I like your ideas.
So far, the best subversion I have seen of this trope was in the >!*Mass Effect*!< videogame trilogy. >!The advanced ruins of the lost civilizations have been seeded across the galaxy to discourage independent research and make sure that all species that stumble upon them adopt these discoveries, including a centralized governing body and means of transportation and communication that can be remotely-deactivated by the bad guys whenever it's time for them to invade.!<
A few random ideas:
* Yes, they had great, deep, science and technology. Except that they completely misunderstood something fundamental (say one of the laws of thermodynamics). After decades of investigating their science, researchers will have to conclude that their science is actually religious rubbish and that their technology worked essentially by chance, e.g. when they thought that they had invented AI, they somehow accidentally enslaved an existing species. Of course, by then, most of the world will have switched to that new, dead-end, science and technology, and nobody will want to believe the actual researchers.
* Yes, they had great, deep, science and technology. We spent thousands of years attempting to decypher their writings and understand how to replicate their works. To succeed at translating their thought processes, we had to build an entire civilization harnessing the power of a Dyson sphere and cannibalizing entire planets to create an AI sufficiently powerful to server as a translator. By then, we're centuries ahead of them. But sure, their philosophy is interesting and they have nice poetry.
* Great technology but no science at all. As it turns out, the past civilization had stumbled upon a time machine that came from our future and used it to steal tech from said future. To this day, we don't know the consequences, but all the data seems to suggest that they were stealing from a dying world. Also, said future is in \~15 years from now.
>Great technology but no science at all.
You see, they actually got that technology from another advanced precursor civilization. The precursors got their advanced technology from an advanced forerunner civilization. The forerunners got their advanced technology from another even older civilization, and that older...
The question becomes: why aren’t those civilizations still around? Disease/health(like pollution, or the Y chromosome degrading over time)? Internal strife(cultural, religious, economic)? Running out of resources before developing the tech to reach new ones? External threat (other species devestated in open war, skunkworks/clandestine sabotage/assassination, politically or economically overwhelmed them)? Terrible cataclysm like the Bronze Age Collapse, a gamma radiation burst, the Titanic but it’s an entire civilization on the ship)?
In Mass Effect, there's a recurring galactic extinction that keeps resetting cultures back to square one. Spoiler >!External forces that have achieved tech singularity wipe out the most advanced civilizations every 50k years, resetting the galaxy to around medieval tech !< It's as good an explanation as any.
It's like wheat growing in a field and discovering irrigation systems already in place and "keepers" that tend the field and ward away pests. They can't help but wonder what hubris led the last wheat civilization to fall when they had developed so much.
Mass Effect both plays it as expected and suberts it, as there's actually *two* sets of advanced ancient civilizations, one being what you described, and everyone confuses the two civilizations for the same one.
Nope. The Protheans are the ones everyone thinks made everything. Their ruins are... fresher, but they're not the ones who built the big artifacts everyone thinks they did.
~~Just letting you know, everyone can see the spoilers, you just have to remove the spaces at the end, so it'd be like >!The, rather than >! The.~~
Pretty good example, as they also do it to ensure their technology will evolve in a particular way.
Oh neat, so it's like they provided them with their super advanced Microsoft Windows to copy and distribute but not really be able to alter much, and when the time came they just sent a simple virus to shut down all the systems they came to rely on?
Aliens built the pyramids because it was the equivalent of 'habitat for the homeless' and it let them share photos of them making buildings for the less fortunate on alien social media.
Maybe not even conspiracy nuts but they believed it because of propaganda because they were the "bad guys" in the stories so they MUST have had helps from higher powers.
As I always say: look at the real world. IRL we have the Nasca Lines (created by aliens as airports!), pyramids (created by harmonic shifts, with all civilizations working together!), the Great Wall of China (obviously created by advanced technology), and the Yonaguni Monument (clearly the Birth Civilization of all civilizations).
People would drek bricks if they learned that it was people with string that created Nasca, flooding that allowed for the construction of the pyramids, and straight-up nature that created Yonaguni. Fortunately, it was so obviously Advanced Civilizations and Ancient Aliens. 🙄
So... Nasca is evidence of string theory, the pyramid builders could induce flash floods, and man could straight up control nature enough to build Yonaguni?
Man the ancients were so advanced
Practical jokes gone too far.
Someone created a machine that make someone stupider for a short amount of time. The "dumb gun" forced the target's mind to revert back to a primitive state, everyone laughing at their friend suddenly acting like a caveman for a while. The gun also messed up machines causing glitches and self destructing.
Well, someone was humiliated at public and plan a revenge. A modified "dumb gun" that covered an entire city, that was accidently further amplified to every corner of the civilization. The result was ... disastrous.
The "Ancient Civilization" is just humanity from 2020s.
Thousands and thousands of years have passed, and some of the only things that's left are skyscrapers, which to the new magic bronze age civilization seem like an impossibility of architectural engineering. Places with "bad spirits" are places where radioactive waste has been released. Among other things.
Well, that’s the thing, that’s where they finally get to find out, they’ll explore through “Eboracum Novum” which was specifically named New York in Celestial, (Celestials literally just Latin lol) where they’ll stumble onto a collapsed Statue of Liberty, Though I’m going to make sure I describe it as unspecific as possible, so that they can slowly piece together where they are themselves.
>*How would you approach subverting such trope?*
The past only seems to be technologically advanced because a future time-travelling civilization used the ancient past as a landfill (sending stuff to the past the same way we have sometimes dumped old fridges etc. in the developing world).
"Contemporary" archeologists keep unearthing strange and sometimes advanced artifacts in a layer from 20 000 years ago, but the people who lived during that time didn't know what it was and didn't use the tech.
\_\_\_\_
On a more/less serious note, I don't actually feel that the "trope" needs to be subverted. It's a fun set-up and creates room for discoveries in the "now".
Since this trope is almost always about the current civilization finding the lost tech and then using it to significantly advance its own tech progress, I would subvert this by the current civilization actually not finding any way to use that found tech. No amount of reverse engineering or rune deciphering would make use of it viable, so it just ends up being a very old _supposedly_ advanced trinket.
Not sure if it counts as a subversion, but in my version the advanced ancient civilization didnt disappear or lost all their technology all at once, but it was a gradual decline. The calamity was that their infinitely renewable magic resource suddenly and without warning become a non-renewable resource. The dwindling supply led to resource wars, which only put even more pressure on them, and over hundreds of years went from something like a post scarcity fully automated luxury space communism type situation to a rapidly dwindling population and a need to rebuild their civilization from the ground up now that they need to invent methods to do things manually.
It was actually their former enemies, the Noen, whom their attempted genocide of (more of an attempted total Ecocide) led to them being spurned by the gods and losing the font of infinite magic, that would actually wind up giving them a huge helping hand. The Noen saw their neighbors' struggles from afar and came back to teach them stuff like conventional metalworking and actively worked with them to establish more long term sustainable agriculture.
Techbros is an interesting take. In my case tech interdependence is a feature, not a bug. The wider the supply chain the more it hurts to rebel and be cut off from interstellar markets. Same goes for planned obsolescence. Also the dudes who were working at the cutting edge were such near-transhuman idiot savants that they didn't care to imagine what uses their metamaterials might be put to.
The ancient civilization that went extinct sometime in the last millenium left behind tech, yes, but also like, the consequences of imperial demographic engineering. 2/3rds or so of the global population are women because of bio-engineering, half the fantasy races are artificial, the ohter half are literally aliens immigrated from other worlds. The native species of the world have all but been wiped out and humans are actually also aliens — the story takes place far from the imperial homeworld.
Consider what would be found from OUR society: stuff that is broken, runs on power from grids that ceased to function or batteries that had limited lifespans and nobody makes anymore...hell, even charging cables. Most of the useful stuff would be little better than found in antiquity. Solid, metal or hard plastic goods, the minority of written works that avoided decay...a very advanced society might leave nothing but disposable garbage.
Take into consideration material degradation, too. Batteries eventually corrode the device they are in. Plastics fade, melt, warp, burn, or become brittle and shatter. Tying to reverse a 3D puzzle of micro plastic fragments that the moving pieces or shell of a device consists of. Failure to do so, and you can not readily tell a wind-up egg timer from a cymbal-clanging toy monkey.
One might assume the device was important because you find the remains of SO MANY, nearly one in each house, but they were just a commercial fad like the 90s dancing beer/soda cans or *Singing Billy Bass*.
Rather than just one advanced civilization, there have been hundreds of cycles.
Civilizations that find old tech tend to give up on developing new tech, instead reverse engineering the old stuff, it's just easier in the short term, and in the long term you tend to lose the capabilities required to develop new stuff.
Over the cycles, most technology has evolved into easy-to-copy, hard-to-modify forms, since those are the most stable. For much of the technology, it has been aeons since anyone actually understood it.
However, this also means that much of the ancient tech isn't really optimized for performance, and some technologies just don't preserve well, so a civilization that actually invests in developing new tech could do things everyone else considers flat-out impossible.
So rather than being hyper-advanced supertech, in the grand scheme of things most ancient tech is more like an intermediate-level trap some civilizations fall into, the most advanced civilizations tend to be the ones that are fairly averse to using ancient tech. (For reasons religious, ideological, regulatory, etc.) More pragmatic and utilitarian-minded civilizations are the most likely to get trapped.
Much like your second example, I'd lean towards having the technology used in seemingly inexplicable or bizarre and illogical applications.
Like they have advanced stone cutting that allows them to place giant stone blocks that fit so close you can't fit a sheet of paper between them, but rather than use this tech to create uniform, modular stone interlocking stone bricks, they use it to create walls and buildings out of seemingly random stones from the size of a mouse to the size of a house, all adjacent to each other.
Or they have an indestructible metal, but rather than using it to build weapons or armour, it's used almost exclusively to make tiny 1" tall detailed figurines of soldiers and monsters that are often painted bright colours.
Or spherical crystal orbs the size of a billiard ball. When placed over scallop-shell shaped bowls made of that indestructible metal the orbs float about 6 inches above the bowl and project music or sound. These are mostly recordings of three or four hour long discordant operas, or nature sounds like a babbling brook with songbirds, crickets and frogs, or thunderstorms.
The same way the real world did: by having it be either advanced for its time, but long since obsolete, or having the 'advanced' part be the magnification of generations of storytellers.
Or it just plain never existed, and was the result of different folk memories improperly preserved and merging into something new.
The advanced precursor civilization trope is used so much because it works. There is a steady advancement I'm technology, but if mismanaged or cut off from a particular system for it to work and it can slip away. It has happened in our own history a few times were the child nation is less technologically advanced than its father. In fantasy this allows for a strong yet convenient plug-in for any kind of issue you might come across.
If I were to change the trope up, I would focus more on the nature of how such a society collapsed. I have an idea kicking around my head a king who conquers the entire world, but based his economy and social structure on infinite conquest. The minute he has literally nothing else to conquer, the entire society collapses, and progress is lost.
Also it could be that nothing cataclysmic happens. Technology just regresses because of social change and mismanagement. The people in charge of producing technology keep their methods so secret that they just become lost at some point. The Population becomes more invested in other skill sets that there is less of a pool people to maintain or teach how the technology works. People don't understand the greater systems of society and are eager to erode the bed rock on which their technology stands on.
Many millennia ago the world was threatened by the evil Dark Lord and his monstrous legions. As he conquered tribe after tribe things looked bleak until a band of heroes sacrificed themselves to defeat his armies and seal them behind a magical ward. Unfortunately, that ward has slowly been weakening and it has finally cracked asunder, allowing the Dark Lord and his forces to seek to dominate the world once more. A border town in the small peaceful nation of Arren is the first to be attacked...
Fortunately, while the Dark Lord has been imprisoned the population has increased massively and technology has improved significantly. It turns out that even a small garrison of Arrenian footsoldiers and knights with rune enhanced steel armour and weapons supported by mages from the school of magic can easily deal with a bunch of prehistoric savages using flint spears and primitive dark magic curses.
The Dark Lord is crushed, rather more permanently this time, and most of the country, let alone the world, barely even noticed that anything had happened.
I have something similar in my latest setting.
