Time Abyss / Tabletop Games

• Age of Aquarius: Semyon Nikolaev, The Archmage and a Trickster Mentor Extraordinaire. We do not learn what exactly he is, presumably some kind of spirit that is permanently embodied, but his age is stated by Word of God to be 14000 or 15000 years.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • In 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, High Elves have natural lifespans of 1600 years, give or take about two to three centuries. Grey Elves have lifespans of 2000 years, give or take another 300, meaning the normal lifespans of High and Grey Elves float around two millennia. By comparison, the lesser Wood Elves and Dark Elves (AKA Drow) have lifespans of "only" 1350 and 1000 years respectively. A Grey Elf PC in 1st Edition AD&D can easily begin play in his 500s, the human equivalent of roughly the mid-30. This would allow your Elf PC to have lived through the rise and fall of historical human kingdoms, with parents over a millennia old and grandparents old enough to potentially have personally witnessed all of recorded human history. For some reason, the 2nd and later Editions cut Elven lifepans in more than half to a mere 700 years (which had previously been the lifespan of Gnomes in 1st Edition.)
  • Dragons are very much like this. They have about ten age categories, from wyrmling to great wyrm, which takes over a thousand years. Then they're just about fully-grown and live a few more thousand years before old age starts to set in (though their twilight years are pretty quick, and basically just leave them enough time to find a way to die with dignity). And some of them can become truly immortal.
    • Time Dragons, the most powerful of the epic dragons, are truly immortal. Able to travel in time at will, a Time Dragon could be tens of thousands of years old or ten minutes old, and still be a Great Wyrm in both cases thanks to how their age is tied to the time stream. They keep their lairs in places unimaginably distant in space and time, and rarely bother to interact even with gods.
  • All Aboleths have genetic eidetic memory going back to before the dawn of the gods. They reproduce asexually and inherit the memories of their progenitor. Since they can live indefinitely, it is possible that there are ones still alive that were around before the creation of the current universe (and yes, their race really is that old).
  • Most every planar ruler qualifies, guys like archdevils, demon lords, the Hebdomad, and the like. Such beings are immortal unless they are killed (which rarely happens, given how powerful they are) and some can trace their roots back eons, some to a time before mortals existed. And then there are beings like the Obyriths, the Baernaloths, and Zargon the Returner who ruled their respective planes before the current rulers took over.
  • The 92nd layer of the Abyss, Ulgurshek, is actually a living creature, called a draeden, who is currently trapped because the Abyss grew around it. It's stated that it was ancient before the Abyss started to form.
  • Liches are very powerful wizards who turned themselves into undead monstrosities to live far beyond their normal lifespan. Some of the most notorious examples in D&D include Vecna, creator of the Hand and Eye of Vecna, Acererak (creator of the Tomb of Horrors) and Larloch (one of the single most powerful mages in the Forgotten Realms, where The Archmage is incredibly common). Liches can exist for millennia, having personally experienced things even most elves only know in legends.
• Exalted:
  • The Celestial Exalted themselves live for a long time, but only one of the currently existing crop actually meets the 5,000-year minimum age requirement for this trope: Chejop Kejak, head of the Bronze Faction of Sidereals. He has the distinction of having been born at the very start of the First Age, making him literally as old as history itself (anything that happened before the First Age is per definition prehistoric). These Celestial Exalted, however, are merely very long-lived demigods. The more powerful of the gods themselves are older still, having been made early in the process of the creation of the universe, making them as old as the concepts they govern.
  • Third Edition introduces a Celestial Exalt older than Kejak: the renegade Sidereal Rakan Thulio, who was born in the time before the First Age, and who tore the thread of his destiny from the Loom of Fate, rendering himself The Ageless.
  • The Primordials, and the various beings that were once Primordials (the Yozis and the Neverborn), who pre-date Creation and all of the concepts that make it up, since they're the ones who, well, created everything. Among the Primordials, Oramus predates even his own existence. To be more precise, he is the prototype and represents the possibility of the existence of the Primordials, having known of himself and his siblings when they were merely dreams of their true selves. When Cytherea, the Divine Ignition, gave birth to herself and her Primordial siblings (arguably the first true event in the setting's chronology), Oramus came into being and said, "I was waiting for you to awaken. I thought it should never happen."
• In Nomine: Celestials can live potentially forever if they avoid being killed, and many of them have been around for a very long time. While rank-and-file angels and demons usually average a few centuries in age, some can clearly recall a time when humans had only recently mastered fire. Almost all Archangels and several Princes predate the Fall, which occurred over 22,000 years in the past, and some Superiors were among the first beings ever created and were there when God was still building the material universe.
• New World of Darkness: Certain spirits claim to have been spawned before recorded history, while a handful of Abyssal demons go back as far as Atlantis. Whether the Dark Mother was the first explorer of the Primordial Dream, humanity's collective fearscape, or the Dream itself made manifest, her children know instinctively that she still lives. The Cheiron Group's Board of Directors date back to at least ancient Greece, while the Strix were kicking around during ancient Rome (as were some particularly ancient vampires, some of whom could conceivably stretch back further). Osiris has been hinted as still being around; if true, this would make him the single oldest living creature on the planet (inasmuch as Prometheans are alive). The Fae have been screwing with people for all of recorded history, and since the realms of the Kerberoi are largely immune to the ravages of time, it's practically impossible to know how old they are (prevailing wisdom is that they are all innumerably ancient). The Judges of Duat, Anpu and Ammut have been around at least since the time of Irem, almost six thousand years ago. It's conceivable, if improbable, that a mummy might have been active for the majority of that time as well. And the God-Machine may have brought human civilization and technology into being just so that it would have a means to modify its own processes and boost its Infrastructure.
• Numenera:
  • The game is set about one billion years into the future. The main feature of the game are artifacts from earlier periods, collectively called numenera, which are based on technology that is like magic to the contemporary people, whose knowledge of history reaches back only for the last thousand years. Given how far in the setting's past the civilizations responsible for the technology rose and fell, the titular numenera can be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years old, many likely predating the formation of the setting's single supercontinent.
  • More specifically, the intelligent octopi who live in the oceans are an extremely ancient species, old enough to have seen at least some of the great ancient civilizations rise, flourish and either die out or leave. This is part of the reason they do not interact much with other species — from their perspective, none ever last long enough for any meaningful interaction to occur. This also applies to individual octopi. They managed to make themselves ageless long in the past, and many octopi are thus very old indeed. Their current queen, for instance, is over a million years old.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Demon: The Fallen: The Elohim (an umbrella term for both angels and demons, though only the Fallen are present for the Time of Judgement) may be the true Time Abysses of the oWoD: they have been around since the dawn of time and one of their Houses was in charge of creating time in the first place. You'd think that the endless years spent inside the Abyss, the absolutely empty prison of the Fallen, would count as suspended animation of sorts, but no: part of their punishment by God was that they remain fully aware of the void of the Abyss and of their own utter impotence until the end of time. No wonder they hold a grudge against the Big One Upstairs.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade:
    • The Antediluvians — so named because they were the only vampires who survived the Biblical Flood. They aren't so much vampires as they are undead gods by the time of the modern age, and they can do truly mindbending things with their power. The Gangrel Antediluvian, for example, apparently earthmelded with the entire planet, and slowly sank deeper as time went on, gently rocked in her slumber by the Earth's core.
    • Elimilech, a 4th generation Malkavian antitribu and Seraph of the Black Hand, has an embrace date given as Ruth, 1:3 — because he's supposedly the husband of the Biblical Ruth, whose death is mentioned in that verse.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Triad, the Wyld, the Weaver and the Wyrm, are also this, being the physical manifestations of Chaos/Dynamism, Order/Stasis and Entropy/Destruction, respectively. In fact, the Wyrm actually spawned beings who are personifications of its thoughts and feelings, children by its standards, that are still old as time itself.
  • The Gehenna supplement features an optional character that fits the trope even better than the traditional Antediluvians. A 3rd Generation vampire who serves Lilith, and is suggested to be the true clan founder of the Brujah, manages to escape being diablerized by displacing himself from time. However, something goes wrong and he is sent on the extremely slow path back to the present, living and being fully aware of over 100,000 years passing.
• Pathfinder:
  • Given its origins as an offshoot of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, what was mentioned under its entry mostly holds true; the Aboleth, for example, were the instigators of Earthfall, which destroyed their uppity puppet Azlant over 10 000 years in the setting's past.
  • Elder sphinxes are generally older than most mortal civilizations — most of the ones alive on Golarion predate the Age of Darkness, which began nearly ten thousand years before the setting's present day, and recall the days when the Precursors still ruled the world.
  • Neothelids are immensely long-lived creatures. Most living individuals predate the fall of Azlant more than ten thousand years before the setting's present, having lived for untold millennia in the dark beneath the world.
