The Ancients
You guys remember the gold-dragon-lawyer-paladin I mentioned way back when? Sure ya do. All my PCs are super-fascinating and it’s a privilege to know about them. But for all you new readers, the character in question was a gold dragon. He was a lawyer. And also a paladin. And none of that’s relevant, because what we’re really talking about today is the dude’s backstory.
If you know Captain America, then you know gold-dragon-lawyer-paladin. He came packaged with The First Avenger’s “man out of time” shtick. Awakened after untold eons in suspended animation, he discovered a world totally changed from the one he knew. He lost his loved ones, his titles, and everyone he ever knew. It’s highly compelling and original stuff, but even that’s not the point. What we’re really really talking about is my GM’s reaction.
You see, I was new to the ways of geekdom back then. I didn’t know it was poor form to invent prehistory for someone else’s campaign world. In an attempt to make a suitably interesting epic-level PC to join this long-running game, I made up some half-baked malarkey about “the first city” that lay beneath my GM’s cradle-of-civilization desert.
“Oh yeah. That ancient empire your archaeologist NPCs are digging for? A degenerate offshoot. My city comes from a time before factions like Primal Good and Primal Chaos split into a pantheon. What are these ‘gods’ you speak of anyway?”
Now I’ve got to be honest. I’d have had a fit if some newbie presumed to walk all over my cosmology like that. This is my world! You just get to play in it! But to his credit, my GM let it ride. My creative contributions were assimilated into the larger history of the world, and the game played on unperturbed. That process informs my thinking about collaborative storytelling to this day.
You see, I find that there’s a wonderful sense of freedom in the past. You can always decide that another tomb lies undiscovered. Yet another cabal of sorcerer-kings once ruled in the region. The tyrant lizards held sway before that. And even further back, before the shards of the Dragon Mind shattered into a thousand chromatic pieces, the wyrms of yore shaped the landscape by dreaming as one.
You can go as weird and as deep as you want. Because time is just another dungeon, with yet more twisting passages and hidden rooms. We can tack on as many as we like. And when it grows to cumbersome and unwieldy, we’re allowed to decide that some are apocryphal: minor footnotes or scrivener’s fictions against the chunks of timeline that actually matter for the current campaign arc. One can only assume that the beach where Artificer is burying her treasure was once part of an ancient manufactory, and that the archipelago where she sails is the fallen aftermath of the conflict that birthed the warforged.
Any dang way, what do you say we invent a few ancient civilizations in today’s comments? Whatever your setting happens to look like at the moment, imagine the people that lived there in the beforetime. In the long long ago. What were they like? What befell them? And if I were to dig a hole down to their ruins, what am I likely to find?
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a thrice monthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
Funny story… I wholeheartedly agree with you, and my main world therefore has a series of historical layers (9 big ones) many of which could fit just about anything in them. Each of them ends with a big earth-shattering war. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time today to write each out, but for one example:
If you were to dig down to earth layers deposited about 7000 years ago anywhere my campaign has ever gone in the world you’d find the remains of an immense, ancient society that built great towering cities branching out from the material into other dimensions and twisting space and distance to their ends. There’d be no dwarfs or elves or humans – this is a period before those creatures biomagically differentiated themselves from their common ancestor. You wouldn’t find any writing or obvious technology beyond basic clothing and metal tools, but you would locate series of gemstones embedded in things and psionically imbued with imprinted thoughts and images. Go back a few hundred years and you’d see those replaced with hieroglyphic markings covering most surfaces; forwards a few hundred and you’d find the civilization gone entirely, fallen into a veritable stone age. Almost none of those great cities survive, despite their remarkable construction, and those that do seem to be… changed by something. Things lurk in their dark dimensional passageways, things that hint in whispering shrieks that the hubris of those Ancients was their undoing…
> my main world therefore has a series of historical layers (9 big ones)
Dammit, Dante!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/articles/a-visitors-guide-to-dantes-nine-circles-of-hell/
I do wonder what the cycle of war and destruction suggests. Is hubris > fall inevitable in this setting? And is it always the same mythos shtick that serves as the great big icon of “me am play gods?”
https://external-preview.redd.it/RGYdlEeJzsO7trOsG0HeMBVnwXjfhL3BDVJfeUMuOLE.jpg?auto=webp&s=58e7e9af5936d44612ba85fcc95b10254794a761
Oh, I’m glad you asked. Each time is generally due to something quite different: some eldritch horror, some conflicts between gods over morality, some just “these two really big civilizations went to war” and some a combination of the above. The core theme it’s reinforcing is that this stuff *isn’t* inevitable, it’s avoidable but people keep putting various different principles or personal ends above peace and stability. If there’s an aesop, it’s that we need to think carefully about when that’s a good idea – because sometimes it is, sometimes it’s time to move on, but sometimes it very much isn’t. That turning of the wheel forces a moral dilemma that all Mt long-term players have eventually had to confront.