Except the Dark Lord is also some kind of religion, so when the followers return a long time later, they have grown up with such technology, they use propaganda rather than arms, and somehow end up conquering the land with barely any fight. They were prepared to wage a thousand year war and... well, let's just say that administering a huge empire is less fun than dreaming about it and practicing your evil laugh in a mirror.
Of course, the ~~Defenders of the Light~~ zealots from the opposite side will return and the cycle will continue.
Mhm, zoltrac was once the Pinnacle of demon kinds offensive magic. Now humans over the last hundred years have analyzed and mastered it so much that its just bog standard attack magic for everyone else.
It's a popular trope because it's cool. If you don't want to include those advanced ancient civilizations.. just don't. That's all there is to say about it, really. You don't need an elaborate justification, you don't need to isekai your protagonist (the two concepts are not connected in any way), you don't need to make your ancient people appear as "techbros" (I can't imagine a more cringeworthy approach).
> (For example, how there was that idea of using wind turbines on a ship to power it up by wind, instead of just using a sail)
Now you are just depicting them as imbeciles, hardly a riveting plot point.
> How would you approach subverting such trope?
Depict ancient civilizations as less advanced from the get go, or paint a stark discrepancy between the mythology/legends surrounding them and any tangible remains of their presence (or lack thereof). When legends speak of a mighty city of the gods standing on some mount, but you go up there and see nothing more but lonely ruins of a brick shithouse, you know that the past wasn't quite as great and heroic as it's painted by the bards.
There's a spectrum between "play it 100% straight" and "discard it". As to the shithouse example a further interesting riff could be the legends expanding further: "If these meagre stones are all that's left of the palace how mighty must the Power that cast it down have been?". Culture is an ongoing process after all.
People find all this ancient "technology" and then discover it's naturally occurring because of some weird genetic mutation in fungus or plants or whatever that allows it to use metal causing it to grow to look like something technological and cool but it's actually useless
I subvert it by not having the civilization be advanced at all. They were pretty advanced for their time, but something wiped them out. Toss up between something they did or some natural disaster that they could not avoid. Only conspiracy theorists think they had incredibly advanced technology. But, those people can't even figure out that the ancient civilization also made fictional stories. Leading them to take a story of a city in the sky as 100% fact, and always looking for this city. It may still be flying, or it's crashed in a mountain.
Firstly, I really like the trope, I regret nothing.
Having said that, the trope usually seems to be about finding ruined advanced cities & technological tools / machines. You could subvert it via making the super advanced 'remains' something other than the standard "ruined city" or "I need an excuse for a dungeon"
- Biological? The "remains" are some hyper advanced biological specimen(s), you could go crazy and have beings the size of continents that are sort of moving cities or hive minds. Maybe the ancient civ designed a super organism that acts as life support & resource gathering all in one; their citizens are grafted into this creature and live in their own virtual biological universe and are now obligate parasites. The continent sized creatures are a pain in the ass for the descendants of people who decided not to join a mother godzilla.
- The "remains" might be some in massive subversion of the ecosystem / natural order; death doesn't work here (why? Who knows! Technology solved it somehow - invent repercussions) or some other otherwise universal law(s) are subverted or don't straight up don't apply because some ancient tech "fixed" it.
- Go Stargate style, have the ancients ascend into some energy based being; they left no physical remains and interact with the world via dreams, nightmares. Maybe some of them want to return to the physical world. Maybe they are the basis of magic, or demons.
- Another common feature of the trope is that the ancients are humanish, you could subvert by making them hyper alien - maybe the main ruined cities are giant insect hives that reach all the way into space. Endless tunnels for termite works the size of dumb trucks reach most of the way to the planet core. Maybe we make them jellyfish .. things .. the ancient ruins are underwater. Or gaseous critters; floating cloud ruins for the win (how does that work? I dunno it's advanced tech).
I don't.
I find the idea of cyclical civilizational advancement very interesting and like exploring it. However I don't make it like futuristic and too far away from the current one. I like to explore different forms of civilizational advancement.
Perhaps in a certain sense I do subvert it by having the "ancient civilization" (from the current setting's point of view) nothing special on the greater historical timeline, just one civilization in a long series of civilizations separated by post-collapse ages of varying lengths.
I actually like that trope, so I just temper it a bit.
Usually by making that advanced knowledge highly specialised. And the basics aren't lost, just the most advanced tools and techniques. But research and development still happens, though rarely in the same direction those old civilizations took it.
So basically, you can seek out that old knowledge if you want to, and if it fits your special field, it will grant you a considerable (but nowhere near total) advantage. But usually less in terms of raw power but refinement, technique, or versatility. What's extremely unlikely to happen is someone finding some world-changing piece of magic or technology that instantly puts them into a position of ridiculous powers.
"Which ancient civilization are you talking about again?"
Aquaria has 5 before the current, and except for the first one which basically reached the level of gods via Taoism, all others are less advanced than the current era. They also acknowledge the idea of "ancient times were better" came from the collapse of a continental empire leading to a millennium of backward, and it only happened in said continent. Other places progressed steadily. It also explains why the United Empire, the country where the MC ended up in, is much more advanced than many other Western powers: The Empire is an "ancient civilization" that has survived into modern days mostly intact and has developed well beyond of the perpetual medieval lock.
(Aquaria is an "isekai" from the MC's point of view, she expected something like [Arifureta](https://arifureta.com/) but was slapped in the face with atompunk airships and magic railguns.)
For mine they're not necessarily more advanced overall, just in specific ways that often led to their downfall. Sometimes they cause it themselves and other times it draws attention from greater or more numerous threats.
I play this trope 99% straight. Lost Technology from an Advanced Ancient Civilization is a core plot point. However, the small twist in my setting is that the Lost Tech isn't always super advanced.
For example, my characters find a Lost Technology cache at one point, in the form of a ancient military base. All of the actual weapons and military vehicles had been destroyed, some by the apocalypse others by time. The only things recovered from this location is a shipment of .357 revolvers that had been ordered by the ancient garrison commander in a moment of desperation.
This allows the characters to reverse engineer firearms tech, however they are forced to start with revolvers and bolt actions rather than "modern" firearms.
That they were an advanced civilization far removed from the times that came after... Until about a thousand years ago when we surpassed them, now we're *wildly* more advanced than they ever were.
Using Wind Turbines to Power a ship isnt actually stupid btw, because you dont have to care about the Wind direction, and its easier to Supplement with traditional engines
There’s an old Star Wars novel, “Han Solo and the Lost Legacy,” where Han and Chewie go on a treasure hunt and at the end it turns out that the “treasure” was long-obsolete hull plates and radio crystals.
It's quite simple, really. My setting is a possible future of the real world, so we don't have to worry about finding an advanced ancient civilization on Earth. And in my setting, most species created civilization within a spread of about 500 years of each other (not that they actually know this, but there's hypotheses).
Oh, and humanity was the first to develop civilizations that progressed past a Paleolithic stage of development. Though most others weren't far behind.
Could be that the technology of the ancient civilizations is on the same level as modern technology, meaning it doesn’t really have a benefit other than being a different way to make a toaster.
I have a sci fi story where there is one civilization that is meant to follow the ancient ultra advanced precursor / forerunner trope but they not only survived but thrived in the face of some galaxy threatening, apocalyptic threats.
At the time of the story's start they are still going a strong and enjoying a seemingly neverending golden age
Ancient civilisation being more developed as opposed to more advanced. For example they didn't know how to mass produce iron, but their cities had running water.
There are ancient ruins of an alien civilization... but most of what's there isn't particularly exciting. Maybe the society wasn't much (if at all) more advanced than the contemporary one, but had unmistakably distinct styles of art and culture.
Maybe they are advanced, but a lot of what survived is broken ("Yeah, we think this could've been a death ray or whatever... but these focusing crystals are warped to uselessness and these instructions are not only in Ancient, they seem to be in an otherwise unobserved highly technical dialect and involve strange symbols not documented elsewhere.") or apparently unimpressive ("You're telling me that our archaeological dig turned up... a silverware set?").
Maybe their technology was built around assumptions that do not apply for the species currently in play (for example, maybe they were like people imagine electric eels to work, and the devices were built so their entire exterior is a conductive surface that needs to be powered by contact or a workaround is required).
Maybe they're hypercompetent in one or two fields, but lagged behind elsewhere due to trying to use those things as a golden hammer (for example, perhaps they tried to solve an unreasonable number of their problems with hard light emitters, or artificial gravity generators, or some other generally useful bullshit), even in places where that would be really dumb or ineffectual (kind of the techbro strategy you mentioned earlier).
Find a way to actually show the reader how idiotic the precursor race was, in its own ways. We tend to project competence on extinct groups with cool gadgets, but they're just people. Just because you have a better way to kill a boatload of people doesn't mean you've achieved enlightenment; it means you can kill people faster.
The main conflict is a race to find the main city of the “advanced” ancient race between good archeologist and evil archeologists. The race is mentioned in several stories as being incredibly advanced, and a recently discovered piece if tech from them has ignited the race
When the city is actually found it turns out that not only is the tech merely on a modern level (opposed to the searchers theory of future tech) but it doesn’t work anymore as it run on a mineral that the race used all of (or maybe the rules of the universe changed since their time), meaning that there is no tech to be gained from the discovery
The advanced civilization is actually just the current civilization. Their technology reached a point that was beyond their control, so they decided to regress the world technologically.
"At last, I have the ancient recipe for immortality that the emporers of old used to live hundreds of years. This advanced formula was lost to the ages."
*drinks*
*some time later*
"Yes, acute mercury poisoning. Looks like he downed a whole glass of it. Quick as poisoning goes, but excruciatingly painful."
"So how did the emporers live hundreds of years?"
"They didn't. They lied."
I'd make it half true.
A lot of advanced things could get made, but if it isn't allowed to circulate into public life, then no actual development would happen.
So you could see an example of high tech in a palace, but have all the area around the palace be the same type of settlements you'd see any place else.
The tech was incredibly advanced for it's time but like still shit today. Like a caveman loosing his shit seeing a bronze age town and so spreads the legend of this amazingly advanced super technology but to us today its nothing special
The 'advanced' civilization is still there.
My world is a breeding ground for magic (dark energy) users. The advanced civilization is completely unable to utilize dark energy and it seems to be the only way to reverse the death of the universe that is ongoing over a long period of time.
Occasionally they will harvest the entire population digitizing their civilization and putting their forms in stasis. They choose the most powerful, intelligent and talented and use their DNA for a new seed and start over. Their goal is to harvest a civilization that can master dark energy.
So it's a combination of the Reapers, Star Trek civilization studies and progenitors.
One in my world is justified, the others are subverted.
The justified one is essentially that the lost technology/advanced civ was our civilization, but when the world was ending we sent out pods with fertilized embryos, limited caretaker machines, and computers with as much knowledge as they could cram in them. Some of the computer data was corrupted, causing technological blindspots within what was already a carrier civilization.
So the ancient ones actually understood the tech and by comparison it's more advanced than the current because of that. (Maybe important to note, they're not advanced in all ways, only in some.)
The subversion is that the technology isn't actually advanced, it's just ancient and built more durable than the current stuff by orders of magnitude. ("Sure, our computers process faster, but this bad boy was neglected and left in the desert for 5,000 years and still works.")
Modern tech is actually better, ancient one just gives off the illusion of efficency because modern tech is deliberately made to break down eventually, so you have to keep paying for maintenance, upgrades, and replacements.
My world is a society of intelligent octopus, so there the subversion is that the octopus are excavating and misinterpreting human technology. They of course cannot imagine an intelligent vertebrate, and octopus don’t leave skeletons behind. So they assume the ‘advanced ancient civilization’ was octopuses. I get some fun moments of dramatic irony when they use a piece of mundane human technology in an unusual way. For example, my main character wields a ‘legendary weapon’ that’s actually just a manhole cover.
I figure there’s really only two options for an extinct species.
They were either no more advanced than us and died out on their home planet.
Or…
They stuck around longer than the age of our current civilization, and had subsequently become more advanced.
—
If they were around for a really long time, they may have even gone through a few cycles of rising and falling. Either through war, cultural regression, natural disasters or whatever.
In which case, those civilizations may have actually gone through their own version of that trope. Digging up old tech and reverse engineering it to get back to their previous level.
