Trope Talk: Precursors!
Added 2024-09-20 15:05:00 +0000 UTCHistory is like an onion: it's got layers. also you might cry about it
Comments
Huh. I kept expecting an FF7 reference (though the protagonist descendent of the precursors is *not* royalty, as far as I'm aware), but I think I'm realizing that Red might not know much Final Fantasy. And I mean, in fairness, neither do I? But FF7 is kind of a big fish, so I figured it'd be known. (And FF14 has like... what, 7 precursor civs? In succession? I don't know much about it, heh.)
Michael Chui
2024-09-22 05:20:38 +0000 UTCLove Outer Wilds. But like Skyrim and fallout and other first person open world rpgs, I have tet to finish the story even once.... Someday I'll go backn and not get so up my own ass about my playstyle and gear and just play.
Ambroze DaDragonBunny
2024-09-21 10:32:55 +0000 UTCAt the moment none of my wips are using this trope. But who knows what the future will hold for them
Ambroze DaDragonBunny
2024-09-21 10:30:40 +0000 UTCOh; and Yaskoydray (also known as Grandfather) is why there's multiple different branches of humans across the stars. He needed a workforce and guinea pigs for his experiments and rocked up on Earth around 300,000 BCE and though "Yeah, these guys'll do. Might take those canines as well, I've got an idea." End result; three major branches of humans developing in different parts of the galaxy (the Vilani who got to grow up on a planet covered in murder bots, the Zhodani who got to develop alongside psionically resonant wildlife, and the Solomani who are the ones the Ancients didn't take), multiple other branches that got more extensive changes (like the elf-like Darrians), and those canines they took? They got uplifted into the Vargr, one of the major species in the Traveller setting.
Anthony Wilson
2024-09-20 23:34:53 +0000 UTCI still like how Traveller used this trope, there's some clever spins here and there for lore written mostly over the course of the 1980s. Namely that they started as a mutation from a species that is still around in the present and never actually advanced to the Precursors' heights. One Droyne, Yaskoydray, developed an unusually high intellect and, between developing a form of body-swapping-based immortality and creating two generations of clone "children" to expand an empire across the stars, elevated his species... kind of. He was never able to give the Droyne his intelligence, but they were able to still benefit from his technological advances. The clones ended up going to war (of the scale one would expect for interstellar precursors... there aren't quite as many stars around as there used to be) and while many in the modern day believe they wiped themselves out entirely, the truth is the survivors just went into hiding and started striking at each other through proxies as a kind of shadow war. But none of the tech they invented is regularly used in the setting's present day (the Jump Drive for FTL travel was invented independently by several species). At most a few prototype devices for starships were reverse-engineered from Ancient tech but they're still years or even decades away from mass production so they aren't used as a hand-wave for the setting's tech.
Anthony Wilson
2024-09-20 23:30:05 +0000 UTCAny other budding writers just mentally checklist the precursors of your setting too?
Tonks Moriarty
2024-09-20 17:59:23 +0000 UTCThis video once again made me think that Red might really enjoy playing Outer Wilds. It's got "What if space but neatly sized", there are remnants of a precursor civilization and it is overall incredible charming. I'll admit it can also be quite intense and a bit frustrating tho, so fair warning to anyone who wants to try it out, but I think it's absolutely worth it.
Der SPS
2024-09-20 16:05:11 +0000 UTCCould it be? My favorite scifi trope???????
A_Legitimate_Salvage
2024-09-20 15:45:06 +0000 UTC
