>Humans are the ancient, precursor race in sci-fi setting
>Humans are the ancient, vanished race that dominated the known world in fantasy setting
Ever play in, or create settings where humans serve the role of "ancient primordial/all-powerful race"? What about settings where they're just either extremely rare or outright extinct/vanished? Doesn't matter on the genre.
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Forgotten Realms' Imaskar and Netheril were ancient, vanished races of humans, as the Azlanti and various others in Golarion.
I played a Pathfinder----------------------- game where we were required to use non-human races for our characters because humans were the precursor race and created everything else in their image before going off to do precursor things. Game went great until a player got hit by a car and died. That's the second group in a row I've been in that's ended because someone died. Now nobody in my local area will accept me as a player because apparently I'm "cursed".
You must flagellate yourself, draw the Ensign around you, and paint your skin with the Glyphs. Then, chanting your mantra, offer your soul to the Abyss. If you heed these instructions well, it will look upon you favourably and grant you power: power to control, manipulate, and shape your curse. You will walk as a shepherd amongst sheep, and will be the arbiter of every action.
Your predicament is but a blessing in disguise, initiate. Continue along the Path.
srsly tho, two deaths and you're cursed? Time to move country again.
This is the case in the History of The Runestaff series by Michael Moorcock.
It's neato but reads like shit.
Yeah, a flooded world setting that turned out to be Earth. There was only one "human" character, trying to figure out where they'd all gone.
Ran a game years ago set in a magically destroyed earth with no humans.
There was evidence they once existed and what they did but no one had actually ever seen one. At the end of the game, the players learned what happened to them, they became mind flayers and got stuck in a far realm.
Played a setting where Humans had created a galaxy wide empire a few millennia prior. Basically they spread out in search of sapient alien life only to discover that the most advanced alien races were nothing more than hunter gatherers.
So naturally, the humans decided to uplift a bunch of barbarian civilisations to populate the galaxy. Gradually, the Humans ceded space to these fledgling states and retreated back to their primary worlds, to watch and "benevolently" guide various factions along the right path.
So humans are extremely rare, but ridiculously overpowered. Imagine the Jovians in E.V.E. but with blackhole weaponry and way less accountability. Half of the alien empires worship them as deities and the others devote themselves to stealing their tech, which generally ends disastrously.
>>Humans are the ancient, precursor race in sci-fi setting
>>Humans are the ancient, vanished race that dominated the known world in fantasy setting
Why not both?
en.wikipedia.org
The world is populated by an array of furry races with medieval/feudal/tribal societies. Giant monsters and magic abound. Nobody’s ever heard of a human. Every now and then a strange-looking being comes along, and remnants of an ancient precursor civilization with highly advanced technology are uncovered.
Centuries ago, humans unearthed the remains of a primordial monster. They use its DNA to create a range of furry slave races and begin creating superweapons. One thing leads to another and one scientist fuses with the primordial god-like monster and sets the slave races free, while also wiping out regular humans through a combination of genetic superpowers and orbital super laser.
I think it'd be neat to run a game in the setting.
I'm slowly working on a setting where in a very far past, humanity had colonized the entire galaxy, became a type III civilization and then managed to fuck things up. A galactic cataclysm happened and most of civilization was wiped out.
The surviving systems lost all contact with technology and rapidly regressed to barbarism. Past genetic experiments and thousands of years of isolation made humanity evolve into many different sub-races and in some cases even evolve into something else.
Its a low-technology space-faring scenario where remains of old technology are treated as magic and there are ancient man-made planet-sized intelligent telepathic super-computers that are treated as gods.
Besides gaming, I'm also thinking about writing a few short stories with it.
There's a sci-fi game, HIC SVNT DRAGONES, which is about the solar system after humanity has fucked off to become posthuman god-things (or died, no-one's entirely sure) and its "children" picking up the pieces and living their lives.
Unfortunately, it's a furry game.
