Have you ever gave thougyt to what the ancient civilizations in your setting would be like?

Have you ever gave thougyt to what the ancient civilizations in your setting would be like?

Yeah, they're hedonistic dicks who made a bunch of animal-man races as slave labor and soldier castes and don't give any thought to the dark magic they're allowing to unspool into the material world because they just assume they'll be around forever.

I wiped out High Elves in my setting because of a cataclysm of some kind that forced them out of their ancestral homes, to eventually branch off and become the "Wood Elves" people in my setting were familiar with, who were culturally, just Mongolians riding around in the plains.

Yes, considering they're half the plot.

They created extensive structures in preparation for the ice age they set off to kill off other civilisations. They then shoved off to a demiplane to leave their home to it's fate, with plans to come back later and take over.

As a way of assuring they had somewhere to come back TO, they left instructions on how to prevent the astronomical catastrophe that might happen.

No ancient civilizations. The God=DM=user created the world from scratch and the "ancient" artifacts and legends has only one purpose. To test the faith of pious folks.

But dinosaur bones are real

Dickass Lizardmen for the most part, they were big into slavery and alchemy, their blacksmithing was terrible tho and their culture wasnt very friendly.

They also had a strange relationship with their gods, all their gods were evil. Not that they worshipped evil gods because they were evil, they were mostly dicks in the same that romans occasionally were dicks, no they acknowledged the evil gods and the need to appease them or lock them away in some way.

Eventually they got done over by a mixture of an ice age and mammals taking over.

Now their Gods are popping up in the "modern" world and wreaking havoc whiel nobody knows why

Sounds simmilar to mine, some of the guys from said Ancient lizardmen decided that they wanted to continue living so they teleported a part of their empire into the future.

This didnt work tho and now they are perpetually stuck behind in time, sort of a langoliers situation.

They constantly try to influence real time to get someone to clean up their mistake so their empire crashes down somewhere and they can continue beeing dickass lizards.

This is part of a plot of my campaign

Their technologies weren't actually that great, they were just widespread thanks to magic portals being readily available.

Cybernetic scarabs.

There was an ancient island civilization that had a stranglehold on all ocean trade that was run by mages that kept their power stored in massive crystals stored in the capital. Their society was literally crushed when another, larger city landed on top of their capital destroying the crystals which cut the survivors off from their magic. As a final act of revenge, they sacrificed themselves to put a curse on the ones that destroyed their civilization.

As for the city that landed on the capital, they all survived the crash landing somehow and have no idea how they got there and rebuilt the area. Due to the curse, they can not use magic in any form, magic ceases to function around them. The eventually took advantage of this curse and produce the best witch/mage hunters.

I whig histories that shit. Ancient civilizations were universally awful, demon worshipping slaughterfucks who also were doing all they could to escape the domination of sentient monsters like dragons and genies who enslaved and ate them. The discovery of wizardry changed the nature of society from a collective society dependent on the power of human sacrifice to a less bloody, more individual society built on individual accomplishments. City-States gave way to more amorphous relationship ships between people, most of whom agree with stamping out the worship of demons and elder evils.

A lot like real life.

Tangentially related question.

If dinosaurs (or any animals before them) had civilzations, would we even be able to tell? Would all evidence have degraded on such a huge timescale?

Maybe you'd find a fancy pot or hammer locked in ancient coal.

You'd see evidence of surgery or dentistry on the bones. And the ground layer would contain signs of pollution and industry, even after millions of years.

Crazy merfolks who criss-crossed the whole continent with their subterranean water tunnels. Due to a huge shift in policies they became a religious super-state trying to find their god. They succeeded but only after sacrificing 3/4 of their population to it. The rest were subsequently eaten by said god.

All their tunnels are still there. Pristine as they were when they left.

What about tribal scale?

The modern world is built atop a honeycomb of underground ruins of progressively older civilizations that most people don't know are there.

The continent is trapped in an unending cycle of destruction and rebuilding because of a primordial god of destruction and chaos that's stuck in the planet's core.

Every few generations the currently reigning magic guild or emperor digs too deep and lets it out for it to rampage across the surface obliterating everything it can before it goes back to sleep and waits for the next fool to awaken it.

Meanwhile, the mutated, degenerate descendants of destroyed civilizations still live in the buried ruins of their ancestors.

You'd still be able to find arrowheads and stone tools, or sculpture.

1.) Sloth Bear termite-farmers, their thalassocracy was driven by a need for wood and rare delicacies in the form of larger insects. Why they went extinct is a very creepy mystery.

2.) Pterosaurs dropped the asteroid belt surrounding the planet in order to wipe out their sauropod rivals far below. In doing so they inadvertently doomed themselves, but not before a few brave souls made their way to the remaining asteroids and hollowed them out. Those hollow worlds above contain the remains of Pterosaur technology and easily explain the strange ruins scattered across the planet's surface. However, getting into the void above involves getting past the gigantic pterosaurs that perpetually circumnavigate the globe, long whiskers and gaping beaks scooping up the rare cloud of aeroplankton if not foolhardy adventurers.

3.) The Parasite Empire of Ib-Yig ruled hordes of hosts hundreds of thousands of years ago but it collapsed for unknown reasons. Their former hosts either died out or reverted back to their pre-Ib-Yig state. Only a few ruins remain, but they're truly aberrant in nature, with breeding pools, mounds of parasite cysts and more unsettling structures. The parasite are far from extinct, however. They've found new hosts (pic related) and control them with hormones and subtle neuronal taps, pursuing alien goals that may or may not involve bringing back Ib-Yig in all of its primordial glory...

...

I'm an autist for worldbuilding, even if it's never seen, so yes absolutely.

The Areonetian Empire (analoguous to Rome in-universe), based near Lake Alba in the city of Trasin Vor, managed to expand and conquer nearly half the known world at the time. They expanded West, conquering the native Naga and Kobolds that were resident at the time, expanded east, conquering the Pseudo-Spaniard human tribes of the Thumb, and from both those regions headed south and back towards the center, encircling the Ironbone mountain range almost entirely, with only the native Gool tribes of central Dootchlund surviving until the Empire started collapsing.

Of note, while Kobolds tend to be the ones blamed for the collapse of the empire, it''s generally agreed among historians that it was probably the Elves and the Gool pressuring the empire on two sides, combined with emperor Nero's mismanagement, that ended up collapsing it.

There is no lizard-person Kobold conspiracy, goyim.

I drew a sketch to accompany this post.

>Dootchlund
Real subtle.

The oldest civilization was made up of Dwarves, and almost nothing remains of them. They lived exclusively underground making great works with their Goblin slaves all across the world while never stepping foot on the surface. They were the biggest and most advanced right until they eradicated themselves in the Cataclysm. By sheer coincidence, one of their magical great works interacted with another magical great works directly above on the surface created by a burgeoning Elven nation, the Riddari. The resulting magic-antimatic catastrophe eradicated all life below, and above, turning the whole region into a lifeless wasteland. As far as the Riddari knew, one day a quarter of their nation spontaneously died.

Yet somehow, the Goblin slaves of the Dwarves survived and made it to the surface with whatever they could grab. There, they revitalized the wasteland and founded their own nation, the Rusilo Empire.

Really depends. And not on the traces themselves, but the ongoing geological processes.
A string of ice ages can considerably fuck up traces of things that were too recent (in geological terms) to end up fossilised and from tribal scale you need to remember about relatively small population and its density.

So it's very unlikely to have traces left on such long period if you want to have them tribal. Not fully impossible, but really hard to come by.

Sounds like your typical pulp mega-dungeon setting.
I like it.

Why should it be subtle?

The world is an excuse for Orc Ninja vs. Elf Pirates in ironclads and airships, with a few people having laser assault rifles from pre-historic mad scientists.

Dootchlund is one of the more subtle aspects of the world. Not to mention this is all literally a millennia old history, and all the placenames have changed since.

It's actually the setting for a novella/short story series I'm working on, which I see as a sword and sorcery and kinda pulpy thing so... yeah.

Still kinda vague and undefined as I work out the ideas but basically dungeons atop dungeons atop dungeons all on top of a looming threat that will be revealed as the story goes on. Quaint peasant villages unknowingly built atop multiple layers of ruined precursors inhabited by violent and twisted mutants that have long since ceased to be human.

I've come up with three different ones actually, all of which have had various effect on the setting.
The first and arguably the greatest is Dor, the not!egypt of the setting whose culture laid the foundation for the culture of the south western parts of Middle Sea and the north western tip of the Zalaian continent and have influenced as far afield as Unam and the great river systems of the heartland of the Arsanid Empire. Dor managed to survive in different iterations for millenias and even managed to regain most of its ancient power as a result of the collapse of the Empire of the Tetrarchy.

Unam was a civilisation centered around the many rivers of their fertile region in northern Zalai from which they grew to becoming the hegemon of the lands around south-eastern parts of the Middle Sea. The most noteworthy of their many gods was a particular species of giant freshwater fish that lived in the area. The unamian people are pale skinned with dark, often black, hair which the men keep short on the head but grows large fluffy beards. Unam's time of power ended when the suddenly emerging "proto-tyrannian" empire conquered them.

The "proto-tyrannians" (PT) is my working name for the people who's culture slowly grew into the tyrannian one. Originally from a backward part of the south-eastern Middle Sea they were an unimportant people untill one of their many chiefdoms managed to unite the tribes. Using revolutionary military tactics that made great use of their heavy bronze armoured hoplites they quickly annexed the majority of the lands around the eastern Middle Sea, founding great cities and building marvels of architecture. Their downfall is said to have been caused by their own hubris as a result of a terrible curse cast by the whole population of the last soverign unamian city that eventfully fell to the PT which resulted in a collection of natural disasters that devastated the realm of the PT and sank much of it into the sea.

Hmm, looks like I shouldn't write at night.