http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Precursors

One relic they always leave behind is a sense of wonder.



The Elder Race still learn and grow

Their power grows with purpose strong

To claim the home where they belong." Rush, "2112" , "2112" "They left our planets long agoThe Elder Race still learn and growTheir power grows with purpose strongTo claim the home where they belong."

Advertisement:

Precursors, a.k.a. "Ancients", "Elders" or "Old Ones", are a standard of Science Fiction (especially Space Opera), fantasy and occasionally Horror: an ancient race whose culture and knowledge rose to its pinnacle in ages long past but which is no longer present.

In Science Fiction, they may have visited Earth and/or other worlds but they would remain a mystery. They are considered the first species to have technology, making them godlike. In fantasy, they will usually be the forerunners created by gods/God, mighty in deeds and magic. At the height of their civilisation, Precursors might have created intelligent species or reworked entire worlds with a snap of a finger. Any strange and persistent mystery in the story's 'verse is usually laid at their feet.

Predecessors now leave behind nothing but tantalizing ruins and rare, sometimes incomprehensible artifacts and dangerous weapons. Just why, no one knows. Perhaps they Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, succumbed to decadence 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.

Advertisement:

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 conveniently got out of the way. 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. If the Precursors implemented a plan that, whether they still exist or not, still influences outcomes, then they are also Powers That Be.

Sometimes the Precursors can be rediscovered; this is often regarded as a bad move, especially by the Precursors themselves. This also applies to the audience: the romance of Precursors can be easily shattered by giving too much away.

It may also happen that Earth Humans are Precursors and their incredibly human descendants try to rediscover their heritage, or conversely, if Earth Humans are the only descendants. If Humans are the Precursors, that's Advanced Ancient Humans. If everyone's scared of them, that's Humans Are Cthulhu. 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 there's one or more race that played Precursors to the Precursors, then they're Recursive Precursors. Any and all of these are susceptible to Awakening the Sleeping Giant. If they gave their tech or it's being used by another race, it's Low Culture, High Tech. Very often, their most powerful technology will appear deceptively primitive and/or ceremonial. If everyone gets into an argument over their leftover toys, you have an Archaeological Arms Race on your hands.

Advertisement:

Very commonly used to justify Rubber-Forehead Aliens: everyone was made from a common template by the Precursors, so they look pretty similar.

Compare/contrast with Sufficiently Advanced, Space Elves, The Fair Folk, Eldritch Abomination.

Not to be confused with the space flight sim, The Precursors.

And now, young one, behold the legacy of those who were here before you:

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

In the Marvel Universe, the race of giant Celestials have influenced many planets, including Earth. They wear strange suits of armor, giving the impression that they are mechanical, but that's not the case. They also test races and civilisations according to their standards to see who are worthy. In addition, there are also the Elders of the Universe, a loose associations of beings who all are The Last of Their Kind, and who hail from the first intelligent races to develop in the universe. They are less active, though, since they are all obsessed with one narrow hobby which apparently is the only thing that keeps them from dying of sheer boredom. The Grandmaster may be interested in the gaming and gambling habits of various lesser races, for instance, but couldn't care less about any aspects of their culture that has nothing to do with his obsession with games. There is also the race know as the Watchers, who started to do something similar, but got cold feet when early interference with a much more primitive race led to horrible wars. They have sworn to not interfere with their nigh godlike powers, only record what happens. (The Watcher appointed to Earth is a juvenile delinquent who breaks this rule regularly, but surreptitiously, so as to not get in trouble with his kind.)

In the DC Universe, the Malthusians were one of the earliest sentient races in the universe. They went on to become the Guardians of the Universe. And the Controllers, and the Zamarons, and Krona. They run the gamut of precursor subtropes.

There's also the Old Gods, precursors of Jack Kirby's Fourth World beings. They are actually older than the DC Universe, and are said to have caused the destruction of the one before.

The Merk in Nexus are or were a race of extremely psychically gifted and technologically advanced aliens who left the galaxy and, apparently, their bodies, behind. One of them remained behind, however, and empowered the eponymous hero.

The High Ones of ElfQuest surely qualify (even though they have known descendants), because none of the protagonist elves know much about them, and their powers and origins are a great mystery when the series begins. Elves, trolls and preservers come to be thought of this way by the humans of the medieval and futuristic eras.

It is hinted that Dr. Manhattan will go on to do this after the events of Watchmen somewhere else in the universe, or in another one of his own creation

In Gold Digger, finding the various precursor civilizations is Gina's job. Of course, she usually ends up encountering the stuff left behind, and occasionally bringing it home.