I play games to escape the real world, not be reminded how it probably works/will work in the 20 millionth millenium.
Fragged Empire has this premise. They made the Archons, a race to inherit their empire, who in turn create a bunch of races, one of whom rebels and creates the Nephilim (the far right race).
I do like how this setting at least justifies why the "aliens" look human, i.e. they were designed by creatures who in turn were designed by us.
Kinda? In a setting of mine, humans actually managed to unify at one point. Leading to breakthroughs in technology that left the rest of the universe on it's ass, which ultimately amounted to the technology to scan brainwaves and recreate human minds perfectly in machines. So SOMA before I knew SOMA existed. Only they were housed in giant space stations called ARC Stations because god i'm so creative.
Then, when humanity's home solar system was destroyed because some other aliens freaked the fuck out over it, it destroyed the exact technology to recreate it and everyone who actually knew how to do it- who were an extremely select few in the first place. Any attempts to reverse engineering existing ARC stations ended up destroying them, and it became too valuable to risk trying it on any more.
So long and short,
>humanity essentially created their own super advanced, "progenitor" technologies that everyone in the galaxy relies on but no one knows how to recreate, but got fucked back into the stone age and has no idea how to get back to that point.
I dunno, i thought it was kind of clever.
>Ever play in, or create settings where humans serve the role of "ancient primordial/all-powerful race"?
You mean like 40k?
Pugmire
That would be the old ones user
>primordial
>all powerful
That would be chaos, user.
That would be both of those, anons
A concept I've always wanted to see for scifi is this
>Humanity begins exploring the stars and colonizing the galaxy
>Find almost no signs of life, the vast majority of life they find is single celled, the life that isn't is still nowhere near sentient
>Humans are lonely and begin using genetic modification to create other sentient species as equals so humanity won't be alone in the galaxy
>Event takes place where humanity is driven to near or total extinction
>Every sentient species in the galaxy was completely uplifted by humanity, and the vast majority are humanoid if not rubber forehead aliens or different coloured people.
At least a ton of aliens looking like humans with head spikes, tentacles or ridges makes sense now.
CATastrophe
I tried to make it sort of like the aftermath of the fall of Rome. All the aliens are influenced by the old human culture, all of them use technology lifted from the old human empire, and all the biggest alien empires see themselves as being heirs to Humanity's legacy. Think of it like the post-Roman kingdoms/empires in Europe. Except, none of the aliens look anything like humans, though human imagery, especially hands and faces, are used extensively in all the major post-human cultures.
I've always wanted to do a Bionicle game,Its a popular theory the ancient precursors in that were humans.
In fact in development one title thrown around for it was Afterman.
That's literally the backstory to Star Trek, just with humans being one of the uplifted species.
Toying with a concept, but I can't tell if it's stupid or not.
Facing a xenocidal campaign against a seemingly immortal enemy, some of the few remaining races (governed by a super advanced race of humans) fled to the dark corners of the universe. These 'Protohumans', who created mundane humans originally as a source for slave labor and extensive genetic modification, decided to free their subjects in the face of total extinction. Since they were bred basically as livestock, it was assumed that they would cap out at the bronze age. Among these inferior humans, several other subject races (or what was left of them) were also left with us. A race of predatory blood suckers, a race of lycanthrope-esque people, you see where I'm going with this.
Well, there were so few of them, they weren't able to keep up their numbers up. But due to human genetic manipulation, we were able to reproduce and absorb those xeno races into our own.
Basically, a low fantasy sci-fi with alt. races being explained as xeno hybrids. I haven't thought of how exactly vampires would work, since it's not passed genetically, but I'm not even sure the idea is worth pursuing.
It's not bad, could be neat with some fleshing out. Sounds kinda like the Pac from Known Space/Ringworld
Engine Heart
Funny enough, a lot of my ideas end up having been done before in things I've never seen or read.
