically everywhere, and any time a powerful mage passes away their apprentice can just step in and take ownership of all their powerful artifacts and go on continuing their work and business. You wouldn't have anything that was ever abandoned or lost, and the mercantilism would be through the roof.

...or everything moves at a sloth's pace and people are only just figuring out how to organize armies for the first time while they've advanced wildly further than that with their metallurgy and arcane arts. Are you doing a "The Invention of Lying" kind of thing?

It's not just that things are like they've been for centuries. If there hasn't been a collapse then things are as they've been for a million years, and it's weird to so utterly lack anyone willing to make power plays for so long.

But I must just not understand something about this.