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Very commonly used to justify Rubber Forehead Aliens: everyone was made from a common template by the Precursors, so they look pretty similar. Very often, their most powerful technology will appear deceptively primitive and/or ceremonial. If they gave their tech or it's being used by another race, it's Low Culture, High Tech. Any and all of these are susceptible to Awakening the Sleeping Giant. If there's one or more race that played Precursors to the Precursors, then they're Recursive Precursors. If they pick on their descendants, that's Abusive Precursors if they couldn't care less about anyone else, it's Neglectful Precursors if they help their descendants, it's Benevolent Precursors. If Humans are the Precursors and everyone's scared of them, that's Humans Are Cthulhu. This also applies to the audience: the romance of Precursors can be easily shattered by giving too much away.īonus points if Earth Humans are Precursors and their incredibly human descendants try to rediscover their heritage-or, conversely, if Earth Humans are the only descendants. Sometimes the Precursors can be rediscovered usually nobody-especially not the Precursors themselves-is happy with that. And then there are the times where they themselves are the reason everything's gone to hell, and they intend to keep it that way. Whatever the reason, they set the stage for the modern world, left behind a few MacGuffins and surprises for the heroes and villains to find, and then got conveniently out of the way. Perhaps they Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence, or were wiped out by a disaster or war, or maybe they just relocated en masse to somewhere else where they haven't been found yet.
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Then they vanished into myth, leaving behind nothing but tantalizing ruins and rare, sometimes incomprehensible artifacts and dangerous weapons. They may have been sufficiently advanced, or just much better than everyone else with technology/magic, but either way they left their mark, a mark that remains to this day. At their height, they are usually rumored to have been capable of doing (and have done) just about anything, up to and including creating intelligent species and reworking entire worlds with a snap of a finger, and almost any strange and persistent mystery in the story's 'verse is usually laid at their feet. In science fiction settings, they are usually considered the first race to have gained sentience in the universe or galaxy, giving them a noticeable leg up on everybody else in fantasy settings, they will usually be the original, pinnacle sentient species created by the gods/God. Also known as "ancients." They are a standard fixture of much science fiction and fantasy: an ancient race whose culture and knowledge rose to its pinnacle in ages long past but which is now extinct or Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence.