What's the most ancient civilization in your setting /tg/?
Elves? Lizardfolk? Yuan-ti? Or is there something even more ancient than that?
Tell me about them. Why are they no longer around and what did they leave behind?
>>47702686
A race of humanoid bird people who worship the sun. They call themselves the firstborn, most other people call the the Ancients. They're still around, people had thought they were all dead until explorers on the far side of the world suddenly ran into their home continent now that naval technology's advanced enough to make it across the ocean.
They've got a lot of Egyptian influences, and while their technology is primitive compared to the "developed world," their understanding of magic is incredibly advanced. Basically the "younger races" have a stunted understanding of magic and that kickstarted the development of things like gunpowder, where the Ancients didn't have any need for it, they see it as a cheap trick.
The major impact they had on the setting before the discovery of their homeland was the founding of an ancient lost colony on the original "mainland" of the setting, which was said to be this enormous magical city at the heart of a glorious civilization- at some point in the distant past it fell with such calamity that it blew a perfectly circular crater in the world that then filled with water from the sea. Nobody goes near that area anymore, it's haunted by old arcane constructs and wraiths (magical engines that had survived the catastrophe). Even the Ancients themselves don't know what happened there, though it's been implied that the leaders of the city tried to cast a fuckhuge spell that went sour. One of the first things the party got asked about when they came to the "new world" full of Ancients was the local government wanting to know what the fuck happened to their lost colony.
>>47702686
Creatures with space age tech that were creatively named as Old Ones, which are basically not!Cthulhu-folk
>Why are they no longer around
They merged with their dying creator god in a attempt of healing it, which . . . wasn't very successful.
>and what did they leave behind?
Nearly everything basically, and with their departure all the other enslaved races (humans, elves, orcs and pals) fought for anything of them, since they are stuck in forever medieval tech.
>>47702686
orcs
Demons got wind of The One True God's plan to uplift the apes, so they uplifted pigs first. Everything went pretty well for the orcs since demons are pretty open about mathematics and simple arcane knowledge. They would have exterminated humanity if God hadn't nuked them, turning their homeland into inhospitable desert.
And then the demon lords showed up since God was low on go juice and humanity had to get it's shit together REAL fast.
>>47702686
Incoherent impossibilities straining to exist alongside the notion of reality, gradually compressed and phased out by inevitable ordering of the cosmos, leaving them in their twisting void just on the reach of what is real and reasoning.
>>47702686
Kobolds are the oldest race, but I don't think you could call what they had a "civilization."
For that it's the second and third races, which were humans or lizardfolk, with some debate between their creators on who actually finished first.
Lizardfolk did (with their creator goddess' help) invent proper architecture first, so they're probably the first "civilization," but not by much as it was immediately given to humans, and several of the later races by direct divine intervention. (It's kind of a Greek-style pantheon. They were really strong and hands-on back in their youth)
>>47702686
Despite afew of the Gods disagreeing on the subject, it's almost universally accepted that the Dragons were the first on the world, hatched from the clutch laid by a truely ancient Astral Dragon.
The disagreement arises as a few of the Gods insist that the world was theirs before the Dragons first were born.
This is considered by the rest of the Gods to be matter of symantics as their own mother, the stillborn dragon, was the last of the original clutch and that the modern day Dragons and their original aunts and uncles are akin to comparing a noble, pure born elf to a sickly debased goblin.
Dragons themselves consider the Gods to be shameful children, casting aspersions on their own shared family.
>>47702686
Pre-earth humanoid aliens. They're no longer a civilization but they have a handful still roaming the universe on the backs of asteroids.
>>47702686
Humans. All other races showed up later or are just off shoots of humanity
>>47702686
There are two in my setting, but only one is actually interesting. The first are typical highly advanced ancients who seeded the other moons of the gas giant planet with life as an experiment. They were at war with each other and one guy decided to end all war forever, so he cast a grand spell that merged them all into a single entity, Third Impact style, and that entity fucked off into the celestial realms never to be seen again. It's mostly just an excuse to have some scifi elements and a large number of convenient ruins to explore.
The other civilization also wiped itself out, but for entirely different reasons. These ones were also into magic, but they did a lot of experimenting with teleportation. The unfortunate thing about teleportation is that all magic of that type involves the Void, the space between planes, a dark and strange and chaotic realm where normal rules of reality and magic don't apply.
This civilization became very good at teleportation, to the point where all their major (and even minor) cities had permanent teleportation platforms that could be used to go to any other platform, which ushered in an age of prosperity as moving between places became cheap and easy.
Then the platforms all fucked up at once and sucked everything within a several mile radius of the platforms into the Void, leaving behind great empty rifts that still have strange residual energies in them. People brave / foolish enough to explore the Void sometimes find ruins of ancient cities on floating chunks of land, the remains of that civilization.
A class of being known as Olus. They were made as servants of masters of the rolling chaos that embodies creation, but they rebelled against their masters by sealing themselves inside pockets of order that they control. Each of these pockets is ruled by a set of laws created at it's birth, and each pocket is it's own universe. The Olus serve a few different kind of roles, but mostly they act as deities so their creations are less likely to rebel against them in turn.
Their old masters, being pure chaos, cannot enter these Ordered Realms without risking destruction, since by entering they are subject to the laws of that universe, so they wait outside them until they have an opportunity to tear them apart with entropy and unmake that entire universe.
>>47702686
>Or is there something even more ancient than that?
The most ancient species are a humanoid precursor to all the humanoid races. Humans, elves, dwarves, what have you, are all genetic descendants of this species. They were all but wiped out by the elder dragons, with the survivors retreating into magical bunkers. By the time they were able to return to the surface of the world, inbreeding and magical fuckery had transformed them into the new races we're more familiar with. The ones that didn't make it to a bunker were transformed into the monster races by the magical fallout of the elder dragons.
>>47702686
Faeries. They're descended from even older, more indescribable things, but when it comes to "civilization", they're the closest thing.
Dragons are also pretty old, being the setting's analogue for dinosaurs. Fittingly, they're extinct.
>>47702686
Ancient? These things are beyond ancient. They're eons older than other race alive today. Their few remaining ruins are one million years older than the oldest in the history books. The few recovered images of them are strange things; some seem to depict creatures with vaguely bird-like shapes, others show vaguely reptilian features. But they are not the bird men, nor are they of the dragons. Their technology, their magic, was clearly advanced, but few even know where to begin with deciphering the meaning behind them. There have been expeditions into their few ruins, but time and time again, these expeditions can never reach deeper than the vast entrances.
Because the ruins are haunted.
Now, not haunted in a "normal" sense, of a spirit unable to let go of the mortal world. The apparitions that appear are beings with purpose, with minds capable of what could be described as rational thought if it weren't so maliciously hostile to those that disturb their places of slumber. Whenever expeditions try to enter the ruins, it is as if intelligences beyond have readied the entire structure to turn against them. Walls will move. Traps will spring. Monsters will appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. Horrors will enter their minds and turn the mightiest of warriors and magicians into sobbing wrecks.
Some are not deterred by these warning signs. They push onward, trying to uncover the mysteries these damned ruins.
They always, without fail, regret it.
For when they press on, they will eventually meet the face to face with one of these ancient beings, dead for longer than any can imagine and a loathing for the living to match. Those who venture too deep know the terror of the Ghosts of Tyrants.
>>47703653
This sounds like a really interesting setting
>>47702686
What if my two most ancient civilizations are still around? I mean, there's bound to have been rudimentary towns and the beginnings of states forming, but all but two have been wiped from the earth several times over. When gods literally split mountains in their war, it's kind of hard to not be collateral damage.
>>47705714
We need the help of the ancient heroes that ended their reign.Was (not was)
>>47702686
No one is sure exactly what they were, but they remember, just barely. A race of untapped arcane power, they shaped the world in the time before even gods walked the earth. They created feats of technology and alchemy not seen before or since. They bent every race on the planet to their will, and those who refused where destroyed in hours.
And one day, they left. There is little evidence here as to what happened, but historians theorize a "uplifting" of sorts; transferring their consciousnesses into a higher plane of reality, becoming more wise and more powerful than could ever be imagined. However, during the ritual, something went wrong, and the souls were torn apart, then scattered to an earthly purgatory forever.
You can still see them sometimes: humanoid figures made of fire, burning with the heat of 10,000 years of hatred.
I haven't put that much thought into it yet, but my world has had numerous prehuman races. The oldest would probably be a race of sentient opabinia that emerged in the Cambrian explosion.
>>47703447
>A race of humanoid bird people who worship the sun.
Sounds like the Arakkoa
>>47702686
Probably the Giants. They've been around longer than anyone can remember and once had a flourishing empire. Then they fought the Dragons, no ones quite sure why, and attempting to run their empire on a war footing for so long against the Dragons basically broke them.
The dragons are still around, nowadays the only remnants to the Giant Empire is a small zone filled with an abnormally high amount of Hill Giants. Most of the rest of the Giants have just fucked off to the ends of the earth to leave in isolation rather than rebuild.
As for their influence, they were rather gifted in animal husbandry and working with natural magics. They basically engineered half the monstrous species in the world. It was making them fertile that really fucked the Giants. Makes em faster to breed, sure, but also made them harder to control. Some say theres still some Giant fortresses left undiscovered. If there is any, its gonna be full to the fucking brim with monstrosities.
its the elves. Because it is always the elves.
>>47706411
Somewhat. Their religion's more like "celestial" worship than straight sun worship, They've got troops who have fullplate armor that's enchanted to be permanently red hot on the outside faces, solar priests who can sling fireballs and teleport groups across distances, these giant Necron monolith/Egyptian obelisk things that drift overhead and forcibly evolve everything beneath them. Lots of ancient magic, lots of Protoss influences of all things.
>>47702686
They were false gods, anon - I wouldn't pay them any heed.
>>47702686
Kobolds.
No, seriously.
Those little scaly darlings have survived in their Volcanic warrens for longer than any other race in the universe.
Every other race has had civilisation collapse at some point in time, but the Kobolds have endured.
Primarily because they're more than happy with their lives, and the only ones who leave are usually those who want to travel the world.
They are entirely unrelated to Dragons, who were created much later.
In fact, Kobolds are the best historians in the world. Simply because they've recorded every single tale told by the adventurers who have returned over the course of thousands and thousands of years, and keep them securely engraved on large stone tablets.
Probably the gods and next the humans, because theyre both civilisations that predate the world.
Titans and dragons are the most ancient races of the world itself.
Orcs are the most ancient race, though both elves and goblins claim otherwise. The people of the tusk were the Titan's first attempt at creating a sentient race. They were unable to decide who would have the responsibility/honor, so they passed it to the Unchainable Black Sky Boar, the Titan of Strength, Freedom, and Will. He made the orcs in his image, both physically and spiritually. They have great strength of body and mind, but despise any attempt to control them. This has prevented them from forming any great lasting empires, so they persist largely unchanged for millennia. The only orc rulers of note are either inspired shamans or warlords with enough resemblance to Grandfather Boar to rile his people into a great horde
Got a lot of those, cause the world is very, very old and the setting and its stories are mostly about delving back in history and fighting the consequences of a obscure past. But the foremost of those who were born on this earth are probably the First Thinkers, a race of semi-sentient arthropods who spawned the first civilization after the great antediluvian monsters they were parasitical of went extinct. They are nowadays only known to the most mad and heretical scholars and mages (in an Abdul Al Azred way) who dare explore the depth of the earth in search of the antique subterranean cities the First Thinkers left behind long after their natural death, and are thought to be the very origin of the First Evolutionary Cycle of this earth.
For comparison, Humans, Elves and the likes only appeared recently in the last days of the Third Evolutionary Cycle.
>>47702686
A race of humanoid, known as the Algraadii that were among the first living organisms to dwell within the rational universe, who were guaranteed survival by a compact with the Creator god, as long as they were willing to accept and be rendered mortal. They were put to sleep until the world was ready for them to dwell in, all the while the Daevas of Respite and Will gave them dreams to teach them how to survive in the new world.
Eventualy the they got proud in their power and their innate control over the stream of life and magic. They enslaved their own kind, enslaved any organisms that showed even the slightest signs of sapience, and even created their own servitor races to fulfill their own roles and desires. They saw themselves as most elect of all beings, started experimenting and making abominations out of the Flow of Life, weaving and warping it into new Cancer magics, all to fuel their increasingly decadent society and culture.