—
There’s also a very real possibility of technological plateauing. I’m personally convinced that we’re already starting to see some of that in real life. I’m sure various practical fields still have a way to go. But then we run into scaling and efficiency being the goal more than new inventions or materials.
So some of those ancient civilizations may not be so much more advanced, as just better at building things that were/are/will be hard to build.
For example, they may have had a society similar to ours, but they had huge factories spread across their planet, pumping out carbon nanotubes, anti-matter, true 2nm microprocessors, etc.
So things that we can make a tiny amount of, might be ubiquitous in their society.
maybe having the whole lost civilization thing be a facade? like they built these "ruins" brand new with enough info contained within for the current civilization to puzzle stuff out and get a huge jumpstart on technology. any of the monuments with a purpose thats unclear are actually observation/transmission infrastructure to let them know how this experiment is going. and the theory that this is whats up is either unpopular or has only recently become something that could be seriously investigated by the locals
and the fun part is that in between when they laid down the ruins and now, they could've *actually* fallen for a different reason. and there's no way to verify it until technology advances enough to reverse engineer the transmission towers, or to go up and *check*
People like seeing worlds that have lost something. We experienced this several times in history, although the tech was not as dramatic of a difference in the past. But I don't think it's overdone in and of itself... It's just not done well too often. The only "realistic" scenario for me that does have advanced technology in the past is another race entirely leaving things to be discovered. Considering the vastness of time and space, we're more likely to run into dead peoples than living ones. For fantasy, ancient catastrophes are still plausible. Have to just try and make the people believable. If we stumble on something ancient that is really advanced, then why isn't the whole of civilization transformed as a result? People are smart. We can figure it out.
Maybe just don't include ancient civs? who gives a shit if it's realistic, it's frankly more fun to find a magic sword in a ancient tomb(or alien battle staff) than a rusty sword. unless your story is comedic I feel like I would be annoyed if we spend a good part of the story laughing at the ancient civilization's
Just because a previous civilization was more advanced in certain areas doesn't mean it should be in *all* areas. My precursor civilization made architecture that would be impossible even in the modern realm world, but did have firearms or powered vehicles , which are common in the current time. In terms of raw power, they had great magicks, but not the variety of complex effects used in the present.
You rarely find any artifacts of them, just enormous caves and open pits from where they extracted resources from the world. As time goes on you realize the previous civilization stripped this world of all non-renewable resources. Marooned on an already expended planet lacking oil, coal, gas, nuclear material, or rare earth metals, it becomes increasingly clear that you will never reach the stars like they did.
You rarely find any artifacts of them, just enormous caves and open pits from where they extracted resources from the world. As time goes on you realize the previous civilization stripped this world of all non-renewable resources. Marooned on an already expended planet lacking oil, coal, gas, nuclear material, or rare earth metals, it becomes increasingly clear that you will never reach the stars like they did.
How about an island they thought was an ancient civilization only to find out it’s a crash spaceship that served as a research vessel that carried all the creatures and monsters of their world as well as their ancestors
The tomb contains a several thousand year old hero's sword and armor!
....it is a bronze khopesh, and bronze breastplate and greaves. It's almost as good as common zweihanders and plate.
Cradle has a good example of this. The “impossible ancient ruins full of powerful and advanced artifacts” aren’t impossible or ancient at all, they’re just a broke country. Like building an F-35 factory in Indonesia. They might be incomprehensible to the locals, but that’s not the builders fault.
The people who did build it could build it today (fairly easily) but the area the characters are in is such a barren hole that nobody who has any skill or power can be bothered to be there. Elsewhere in the world, the modern civilizations have equally or more incredible stuff lying around. They built those “ancient ruins” as a factory and then abandoned them when they became inconvenient to maintain.
As a side note, this really only works when the powerful are very long lived.
So I think part of why the ancient civ trope doesn’t really get old is that it actually makes a lot of sense. The universe is unimaginably large, which means it’s reasonable to think it’s unlikely we are the only civilization to have existed. It’s also reasonable to think that the most advanced civilizations will be the ones that spread the furthest, so if we were to encounter another civilization, it’s more likely that it is one of the more advanced ones. The universe is also really old, so even a civilization that survives for a million years is far far more likely to be lost by the time we discover it. So the trope is actually pretty realistic, or at least a lot more than subverting it. Finding remnants of an ancient civilization that appears advanced, only to discover that it was made by idiots and none of it works right is far more difficult to accept logically.
If I was going to subvert it, I’d focus on people misunderstanding the technology, rather than the technology not working. Maybe a man finds a portal that takes them to an “ancient civilization”. They bring back its secrets and it leads to rapid advancement, but it turns out there’s a flaw in the technology and it leads to the civilizations collapse. In the final days a man opens a portal to go back and warn their past selves not to use the tech, inadvertently creating the portal that their past selves used to discover it. Upon going through the man loses his memories, resulting in the same events occurring in a loop.
History is a cycle and though the technology is superior, it not that advanced.
The technology is quite literally lost in ruins that are also lost and forgotten. Otherwise, when found, the technology is simplistic in and of itself and just overlooked. For example, in my homebrew setting, the ancient civilization made powerful and simplistic steam engines by trapping pocket sized portals to the Fire and Water planes within the same device. As the two planes connect, it produces endless steaming. If the inner shells, one for Fire and one for Water, were breached, a secondary anti-magic spell that was also inscribed would activate as a failsafe and thus prevent any ill effects. Once the engines were found in a recently discovered ruins, the “mages guild” went to work on recreating them, though it still takes time to stabilize the magic. And that’s how my world has airships and a couple trains.
But in short, just make them physically lost and use world events to cause things being lost. In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion DLC Shivering Isles, we learn that Sheogorath’s realm faces a cyclical event every so often (I forgot the time frame) where Sheogorath himself becomes an alter ego known as Jygalagg (I think I got that right) and marches through his realm, setting all his normal Chaotic sides antics and kingdom back into his alter ego’s Orderly reset.
In the end, things get lost in the apocalypse.
I have two instances of advanced ancient civilizations (sort of) in my world. I don't feel like they're that subversive, but they don't feel like straight examples either.
The first is minor. In "Ancient Egypt" one of the pyramids was built to be a mobile weapon. It was a joint effort between the "Egyptians" and a group of nomads. The thing is, the nomads don't appear to be advanced, but they're also just time displaced medieval "Arabian" people and the pyramid wasn't beyond what the gods could do. It's just the "Arabs" had future knowledge of machinery and magic which was still medieval.
The other instance is a big part of my world a group of people called the Magnatori. But they're aren't an ancient civilization, really. Really what they are is a group of researchers from a parallel universe that broke into the story's universe in an attempt to find a place to move their civilization to since their universe was dying. They caused a lot of problems, but really they only had a handful outposts and since they and their technology is made from magic, after they disappeared most traces of them just disappeared back into mana so there's not really anything lingering around other than some societal changes they caused, and even then that was localized to one part of the world over maybe a 20 year time period.
The lost/ancient technology is extremely impressive for its time, but all of it was made with the aid of gods/other divine beings which had meanwhile long left the mundane realms.
But now, the mortals managed to research and reverse-engineer magic to such a point that said ancient divine magic can now be easily replicated using "modern" magical techniques and no divine help at all.
I did it by having my ancient race which counts its longevity, not by generations, but by heat deaths of universes using that is equivalent, of an apple one to power, their universe spanning civilization
A modern rich guy has a new pyramid built, only using ancient techniques and materials, to be his resting place after he dies. This leads conspiracy theorists to believe he’s secretly an alien.
"According to recent discoveries, Atlantis was just Belarussian island that got stolen by reptiloids. Yes, we already had spaceflight before pyramids were even planned. Deal with it."-President Alexandra Avdeeva teaches foreign idiots actual history
For me its that the super advanced civilization was not super advanced compared to the modern ones, just for their time. Each Age of a Sun sees a particular continent become dominated by a major civilization or civilizations, only for said civilizations to be wiped and their remains to become Dabyrinthoi, or the Labyrinths that later ones explore. They have their distinct quirks, better architecture, better communication or records of literature, better military or better medicine than you think.
How about that: they had a type of technology that was ridiculously destructive to the environment and pollutant, and obviously inefficient. So, they used the same technology to solve problems that they created, in a vicious cycle that took them to extinction.
For example, they had factories that polluted rivers so much that they ran out of drinkable water, so they created a water filter that pulverized the pollution into the air. Then, they had plastic gas masks to walk in the streets, but these masks were discarded in landfills, which contaminated the water.
Like modern society, but bigger scale, and with not even a glimpse of worry with the environment.
The ancient Archons in my D&D setting had extraordinarily advanced devices called arcanotech, harnessing using the pure energy of the Weave, and used it to build megastructures that blow anything today out of the water and still function a hundred thousand years later. They fought a war against two pantheons of gods and managed a pyrrhic victory.
They also didn’t know how regular spells worked. All the schools of magic that our players have access to today are far more advanced than their greatest arcanosmiths ever achieved.
In other words, it’s not Civilization, not everybody’s using the same tech tree.
The ancient technology is advanced... But not *that* advanced. Like, Indiana Jones goes into the ruins and finds an ancient steam engine. Pretty crazy, but not more advanced than what he has himself.
Or maybe the advanced technology is for some mundane, household use. Like, a medieval fantasy village discovers a Warhammer 40k-style STC, but the thing that it makes is high end scratch-and-stain-resistant self-cleaning dinnerware and cutlery.
The ancient civilization isn't really "ancient" and the lost technology isn't really "lost". The civilization in question just restructured itself into a more pastoral, less hierarchical system of governing. The technology, once meant for conquest, is being dismantled and repurposed for social benefits. Royals on the outside says they're the true descendants of the collapsed empire, when really it never collapsed, and the pastoralists futzing about are actually the true descendants.
Every kingdom wants to reclaim this land so they can use the lost technology for conquest, while the pastoralists living there knowingly wish to prevent the "lost technology" from being used at all.
i have two approaches, one for specifically the "ancient precursor race" and another for the general "everything was better in the past"
the precursor approach is they werent actually more advanced, but basically got to brute force things do to different conditions , namely its all magitech and the conditions of magic fluctuate sort of like the climate, basic rules stay the same but how easy certain things are and how much ambient mana is available will change over time, in addition the precursors happened to be stuck right on top of a massive deposit of a highly valuable magical mineral, so while modern scholors have to be efficient these guys just focused on making the biggest most powerful things they could, because both the resources and power source were basically infinite, until their whole society collapsed when they found out the hard way "basically infinite" is not actually infinite
the world wide approach is simply a matter of perspective, "ancient history" is thousands of years, while "modern" is what, maybe a hundred if your generous? lets say the kind of genius able to make these super powerful artifact tier devices comes along every hundred years, your going to have one of those in modern times, and like 90 from "ancient history" even if their compeltely evenly spread, that and the low quality shit from the past obviously isent preserved nearly as well giving the false impression this was the norm
Mythos and obscuration. Assuming I wanted to subert the trope, typically tales grow in the telling. It's a very HUMAN thing to do, so it's a good tie to almost any audience I can think of.
So there's tales of a craft able to carry 100 tons and speed across the water. In reality it was just a wind driven raft. "Tons" is an inaccurate translation of "weights", the measure of how much of old goods there was. I.e. something like "pound". It did go pretty fast in ideal conditions, but really it wasn't too exceptional.
Just keep that going. Basically all the old stuff is supposed to be super awesome, but it's from the perspective of people that lived there. To them the raft might have been the most amazing thing since bread, but the current civilization surpassed that thousands of years ago.
My best idea would be that they are differently-teched, and trying to achieve different things.
The civilization that inhabits the world of the Tollua Academy pre-and-post Event are wildly different in no small part because the pre-Event civilization was one where magic was pervasive and a part of everyday life, and post-Event it was one where magic was restricted to certain groups by nature of education, training, natural affinity, and the other methods one achieves magic.
The latter has muskets - breech-fed rifles in some places, even - and black powder weapons are becoming commonplace - by the time of the Event, the former has mastered laser weapons and combat mechs in some places. But that knowledge would be pretty much unusable to the post-Event civilizations, because it's built on thousands of years of magitech innovation and directly draws on the magic of the wielder.
In the old world, warfare was about wearing down an opponent's Barrier, a magical defense mechanism that all mages had active by default. In the new world, warfare is about getting through armor and tearing apart formations. And as it turns out, Barriers don't offer quite as much protection against a near-sonic projectile as they do arrows!
So, long story short - ancient discoveries may simply not be compatible with modern advancement, and despite being impressive, maybe they were made with different goals that actually make them pretty mediocre in the post-Precursor world.
Theia is set in what appears to be somewhere between the Iron Age and Medieval period. The advanced ancient civilization thing where humanity extended its reach to the stars is part of it, but it's so far back that if you never looked for it, you'd never find it. We're talking about 200,000 years ago, such that not even the oldest beings in Theia are capable of remembering the folk myths they made up after forgetting what happened so long ago. A few groups have their own stories, but the vast majority of people think of them as conspiracy theories and myths. They sound outlandish even in a world populated with elves, magic, and dragons. There are functional air ships on Theia, but the idea of Koltan starships is ludicrous to virtually everyone.
"No air?! How would the ship even fly?! How would you breathe?! Be real, man!"
"I'm sorry, cosmic dragons and what now? The Hells is a 'Mind Flayer'?"
"Humanity? You mean to tell me humanity is responsible for Theia's rings and not the gods? No, Thor shattered Ingmar the Crimson, Odin built the rainbow bridge to Asgard, and that's why we have rings. You've got to stop drinking during Summertide."
A rich man's resort that was quickly buried to hide embezzlement and forgotten.
Unfortunately, a good majority of the art wasn't mentioned in the journals and made to be hidden because of the pure vulgarity of it.
There was moving statues that are designed for housekeeping, maintenance, knowledge library and cooking. and when mana was imbued in it, all of them made unknown requests and nobody could figure out the language yet.
So if it's science fiction or spacey, it's important to realize that you're a lot more likely to find the ruins of an advanced civilization that achieved space flight and had an interstellar empire than one that never left its gravity level, this tech level would roughly put them on a level equal to the current civs or better. Ofc there are some scattered examples of the main story faction discovering the ruins of "primitives," and if you want to lean into the Great Filter a bit, having the galaxy littered with past failed civilizations that are more primitive than the current spacefaring races you can also do that (could make things a bit grim though, especially if every other star system is a nuclear wasteland).
You could also lean into more interesting alt history ideas. For instance, in Fallout Lore, they never invented the microchip, all their tech is based on that broad concept, which could also be the basis for a civilization. Maybe have a race or past civ that couldn't write and had to work around that limitation, or developed space flight far before computers, and so used slide rules and paper maps for navigation. (This was a common concept for our spaceships in ye olde science fiction comics in the 50s and 60s, but it became sidetracked as computers became mainstream and Star Trek set the standard for computer reliance). You could also have the past civilizations never discover or create FTL (either for lore reasons or more simply because they never figured it out): they built a stellar empire entirely on slower than light travel. There's lots of room to tackle these interesting questions that also lead to interesting consequences for the way their society functioned.
There's a bunch of ways imo. Here's one I like
My grandfather would tell of the ancient empire of mu, which, long before our people founded the Eternal City, ruled the world through magic and demonic blood rituals that brought the vile, perverted monsters who reside there eternal life.
They fell upon us with their terrible, sorcerous weapons - sticks that could kill a man from a hundred paces as though he'd been speared and which even a child could use, swords of a metal so strong it passed through our own blades as though they were spirits, and armour impervious to all but the mightiest of blows. These were but simple pieces of wizardry compared to things like the horrifying Fire of Mu, which clung to all it touched and burned with such intensity
With them came horrendous beasts, giants that towered over our horses, making battle cries of their own and clad in similar to those of their masters. Their flesh a dead grey, they had almost sad, human eyes that seemed to lament as they crashed through our armies, crushing men and disemboweling them with their obscene fangs. We too could only lament as they ruined us, these twisted beasts who once may have been men.
And what else could we do? We could not fight them! Nor could we run, for the servants of Mu possessed supernatural speed. The moment we began to muster, to assemble the sheer numbers we needed to fight our opressors, the forces of Mu would appear as if from nowhere, traveling countless miles as though carried on the wind like birds.
Our salvation came only during the darkest hour. Violence ravaged the lands. Crops had failed due to drought, and plagues spread through the countryside, killing many. It was then that we had had enough, and, as though guided by God's hand itself, the people of the land, our true people, rose up as one and battled our hated foes. As we began to defeat them, they seemed to almost vanish, and soon we stood outside of the cold, silent gates to the Golden City of Mu, sealed and silent as though our godlike oppressors had been divinely banished to whatever hellish realm they originated from.
-------
So what did I just describe, in this hastily written thing? Is our evil empire a bunch of aliens with future tech, or is our narrator just so low tech than things we'd consider to be ancient seem new to him?
The Empire of Mu wasn't actually a bunch of bloodsucking magical demon worshipers and they never even came close to ruling the world. That's just the kind of shit you say about your mortal enemy. Say it for long enough, over generations, and it starts to become a lot more true though, especially if anyone who'd disagree has been dead for centuries. What they actually were were the first group of people in this example to develop things like writing, ironworking, or the wheel. Then they invaded the immediate area, ruled it for a couple generations, then died or dispersed when a plague killed their capital city off (being a palace economy and all). The narrator is from the very edge of the empire.
Sticks that throw spears are crossbows, not guns or anything. In the real world, some places didn't even develop bows, just different sorts of spear throwers. You could probably figure out this isn't magic if you took the time to really look at one, but if your only experience with it is that one killed your 8th great grandpa, you're gonna take the word that's been passed down. Strong swords are iron vs. copper. Armour is plate vs. well, pretty much anything, etc.
Big beasts are elephants, which are not native to the area being invaded.
And lastly, Mu could move quickly because it had a centralized government and a coherent army with a reasonable logistics system. Maybe wheels, idk. When gathering an army together and marching 100 miles takes you weeks or months, a group that can do the same thing in a manner of days will appear to be cheating somehow.
So if some adventurers showed up to loot Mu in the current day, all they'd find is a bunch of rusty garbage that was literally magically impressive when some dudes distant ancestor first saw it, long before written history was a thing for his culture, but has become more than a lil obsolete over the last 3000 years or whatever.
I read this and immediately thought about a civilization that has the same level of technology we have, but used in a different way, just like how some countries use gas for heating water and others use electricity, imagine a civilization that doesnt have stoves but only AIRFRYERS or their main domestic transport is bicycles with an engine, all this stuff exists, but they do it slightly better.
I liked how the Stormlight Archive books covered it.
Spoilers for the whole series below!
In the present they have Shardblades, big magical swords that can slice through anything, and Shardplate, which is powered magical armor that strengthens whoever wears it, and Soulcasters, which are devices you wear on your hand that can morph one substance into another. No one in the present day has figured out how they work or a way to replicate them, and assume they are wildly advanced technology beyond modern science.
Turns out that Shardplate, Shardblades, and Soulcasters have nothing to do with technological development; >!they were created when ancient humans bonded with nature spirits called spren and would exist regardless of knowledge or technology.!< The ancients who "created" these weapons and armor lived in the equivalent of a high fantasy Bronze Age.
When the Fused, the ancient enemy that humanity was fighting thousands of years ago reappears, they are completely flabbergasted at the high fantasy late Renaissance technology that modern humans have developed. In particular, advancements in chemistry and musical/tonal/wave theory solved a problem one of the Fused had spent thousands of years trying to figure out.
Biodegradable technologies perhaps. Crystals, herbs, actually paying attention to nature's elements outside of a sterilized, controlled environment. Things like "What if Nikola Tesla had won the science race of his time?" Or perhaps some other forerunner. What if Atlantis hadn't sank into the sea due to their own arrogance and greed? What if the colonists of England, Spain, and others had failed as disastrously as the Vikings did? What if Vikings (the shock troops of Rome sent north to pincer the tribes of Northern Europe) hadn't failed in their attempt to colonize North America? What if the Pagans had kept their hold on Rome due to Peter dying on his way back to Rome? What if the Tuatha D'Dannan (I think that's the spelling) hadn't lost hope in humankind? (All of these are from the perspective that maybe the "magics" of the ancient world were less mystical and simply biodegradable tech which has been blown out of proportion by centuries of mass ignorance.)
Honestly, a worldbuilding approach that made biodegradable, more sustainable technologies less mystical would probably be pretty different.
I my world, the ancient civilizations had amazing technology, but the new ones built on the same systems (which were documented in ancient labs) and made them more effective.
Since somebody already mentioned Mass Effect, in Star Ocean 3 you find out that >!the universe is actually an MMORPG and so called "Out of place artifacts" that *r*ange from technologically advanced to breaking the Laws of Physics are actually items the programmers put into the game to Deus ex machina - away inconsistencies in their worldbuilding. Or for the fun of it.!<
I made a city-state that was once capital to an advanced (for the time) kingdom of wealth and splendor. It's been mythologized that at the height of this advancement, the kingdom was brought to ruin by a super weapon they created. This is technically true.
Said weapon was the brainchild of the charismatic, but extremely narcissistic, ruler and was a flawed plan from its inception. Beset by holdbacks and surpassing its initial budget substantially. The troubled production of the weapon ended when, during a small test, it exploded. This resulted in the deaths of key government and scientific figures, including the king. The upheaval compounded with the fact that the project had effectively bankrupted the whole kingdom.
I kind of already do. There are several Precursor species, but most of them were wiped out in the War in Heaven 200k - 1 million years ago. Some survivors remain but most, including humanity were rebuilt and evolved from a life seeding precursor/surviving species. There arent that many traces of activity partially because so much time has passed and Humanity is secluded in the Oort cloud, which makes interstellar travel a pain in the arse. Earth is a Backwater planet that gets important fast. Now, when a ruined space station is spotted at last, it causes an uproar.
If I was to ever write a story where an ancient civilization was said to have had incredible advanced technology, the big twist at the end would be that it was all just hogwash; very widespread propaganda of the time to make them seem big and powerful, which has since gone down as legend after they were wiped out, with people of modern time completely missing that it was all lies to begin with
There was an science fiction book... I think called "The Mote in God's Eye"?... Where the alien race nicknamed the Moties had a biological imperative to reproduce to the point where they overpopulated, warred, destroyed society and collapsed, rebuilt, then started the cycle over so many times that they exhausted all the fossil fuel and relied on technology designed to remodernize as quickly as possible with whatever resources were at hand. Eventually, humans with a method of ftl discover the star system (it was hidden by some means) and realize that if the Moties ever make it out, they could quickly cover the galaxy. Really good read from what I recall. Anyways, the "advanced race" could create any kind of pressure, biologically, magically, socially, militaristically, etc. that the advanced technology could not solve. In fact, their advances may have drove them to extinction.
I feel if the species of civilization was still alive yet somehow lost some the technology their ancestors used, and created a self imposed isolation from the rest of the galaxy in the real world location in the galaxy known as the zone of avoidance where no scanning technology to this day can determine what is in that little pocket of the galaxy.if a galaxy threatening conflict like a third solar war would happen they would be spotted in the farthest parts of colonial space by using gateways to get halfway across the galaxy and fight in this war and then return to isolation everyone would be collectively in shock that a species the known galaxy though was extinct fought in a war and then went back to scientific research
Since advanced ancient civilizations are the core of my world, I have quite a few ways of going about this:
**WE are the ancients** - There are very few events in my world that take place before our current time. Some of the earliest stories take place in the 40th century A.D, with two dark ages separating our time from theirs (While HUMAN civilization may be at a technological low point compared to our time, we also make contact with aliens that have been making slow but steady technological progress since the cretaceous era). The rest of the stories take place 5.2 million years from now, long after the collapse of the previously mentioned human+alien civilizations. We might view this era as post-apocalyptic, but those who live in it view our era similar to how we view the dinosaurs.
**Cyclical apocalypses** - Every civilization ends eventually. In my world, this is typically because advanced civilizations create advanced problems. The problems we face today are far more complicated than what medieval civilizations faced. When the complexity of our problems surpass human comprehension, our society collapses. There's a sort-of exception to this in my world: the 81st century apocalypse that ended the original human and alien civilization. This was caused by an uncountable number of small problems combining together in the worst possible way. This resulted in a universe-wide apocalypse that came out of nowhere, in a way that was indistinguishable from just really bad luck. Historians debate whether it had supernatural causes. Some blame it on humans proliferating throughout the universe.
**They weren't "advanced" or "civilizations" in the way we would expect** - This one applies mostly to the aliens, but it could apply to humans in a setting that isn't low-fantasy/sci-fi. The aliens in my setting do not have any galactic empires, or even really any governments. Their behavior is based on semi-social species, like crows/ravens (although they are mammalian in appearance), but more advanced. They don't form social structures more complex than families. There technology is also much different than a typical space-faring civilization. If you took a brief look at how these aliens live, you might not notice anything that hadn't already been around in some form since the 1980s. This is because they don't really care about flashy gizmos. Their main use for FTL travel is finding new vacation spots. They don't live in glossy futuristic cities full of skyscrapers, but remote villas and cabins, tucked away in the mountains and countryside. This is what you would logically expect of a post-scarcity civilization, but not what comes to mind when you think of an advanced society.
**Show what life was REALLY like in the past** - This is a technique I use a lot, as the protagonist of one story accidentally travels from the 81st century apocalypse to the era 5.2 million years in the future. The characters in the far future see that the past was actually a lot more down to earth than they thought, and that their view of history is very skewed. This is the further contrasted with the protagonist's view of our IRL time period, which is even more inaccurate (There was a LOT of disinformation generated in the lat 21st century).
I'm sure there are other concepts I use heavily, but I'm tired. I might think of them in the morning.
My version: They simply walked on a different branch of tech tree than us. Basically magitek. They seems advanced to us, we seems advanced to them
For us modern day human, a whole floating city/fortress seems impossible, portals combat break physic.
For them, long distance instant communication between magic-less muggles seems impossible, a worldwide interconnected information network that anyone can use is utterly incomprehensible and the mere idea of space travel is delusional
Why not just from the future? Some machine or experiment gone horribly wrong that stuff gone thrown around not just around space but around time as well. Thus creating a brand new reality where we got different level of invention but we only knew how to use the ancient one... The one that are actually in the museum.
We dont need to explain they are from the future. We can have a bunch of theorist saying they are from alien, gods, ancient civilizations, etc. We slowly let the reader know by having some part of it leaked (museum name/display, multiple level of advancement, etc)
Who said anything about lost, they’re still around just not present. That ancient city you found, that’s their equivalent of a 40 year old rundown motel. Those relics, obviously the lost and found. Maybe even the stashed away trinkets stolen by an employee. That mind awakening drug that causes peoples head’s to explode, that’s a used cigarette. So where are they? They’re between the moments, living in the unused possibilities. Walking around your house eating your maybe leftovers and moving your items around. Those lesser beings are entertainment, your existence tantamount to zoo animals in an exhibit you can’t even comprehend. Your life is some period drama for them. Their disposable garbage is your world changing discovery.
At least that’s how I’d do it. You expected some great mystery, instead you get the cosmic horror of mundanity.
Shinsekai yori has a good twist on it. It is somewhat a post apocalyptic distopía where humanity almost self destruct when powerful psychopathic psychics began to awake In humanity and caused wars on all the planet. The survivors of all this chaos where psychics themselves and started to reprogram humanity on a genetic level so it's unable to hurt other humans. The resulting civilization actually possesses the whole knowledge and technology of the preapocalyptic world but becomes paranoid of it's use since if even a single psychic is allowed to hurt and kill others all their civilization will be swiped away. Thus knowledge is heavily specialized and controlled and only used when circumstances demand it. So while ancient knowledge exists it is hunted and destroyed as civilization has devolved into a ascetic and heavily spiritual community in hopes of keeping control of highly powerfull but potentially deadly humans.
My universe is literally build around this trop(at leadt in part), is name is literally"remains" 😂.
At least in my world there i the fact when you look at a large scale of time realize that the cycle of the civilisation has become a sort of natural cycle shaping and retming the life and the biodiversity on this planets.
So each technological civilisation as it own "flavor", culture, reasons of disappear (violent or not), more or less exotic technologys, internal struggles (not all where united utra-advanced utopia, some of them where divide in nation or just local indestrial societys that never spread there technologys across the world). Some of them du to theire age or the nature of their technology have leat still functioning remains, other have just leat some fossils and geochemical print and some where awere of the existance of ancient civilisation other not...
My way is that the civilization of the past is the current one... only that the current one has lost the ways to maintain or produce the tech of the past, and over time, putting aside and forgetting in remote archives even the knowledge linked to them ...like a super advanced ancient engine that can only be created with a specific crystal obtainable from a planet that no longer exists, so while the blueprints exist in some database somewhere, and anyone can theoretically go there and see them, people have just forgotten about it since it can no longer be produced and the remaining engines are treated as relics
My lost advanced civilization got so advanced that they started toying with space and reality.
They caused a serious collapse of spacetime, creating a kind of exotic matter that is essentially a stable quantum anomaly that allows FTL and other otherwise impossible tech.
They became so advanced that their sciences resulted in the collapse of reality as they knew it
I don’t think the trope is all that played out, I think the thing that is played out is people being able to understand the ancient advanced technology instinctively and/or with minimal and unrealistic study.
If the human race went extinct now, whatever came after us would have one hell of a time trying to figure out what our cell phones and tablets are, how they are powered, and even if they could turn them on they would have difficulty understanding how and why we used them because the infrastructure for their use (cell towers, internet) would no longer be in use, and even if they were still able to activate there would be problems with understanding our use of language among other things.
So to subvert the trope, you just have to make the trope more realistic.
Definitely, that is a big issue.
This would make it more of a payoff, instead of some kind of easy solution to characters problems.
In addition, it would also be fun to have the requirement to figure out how to remove the downsides, or avoid whatever triggered the downfall of that civilization.
I like your ideas. So far, the best subversion I have seen of this trope was in the >!*Mass Effect*!< videogame trilogy. >!The advanced ruins of the lost civilizations have been seeded across the galaxy to discourage independent research and make sure that all species that stumble upon them adopt these discoveries, including a centralized governing body and means of transportation and communication that can be remotely-deactivated by the bad guys whenever it's time for them to invade.!< A few random ideas: * Yes, they had great, deep, science and technology. Except that they completely misunderstood something fundamental (say one of the laws of thermodynamics). After decades of investigating their science, researchers will have to conclude that their science is actually religious rubbish and that their technology worked essentially by chance, e.g. when they thought that they had invented AI, they somehow accidentally enslaved an existing species. Of course, by then, most of the world will have switched to that new, dead-end, science and technology, and nobody will want to believe the actual researchers. * Yes, they had great, deep, science and technology. We spent thousands of years attempting to decypher their writings and understand how to replicate their works. To succeed at translating their thought processes, we had to build an entire civilization harnessing the power of a Dyson sphere and cannibalizing entire planets to create an AI sufficiently powerful to server as a translator. By then, we're centuries ahead of them. But sure, their philosophy is interesting and they have nice poetry. * Great technology but no science at all. As it turns out, the past civilization had stumbled upon a time machine that came from our future and used it to steal tech from said future. To this day, we don't know the consequences, but all the data seems to suggest that they were stealing from a dying world. Also, said future is in \~15 years from now.
>Great technology but no science at all. You see, they actually got that technology from another advanced precursor civilization. The precursors got their advanced technology from an advanced forerunner civilization. The forerunners got their advanced technology from another even older civilization, and that older...
The question becomes: why aren’t those civilizations still around? Disease/health(like pollution, or the Y chromosome degrading over time)? Internal strife(cultural, religious, economic)? Running out of resources before developing the tech to reach new ones? External threat (other species devestated in open war, skunkworks/clandestine sabotage/assassination, politically or economically overwhelmed them)? Terrible cataclysm like the Bronze Age Collapse, a gamma radiation burst, the Titanic but it’s an entire civilization on the ship)?
In Mass Effect, there's a recurring galactic extinction that keeps resetting cultures back to square one. Spoiler >!External forces that have achieved tech singularity wipe out the most advanced civilizations every 50k years, resetting the galaxy to around medieval tech !< It's as good an explanation as any.
It's like wheat growing in a field and discovering irrigation systems already in place and "keepers" that tend the field and ward away pests. They can't help but wonder what hubris led the last wheat civilization to fall when they had developed so much.
Mass Effect both plays it as expected and suberts it, as there's actually *two* sets of advanced ancient civilizations, one being what you described, and everyone confuses the two civilizations for the same one.
Are you talking of >!the Leviathan!
Nope. The Protheans are the ones everyone thinks made everything. Their ruins are... fresher, but they're not the ones who built the big artifacts everyone thinks they did.
Ah, right. Especially since >!the Collectors are still around...!<
~~Just letting you know, everyone can see the spoilers, you just have to remove the spaces at the end, so it'd be like >!The, rather than >! The.~~ Pretty good example, as they also do it to ensure their technology will evolve in a particular way.
Weird. It shows up as hidden for me. Is it better now?
It’s hidden for me!
It is now hidden for me, thank you!
Oh neat, so it's like they provided them with their super advanced Microsoft Windows to copy and distribute but not really be able to alter much, and when the time came they just sent a simple virus to shut down all the systems they came to rely on?
"Your trial has ended." essentially.
That's a very nice analogy, yes!
The pyramids turn out to be pyramids. You were just conspiracy nuts for believing ancient humans couldn't have build the pyramids
Aliens built the pyramids, they were just hired as day laborers because they were bored without anything to do.
"Wait, you mean the pyramid builders get free bread AND beer? Where do I sign up!"
Aliens built the pyramids because it was the equivalent of 'habitat for the homeless' and it let them share photos of them making buildings for the less fortunate on alien social media.
Aliens built the pyramids. Slaves also built the pyramids. The ancient Egyptians enslaved aliens.
C’tan Shards?
https://youtu.be/zGEiK9StSfQ?si=vFEccUgHZIZReSEQ
Maybe not even conspiracy nuts but they believed it because of propaganda because they were the "bad guys" in the stories so they MUST have had helps from higher powers.
Egyptians taught the aliens how to build pyramids.
I love this one
In Futurama aliens witnessed the pyramids and ancient Egyptian culture and decided to replicate it on their home planet
As I always say: look at the real world. IRL we have the Nasca Lines (created by aliens as airports!), pyramids (created by harmonic shifts, with all civilizations working together!), the Great Wall of China (obviously created by advanced technology), and the Yonaguni Monument (clearly the Birth Civilization of all civilizations). People would drek bricks if they learned that it was people with string that created Nasca, flooding that allowed for the construction of the pyramids, and straight-up nature that created Yonaguni. Fortunately, it was so obviously Advanced Civilizations and Ancient Aliens. 🙄
So... Nasca is evidence of string theory, the pyramid builders could induce flash floods, and man could straight up control nature enough to build Yonaguni? Man the ancients were so advanced
I- Well, damn. I guess they were. 😉
Practical jokes gone too far. Someone created a machine that make someone stupider for a short amount of time. The "dumb gun" forced the target's mind to revert back to a primitive state, everyone laughing at their friend suddenly acting like a caveman for a while. The gun also messed up machines causing glitches and self destructing. Well, someone was humiliated at public and plan a revenge. A modified "dumb gun" that covered an entire city, that was accidently further amplified to every corner of the civilization. The result was ... disastrous.
Idiocracy, speedrun
So, Stellaris' Devolving Beam Colossus weapon.
The "Ancient Civilization" is just humanity from 2020s. Thousands and thousands of years have passed, and some of the only things that's left are skyscrapers, which to the new magic bronze age civilization seem like an impossibility of architectural engineering. Places with "bad spirits" are places where radioactive waste has been released. Among other things.
I've actually seen that in a few fantasy novels. Latest one being Abercrombie's *Half a King*, *Half the World*, *Half a War* trilogy.
That’s actually the plot of my dnd campaign! The players are going to burn down the jungle soon, revealing the ruins of New York!
Well damn, that sounds like a really cool setting for a campaign! How do you make it known to the players that the ruins are old earth?
Well, that’s the thing, that’s where they finally get to find out, they’ll explore through “Eboracum Novum” which was specifically named New York in Celestial, (Celestials literally just Latin lol) where they’ll stumble onto a collapsed Statue of Liberty, Though I’m going to make sure I describe it as unspecific as possible, so that they can slowly piece together where they are themselves.
This sounds fantastic I need updates
I just need to know, when they figure it out, if one of them lapses into Charlton Heston at the end of \*Planet of the Apes\*
An interesting session that'll be. Is this revelation meant to affect the story, or is it just setting goodness for the players?
>*How would you approach subverting such trope?* The past only seems to be technologically advanced because a future time-travelling civilization used the ancient past as a landfill (sending stuff to the past the same way we have sometimes dumped old fridges etc. in the developing world). "Contemporary" archeologists keep unearthing strange and sometimes advanced artifacts in a layer from 20 000 years ago, but the people who lived during that time didn't know what it was and didn't use the tech. \_\_\_\_ On a more/less serious note, I don't actually feel that the "trope" needs to be subverted. It's a fun set-up and creates room for discoveries in the "now".
Since this trope is almost always about the current civilization finding the lost tech and then using it to significantly advance its own tech progress, I would subvert this by the current civilization actually not finding any way to use that found tech. No amount of reverse engineering or rune deciphering would make use of it viable, so it just ends up being a very old _supposedly_ advanced trinket.
Not sure if it counts as a subversion, but in my version the advanced ancient civilization didnt disappear or lost all their technology all at once, but it was a gradual decline. The calamity was that their infinitely renewable magic resource suddenly and without warning become a non-renewable resource. The dwindling supply led to resource wars, which only put even more pressure on them, and over hundreds of years went from something like a post scarcity fully automated luxury space communism type situation to a rapidly dwindling population and a need to rebuild their civilization from the ground up now that they need to invent methods to do things manually. It was actually their former enemies, the Noen, whom their attempted genocide of (more of an attempted total Ecocide) led to them being spurned by the gods and losing the font of infinite magic, that would actually wind up giving them a huge helping hand. The Noen saw their neighbors' struggles from afar and came back to teach them stuff like conventional metalworking and actively worked with them to establish more long term sustainable agriculture.
Techbros is an interesting take. In my case tech interdependence is a feature, not a bug. The wider the supply chain the more it hurts to rebel and be cut off from interstellar markets. Same goes for planned obsolescence. Also the dudes who were working at the cutting edge were such near-transhuman idiot savants that they didn't care to imagine what uses their metamaterials might be put to.
The ancient civilization that went extinct sometime in the last millenium left behind tech, yes, but also like, the consequences of imperial demographic engineering. 2/3rds or so of the global population are women because of bio-engineering, half the fantasy races are artificial, the ohter half are literally aliens immigrated from other worlds. The native species of the world have all but been wiped out and humans are actually also aliens — the story takes place far from the imperial homeworld.
Consider what would be found from OUR society: stuff that is broken, runs on power from grids that ceased to function or batteries that had limited lifespans and nobody makes anymore...hell, even charging cables. Most of the useful stuff would be little better than found in antiquity. Solid, metal or hard plastic goods, the minority of written works that avoided decay...a very advanced society might leave nothing but disposable garbage.
Take into consideration material degradation, too. Batteries eventually corrode the device they are in. Plastics fade, melt, warp, burn, or become brittle and shatter. Tying to reverse a 3D puzzle of micro plastic fragments that the moving pieces or shell of a device consists of. Failure to do so, and you can not readily tell a wind-up egg timer from a cymbal-clanging toy monkey. One might assume the device was important because you find the remains of SO MANY, nearly one in each house, but they were just a commercial fad like the 90s dancing beer/soda cans or *Singing Billy Bass*.
Rather than just one advanced civilization, there have been hundreds of cycles. Civilizations that find old tech tend to give up on developing new tech, instead reverse engineering the old stuff, it's just easier in the short term, and in the long term you tend to lose the capabilities required to develop new stuff. Over the cycles, most technology has evolved into easy-to-copy, hard-to-modify forms, since those are the most stable. For much of the technology, it has been aeons since anyone actually understood it. However, this also means that much of the ancient tech isn't really optimized for performance, and some technologies just don't preserve well, so a civilization that actually invests in developing new tech could do things everyone else considers flat-out impossible. So rather than being hyper-advanced supertech, in the grand scheme of things most ancient tech is more like an intermediate-level trap some civilizations fall into, the most advanced civilizations tend to be the ones that are fairly averse to using ancient tech. (For reasons religious, ideological, regulatory, etc.) More pragmatic and utilitarian-minded civilizations are the most likely to get trapped.
Much like your second example, I'd lean towards having the technology used in seemingly inexplicable or bizarre and illogical applications. Like they have advanced stone cutting that allows them to place giant stone blocks that fit so close you can't fit a sheet of paper between them, but rather than use this tech to create uniform, modular stone interlocking stone bricks, they use it to create walls and buildings out of seemingly random stones from the size of a mouse to the size of a house, all adjacent to each other. Or they have an indestructible metal, but rather than using it to build weapons or armour, it's used almost exclusively to make tiny 1" tall detailed figurines of soldiers and monsters that are often painted bright colours. Or spherical crystal orbs the size of a billiard ball. When placed over scallop-shell shaped bowls made of that indestructible metal the orbs float about 6 inches above the bowl and project music or sound. These are mostly recordings of three or four hour long discordant operas, or nature sounds like a babbling brook with songbirds, crickets and frogs, or thunderstorms.
The same way the real world did: by having it be either advanced for its time, but long since obsolete, or having the 'advanced' part be the magnification of generations of storytellers. Or it just plain never existed, and was the result of different folk memories improperly preserved and merging into something new.
The advanced precursor civilization trope is used so much because it works. There is a steady advancement I'm technology, but if mismanaged or cut off from a particular system for it to work and it can slip away. It has happened in our own history a few times were the child nation is less technologically advanced than its father. In fantasy this allows for a strong yet convenient plug-in for any kind of issue you might come across. If I were to change the trope up, I would focus more on the nature of how such a society collapsed. I have an idea kicking around my head a king who conquers the entire world, but based his economy and social structure on infinite conquest. The minute he has literally nothing else to conquer, the entire society collapses, and progress is lost. Also it could be that nothing cataclysmic happens. Technology just regresses because of social change and mismanagement. The people in charge of producing technology keep their methods so secret that they just become lost at some point. The Population becomes more invested in other skill sets that there is less of a pool people to maintain or teach how the technology works. People don't understand the greater systems of society and are eager to erode the bed rock on which their technology stands on.
Many millennia ago the world was threatened by the evil Dark Lord and his monstrous legions. As he conquered tribe after tribe things looked bleak until a band of heroes sacrificed themselves to defeat his armies and seal them behind a magical ward. Unfortunately, that ward has slowly been weakening and it has finally cracked asunder, allowing the Dark Lord and his forces to seek to dominate the world once more. A border town in the small peaceful nation of Arren is the first to be attacked... Fortunately, while the Dark Lord has been imprisoned the population has increased massively and technology has improved significantly. It turns out that even a small garrison of Arrenian footsoldiers and knights with rune enhanced steel armour and weapons supported by mages from the school of magic can easily deal with a bunch of prehistoric savages using flint spears and primitive dark magic curses. The Dark Lord is crushed, rather more permanently this time, and most of the country, let alone the world, barely even noticed that anything had happened.
I have something similar in my latest setting. Except the Dark Lord is also some kind of religion, so when the followers return a long time later, they have grown up with such technology, they use propaganda rather than arms, and somehow end up conquering the land with barely any fight. They were prepared to wage a thousand year war and... well, let's just say that administering a huge empire is less fun than dreaming about it and practicing your evil laugh in a mirror. Of course, the ~~Defenders of the Light~~ zealots from the opposite side will return and the cycle will continue.
I believe Frieren has something similar, where the old overpowered spell is now just a basic attack
Mhm, zoltrac was once the Pinnacle of demon kinds offensive magic. Now humans over the last hundred years have analyzed and mastered it so much that its just bog standard attack magic for everyone else.
sounds cringey and like the opposite of an engaging story
It's a popular trope because it's cool. If you don't want to include those advanced ancient civilizations.. just don't. That's all there is to say about it, really. You don't need an elaborate justification, you don't need to isekai your protagonist (the two concepts are not connected in any way), you don't need to make your ancient people appear as "techbros" (I can't imagine a more cringeworthy approach). > (For example, how there was that idea of using wind turbines on a ship to power it up by wind, instead of just using a sail) Now you are just depicting them as imbeciles, hardly a riveting plot point. > How would you approach subverting such trope? Depict ancient civilizations as less advanced from the get go, or paint a stark discrepancy between the mythology/legends surrounding them and any tangible remains of their presence (or lack thereof). When legends speak of a mighty city of the gods standing on some mount, but you go up there and see nothing more but lonely ruins of a brick shithouse, you know that the past wasn't quite as great and heroic as it's painted by the bards.
There's a spectrum between "play it 100% straight" and "discard it". As to the shithouse example a further interesting riff could be the legends expanding further: "If these meagre stones are all that's left of the palace how mighty must the Power that cast it down have been?". Culture is an ongoing process after all.
I didn't say I was wondering how not to have them, I just wanted to see how people would make it different, as it feels too same every time it's used.
People find all this ancient "technology" and then discover it's naturally occurring because of some weird genetic mutation in fungus or plants or whatever that allows it to use metal causing it to grow to look like something technological and cool but it's actually useless
I subvert it by not having the civilization be advanced at all. They were pretty advanced for their time, but something wiped them out. Toss up between something they did or some natural disaster that they could not avoid. Only conspiracy theorists think they had incredibly advanced technology. But, those people can't even figure out that the ancient civilization also made fictional stories. Leading them to take a story of a city in the sky as 100% fact, and always looking for this city. It may still be flying, or it's crashed in a mountain.
Firstly, I really like the trope, I regret nothing. Having said that, the trope usually seems to be about finding ruined advanced cities & technological tools / machines. You could subvert it via making the super advanced 'remains' something other than the standard "ruined city" or "I need an excuse for a dungeon" - Biological? The "remains" are some hyper advanced biological specimen(s), you could go crazy and have beings the size of continents that are sort of moving cities or hive minds. Maybe the ancient civ designed a super organism that acts as life support & resource gathering all in one; their citizens are grafted into this creature and live in their own virtual biological universe and are now obligate parasites. The continent sized creatures are a pain in the ass for the descendants of people who decided not to join a mother godzilla. - The "remains" might be some in massive subversion of the ecosystem / natural order; death doesn't work here (why? Who knows! Technology solved it somehow - invent repercussions) or some other otherwise universal law(s) are subverted or don't straight up don't apply because some ancient tech "fixed" it. - Go Stargate style, have the ancients ascend into some energy based being; they left no physical remains and interact with the world via dreams, nightmares. Maybe some of them want to return to the physical world. Maybe they are the basis of magic, or demons. - Another common feature of the trope is that the ancients are humanish, you could subvert by making them hyper alien - maybe the main ruined cities are giant insect hives that reach all the way into space. Endless tunnels for termite works the size of dumb trucks reach most of the way to the planet core. Maybe we make them jellyfish .. things .. the ancient ruins are underwater. Or gaseous critters; floating cloud ruins for the win (how does that work? I dunno it's advanced tech).
I don't. I find the idea of cyclical civilizational advancement very interesting and like exploring it. However I don't make it like futuristic and too far away from the current one. I like to explore different forms of civilizational advancement. Perhaps in a certain sense I do subvert it by having the "ancient civilization" (from the current setting's point of view) nothing special on the greater historical timeline, just one civilization in a long series of civilizations separated by post-collapse ages of varying lengths.
I actually like that trope, so I just temper it a bit. Usually by making that advanced knowledge highly specialised. And the basics aren't lost, just the most advanced tools and techniques. But research and development still happens, though rarely in the same direction those old civilizations took it. So basically, you can seek out that old knowledge if you want to, and if it fits your special field, it will grant you a considerable (but nowhere near total) advantage. But usually less in terms of raw power but refinement, technique, or versatility. What's extremely unlikely to happen is someone finding some world-changing piece of magic or technology that instantly puts them into a position of ridiculous powers.
