GMs: Do you have a "Before" race for your setting?

[Hand of Evil]

Simple question, do you have a race or group of races that built stuff as part of your campaign myth? If so, who were they and what happened to them?

 

[payn]

In Traveller there was the Ancients. Nobody alive knows what happened to them msny of the species of the setting where genetically engineered or bred and spread around the galaxy by them. Some old ruins remain and occasional piece of tech is found.

A campaign was written where the travelers find out what happened. Otherwise, in most my games it’s just an oddity in the background.

 

[Li Shenron]

Nah, usually just a generic "dragons and giants once ruled the world, then elves did, then... it's now". Mostly, I have abandoned any interest in worldbuilding including history. Nobody cares except the one who does it, and I stopped caring.

 

[Aldarc]

Simple question, do you have a race or group of races that built stuff as part of your campaign myth? If so, who were they and what happened to them?

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing but their legacy remains hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge.

 

[Mannahnin]

In my last campaign:

A thousand years ago reigned the ancient Emorian empire, which built stone ruins and fortifications and dungeons which still remain. The Emorians were mostly human, though fairly cosmopolitan.

Between then and now was the Kael elven empire (swiped from Dyson Logos) who also left various ruins, and also hated humanity and were defeated and disappeared around a hundred years prior to the start of the game.

 

[DragonLancer]

In the early 90's in a 2nd ed AD&D setting I wrote, there was an ancient insectoid race called the Thrax. They became sci-fi advanced and eventually left for the stars, leaving the world for whatever came after them. Those Thrax who stayed eventually de-evolved become the Thri-Kreen.

 

[Umbran]

Simple question, do you have a race or group of races that built stuff as part of your campaign myth? If so, who were they and what happened to them?

Not usually. I mean, I don't have a single campaign world everything happens in, so I don't have one myth. It changes from campaign to campaign, and I only rarely use that trope.

 

[cranberry]

Half-Elves and Half-Orcs will live on in friend's campaigns.

 

[cbwjm]

Dragons (and dragonborn), giants (and giantkin like goliath), and elementals (and genasi). Technically also humans but they tended to be conscripted into armies, outright ignored, or turned into genasi (and then conscripted into the elemental armies).

Humanity may have had some myths about these 3 groups but they've disappeared over time, even those areas that were heavily influenced by these 3 groups have lost much of the stories behind their homelands, though the dragonborn have some extensive historical texts dating back to the mythic age and the ages following.

 

[Moonmover]

In my main D&D campaign setting, I've got three:
•The Star Giants are responsible for long-lost sci-fi tech that PC's occasionally come across. They left the planet when they were overrun by the First Empire (see below). They still exist, in a greatly reduced capacity, as space nomads.

•The so-called First Empire were humans, but their culture and technology revolved around psionics. Their artifacts are all mystical crystals and such.

•The Silver Empire, a militaristic theocracy, also human, was the most recent and most "normal." Their lost treasures are regular old magic items.