Does your setting have a hilariously irresponsible precursor race? Tell me more about them

They are a coalition of three different species colloquially known as Greys, Titans, and Tall Men. Together, they oversaw and controlled the lesser species shaping events as they saw fit. They ran into a problem though. Despite their power, they were not powerful enough to control everything as they saw fit. The lesser species had become too many in number to influence subtly and too advanced. So the Coalition went back in time to a period where the other species were far inferior and "fixed" a number of problems. They also dropped their own technology in the past (for themselves) in order to have an even more advance future. This scheme had two results.

1. The lesser species were made more powerful. One of the "problems" that was fixed was that the lesser species all gained sapience on the same planet just as the Coalition gained sapience on their own planet. This was an issue because the lesser species never made a coalition and just kept on overpopulating and killing each other. The Coalition spread them out over several planets which just gave them more resources and space to gain power.

2. The Coalition made vast technological advances and started playing God. Like any good precursor civilization, this got them in a world of hurt when they basically said "we are beyond death" and made a machine that immediately teleports, rebuilds, and resurrects their dead (and does this autonomously). Of course, the machine protected itself with a giant fleet and then promptly broke turning the capital into a nightmarescape of infinitely resurrecting cyber-zombies that increase in number by the second.

The Coalition still exists at a fraction of its former power, still mucking about with the affairs of "lesser" creatures. Now they've basically said "fuck advancing in tech, we remember what happened last time" which has given the other races time to catch up to them. It's only a matter of time before a final confrontation happens.

They were actually trying to be helpful, and warn future societies of what was going on, how to fix it, and how to stop the great evil from fucking with it.
However, their warnings are in archaic languages and are literally buried under a mile of ice due to what they failed to prevent. At least, those that the dwarves didn't recycle into their own architecture.

They do, however, explain how to fix the problem and avert the end of the world.

Several, actually. Being hilariously irresponsible is why they're Precursor races in the first place, and not the extant ruling powers.

They grew decadent and corrupt, abusing their power and fighting among themselves. They would often oppress their own people, and power would sometimes become increasingly centralized as their leaders began to see themselves as gods. This led to several contradictory efforts to remake existence in their image and force their ideals on one another. Rebellions and harsh countermeasures became increasingly frequent, among both their own people and their servitor races.

Some remnants do still hold influence, but they're being pushed out by Human expansion.

The Olympians , so named for the listening post discovered inside Olympus Mons, are the reason why +90% of life in the galaxy is reasonably biochemically compatible, and why a lot of it looks sort of humanoid. They were generally massive narcissists, and wanted to create lesser races that would look and act like them, and that they could lord over with little fuss. They also conducted a lot of questionable science and had a lot of half assed inefficient systems prone to malfunction and catastrophic failure. Both of which were left for their 'descendants' after they either ascended to a higher dimension, or were eaten by some sort of cosmic space jellyfish from said dimension

The twist is that the precursor race was actually something closer to half elves rather than ancient humans or ancient elves

>>now we have catgirls
was shit until this, 10/10.

...

It has an Earth god that has an eternal grudge out on elves. In the primal ages the gods took pity on the races and taught them to survive and magics.
The elf tribe declined the earth gods help, thinking the dirt and earth beneath them, as a result they do shit in deserts and caves n sheet. Caravans fall to mudslides and settlements are hit by freak sandstorms and the odd earthquake.

Smug bitches.

>Race now known as the Godless
>Used to be creatures of immense magical power and technological advancement
>Decided to integrate magic and science together by making machine enhancements for themselves
>The process of converting a person drove 99% of the population mad
>The 1% that kept their sanity through the conversion realized their mistake and nuked the world to kill themselves
>However, they made themselves durable enough to survive nukes.

Unless you mean that the elves are causing those things to caravans and settlements, that has nothing to do with precursor races and just sounds like a passive-aggressive way to shit on elves.

This sounds awfully familiar to the Phantasy Star JRPGs.
Good! Those games rock and it's a fun setting. I literally learned to read through Phantasy Star IV.

Well it was related in that the gods taught the mortals how to do stuff.
And you always have to think of new and interestinf ways to shit on elves.

There were several and this current civilization is on it's last leg

>Does your setting have a hilariously irresponsible precursor race? Tell me more about them.
Okay:

>be god-like wizard kings who killed the creator gods
>enslave and breed all other races
>get bored and disenamored of dealing with slaves and slave work.
>all tech is keyed to Precursor DNA
>breed a race of slavemaster slaves with high levels of Precursor DNA so they can use tech and handle slaves
>now only have to encounter pretty, superior looking slaves and can ignore unpleasant concerns
>still treat slavemaster slaves as the inferior chattel they are, just give them better living conditions and the ability to use some of their magic and technology
>WhatCouldGoWrong.jpg

>Modern day humans "oopsed" into an energy source and magic
>Created dragons fueled by the emotion of despair trying to figure out how it worked
>Dragons proceeded to genocide humanity and then die, letting their magic into a now lifeless world causing it to come back to life, but more magic than before.

In the end the OG humans got what they wanted, they just all needed to die first so the dragons would run out of food.

My setting had a bunch of angels known as Watchers who were supposed to guide the races of the earth, but they decided instead to become gods (they practically were anyways) to the people and kinda dropped the ball.
Most of them ended up getting killed or imprisoned by archangels, others are now known as Penitent and are basically nameless hobos who try to fix wrongs But even though some Watchers die, they're not killed. It's possible to bring them back to life through often such convoluted and riddled ways that most of the time it's done by accident. Or is it?

First it was the kobolds, who caused the hyborian age with a war, then it was the dragons they made who took credit for making kobolds and then made other races kinda willy nilly by trying to improve on humans and such

Dragons and Giants. They were at war with each other since the world began, if not longer. Nobody knows why, they just were.
They were also both functionally immortal, until murdered by the other side in some fashion.
They created super weapons to murder each other more efficiently, super fortresses to defend against such super weapons, which led to an arm race that nearly wiped them all out.
Most of the super weapons and super fortresses were rendered useless either by being damaged in the crossfire, the operators being killed, deliberate sabotage to deny it to the enemy, or a combination of all three (the enemy can't use it if only I can make it work!)
Once their population was down to single digits, the Dragons created the Dragonborn from their scales, the Giants created the Dwarves from rocks and both said "Go fight our war for us while we sit here and scheme."
This went on for a long time. Eventually, the Dwarves got sick of being used like bullets, turned on the Giants and killed them. Presenting the head of the Giant King to the Dragon (as at this point, there was only one) the Dwarves asked for peace. The Dragonborn rejoiced, but the Dragon perceived it as a trick and attacked the Dwarven diplomats. But, upon doing so, a great explosion engulfed the Dragon, killing him and destroying the Dragonborn capital.
The Dragonborn claimed the Dwarves did trick the Dragon, while the Dwarves claim the Dragon activated some trap in the Giant King's head (not unheard of). Of course, the Dragonborn said they set off the trap deliberately, the Dwarves claim ignorance (why didn't it activate when they killed him?) and so on. The war thus continued unabated, until outside forces intervened.

People in the present still find ancient fortresses and terrifying weapons made by the Dragons and Giants and they can be dangerous even in their damaged or inoperable state. A lot of the time, what makes them dangerous now wouldn't be considered a hazard by their creators.

Yeah. They accidentally created angry, immortal, nigh-unkillable beings and couldn't deal with it, so they effectively hit a reset button on the planet in hopes of getting rid of them.

They didn't

>every culture's deities often have common themes of 'gardeners' who rescued the culture/race from certain death
>gardeners actually transport races when their universes go FUBAR and need to be destroyed
>they are all transported to a ringworld inside a pocket dimension
>basically a giant ass sapient zoo
>ancient artifacts are either older saved races who went extinct because the gardeners don't actually check the garden that older, or mechanisms that keep the ringworld in check

>mfw all my players browse Veeky Forums and this was meant to be a surprise

Elves
>Mastered magic and technology to unprecedented levels
>Don't even bother traveling through space. Instead they bent reality until the worlds they were interested got warped and fused into their mother planet
>The 'Earth' of this setting is far larger than most solid planets normally are, but Elf technoorcery keeps that shit from happening.
>Factions start to form within their ranks that fight with each other
>Rather than risk their own lives, they take animals, and uplift them, twisting their forms down to a base level to make them into a new race, sentient and changing.
>Appear as gods to these new species to guide their society.
>Deliberately manipulate the placement of these species so that rival faction uplifts eventually run into and start fighting each other.
>Most races have a myth where their gods abandon them for their sins, starting a mass pogrom of civilians over perceived sins when in reality they all got on their 8th dimensional ships and fucked off to another plane of existence.

The closest I have is an era of time when the evil elder god said to his brother, the good holy god, "fuck you and fuck your time space" before engaging war with him, leading to an unsupervised amount of wizards with the ability to travel to the future and back. So they occasionally find whole modern day buildings underground, or things from modern time turned into medieval usage. No future stuff since the future people realized that "oh shit there was time traveling wizards" and put up a 4th dimension shield against things from the future going to the past.

The history of my setting is the history of incompetence.

>First race created by the progenitor was a group of very powerful beings made of pure magic called the Lazians
>They accumulate magic power as they age and after thousands of years become immensely powerful
>Until they undergo a process of magical mitosis and become two new individuals.
>They were created to guide the younger races that were destined to rise in the future
>Instead they split into two rival factions that fight so hard they almost destroy the world
>In the end one group eradicates the other, now there is peace
>Other races show up, Dwarves, Giants, Elves, and Dragons, and a myriad of smaller races
>Lazians decide to try genociding them because they can, but fail horribly
>The younger races are able to survive until only The great races, Dwarves, Giants, Elves, and Dragons, now rule the world, small races, including humans get fucked even harder then when the Lazians were around.
>Dwarves lose interest in the surface world and focus on their tunnels and clockworks
>Giants use magic to automate their entire society and get lazy and soft
>Elves turn crazy evil as they lust for power
>Dragons start infighting as they grow increasingly greedy
>Elves summon demons in an attempt to acquire greater power and end up becoming their slaves
>Massive demon army destroys the giants and dragons civilizations and the Dwarves try to make a spaceship to flee to the moon, which crashes and burns, killing them all.
>Demons now rule the world

Shit gets better and eventually humans end up on top but all of this fuckery probably could have been avoided.

Basically harder-scifi SG: Atlantis without the Stargate verse or ET origins.
>Humans evolve
>shit happens about how it did IRL plus or minus some dragons until about 40,000 BC
>First round of civilizations were created
>due to glacial and climatological cock dickery, most of these groups die out or regress all the way back to the Neolithic by 11,000 BC except the Atlanteans
>then their astronomers detect a fuckoff huge comet on a collision course with Earth, equivalent to the Dino-killer in size
>mass evacuation of the planet occurs, with generation ships so large they're really O'Neill Cylinders with fusion drives at one end pointed towards various nearby star systems at 0.1c
>a few Atlanteans stay behind in stasis pods to wait out the catastrophe and reteach the survivors
>they kickstart the history that is familiar to us, particularly in Egypt where civilization appears out of nothing in short order
>fast forward to 2067 AD
>NASA's first FTL ship is taking its maiden voyage
>quick jaunt out to the Jovian colonies and back
>everything goes as expected
>cheers all around
>then a ship 20 times its size appears out of nowhere, and starts broadcasting in what seems suspiciously like FM radio
>"Congratulations, little brothers. You've taken your first steps beyond the cradle."

I have a d6 fantasy game idea that I'm kicking around.
First came the Dragons, and they had a glorious utopia, then the madness started to spread, so they created the Giants. Now most Dragons are insane and kill crazy, and the ruins of there society are all over the place.
So the Giants build their society in the ruins of the massive structures left over from the Dragons, and they start tinkering as well, create humans, orcs, elves and dwarves, then THEY get hit with the madness, only they saw what happened to their parents, so they bred their creations to be largely immune to the madness. Now most of the Giants are insane and kill crazy.
Dwarves are librarians / mages (only ones strong enough to carry the tomes of the giants)
Elves, with their nimble fingers are tinkerers
Orcs do food production and with their green skin do photosynthesis.
Humans are overseers / protectors and can do a bit of everything.
if the races interbreed they create halflings that are madness personified and need to be killed ASAP