I hear that Mt. Long-Term takes a while to climb. 😛
Anywho, I always like Aragorn on this theme of “think it through yourself.”
> Eomer said, ‘How is a man to judge what to do in such times?’ As he has ever judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.
No idea how to make it work, but I’ve always liked the idea of playing a game where the PCs are ancient immortals… something like the Ascendants in the Malazan novels. And it seems to me that a lot of world-building in such a game could occur as part of the players reminiscing over stuff they did a few thousand years earlier.
Indeed, I had a concept for a character who was known for being a remarkably well-informed historian — and a big part of that was that she was an elder goddess, quite literally older than time. And yes, she *does* know what caused the destruction of that ancient city, and apropos of nothing, you probably should be polite if you ever happen to meet an elder goddess, lest you emulate the mistakes of ancient high kings.
I’ve toyed with that campaign concept myself. My thought was to use Sidereal Exalted as PCs.
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Sidereal_Exalted
You space a few centuries between each session, then modify some kind of Microscope style world building game to advance nations, dynasties, and destinies. The PCs then descend to the world to play Gandalf at the next crisis point in the next session.
Sidereals could work, but they’re a bit too covert for what I had in mind… Solars and Lunars would be closer, though Exalted in general is a little too combat-oriented for what I’m envisaging. I’d be looking for something that’s more about the clash of personalities… something like Masks, but for gods walking the earth rather than teen superheroes.
One of the things I love about the Malazan setting is that you have these ancient powers just wandering around in the setting, some of them literally gods and elder gods, but functioning basically as adventurers. If you’ve read the series, you might recall some of the times where someone like Rake reminisces about traveling with Brood, Triss and Osserc… we never see those times, but they make me think of a typical wandering D&D party but on a potentially-cataclysmic scale. And of course, the setting has so very many powers playing their own games… some ancient, some new.
Those books worked well for me when they worked. Implications of unknown depths, glimpses of backstory, and a sense of revelation when you put one and one together. On the other hand, they were absolutely miserable when they disappeared into the well of their own obscurity. I couldn’t tell you who Triss and Osserc were, even after reading a dozen of the silly things. Friggin’ series ought to come with a link to the fan wiki stapled to the inside cover.
Anywho, Exalted works for me because we ignore half the rules. Never figured out knockback or bleed, for example. And all those ridiculously bloated blocks of charm-text (while frustrating to parse for rules) were weirdly helpful when it came to improvisation, helping to inspire inventive actions rather than strictly mechanical ones. I wouldn’t recommend the social combat system, but I do like the idea of using bits and pieces of it to spice up social scenes.
The system breaks when you look to closely at it, but if you approach it as goofy good times rather than a mechanical puzzle it works. YMMV of course, and I can certainly respect looking for a rule-light alternative. 🙂
From that comment about social combat, I’m guessing your Exalted experience is mostly second edition? Mine too, but while 3e has its faults — way too many charms and moving bits — its social influence system is one of the best out there.
And yes, keeping track of everything going on in the Malazan universe is admittedly a challenge ( I perhaps have more tolerance for such things than you), and those two aren’t particularly important to the narrative the way Rake is. But Triss is the goddess known as the Queen of Dreams, and Osserc is Rake’s counterpart of Light… so when Rake is reminiscing about his old adventuring buddies, he’s talking about some of the most powerful individuals within the setting.
Ravenloft? Demiplane of Dread? Pshaw! These are merely the best-known remnants of world-fragments that have been culled by the mysterious Lords of Necessity, entities that even the gods themselves fear and whose alien morality defies our own standards of judgment.