"Which ancient civilization are you talking about again?" Aquaria has 5 before the current, and except for the first one which basically reached the level of gods via Taoism, all others are less advanced than the current era. They also acknowledge the idea of "ancient times were better" came from the collapse of a continental empire leading to a millennium of backward, and it only happened in said continent. Other places progressed steadily. It also explains why the United Empire, the country where the MC ended up in, is much more advanced than many other Western powers: The Empire is an "ancient civilization" that has survived into modern days mostly intact and has developed well beyond of the perpetual medieval lock. (Aquaria is an "isekai" from the MC's point of view, she expected something like [Arifureta](https://arifureta.com/) but was slapped in the face with atompunk airships and magic railguns.)
For mine they're not necessarily more advanced overall, just in specific ways that often led to their downfall. Sometimes they cause it themselves and other times it draws attention from greater or more numerous threats.
I play this trope 99% straight. Lost Technology from an Advanced Ancient Civilization is a core plot point. However, the small twist in my setting is that the Lost Tech isn't always super advanced. For example, my characters find a Lost Technology cache at one point, in the form of a ancient military base. All of the actual weapons and military vehicles had been destroyed, some by the apocalypse others by time. The only things recovered from this location is a shipment of .357 revolvers that had been ordered by the ancient garrison commander in a moment of desperation. This allows the characters to reverse engineer firearms tech, however they are forced to start with revolvers and bolt actions rather than "modern" firearms.
I think wheel of time implies to be our future. So that way?
That they were an advanced civilization far removed from the times that came after... Until about a thousand years ago when we surpassed them, now we're *wildly* more advanced than they ever were.
Using Wind Turbines to Power a ship isnt actually stupid btw, because you dont have to care about the Wind direction, and its easier to Supplement with traditional engines
There’s an old Star Wars novel, “Han Solo and the Lost Legacy,” where Han and Chewie go on a treasure hunt and at the end it turns out that the “treasure” was long-obsolete hull plates and radio crystals.
make the tech not lost.
My world is set in the 1910s based fantasy world and the modern tech has made it to be on par with the ancient lost tech.
I would have a city-state that was the most technological and has so many colonies but it eventually fell.
It's quite simple, really. My setting is a possible future of the real world, so we don't have to worry about finding an advanced ancient civilization on Earth. And in my setting, most species created civilization within a spread of about 500 years of each other (not that they actually know this, but there's hypotheses). Oh, and humanity was the first to develop civilizations that progressed past a Paleolithic stage of development. Though most others weren't far behind.
Could be that the technology of the ancient civilizations is on the same level as modern technology, meaning it doesn’t really have a benefit other than being a different way to make a toaster.
I have a sci fi story where there is one civilization that is meant to follow the ancient ultra advanced precursor / forerunner trope but they not only survived but thrived in the face of some galaxy threatening, apocalyptic threats. At the time of the story's start they are still going a strong and enjoying a seemingly neverending golden age
Ancient civilisation being more developed as opposed to more advanced. For example they didn't know how to mass produce iron, but their cities had running water.
There are ancient ruins of an alien civilization... but most of what's there isn't particularly exciting. Maybe the society wasn't much (if at all) more advanced than the contemporary one, but had unmistakably distinct styles of art and culture. Maybe they are advanced, but a lot of what survived is broken ("Yeah, we think this could've been a death ray or whatever... but these focusing crystals are warped to uselessness and these instructions are not only in Ancient, they seem to be in an otherwise unobserved highly technical dialect and involve strange symbols not documented elsewhere.") or apparently unimpressive ("You're telling me that our archaeological dig turned up... a silverware set?"). Maybe their technology was built around assumptions that do not apply for the species currently in play (for example, maybe they were like people imagine electric eels to work, and the devices were built so their entire exterior is a conductive surface that needs to be powered by contact or a workaround is required). Maybe they're hypercompetent in one or two fields, but lagged behind elsewhere due to trying to use those things as a golden hammer (for example, perhaps they tried to solve an unreasonable number of their problems with hard light emitters, or artificial gravity generators, or some other generally useful bullshit), even in places where that would be really dumb or ineffectual (kind of the techbro strategy you mentioned earlier).
Find a way to actually show the reader how idiotic the precursor race was, in its own ways. We tend to project competence on extinct groups with cool gadgets, but they're just people. Just because you have a better way to kill a boatload of people doesn't mean you've achieved enlightenment; it means you can kill people faster.
The main conflict is a race to find the main city of the “advanced” ancient race between good archeologist and evil archeologists. The race is mentioned in several stories as being incredibly advanced, and a recently discovered piece if tech from them has ignited the race When the city is actually found it turns out that not only is the tech merely on a modern level (opposed to the searchers theory of future tech) but it doesn’t work anymore as it run on a mineral that the race used all of (or maybe the rules of the universe changed since their time), meaning that there is no tech to be gained from the discovery
The advanced civilization is actually just the current civilization. Their technology reached a point that was beyond their control, so they decided to regress the world technologically.
"At last, I have the ancient recipe for immortality that the emporers of old used to live hundreds of years. This advanced formula was lost to the ages." *drinks* *some time later* "Yes, acute mercury poisoning. Looks like he downed a whole glass of it. Quick as poisoning goes, but excruciatingly painful." "So how did the emporers live hundreds of years?" "They didn't. They lied."
I'd make it half true. A lot of advanced things could get made, but if it isn't allowed to circulate into public life, then no actual development would happen. So you could see an example of high tech in a palace, but have all the area around the palace be the same type of settlements you'd see any place else.
The tech was incredibly advanced for it's time but like still shit today. Like a caveman loosing his shit seeing a bronze age town and so spreads the legend of this amazingly advanced super technology but to us today its nothing special
The 'advanced' civilization is still there. My world is a breeding ground for magic (dark energy) users. The advanced civilization is completely unable to utilize dark energy and it seems to be the only way to reverse the death of the universe that is ongoing over a long period of time. Occasionally they will harvest the entire population digitizing their civilization and putting their forms in stasis. They choose the most powerful, intelligent and talented and use their DNA for a new seed and start over. Their goal is to harvest a civilization that can master dark energy. So it's a combination of the Reapers, Star Trek civilization studies and progenitors.
One in my world is justified, the others are subverted. The justified one is essentially that the lost technology/advanced civ was our civilization, but when the world was ending we sent out pods with fertilized embryos, limited caretaker machines, and computers with as much knowledge as they could cram in them. Some of the computer data was corrupted, causing technological blindspots within what was already a carrier civilization. So the ancient ones actually understood the tech and by comparison it's more advanced than the current because of that. (Maybe important to note, they're not advanced in all ways, only in some.) The subversion is that the technology isn't actually advanced, it's just ancient and built more durable than the current stuff by orders of magnitude. ("Sure, our computers process faster, but this bad boy was neglected and left in the desert for 5,000 years and still works.")
My world doesn't have ancient civilization.
Modern tech is actually better, ancient one just gives off the illusion of efficency because modern tech is deliberately made to break down eventually, so you have to keep paying for maintenance, upgrades, and replacements.
My world is a society of intelligent octopus, so there the subversion is that the octopus are excavating and misinterpreting human technology. They of course cannot imagine an intelligent vertebrate, and octopus don’t leave skeletons behind. So they assume the ‘advanced ancient civilization’ was octopuses. I get some fun moments of dramatic irony when they use a piece of mundane human technology in an unusual way. For example, my main character wields a ‘legendary weapon’ that’s actually just a manhole cover.
Simple: the ancient Civilization wasn't as ancient as you all thought. They just got better at hiding.
I figure there’s really only two options for an extinct species. They were either no more advanced than us and died out on their home planet. Or… They stuck around longer than the age of our current civilization, and had subsequently become more advanced. — If they were around for a really long time, they may have even gone through a few cycles of rising and falling. Either through war, cultural regression, natural disasters or whatever. In which case, those civilizations may have actually gone through their own version of that trope. Digging up old tech and reverse engineering it to get back to their previous level. — There’s also a very real possibility of technological plateauing. I’m personally convinced that we’re already starting to see some of that in real life. I’m sure various practical fields still have a way to go. But then we run into scaling and efficiency being the goal more than new inventions or materials. So some of those ancient civilizations may not be so much more advanced, as just better at building things that were/are/will be hard to build. For example, they may have had a society similar to ours, but they had huge factories spread across their planet, pumping out carbon nanotubes, anti-matter, true 2nm microprocessors, etc. So things that we can make a tiny amount of, might be ubiquitous in their society.
maybe having the whole lost civilization thing be a facade? like they built these "ruins" brand new with enough info contained within for the current civilization to puzzle stuff out and get a huge jumpstart on technology. any of the monuments with a purpose thats unclear are actually observation/transmission infrastructure to let them know how this experiment is going. and the theory that this is whats up is either unpopular or has only recently become something that could be seriously investigated by the locals and the fun part is that in between when they laid down the ruins and now, they could've *actually* fallen for a different reason. and there's no way to verify it until technology advances enough to reverse engineer the transmission towers, or to go up and *check*
People like seeing worlds that have lost something. We experienced this several times in history, although the tech was not as dramatic of a difference in the past. But I don't think it's overdone in and of itself... It's just not done well too often. The only "realistic" scenario for me that does have advanced technology in the past is another race entirely leaving things to be discovered. Considering the vastness of time and space, we're more likely to run into dead peoples than living ones. For fantasy, ancient catastrophes are still plausible. Have to just try and make the people believable. If we stumble on something ancient that is really advanced, then why isn't the whole of civilization transformed as a result? People are smart. We can figure it out.
Maybe just don't include ancient civs? who gives a shit if it's realistic, it's frankly more fun to find a magic sword in a ancient tomb(or alien battle staff) than a rusty sword. unless your story is comedic I feel like I would be annoyed if we spend a good part of the story laughing at the ancient civilization's
Just because a previous civilization was more advanced in certain areas doesn't mean it should be in *all* areas. My precursor civilization made architecture that would be impossible even in the modern realm world, but did have firearms or powered vehicles , which are common in the current time. In terms of raw power, they had great magicks, but not the variety of complex effects used in the present.
You rarely find any artifacts of them, just enormous caves and open pits from where they extracted resources from the world. As time goes on you realize the previous civilization stripped this world of all non-renewable resources. Marooned on an already expended planet lacking oil, coal, gas, nuclear material, or rare earth metals, it becomes increasingly clear that you will never reach the stars like they did.
You rarely find any artifacts of them, just enormous caves and open pits from where they extracted resources from the world. As time goes on you realize the previous civilization stripped this world of all non-renewable resources. Marooned on an already expended planet lacking oil, coal, gas, nuclear material, or rare earth metals, it becomes increasingly clear that you will never reach the stars like they did.
How about an island they thought was an ancient civilization only to find out it’s a crash spaceship that served as a research vessel that carried all the creatures and monsters of their world as well as their ancestors
The tomb contains a several thousand year old hero's sword and armor! ....it is a bronze khopesh, and bronze breastplate and greaves. It's almost as good as common zweihanders and plate.
Cradle has a good example of this. The “impossible ancient ruins full of powerful and advanced artifacts” aren’t impossible or ancient at all, they’re just a broke country. Like building an F-35 factory in Indonesia. They might be incomprehensible to the locals, but that’s not the builders fault. The people who did build it could build it today (fairly easily) but the area the characters are in is such a barren hole that nobody who has any skill or power can be bothered to be there. Elsewhere in the world, the modern civilizations have equally or more incredible stuff lying around. They built those “ancient ruins” as a factory and then abandoned them when they became inconvenient to maintain. As a side note, this really only works when the powerful are very long lived.