Royals has a reveal that the Kree were created by a long-gone bunch called the Progenitors, much like how they created the Inhumans. These Progenitors are also the ones responsible for the mysterious Sky Spears. It eventually turns out they're full on Abusive Precursors. They enhance species, then come back and sample the innovations to make more Progenitors out of their test subjects. They gave up on the Kree thanks to their becoming an evolutionary dead-end, but when a handful of Inhumans stumbled upon one of their farm-moons and blew it up, that got their attention. And so they decide to come to Earth to farm the Inhumans.

Fan Works

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

In the The Sword song, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians", the Precursors are humans from roughly the current era. After a presumably nuclear war screws up the planet, the survivors idiotically decide that they need to find and launch more of our missiles.

The Jimi Hendrix song "Up From the Skies" has an alien revisiting Earth after a long hiatus: "I have lived here before/ in days of ice/ and of course this is why I'm so concerned/ and I come back to find/ the stars misplaced/ and the smell of a world/ that's burning." Maybe a precursor, maybe not, but he'd been here a long, long time ago.

Some of Doctor Steel's music and videos, most notably his song "Planet X Marks the Spot", deal with the Ancient Astronaut theories of Zechariah Sitchin.

Pinball

According to Loony Labyrinth, the ancient Minos were masters of time travel, genetic engineering, and other amazing feats.

Podcasts

In the backstory to the Cool Kids Table game Small Magic, the Tenshi and the Oni are this for humanity. When a Tenshi and an Oni had a child together (the first human), it led to a war that wiped out most of them, forcing the Tenshi to put the Oni in a deep sleep and flee the world.

Tabletop Games

Toys

BIONICLE toyed with this idea a lot, but eventually subverted it with the Great Beings: hailed in the story's early years as powerful, mythological figures responsible for creating the Matoran Universe and its creatures, but then moved to other projects, and chaos ensued. Later it was revealed that these Beings were a highly eccentric group of scientist governors, and can only be seen as the precursors to the Matoran Universe's inhabitants — whom they themselves viewed as expandable machines. Otherwise, they were just one of Spherus Magna's (the planet which they once ruled over) several species. They are also still around someplace, but are hiding, as the inhabitants of their world hated their guts.

Video Games

Webcomics

In Jack (David Hopkins), a Furry Webcomic, the furries that currently live on Earth are the descendants of furries created in a lab by humans, making humans the Precursors. They were wiped out in a war started by the first furry, Jack. The furry version of the United States government knows about furrykind's origins, and is (probably wisely) keeping it a secret.

In Unity, the creatures living in the ship are all distant descendants of Earth life. Humans built the ship, but disappeared long ago.

In Homestuck, universes are created by sessions of Sburb. And the trolls created ours.

In Impure Blood, they are the Ancients. Roan is a Half-Human Hybrid descendent. The Watchers think they are evil.

The Cyantian Chronicles have at least two species, the Rumuah who created the Cyantians as servants and heirs, than died out from a genetic disease. And the "Squids" who came along centuries later and enslaved the Cyantians, until Alpha Akaelae led a successful rebellion and wiped them out.

In Iothera, the ancient Seb attained spaceflight, then apparently vanished. Cassandra: We still don't really know who the Seb were  or how they built the Red Towers  or why they were on the moons  or even what all the stuff they left behind does.

Harbourmaster has the Qohathoth, who were tormented by the loneliness of being the only sapient lifeform in the galaxy. Although their quest to find other species to befriend (the Yogzarthu didn't want friendship) led them to journey into other dimensions before humans could become spacefarers, they terraformed many other planets to be Earth-like in hopes of sparing humanity that same pain. Ironically, they made the terraformed planets too paradisial; nothing was subjected to the kind of pressures that would select for sapience, until a comet strike altered Tethys's climate, allowing the entomorphs to evolve to sapience.

Drive: The Sill were the most advanced race the galaxy has ever known and the only one to ever reach a type 2 Kardashev civilization. They ruled the galaxy for over 20,000 years undisputed, they played crucial roles in the history of almost every species they encountered and their technology reached levels that modern societies can barely dream of. All that's left of them now are some impressive ruins and some slowly dying monks.

Awful Hospital has the Old Flesh and, to a certain extent, the Parliament of the Old Flesh. Apparently, at the beginning of all things, all of existence contained the Old Flesh, and nothing else. At some point, the Old Flesh became infected, and as that infection devoured the Old Flesh, it gave rise to all other concepts in the Range. The Parliament are the remains of the Old Flesh itself note One in-universe book that the Eye Slob finds tells this tale using the metaphor of a 'cake' to describe the Flesh, and refers to the Parliament as the 'crumbs' of that cake , and they seek to use their own infection to eliminate all concepts that arose from the Old Flesh (i.e. 'literally everything') and re-create it in the form of the New Flesh.

, and they seek to use their own infection to eliminate all concepts that arose from the Old Flesh (i.e. 'literally everything') and re-create it in the form of the New Flesh. Leaving the Cradle: The Ancients had unimaginably powerful presence in the galaxy some milions to billions years ago, changing planets and star systems so they could be able to support life, leaving behind artifacts that enabled the civilizations that came after to discover FTL and other fancy tech, and apparently they are even responsible for the very possibility of FTL travel itself, with strong implications that they tampered with the fundamental physical forces of the Universe on a whim, and before that you could travel only as fast as Einstein would allow you. Then they just disappear without a trace, sans for some artifacts or occasional astroengineering project.

Schlock Mercenary: There's a scattering of ruins from extinct civilizations, but not as much as one would expect considering Fermi's Paradox. The oldest race around, the Gatekeepers, are only a million years old. Quite old, to be sure, but young compared to the galaxy. As Petey put it, "If it's this easy to be immortal, where are all the adults?" They were all wiped out due to a variety of reasons over the eons, top of the list being the long-gun, a weapon that can fire anywhere in the galaxy from anywhere in the galaxy as long as you have targeting coordinates. The few survivors of these eras went completely off the grid, hiding their stars in massive superstructures or constructing spaceships the size of planets and running dark. The reason the Gatekeepers were still around (though they hid the bulk of their people in Dyson Spheres ) was as part of a plan to halt this cycle by restricting galactic travel to a Portal Network instead of receiverless teleportation , in the hopes that this would prevent the rise of the long-gun. It worked for a while, and the current galactic civilization has lasted longer than most previous ones, but eventually the Gatekeeper stranglehold was broken and things continued on the same path as before. It eventually turned out that many, perhaps even most, of them weren't wiped out at all; all civilizations reach a point where immortality is easy and it's just safer in the long term to move your entire civilization into gas-giant sized spaceships and go dark beyond the galactic rim. Once the galaxy figured out how to detect them they discovered that there's so many of those ships that by conservative estimates surviving precursors outnumber what they had thought was the population of the galaxy by fifteen orders of magnitude

Outsider: Several ancient empires rose and fell over the history of local space, impacting its development to various degrees. They are discussed in the side blog at some length . The earliest know civilization was active sixteen million years ago, and is known only from a large number of worlds bearing extensive cratering and having undergone mass extinctions at that time. Modern scholars believe this to be the testament of a devastating war between otherwise unknown powers, but nothing's known for sure. The Fenrias civilization arose long after these conflicts, but still over a million years back. It spread through local space and either subjugated or ignored the primitive ancestors of the modern sapient species. The Fenrias split into multiple factions early on and warred extensively against each other, eventually diverging into numerous distinct breeds. Two modern-day species, the Delrias and Morat, are descended from Fenrias populations that survived the fall of their empires. The Dreiman were small — lapdog-sized — but highly advanced aliens that arrived about a million years in the past from outside of local space and quickly wiped out the Fenrias nations, although a few fringe groups held on on the edges of their territory. They rarely settled planets and mostly remained in orbital stations, but engaged in extensive planetary and biological engineering — they seeded and terraformed multiple worlds, many of which remain habitable into the present, and seemingly uplifted many of the local pre-sapient species. Around 500,000 years back, the Dreiman suddenly vanished and the remnant Fenrias nations all collapsed, to be replaced by the Soia. They were more advanced than the Dreiman and, like them, seem to have come from outside known space. They traveled in massive and heavily armed artificial moons that they used to enforce their rule and created numerous genetically engineered species, referred to as the Soia-Liron species; most were hyper-efficient food plants and animals, which are still found on multiple worlds, but at least five sapient species are known from Soia sites and may also have been created in this manner — the ancestors of the modern Barsam, Neridi and Loroi and two now-extinct species. The Soia are thus believed to have been a multi-species civilization, although whether these species were naturally occurring ones from a single world, artificially created or a mix of both, as well as wether any of these were the "true" Soia, isn't really clear. The Soia empire collapsed 275,000 years ago, seemingly in a devastating conflict that subjected every settled planet to devastating orbital bombardment and caused every sapient species to regress to the stone ages — galactic civilization is technically still climbing out of these dark age.

.

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life and Mythology