Strangely, those (hypothetical) powers are somewhat hit-or-miss when it comes to erasing *all* traces of a banished civilization. There are legends of a Forsaken Prison of the Endless Labyrinth, an impregnable structure that hangs suspended from a massive chain within an enormous cavity in the bowels of the earth. What nightmare creatures might be imprisoned therein, what ancient magics could be capable of containing them, and just how it is that there are still legends about it if the civilization that created it has been excised from our existence are all questions for a better sage than I.
That said, for a few hundred more gold, I might be persuaded to continue my research for you… (cough)
For a second I thought you were going for The Labyrinth labyrinth:
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Labyrinth_(AOS)
Kudos for including sages in your world. Those are some useful NPCs to keep on staff.
Reminds me of a particularly old and obstinate dwarf I played once named Hrif Ironshod. It was a new campaign, with the world only barely fleshed out, and Hrif was the only dwarf of the party; leaving him free to spout whatever nonsense entered his head and declare it ‘dwarven history’.
“Long ago, the Dwarf king taught the elves how to work in stone and steel, in exchange for the elven princess’ hand in marriage. Me great, great, great, great grandfather was the best man.”
Some of it, the DM kept; some of it simply became the traditions of the particularly backwards Ironshod clan.
I think we all want to play that dwarf at least once. I know that I was tempted when I found this feat back in the day:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/breadth-of-experience/
Just invent random lore-nuggets and summer jobs to explain your weirdly relevant experience.
I once played a guy like this, an older gent in a post-apocalyptic setting who would constantly go on about “the good old days”, basically a one-man 4 yorkshiremen sketch. Of course, since he was in his 60s on the outside and The Event happened some 100 years ago, it was pretty obvious he was totally full of shit, but the others put up with him because he was a reliable source of high explosives.
Over time, the names of the Gods changed as people changed. Yet dig far enough, and you may find the Lost Gods…
Or in this case, climb.
After the rise of the Eight Great Gods, many minor ones grew to take their places in the Heavens. Many were minor Spirits that grew powerful from the attention of mortals while others were created to serve a function by the Eight working together to make something new. No one knows which Fykther was, though perhaps people could find out if they ever cared to ask.
Fykther is an unknown God in the modern world. There are no priests, no half forgotten customs, no relevance, only old historians that keep the footnote alive. Was He replaced? Was he usurped? None know save the Gods. Yet if you wish to know of him, the few scholars all agree on how to find more.
“Climb.” The Scar, that imposing mountain range to the North that cuts into the sky itself, is where the few remaining temples hide. At the top of those peaks, a few structures still exist from the civilization that once existed there before the Gods raised the mountains. And at the highest of peaks, the last Temple of Fykther can be found.
To explore this place, you must have some way to deal with the lack of elemental energy, for it is said this mountain pierces the sky and the blessings of the Elemental planes entirely. There will be little to no air, it shall have a killing cold despite being the closest thing to Bara’s Light and there will be no water that high up. Only the Plane of Earth can help you and even then it is but a little, for the mountain is said hold a portal to the Plane of Earth and it alone is solid enough to withstand the forces of breaking the Sky.
Should you somehow do all of this, Fykther’s last temple is a broken masterpiece. The temple itself looks to made of crystal at first glance, though modern scholars now know that it is a type of clouded glass. Inside, the glass is colored, revealing the artwork of Fykther’s faithful. With this, a potential truth of Fykther can be found, for on the murals are legendary creatures bowing their heads before Fykther’s gemstone visage.
Fykther’s faithful were Dragons, you see. And the dragons are long gone from these lands. The few remaining ones may be the only chance of learning more, for the Temple In the Sky can give you nothing more.
I was expecting a space station. I was disappointed not to find a space station. I WANT ANCIENT DRAGON ASTRONAUTS!
Damn, now I want draconic space stations. Since that world is shelved, maybe I can make changes…
Dragons are eldritch and otherworldly BECAUSE THEY COME FROM ANOTHER WORLD!
I mean, if it works for elves….
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Elf#Early_history
make the mountain that “the gods raised” be a space elevator that has been covered to avoid issues, have the dwarves that mind the mountain either be tending or studying the mechanisms.
Fykther could be the AI of the station that still monitors… have a light at the top be visible as light reflects…
Yes yes…
I’ve spoken before about my college group and how we accidentally triggered the third meltdown of Chernobyl, singlehandedly wrecking half the map and forcing th DM to rewrite the entire campaign going forward. The Chernobyl description wasn’t figurative, it was literally Chernobyl’s ruins and our campaign setting, Thule, was a post-apocalyptic Europe in the very distant future!