>Universe began
>Firstborn race emerge
>Secondary races show up, get enslaved
>Create Utopian society after millions of years of supremacy and dicking around in space
>Use their janky-ass language as the basis of all creation by pinning 'names' to everything ever made like some Multiverse-wide OCD neat freak
>This is how magic is formed apparently (using/bending/'rewriting' the names changes how it works or something similar)
>Able to open portals between locations with this (imagine That Corridor Scene from Scooby Doo.)
>They try harder, then start travelling between dimensions
>Whole race get stuck in the "in-between" of dimensions because of some fuck-up, leaving slave races behind
>The slave races start fighting for supremacy, start implanting their 'language' into all creation like their masters did
>They start fighting their masters in the 'in-between' for supremacy/revenge/etc
>Masters win because fuck you, but the slave races have implanted some of their 'language' into the universe, so they win anyway
>Due to space-time-dimension war fuckery, or general dimension hole-ripping, holes between the universe form
>Weird shit starts seeping out of these holes, Firstborn freak the fuck out
>Descendants of the slave races (or altogether new races) are 'ascended' by the Firstborn in order to fight this threat
>Basically Cthulhu Space Janitors
>Cthulhu Space Janitors form their own factions, some form cults because the Firstborn are still seen as gods
>Some dick finds out a way to gain more power from the Firstborn by killing other Space Janitors, Highlander-style
>Cthulhu Space Janitor Highlander is a thing
>Also a new universe is formed every two billion years because the "big bang" is actually a funnel of superheated atoms from other or previous universes.
>Cthulhu Space Janitor Highlander Factions fight for the right to be ruler of that new universe.

I didn't know where I was going with this. But I think it's cool.

>tfw your setting has more extinct precursor races than actual contemporary races

Y-you guys like fossils, right?

The Elder Dwarves. Pretty standard stuff for the most part, they created a bunch of servitor races, namely the various races of Petty Dwarves, may have created humans, and engaged in widespread acts of genetic vandalism across the planet. One time, they accidentally poisoned their gods by sacrificing too hard. Eventually, the Elves (who are so beautiful due to genetic engineering that they've reached a second, much deeper uncanny valley and are therefore absolutely terrifying) came along and decided that they wanted the planet, and the Elder Dwarves, not being prepared to fight them, left peaceably, leaving behind the Petty Dwarves and all their creations.

The Elven empire which had kicked the Elder Dwarves out promptly collapsed, leaving those Elves stuck on the planet to inbreed and nearly die out. These elves also engaged in precursor dickery, as they tried to use human genetic stock to create more elves, resulting in the Low Elves, creatures that look kind of like elves (they're objectively less beautiful than their creators, but that makes them not terrifying but instead extremely attractive to humans) but are basically what it would be if deer were people. They're barely capable of language or tool use, and while they can theoretically interbreed with humans, their anatomy can't handle the size of the resulting hybrid babies so these hybrids can only really come about from a human mother. The hybrids are just exceptionally pretty humans that are almost unbearably retarded.

Kind of man size tadpoles with arms. Figured out how to open a dimensional gate to somewhere else. Where? Who cares! Open that shit! Angry horrific abominations from totally alien space-time happen quicky followed by an apocalypse.

My precursor races? Sure.

Humans were born, grew and spread from their little green dot across the stars over the eons, at appreciable fractions of lightspeed they managed to spread out into an empire of sorts among the barren, lifeless planets of their barren, lifeless galaxy. Being humans they of course thrived, grew mighty, and fell to decadence many times until the stars grew cold and dim, and all things drew to a close.

Most either didn't know or didn't care that the universe was dead, but a few managed to find cracks in the old, worn out fabric of space stretched to nothing over the eons. And when they looked through they found a way to send something back.

Enough was changed that that future never was, and humanity raced across the galaxy on filaments of a great and mysterious web stretched between the stars. Still, it was barren, cold and lonely until humanity turned their attention to divergence, tinkered with their genome, and spawned new life over the ages from simple chemicals.

It took too long, in the end. They made simple things, new breeds of Man, but never a truly -alien- creature to share existence with. But they, too, found the way to send something back.

Humanity has always looked to the stars and dreamed. And now, as their homeworld begins to heal from the scars of the most devastating war it has ever seen, they find not just an impossibly provident network of FTL routes, but green, vital worlds teeming with all manner of creatures, plants and much stranger things.

They must be out there somewhere, looking out at the stars and dreaming. We will find them. It's only a matter of time....

Demons created humans and a universe for them to live in so that they would have something besides each other to terrorize. When humans die, they go to the demon realm and are promptly tortured for all eternity.

However, one day there was a fuck up and humans got hold of magic, promptly spread it amongst themselves and have since invaded Hell, with mixed results.

It's ancient aliens all the way down

my upcoming setting? Technically there's two:
>First is the Dragon Civilization which went out ten thousand years before the game will begin.
>Dragons made a whole bunch of cool shit, enslaved other races, mutated others into something they liked (kobolds and dragonborn originally were other races once).
>A Prophecy foretold of some terrible disaster causing the dragons to shit themselves and go full prepper mode.
>The selfish hoarding (well, more hoarding) of their resources caused their empire to decay and they started to fight among themselves.
>A traitor may or may not have spurred this on and made sure it escalated uncontrollably.

More recently
>elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, etc. Pretty much every race and kingdom of said races were at war with one another
>One exiled prince who lost fucking everything (like, pretty much anyone similarly in his position) is tired of the pointless wars and decides he's going to end things
>Goes full God Emperor during the end of the Dark Ages on the continent, building an army and uniting the kingdoms and races one by one with swift brutality and strategic genius
>Continent is united under a single empire and shit's all jolly good for about fourty years
>Emperor starts losing his mind and slowly becomes more and more tyrannical and paranoid
>THE RESISTANCE FORMS!
>The resistance is promptly crushed by an army of demons, risen undead, and corrupted by a black taint that turns them into discount shaggoths
>remaining parts of the race go 'fuck this shit' and abandon the continent in a massive fleet of ships
>Eventually, and after many many ships are lost, survivors end up on the shores of a new continent and battle with natives for awhile before everyone calms their tits
>80 years pass and the exiles have set up pretty nice and well, also the queen wants people to start exploring the continent more for settlement locations to expand

And that's where things basically pick up.

I haven't actually implemented it into a game yet, but I had this idea kicking around.

The first liches weren't evil. They were actually Desert Fathers-type arcane scholars who sacrificed livestock to prolong their study of the mysteries of the universe. Unfortunately, a few of their students realized that they could get more power by sacrificing humans and they ended up destroying the nicer liches.

Now, the remaining nice liches are hermits who sealed themselves inside tombs to ponder the infinite in isolation while their bastardized successors try to take over the world.

>aliens

More like ancient natives

>Yes, yes, you've reached the top of the Kardashev scale...
>HOWEVER

It's a post post apocalypse, so the precursors were human

Current generation humans.

What happened was that when one of them gained the power to grow more powerful from absorbing heat and entropy, they decided to nuke his position before he became an unstoppable threat. When that failed, they tried it again with more bombs.

And that's how the powerful, easily irritable and abusive god of the setting was born.

holy shit that sounds like such a retarded plan
>oh gee he gains power from abosrbing energy
>NUKE HIM HAHA THAT WILL WORK GAIS!
i wouldn't be surprised if humans did it desu

...

Lemurians, large golden-looking people designed to embody the virtues valued by each of the gods. At one point they got so sick of the god of evil's shit that they sent their most powerful adventuring party into heaven in a rocket to murder him. The other gods tried to talk them out of it, preaching about the cosmic balance and that kind of stuff, until the hated god of evil arose and quit the universe in an angry huff. It turns out that this really did upset the cosmic balance, the world collapsed, and the remaining gods had to start again with not enough manpower to do it right this time.

youtube.com/watch?v=5R0G_RZykVA

extremly relevant

> Humanity reaches technical singularity
> Creates carefully balanced set of AI gods to make universe awesome
> Somehow half of lameass Easter eggs got released
> The least fucked up god now is god of "chaos, progress and tentacle rape (TODO: remove last one)".
> Yet, somehow universe still isn't destroyed.

Inb4 this is a plot of a porn game I want to make

Technically not a 'race' but a collection of hilariously irresponsible precursor empires

> Be Europe analogue
> Sail to New World
> Set up colonies and shit, fuck over natives, send all your prisoners and poor people there, etc.
> Actively encourage population growth to the point of point of total instability because muh high birth rates for muh racial superiority (Mussolini and his fucks did something similar)
> Oshitwatdo.jpg
> Overhaul colonial agriculture. Crop rotation? We don't need that.
> Fuck it isn't enough
> Invade neighbouring Old World powers for land, undergo extremely rapid industrial revolution to keep up supply lines
> War goes on for ages. Trench warfare standstill
> Fuck, now the colonies have entered Dustbowlx2
> Have to stop this war right the hell now
> Invent superweapons that spray nasty Agent Orange's big brother over miles of land. Mutates and corrupts anything it touches
> Fuckfuckfuck the enemy had the same idea wat do?
> Die
> Oops, we forgot to invent the telegraph
> Colonies have no clue what the fuck is going on. Old world just stopped replying one day

>

> Dust Bowl is still going strong, economy was overreliant on manufactured goods from the Old World and falls apart.
> Dark Age happens. Regress into nomads and small farming settlements where farming is still possible
> Three cities that broke off from the Old World empires are basically fine since they already had independent economies
> Wall off from desert to prevent mass immigration/raiding and overpopulation
> Desert dwellers slowly build back a semblence of civilization based around the waste tossed over the walls of the Three Cities, the scant resources they can gather themselves from the desert, and what skilled smugglers can get our of the cities

> Meanwhile, Old World is still radioactive hellhole
> Wait, fuck, fallout spreads
> Northern coast of New World is irradiated by fallout and nasty crap carried over from the Old World. Keeps spreading, but none of the desert factions can do squat about it and the Three Cities are too isolationist to give a damn

Why yes, it DOES have a hilariously irresponsible precursor race! They mixed high technology and magic and blended them together to the point that they were indistinguishable, but despite their advanced philosophies and powerful magic, they just couldn't fucking stop fighting each other. Just, war war war, all the time.

They came from the furthest moon of a gas giant, and they terraformed the other three inhabitable moons to use as a great big ant farm of sorts, resulting in the civilizations of the playable peoples in my game. There were factions that wanted to turn those peoples into slave races for use in war, and others who wanted to let them be and gently guide their societies to see how they would develop. Others wanted to just plain wipe them out for being inferior.

Eventually, shit got so bad that the greatest mage among all the precursors said "Fuck it, I've made a spell to end all war, forever" and he cast it. The result was that the soul of every member of the precursor race was pulled from its body and formed a collective entity, which promptly used its newfound power to ascend into the celestial realm, never to be seen again, leaving behind a dead world and fledgling civilizations on the other moons.

There was one precursor who survived, and of course it's the guy who was bad enough to be dumped in an extradimensional prison for a couple centuries for his crimes against nature and heaven. He's been using his vast powers to infect the minds of the weak-willed and those with evil in their hearts, trying to get them to gather the World Seed crystals, which are the only precursor artifacts that hold enough power to free him from his prison.

It doesn't quite fit the thread's theme to a T, but I'll post this anyway.
Also still developing and probably horrendous
>Two immense galactic powers
>Both totalitarian shitholes that hate each other to death
>One is >muh tradition muh stronk while the other is some sort of bread and circuses wankery
>There are skirmishes every few years
>The average small skirmish involves a few battleships on both sides, and both make extensive use of dumb AI-guided drones
>Both empires have researched space WMDs
>Things escalate
>All out war happens, both regimes decide that letting the enemy live is the greatest sin of all/a massive bore
>Thus, after one month of tremendous war, the two empires wipe each other off the map
>Bloody enormous power vacuum ensured, 95% of their population is simply erased
>Each "Empire" now has a number of colonies in the single digits, and all are completely isolated
>Remaining AI Fortresses, being programmed only for war, continue "fighting" and sending drones
>Space pirates are now free to prowl the spacelanes, some even form small raiding empires
>Some areas of space are made completely impossible to traverse
>And so, twenty years after the Greatest War, humanity enters the galactic scene by making first contact with some random traders