It's why I like running ideas past people, first
...
>Unfortunately, it's a furry game.
This is the endemic problem with these settings. It requires you to create a non-human primary species, and most people can't do that for shit.
The only easy compromise is having humanoid races with aesthetic changes (e.g. anthropomorphic animals), or extremely humanoid aliens (e.g. Mass Effect, Star Trek, and Star War's aliens).
Inevitably, people complain either way. If it's animal-based, you get the cries of antifurfags saying that it's injecting a fetish; if it's xenomorphic then you get the cries of 'realists' campaigning that evolution doesn't work that way.
Ultimately, I prefer the latter despite being a closet furfag, but most worldbuilders can't make a group of species that just... mesh well. They're ultimately all archetypes taken out of proportion, and they usually get some weird superpower that unbalances everything mechanically.
I mean, it's not a terrible thing and your idea isn't exactly the same, just similar. The Pac were precursors to humans because humans are the adolescent form of Pac Protectors and the symbiotic plant that forces them into their final stage died out. Humans speciated on the Ringworld because no one had brought things like scavengers to their idealist artificial world. So its not quite the same, I just happen to have been rereading Ringworld and thought of it.
OP here, this is fucking fantastic. Who wrote this?
came here to post this. citation is TNG S06E20, "The Chase."
I need to put this in context, because that sounds silly given that there's a name on the cover. I mean to ask, did someone on these boards create this?
Albedo. Based on the Erma Felna: EDF comic from the 80s.
>Humans went into space thousands of years ago
>Expanded rapidly because no other species were remotely on their level
>Humanity has been on top for as long as anyone can remember
>They've gotten lazy and stopped advancing because they don't need to push themselves anymore
>Suddenly, a new alien race bursts onto the scene
>They're short-lived, violent idiots with a huge chip on their shoulders, but are still somehow challenging humanity's dominance for the first time in literally thousands of years
Would you play in this setting?
>A galactic cataclysm happened and most of civilization was wiped out.
The surviving systems lost all contact with technology and rapidly regressed to barbarism. Past genetic experiments and thousands of years of isolation made humanity evolve into many different sub-races and in some cases even evolve into something else.
So All Tomorrow's but with less body horror?
FUCK YES. SEFY!
>Humans
>Stopping at one point any point with weapon development
I wouldn't fuck touch that game, because we're always trying to find new ways to kill even in peaceful era's.
Reminds me of this short film
youtube.com
Exactly what you described... Humans were the ancient precursor race, practically seen as Gods.
They work well as a sort of superclass that only functions well in the game setting in symbiosis. Sort of like 1e classes.
It makes sense mechanically if their differences are so bizarre to the normal human as to be mostly useless in most situations. I had something figured out once.
Just making cats and dogs and shit is so much easier and just werks so why bother?
Our DM once made us play a campaign in his homebrew med-fan setting, which contains five races, the humans being one of the two largely least numerous specie. The other one being a race of "orcish" tribal honorable warriors who lost their greatness when a divine cataclysm struck the heart of their civilisation many years ago.
The main antagonist of the campaign is a kind of mysterious plague corrupting living things, transforming them into monsters a bit like the indoctrination thing in mass effect.
At the end of the campaign we discovers that the plague is a kind of IA coming from a very ancient wrecked starship, which was apparently a human colony ship.
And the plague was a heavily damaged bio-engineered IA programmed to be launch on the planet to wipe all sentient races so humans can then colonize the planet.
(the orcish race previously mentionned was almost wiped out when a large part of the ship split up from the hull and crashed into their homeland)
>because apparently I'm "cursed".
You are user. You're surrounded by idiots who don't understand probability and lack good judgement. Time to move, before one of those idiots gets you killed and then blames their stupidity on 'ZOMG! The Curse!'
I got it from a thread on Veeky Forums similar to this one.
I'm living in that setting.
Giganita?
Let me guess, British? Or Italian?