As we uncovered a but earlier than the DM had originally intended, there had been a very sci-fi-esque human civilization in the distant past that had gone all Arthur C. Clarke and made nanotechnology that was indistinguishable from magic, and genetic-engineered humans into things like elves, orcs and halflings. The greatest scientists of the age and some of their staff used the nanomagitech to become the deities our characters would worship in the future (in the case of my paladin, Heironeous had been a security officer for the scientists)! Unfortunately this also coincided with a new Ice Age that had reduced humanity and the new fantasy offshoots of it to medieval levels. They forgot how the technology of the past had worked and they began to consider it magic. Things that had once been considered mundane were now rare and fabulous (a landfill full of aluminum pop cans was buried by the glacial movement, and when its contents were rediscovered those cans were considered precious mithral, some of which my paladin had forged into plate armor! How’s THAT for recycling?!).
But the most devastating secret of the ancients was a contingency left from their time: a massive force of robots kept in bunkers buried even deeper, controlled by “The Clockwork Spirit,” which was the only way they could describe a technology as advanced as an AI to us primitives. They had scanned the surface world and discovered that things had evolved to unacceptable parameters with people like hobgoblins and kobolds roving around, so they mobilized to capture all the humans and human offshoots to put in cryogenic stasis and then genocide everything else. We rallied the remaining nations of Thule to engage the Clockwork Army, led by my paladin, Sir Georg Redcrosse, while the rest of the party ventured deep into the underground bunkers to take down the Clockwork Spirit itself (I was going home for the summe4 and would miss out on the final session)!
The DM then wrote a sequel campaign set after our victory where my character was the sole survivor of the ancient world, playing a custom technology-based class of the DM’s design! The scientists and staff who became the gods had been my coworkers, but unlike them I’d been gravely injured in the disaster that kicked off the Ice Age and was rebuilt over the centuries by automated to be more machine than man, awoken from stasis by the death of the Clockwork Spirit, but I ended up graduating that year and so the campaign didn’t last very long.
You know, today’s whole conversation is making me want to try out Numenera in the worst way.
http://numenera.com/
God, Torment: Tides of Numenera has been sitting barely played in my Steam Library for going on 5 years now…
Nodwick actually took this appraoch, if you read the online strips (it was indicated in the print comics as well). The ‘typical D&D world’ the nodwick caste inhabited was just the post-apoc period for a much more advanced global society ages before that destroyed itself (implied to have been the result of a massive magical accident)
In fact at times it is implied that there had been a series of such rise and falls of advanced societies, and that the apparent ‘medieval stasis with anachronistic references’ which forms much of the humor is the result of such collapses.
> ‘medieval stasis with anachronistic references’
Well damn, I think you’ve just given the logline for Handbook-World.
Heh, my main world is essentially Earth…plus all the other material in the solar system except the sun. And is hollow, with the center filled with the machinery maintaining it. It is a “heritage” world, which means that various “mythos” through out history have been returned and the overall look and feel is kept at the standard for that particular one. So large (and I mean LARGE) areas of medieval European fantasy, other areas of Asian, Native American, various eras of dinosaurs, etc. Just nothing more modern than the early Renaissance.
It’s essentially a living museum set in my much larger science fiction universe. This means I can fit just about anything I want and I also have systems in place to keep the players from screwing things up.
I’m reminded of the map of Earth on the Ringworld.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR2296df-bc
When I did “In Search of Sanity”, the first book of the “Strange Aeons” AP, as an independent adventure, I had to write up backstories for all the PCs, since they start with amnesia. One PC was based on the Leper, a character from the video game Darkest Dungeon who was a king who went into exiled after he got, well, leprosy. Since some of the adventure’s backstory related to an archeological expedition in the far east, I made him a time-displaced king of Ninshubar, a Babylon knockoff, who had been on a quest to slay the nightmare-causing Lovecraftian entity at the center of the story. While I gave him a few baseline things (like his god, Ninurta, an actual ancient Mesopotamian deity), he mostly got to make up all sorts of cultural things about Ninshubar that I went along with (with the get-out-of-problems card that the character has amnesia and is a little crazy anyways, so nothing he says is 100% reliable). It was a good time.
