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

[John Dallman]

There seems to have been a previous civilization in my homebrew AD&D world, because tombs and the very occasional creature from it get found. It isn't mentioned in the oldest extant records, and nobody seems to have investigated it very much.

That's a plot line that's been waiting around for someone to get interested in it for about 40 real-time years.

 

[Blue]

In my Masks of the Imperium campaign, the planet was the body of a murdered goddess, with the moon as her decapitated head. There was no progenitor "race" per se, but the first inhabitants were a large number of offshoots from her - not children exactly which would imply godhood, something less. These lived a long time and had a lot of influence, and eventually all died out. There is one still around as a ridiculously old vampire that leads an Aztec/Mayan inspired gnome wereleopard empire that lawful and humane - and the penalty for any infraction is an amount of blood. The others are gone, but fossilized echoes of their ghosts were shaped into the titular Masks of the Imperium.

(But mind you, the goddess was brought to a limbo plane with nothing in it to murder -- there are other civilizations and races elsewhere. The Feywild played a big part, and an elder brain and illithid colony from a crashed nautiloid that was attempting to eat the petrified brain of the goddess deep inside the moon attempting apotheosis. So even that precursor "race" was just for this plane.)

In my Errantas campaigns I have a unique cosmology where all of the material planes bobbed independently in the four elemental planes, and the prime material the campaigns started on had a "thin shell" making it easier to get to when the bubbles pressed against each other, so the majority of races were fleeing genocide or the like from their own worlds and were brought here by their gods. Which made things interesting, such as two orcs civilizations that came from completely different planes, and elves went around in demi-planes called Courts that they could control in the elemental planes. (This started with 3ed, before the Feywild was codified.) The original race living on this world was an underdark variant of the halfling, and all of the surface halflings were unknowingly decended from them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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?

Some yes, some no.

In one campaign, the setting was explicitly a post-apocalyptic D&D world, so there were dwarves, elves, etc., almost all gone.

In another, I replaced Drow & some other subterranean races with the Seshayans from StarDrive. In a past so distant even elves had forgotten it, Seshayans had created a powerful Underdark empire that threatened the political stability of the surface world. So the surface kingdoms united to destroy the Seshsayan Empire, reducing it to rubble and scattering the survivors. At the beginning of the campaign, even the modern Seshsayans were unaware of their past. But adventurers delving deep into the Underdark are beginning to find traces of that literally buried past.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Back in the day, it's a trope I used in every setting I wrote. Used it so much, and usually with more than a single progenitor race, that I eventually tired of it. Nowadays I rarely think that far back in my settings' histories.

But having read through other people's cool ideas I'm finding I have a little itch in the back of my brain.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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?

My homebrew setting uses two: aasimar and yuan-ti. Both civilizations basically destroyed each other thousands of years ago, and both bloodlines occasionally pop back up in the human population from time to time.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

The Ruins Of Symbaroum campaign I'm prepping uses the lore as written in the source books. So there was a 'before race' about a thousand years ago. They established a powerful nation but their overuse of forbidden magic corrupted their bodies and souls. Their kingdom collapsed and over the years a vast forest has grown over it, inhabited by savage beasts that have also become corrupted by the residual arcane energy that seeps from the buried ruins. Now, a thousand years later, the player characters are adventurers who embark on expeditions to find the treasures of this lost empire.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

My homebrew setting uses two: aasimar and yuan-ti. Both civilizations basically destroyed each other thousands of years ago, and both bloodlines occasionally pop back up in the human population from time to time.

Yuan-ti are great. Unfortunately they seem to be very underutilized in 5E, I don't think they've been majorly featured in many of the official WOTC 5E adventures.

The current homebrew 5E D&D campaign I'm running is set in the Forgotten Realms near the Serpent Hills and Najara so I'm thinking about having my players encounter some pure-blood Yuan-ti soon. I might make them potential allies as a surprise to change things up 'cause Yuan-ti are nearly always antagonists and it's a bit too predictable. Or I might have two different factions of Yuan-ti (maybe a religious war where each group worships a different serpent god) that are in conflict and the players can choose a side.

 

[CleverNickName]

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.

Came here to say this. I added them wholesale into my 5E D&D campaign, and the party is currently on a mission to find out a little more about them.

Well, a little bit about one of them, at least.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

There is one who knows what happened to the Ancients ...

Spoiler

Yaskodray, the first of the Ancients, is still around after 300k years... and he also ended the Ancients

Traveller also has the species which built the facility in the advenure Shadows.
And DGP introduced the Primordials.

Plus, in the setting, the Imperium is the Third Imperium.
The First was a human empire from another world, Vland...
It fell to Terran humans, who became the Second Imperium...
When it fell into the Long Night, most of its area fell into small pockets. After a few centuries, the Third Imperium arises from Sylea....

 

[Professor Murder]

In my current campaign the PCs are excavating a huge city underground that belonged to a race of Necromancers who came from the stars. Researchers call them the "Ur."