Eventually, the most cunning and powerful of these Masters of Cancer, who called themselves the Virtual Optims, began to devolve from mere hedonism to self destruction and resentment for life and mortality. They attempted to sunder the heavens themselves, and undo the weave of reality and beckon in the horrible and unspeakable things from outside the sane universe.
In the ensuing war, where their former slaves, religious sects, and other primordials sought to overthrow them for their treachery, they managed to open a small rip in the rhyzeal bark of reality. While it was soon closed within a few minutes when the last Virtual Optim was alas slain, crushed under the weight of a Primordial's hammer, the damaged had allowed whispers of the insane beings from beyond sanity to filter in, and were eventually known as the 3 Intrusive Movers.
At the conclusion of the war, the Algraadii had to be punished for breaking their compact. thus their connection to the Flow was diminished and they became the Fae and their works destroyed.
>>47702686
Humanity, after blasting themselves back into pre stone age, the planet suffered poorly from the horrors unleashed by wwIII, almost going extinct.
Demons
>>47703688
I love this.
>>47702686
Skeletals
>What's the most ancient civilization in your setting /tg/?
Dragons. Though I might want to change that name to distinguish them from the animal-like dragons.
>Why are they no longer around
Because the gods fought against them, also created the fantasy races as their soldiers. They were the rulers of the world, but the gods thought it was their time now.
>what did they leave behind?
Not much. You can imagine that all sources are heavily biased against them. There are some survivors, but they are all ancestors of that one dragon that betrayed his kin. So they are prime assholes that fight each other over the remnants of their civilization.
The Ogres in my world descend from a race that predate any other, though they have seriously devolved since those days (this is tied into an ancient historical event called The Bloodwrit, which banished Demons from the world). They currently exist as three large tribal lineages inhabiting the lands of the race they descend from, treating ancient structures as holy sites.
Minotaur, Elves and the Illithid are my most ancient cultures, with the Elves being the most wide spread and powerful of those (Elves in my world occupy the largest swaths of lands in six kingdoms and a seventh kingdom, the Blue Elves, are the most powerful naval force in the world). Blue Elf is my trade language (I don't have a 'common' tongue).
The Minotaur may have been as powerful as the Elves, except their history is replete with instances of them being conquered and enslaved (their historical ages are divided by these enslavements), so they have constantly had to rebuild over and over again.
My Illithids inhabit a desert on a South Western continent rather than the same one as the other races above, and are a major power in their area. I never liked the idea of 'evil' races, so every race, on the whole, is mostly neutral. I nerfed the Illithids and have made their four kingdoms Babylonian/Mesopotamian inspired.
In mine, the oldest civilised races are gnomes, halflings and dwarves.
Unless dragons or something predated them
>>47702686
>>47702686
Humans. I got some inspirations from the Abrahamic religions. The humans cannot use magic, since they evolved from nature and are linked to the environment whether they like it or not. To make up for inability to use magic they have high physical prowess and lived up to 600 years. At the beginning it was only them but later on creatures made from Magic and Aether such as the Elves, Dwarves, Fae, Yokai, have already appeared and made their own nations.
A war between the magical races happened and it resulted in a shitstorm on the world, with monsters, demons, death creatures being unleashed.
Nature got pissed of at this and mutated every single one of her creatures. Bears became massive able to cleave through armor easily. Wolves became 5-6 ft tall and can chomp a elf in half. Humans, being another animal that evolved from nature, mutated as well. Their skin color changed to a purple. Their lifespan dropped to 60-80 years. And they lost some of their physical prowess. But they gained Psionic powers as a way to defend themselves.
At modern times the demons were pushed back and the portal sealed. Many of the magical monsters were defeated, however they still roam the wild. The death creatures are hiding somewhere waiting for their time to kill all life. Civilization has recovered with the Yokai Empire currently being the largest and strongest nation.
Currently 95% of humans lives in a continent the size of North America. It is ruled by one nation called Estrala, an absolute monarchy ruled by the Al-Khadi family, originally a family of Alchemist whom made an immense fortune by making the Elixir of Life, causing human lifespan to extend to 140 years and extend their youth to 80 years.
So what do you all think?
>>47702686
My oldest civilization is still alive and running in most settings. It's just that nobody knows it is.
I have these special old dungeons called forgotten ruins, and sometimes adventurers, monsters and humans populate them, they're very VERY hard to find and always have endgame tech and magic even on the first level, not to mention the wonders below.
Thing is, most endgame tech and magic is tied to that place, and sometimes players may arrive to empty ruins, dusty halls that seem to be inhabitable and maybe were inhabited except they're improbably old and shit, and when empty give a huge sense of dread.My first civilization are the ruins themselves, they'll sprawl into dungeons, cities, floating islands, even artificial planets once they grow old enough; they reproduce absorbing the energy that sprawls from points when planes superpose, intertwine or collapse. The ruins themselves are intelligent and have undetectable but strong alignments, although they won't harm inhabitants, even those that they don't like. They reproduce in phases that might be boosted by smaller organisms, such as dwarves, dragons or liches.
The beastmen and trolls. They had a couple of cyclopean stone cities and lots of carved stones and such, not a particularly advanced lot, but they were there before god showed up and fucked everything up from their perspective.
Regular humans from the times before an alien spaceship holding an extragalactic abomination crashed into the planet and destroyed most complex life including all human civilization. Several countries from these before times left behind complex machines which acted as seeds, restarting the biosphere earlier than it would have been and reintroducing most animals and plant species that were destroyed, including humans. Fallout from a broken part of the alien spaceship resulted in the world now having magic. Current human civilizations have religions and creation myths based on the various methods by which the original humans preserved the species. It's been a long time, many thousands of years, all electronics no longer function and what few written texts are preserved are undecipherable, but scavenged pre-apocalyptic steel makes for better tools than that produced by contemporary metallurgy.
It would be unlikely but I hope my players don't stumble upon this. It kind of a spoiler, and it wouldn't be too hard for them to figure out i'm talking about their game. If you're playing a game setting with a Capybara necromancer as one of the gods...
Discounting a certain special snowflake entity that exists outside of time, in my D&D setting the ancient race is these guys.
Tank-sized, semi-nomadic Eurpyterid-esque people from a world far from the main setting. They are born as basically animals but gradually develop sentience over the course of millennia. Warrior poet types with mastery of autonomous constructs, inter-planetary portals. They also have a fondness for ballistic weaponry. Like astral pilgrims, they built and traveled through gateways leading from world to world, exploring, singing and fighting as they went.
Two such pilgrims eventually came upon the world that most of the setting takes place on, populated by early, primitive humans. On this world, the pair discovered what humans would eventually call 'spirit', the source of 'divine' magic in this setting, and a conduit for consciousness (basically the excuse for how incorporeals and shape-shifters can exist without a functioning brain.) Over time they learnt to direct this energy source to create desired effects.
They began settling the place and set up a number of structures on the planet, including a (now defunct) portal network, fortress stockpiles of weapons, equipment and constructs Included was a certain intelligent construct to act as a clerk. Aided by spirit it was able to become truly sentient, and in modern times acts as a god of the setting, subtly directing and protecting the people of the city that sprung up around its bulk.
Cont.
>>47720493
Around this point, the race's home star collapsed and became a black hole, eating up the planet and every planet connected to it through their gateways. The setting world was saved when the 2 lobsters on the world used the spirit to seal the portal The singularity changed the spirit around it into a new, warped form (This form of spirit is what allows for the creation of sentient undead, as discovered by aforementioned capybara). The ancient race guys then sent the portal into a pocket demi-plane within the world. When discovered by humans That singularity-containment plane was thought by many to be the resting place of souls after death. It later become the home to the celestials after they arose.
With their people gone the last two survivors decided to work with the humans. disguising themselves in human form, they took on a number of humans as students, teaching a subtle philosophy of peace, accord with the earth, and broadening one's mind. Eventually a religion formed around their teachings that persists long after they were gone,
Oh, and the previously mentioned sentient construct, watched the lives of the lizard/amphibian that settled the land above it. Thinking they were too chaotic and directionless, from them it created a new race to act as rulers over them. This race was the Slaadi. It, uh, didn't play out as well as it had hoped.
>>47720715
wow, I really fucked up my writing there. That's what I get for not proofreading.