  • Since the base setting of Golarion has a history that stretches back over ten millenia to Earthfall, it's inevitable that it ends up with many examples:
    • Any surviving ruins or items from Azlant or its splinter colony Thassilon, which were destroyed by Earthfall;
    • Anything remaining from the nonhuman kingdoms of the Cyclopes and Serpentmen, whose fall predates Earthfall;
    • The elf-gates which most elves used to escape Golarion just before Earthfall;
    • The country of Nidal, whose three greatest horselords swore the eternal fealty of their land to the Midnight Lord Zon-Kuthon to save it from Earthfall - they still rule Nidal in their dark god's name as the Black Triune;
    • The Dwarven Sky Citadels, built right after they emerged on the surface from their great crusade/migration they call the Quest for Sky, shortly after Earthfall;
    • The enormous starship that crashed in what would later become Numeria did so a few centuries after Earthfall, and has yet to be fully looted and explored over 9000 years later;
• Shadowrun has more than a few. Immortal Elves such as Harlequin all qualify, having been born in the Fourth World of Earthdawn, and lived through all five thousand years of the Fifth World to reach the Sixth, which began in 2012. All Great Dragons were born in the Second World — the Age of Dragons — which was separated from the Fourth by another five thousand year gap.
• Warhammer contains quite a few examples between the various elves, dwarves and daemons.
  • The most notable are certainly the Slann, all of whom have been alive since well before the Coming of Chaos, an event which occurred around 8,000 years ago. Granted, some of them have been in a near-comatose state of meditation since Chaos arrived, but not all have, and some of the ones that haven't can rightly claim they were alive before Man existed. The Saurus, while often dying relatively early due to their lives of constant war, are theoretically as ageless as the Slann — the legendary Saurus warrior Kroq-Gar, for instance, was already an experienced veteran during the Coming of Chaos seven millennia in the past.
  • Among the elves, Malekith the Witch-King was born 4458 years before the founding of the Empire, shortly after the end of the first Chaos incursion, and has ruled over the Dark Elves for the entirety of their history, remaining a constant in the elven civil war while the Phoenix Kings of the High Elves rose and fell. He's still only the second-oldest Elf alive, however — the title of eldest most likely goes to his mother, Morathi, who's still quite alive as well and is the only remaining (technical) mortal to have been born before the Coming of Chaos. Elves don't normally live this long — Malekith, Morathi, and other Dark Elf sorcerers have lasted as long as they did entirely through habitual use of dark magic.
  • The High Elf lord Alith Anar is also said to have taken over rule of the realm of Nagarythe shortly after the Dark Elves' rebellion more than five thousand years before the setting's present day.
  • Daith, a legendary Wood Elf smith, is rumored to be incredibly ancient, having outlived even the already impressive elven lifespan — he's suspected to have already been alive when the Asrai first came to Athel Loren, and the wilder rumors claim that he was the one to forge the armor of Aenarion the Conqueror, the first Phoenix King of the elves.
  • Nagash, the First Necromancer, can possibly claim to be over 5,000 years old depending on how you count all his accumulated time dead. A few other undead (Arkhan, the original Vampires, Settra) have been around just as long without having spent any of that time dead.
  • Dwarfs, while long-lived, don't last as long as elves. However, some have lived long enough to qualify, such as the Ancestor Gods — Grimnir for certain, possibly Grungni and Valaya — and the White Dwarf — who lived more than a thousand years as Snorri Whitebeard, "died", and has been popping up ever since.
  • Even older examples are Durthu, the oldest treeman, who is as old as Athel Loren, a forest the Old Ones seeded when they first arrived on the planet over 10,000 years ago.
  • The Dragon Ogres and Dragons were native to the world prior to the arrival of the Old Ones, and their Monster Progenitors Krakanrok the Black and Kalgalanos the Black are both still alive, though they're both currently asleep. Krakanrok's oldest living son, Kholek Suneater, is considerably more active and was present at the arrival of Chaos all those millennia ago.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: A number of characters from the old Warhammer setting managed to survive its destruction and endure into the Mortal Realms' present day, making them all thousands of years old and technically older than the world they inhabit.
  • The most notable examples are the formerly mortal gods of the realms, Sigmar, Tyrion, Teclis, Alarielle, Malerion (formerly Malekith) and Nagash, who played large roles in shaping their homelands into being the way that they are. A few deities from the old world, such as the Orc gods Gork and Mork and the Dwarfs' Ancestor Gods, who were already staggeringly ancient to begin with, are also still around.
  • A few mortals have also hung around for very long times, such as the Dwarf Slayer Gotrek, who spent unknown amounts of time wandering in the Warp before reemerging in the Mortal Realms, and the Skaven Grey Seer Thanquol, who lived through the End Times and the entire history of the Mortal Realms to become what's likely the oldest living Skaven in existence.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Almost all Eldar live to be at least a thousand years old or so, and some live well over ten thousand (such as Eldrad, who was already a powerful psyker back in the early years of the Imperium), while the Phoenix Lords were around long enough to found ancient (by Eldar standards!) schools of war. Dark Eldar meanwhile are made of Immortality Immorality, and on average are even older than most Eldar. Their de facto ruler, Asdrubael Vect, is old enough to have seen the Fall of the Eldar and to remember a time before the Chaos God Slaanesh existed, making him the oldest unambiguously, continuously living thing in the setting, Necrons and the near-dead God-Emperor aside. Or so he claims, at any rate.
  • Many Chaos Space Marines are the original Traitor Marines, who rebelled against the Emperor in the Horus Heresy ten thousand years ago. However, they spend most of their time in the Eye of Terror, which due to an overlap with the Warp lacks anything resembling a linear time stream and proper causality, so the actual age of any individual is usually a mystery. For example, the two canonically confirmed oldest Space Marines are Kharn the Betrayer and Ahzek Ahriman, both being born during the Unification Wars on Terra; this means they're both over 10,000 years old (although Kharn and fellow Champion of Chaos Lucius the Eternal have both been known to be killed and brought back by their patron).
  • There's a few time abysses in the Imperium as well, mostly in the Space Marines. They're functionally immortal, and so the upper limit of their lifespan has never been tested. As an example, Commdander Dante of the Blood Angels has been serving as chapter lord for 1100 years. And considering you don't even get that rank until at least a few centuries of service, it's reasonable to assume he's even older. And those are just the ones who get names; the Dark Angels are still hunting the Fallen Dark Angels who turned traitor during the Heresy, so there's at least several hundred more marines who have ten thousand candles or more on their birthday cakes.
  • And that's even before you factor in the crippled marines interred in Dreadnaughts. Many of those marines are at least a thousand years old, spending the years asleep until need compels them to be awakened. Bjorn the Fell-Handed of the Space Wolves was actually the personal equerry to Leman Russ himself during the Great Crusade, the Horus Heresy, and the first century or so afterwards.
  • Speaking of Primarchs, if we assume the ones that aren't explicitly dead are still kicking around somewhere (and discounting the traitor ones who cheated and became demons), then there's at least six of them still alive from the days of the crusade: Russ, the Khan, Vulkan and Corax all left on personal journeys from which they never returned, and the Lion is asleep in the heart of the Dark Angels fortress monastery (which even the Dark Angels themselves don't know about). Guilliman of the Ultramarines was thought to be dead, his body preserved in a stasis field on Macragge, but it turns out he was actually healing from his near fatal wounds and wound up waking up and returning to lead the Imperium after Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade unleashed a galaxy-wide warp storm.
  • The Horus Heresy novels introduced the concept of perpetuals, or human immortals. One of these, Ollanius Pious, can remember being alive on 20th century earth. Which makes him the second-oldest human character known, beaten out only by...
  • The Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind is approximately 50,000 years old, if his backstory is accurate, although he's spent ten thousand of them on life support.
  • The Necrons fought and ultimately lost a war for control of the galaxy long before the dinosaurs died on Terra. While most of them where asleep for their sixty million+ years of self-inflicted sealing, some like Praetorians, the Flayed Ones and Szarekh the Silent King were awake the entire time.
  • The C'Tan, masters of the Necrons, were literally the oldest beings in the universe, being not that much younger than the first stars. Were being the operative term, considering the Necrons Turned Against Their Masters and shattered them into pieces.
  • The Chaos Gods are pure beings of the Warp, and thus time is literally and utterly meaningless to them. The Great Game, the perennial war between them fight for dominance of everything, has been going on for eternity and will continue for eternity, with none of them ever emerging the true victor. There's also some Timey-Wimey Ball with this, as the Warp was calm and uninhabited for much of the setting's history; Slaanesh for example came into being around the year 30,000 and suddenly he'd always been there, and the Emperor was created by early humanity as a counter to birth of the others.
  • The Swarmlord of the Tyranids has been around as long as the Tyranid race has, and has more autonomy than any other Tyranid, likely to the point of having a sort of consciousness of its own. Considering that they have attacked the Milky Way from multiple directions, it would follow that they are attacking from different galaxies, and as such have stripped multiple galaxies of all biological matter. Such a process would take eons, making the Swarmlord incredibly old. Seeing as the Swarmlord is reborn with all of its experiences, memories, and character whenever it is killed, it will continue to exist for as long as the Tyranid race does.