In terms of ancient history in my campaigns, there is of course the Ancient Aliens campaign where 10,000 years ago the elves were in peaceful contact with technologically advanced aliens until that all went south and the elves threw up a magic barrier around the whole solar system (with the pro-alien elf faction becoming the drow) before the Elfluminati stamped out all public knowledge of the aliens. I also have a side campaign world where serpentfolk were not only the dominant species in the ancient past, but actually created humans as a slave race, which turned out to be a terrible idea, because humans ruin everything.
> nothing he says is 100% reliable
It’s always nice to have an escape hatch in case narrative continuity breaks.
> with the pro-alien elf faction becoming the drow
Were these perchance spider-like aliens?
That is fantastic alt text. My wife and I quote it at each other all the time, with the appropriate context. Most recently in Project Zomboid:
Me: “She is the cabbage guardian, guardian of the cabbage.”
Wife, immediately yelling: “Zombies quiver before her!”
Our friend in question: ????
Saw it for the first time yesterday after previewing the comic for a friend. Changed the alt text several minutes later once I stopped laughing.
A small piece of lore of the setting i made is the story of how how gods, the fae and some precursors made humanity. That is the accepted origin by those parties but there is some tidbits that point that is fake or that those groups made humanity but where manipulated on doing it by either what humans were, what humans truly are or what humans will be. That if even any of that stories is even true 🙂
Most often for some precursors i go for either some previous civilization, our multiverse got a heavy theme of recursiveness, or just go with my brand of precursors, the first people. A thing they got is that more than an ancient precursor civilization they are still at large even if busy containing some members of their race that become the void false-gods 😀
Precursors were a big hairy deal in my flying island campaign. The shtick was that a growing rot within the planet was threatening to infect everything. That chunk was ejected like a comet, but everything else broke up into floating chunks of real estate: some the size of cities, some of countries, and some personal islands no larger than an estate.
I really ought to go back to writing that novel. I enjoyed the setting, even if the plot needed a massive overhaul.
Sounds good, kinda like bastion 🙂
“In the distant past, this mortal world was ruled by the Sidhe, the lords and ladies of the Faeren. Beautiful and terrible were they, cruel and capricious gods but gods none the less. They wielded magic as easily and as naturally as a man moves his arms or his legs, calling for sun or storm as they desired, commanding the mountains to kneel or the earth to be split asunder. They it was who taught to mankind the secrets of fire and of iron and of magic, and they who taught the first werewolves the rites to bind the wolf-spirit unto the human. And yet all these were not the greatest of their marvels. For they shaped the very stuff of life itself to their will, and made races to be their servants. The orcs they fashioned to be their soldiers, and the goblins to be their craftsfolk, and the house-elves to be their butlers and their maids.”
“And then… they left, departing to the world that scholars now name the Glimmervoid, leaving behind them countless trinkets and treasures and also countless monsters and horrors, and leaving this world to the mortals, both the races that they had taught and those that they had made. The eldest of them will not speak of why they left, and the younger give many answers that do not agree. But certain it is, that no power save themselves could have compelled their departure. And if ever they return, kings and emperors will bow before them.”
civilization is a rather recent development on Aeri, though its old enough that some of the less successful attempts have collapsed. Giving that the entire surface of the world is coated in a 200 ft. deep layer of fog, exploration can be a little difficult, but here and there ruins can be seen poking out of it. Their presence has led to a consistent belief that in some distant past the fog layer did not exist, and a civilization of ancients covered the land. This is incorrect; the fog layer has always been part of the landscape, at least as long as intelligent life has. All civilizations on Aeri colonize islands that fly due to a local species of coral that nullifies gravity; the ruins in the fog are simple cities built on islands who’s coral banks eventually died out or went dormant, a process that takes several thousand years, until the islands slowly settle onto the surface until a new coral colony begins to form on the bottom of the island.
As to what the ancients were like; ancient. They mostly used bronze or stone tools, didn’t have a very good grasp of agriculture, and ascribed religious significance to basically everything.
Long ago, so long ago that most traces of these events have since sunken below the mountains, there was a titanic conflict between two extremely advanced races, that wielded magic and technology far beyond anything we can imagine nowadays.
I refer, of course, to the fabled Firbolg-Korrigan Hyperwar.