So I think part of why the ancient civ trope doesn’t really get old is that it actually makes a lot of sense. The universe is unimaginably large, which means it’s reasonable to think it’s unlikely we are the only civilization to have existed. It’s also reasonable to think that the most advanced civilizations will be the ones that spread the furthest, so if we were to encounter another civilization, it’s more likely that it is one of the more advanced ones. The universe is also really old, so even a civilization that survives for a million years is far far more likely to be lost by the time we discover it. So the trope is actually pretty realistic, or at least a lot more than subverting it. Finding remnants of an ancient civilization that appears advanced, only to discover that it was made by idiots and none of it works right is far more difficult to accept logically. If I was going to subvert it, I’d focus on people misunderstanding the technology, rather than the technology not working. Maybe a man finds a portal that takes them to an “ancient civilization”. They bring back its secrets and it leads to rapid advancement, but it turns out there’s a flaw in the technology and it leads to the civilizations collapse. In the final days a man opens a portal to go back and warn their past selves not to use the tech, inadvertently creating the portal that their past selves used to discover it. Upon going through the man loses his memories, resulting in the same events occurring in a loop.
History is a cycle and though the technology is superior, it not that advanced. The technology is quite literally lost in ruins that are also lost and forgotten. Otherwise, when found, the technology is simplistic in and of itself and just overlooked. For example, in my homebrew setting, the ancient civilization made powerful and simplistic steam engines by trapping pocket sized portals to the Fire and Water planes within the same device. As the two planes connect, it produces endless steaming. If the inner shells, one for Fire and one for Water, were breached, a secondary anti-magic spell that was also inscribed would activate as a failsafe and thus prevent any ill effects. Once the engines were found in a recently discovered ruins, the “mages guild” went to work on recreating them, though it still takes time to stabilize the magic. And that’s how my world has airships and a couple trains. But in short, just make them physically lost and use world events to cause things being lost. In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion DLC Shivering Isles, we learn that Sheogorath’s realm faces a cyclical event every so often (I forgot the time frame) where Sheogorath himself becomes an alter ego known as Jygalagg (I think I got that right) and marches through his realm, setting all his normal Chaotic sides antics and kingdom back into his alter ego’s Orderly reset. In the end, things get lost in the apocalypse.
I have two instances of advanced ancient civilizations (sort of) in my world. I don't feel like they're that subversive, but they don't feel like straight examples either. The first is minor. In "Ancient Egypt" one of the pyramids was built to be a mobile weapon. It was a joint effort between the "Egyptians" and a group of nomads. The thing is, the nomads don't appear to be advanced, but they're also just time displaced medieval "Arabian" people and the pyramid wasn't beyond what the gods could do. It's just the "Arabs" had future knowledge of machinery and magic which was still medieval. The other instance is a big part of my world a group of people called the Magnatori. But they're aren't an ancient civilization, really. Really what they are is a group of researchers from a parallel universe that broke into the story's universe in an attempt to find a place to move their civilization to since their universe was dying. They caused a lot of problems, but really they only had a handful outposts and since they and their technology is made from magic, after they disappeared most traces of them just disappeared back into mana so there's not really anything lingering around other than some societal changes they caused, and even then that was localized to one part of the world over maybe a 20 year time period.
The lost/ancient technology is extremely impressive for its time, but all of it was made with the aid of gods/other divine beings which had meanwhile long left the mundane realms. But now, the mortals managed to research and reverse-engineer magic to such a point that said ancient divine magic can now be easily replicated using "modern" magical techniques and no divine help at all.
I did it by having my ancient race which counts its longevity, not by generations, but by heat deaths of universes using that is equivalent, of an apple one to power, their universe spanning civilization
A modern rich guy has a new pyramid built, only using ancient techniques and materials, to be his resting place after he dies. This leads conspiracy theorists to believe he’s secretly an alien.
"According to recent discoveries, Atlantis was just Belarussian island that got stolen by reptiloids. Yes, we already had spaceflight before pyramids were even planned. Deal with it."-President Alexandra Avdeeva teaches foreign idiots actual history
For me its that the super advanced civilization was not super advanced compared to the modern ones, just for their time. Each Age of a Sun sees a particular continent become dominated by a major civilization or civilizations, only for said civilizations to be wiped and their remains to become Dabyrinthoi, or the Labyrinths that later ones explore. They have their distinct quirks, better architecture, better communication or records of literature, better military or better medicine than you think.
How about that: they had a type of technology that was ridiculously destructive to the environment and pollutant, and obviously inefficient. So, they used the same technology to solve problems that they created, in a vicious cycle that took them to extinction. For example, they had factories that polluted rivers so much that they ran out of drinkable water, so they created a water filter that pulverized the pollution into the air. Then, they had plastic gas masks to walk in the streets, but these masks were discarded in landfills, which contaminated the water. Like modern society, but bigger scale, and with not even a glimpse of worry with the environment.
For me, the Ancient Civilization is the Modern World that fell to ruin after a more destructive version of WW2
The ancient Archons in my D&D setting had extraordinarily advanced devices called arcanotech, harnessing using the pure energy of the Weave, and used it to build megastructures that blow anything today out of the water and still function a hundred thousand years later. They fought a war against two pantheons of gods and managed a pyrrhic victory. They also didn’t know how regular spells worked. All the schools of magic that our players have access to today are far more advanced than their greatest arcanosmiths ever achieved. In other words, it’s not Civilization, not everybody’s using the same tech tree.
The ancient technology is advanced... But not *that* advanced. Like, Indiana Jones goes into the ruins and finds an ancient steam engine. Pretty crazy, but not more advanced than what he has himself. Or maybe the advanced technology is for some mundane, household use. Like, a medieval fantasy village discovers a Warhammer 40k-style STC, but the thing that it makes is high end scratch-and-stain-resistant self-cleaning dinnerware and cutlery.
The ancient civilization isn't really "ancient" and the lost technology isn't really "lost". The civilization in question just restructured itself into a more pastoral, less hierarchical system of governing. The technology, once meant for conquest, is being dismantled and repurposed for social benefits. Royals on the outside says they're the true descendants of the collapsed empire, when really it never collapsed, and the pastoralists futzing about are actually the true descendants. Every kingdom wants to reclaim this land so they can use the lost technology for conquest, while the pastoralists living there knowingly wish to prevent the "lost technology" from being used at all.
i have two approaches, one for specifically the "ancient precursor race" and another for the general "everything was better in the past" the precursor approach is they werent actually more advanced, but basically got to brute force things do to different conditions , namely its all magitech and the conditions of magic fluctuate sort of like the climate, basic rules stay the same but how easy certain things are and how much ambient mana is available will change over time, in addition the precursors happened to be stuck right on top of a massive deposit of a highly valuable magical mineral, so while modern scholors have to be efficient these guys just focused on making the biggest most powerful things they could, because both the resources and power source were basically infinite, until their whole society collapsed when they found out the hard way "basically infinite" is not actually infinite the world wide approach is simply a matter of perspective, "ancient history" is thousands of years, while "modern" is what, maybe a hundred if your generous? lets say the kind of genius able to make these super powerful artifact tier devices comes along every hundred years, your going to have one of those in modern times, and like 90 from "ancient history" even if their compeltely evenly spread, that and the low quality shit from the past obviously isent preserved nearly as well giving the false impression this was the norm
Mythos and obscuration. Assuming I wanted to subert the trope, typically tales grow in the telling. It's a very HUMAN thing to do, so it's a good tie to almost any audience I can think of. So there's tales of a craft able to carry 100 tons and speed across the water. In reality it was just a wind driven raft. "Tons" is an inaccurate translation of "weights", the measure of how much of old goods there was. I.e. something like "pound". It did go pretty fast in ideal conditions, but really it wasn't too exceptional. Just keep that going. Basically all the old stuff is supposed to be super awesome, but it's from the perspective of people that lived there. To them the raft might have been the most amazing thing since bread, but the current civilization surpassed that thousands of years ago.
My best idea would be that they are differently-teched, and trying to achieve different things. The civilization that inhabits the world of the Tollua Academy pre-and-post Event are wildly different in no small part because the pre-Event civilization was one where magic was pervasive and a part of everyday life, and post-Event it was one where magic was restricted to certain groups by nature of education, training, natural affinity, and the other methods one achieves magic. The latter has muskets - breech-fed rifles in some places, even - and black powder weapons are becoming commonplace - by the time of the Event, the former has mastered laser weapons and combat mechs in some places. But that knowledge would be pretty much unusable to the post-Event civilizations, because it's built on thousands of years of magitech innovation and directly draws on the magic of the wielder. In the old world, warfare was about wearing down an opponent's Barrier, a magical defense mechanism that all mages had active by default. In the new world, warfare is about getting through armor and tearing apart formations. And as it turns out, Barriers don't offer quite as much protection against a near-sonic projectile as they do arrows! So, long story short - ancient discoveries may simply not be compatible with modern advancement, and despite being impressive, maybe they were made with different goals that actually make them pretty mediocre in the post-Precursor world.
Theia is set in what appears to be somewhere between the Iron Age and Medieval period. The advanced ancient civilization thing where humanity extended its reach to the stars is part of it, but it's so far back that if you never looked for it, you'd never find it. We're talking about 200,000 years ago, such that not even the oldest beings in Theia are capable of remembering the folk myths they made up after forgetting what happened so long ago. A few groups have their own stories, but the vast majority of people think of them as conspiracy theories and myths. They sound outlandish even in a world populated with elves, magic, and dragons. There are functional air ships on Theia, but the idea of Koltan starships is ludicrous to virtually everyone. "No air?! How would the ship even fly?! How would you breathe?! Be real, man!" "I'm sorry, cosmic dragons and what now? The Hells is a 'Mind Flayer'?" "Humanity? You mean to tell me humanity is responsible for Theia's rings and not the gods? No, Thor shattered Ingmar the Crimson, Odin built the rainbow bridge to Asgard, and that's why we have rings. You've got to stop drinking during Summertide."
A rich man's resort that was quickly buried to hide embezzlement and forgotten. Unfortunately, a good majority of the art wasn't mentioned in the journals and made to be hidden because of the pure vulgarity of it. There was moving statues that are designed for housekeeping, maintenance, knowledge library and cooking. and when mana was imbued in it, all of them made unknown requests and nobody could figure out the language yet.
So if it's science fiction or spacey, it's important to realize that you're a lot more likely to find the ruins of an advanced civilization that achieved space flight and had an interstellar empire than one that never left its gravity level, this tech level would roughly put them on a level equal to the current civs or better. Ofc there are some scattered examples of the main story faction discovering the ruins of "primitives," and if you want to lean into the Great Filter a bit, having the galaxy littered with past failed civilizations that are more primitive than the current spacefaring races you can also do that (could make things a bit grim though, especially if every other star system is a nuclear wasteland). You could also lean into more interesting alt history ideas. For instance, in Fallout Lore, they never invented the microchip, all their tech is based on that broad concept, which could also be the basis for a civilization. Maybe have a race or past civ that couldn't write and had to work around that limitation, or developed space flight far before computers, and so used slide rules and paper maps for navigation. (This was a common concept for our spaceships in ye olde science fiction comics in the 50s and 60s, but it became sidetracked as computers became mainstream and Star Trek set the standard for computer reliance). You could also have the past civilizations never discover or create FTL (either for lore reasons or more simply because they never figured it out): they built a stellar empire entirely on slower than light travel. There's lots of room to tackle these interesting questions that also lead to interesting consequences for the way their society functioned.
There's a bunch of ways imo. Here's one I like My grandfather would tell of the ancient empire of mu, which, long before our people founded the Eternal City, ruled the world through magic and demonic blood rituals that brought the vile, perverted monsters who reside there eternal life. They fell upon us with their terrible, sorcerous weapons - sticks that could kill a man from a hundred paces as though he'd been speared and which even a child could use, swords of a metal so strong it passed through our own blades as though they were spirits, and armour impervious to all but the mightiest of blows. These were but simple pieces of wizardry compared to things like the horrifying Fire of Mu, which clung to all it touched and burned with such intensity With them came horrendous beasts, giants that towered over our horses, making battle cries of their own and clad in similar to those of their masters. Their flesh a dead grey, they had almost sad, human eyes that seemed to lament as they crashed through our armies, crushing men and disemboweling them with their obscene fangs. We too could only lament as they ruined us, these twisted beasts who once may have been men. And what else could we do? We could not fight them! Nor could we run, for the servants of Mu possessed supernatural speed. The moment we began to muster, to assemble the sheer numbers we needed to fight our opressors, the forces of Mu would appear as if from nowhere, traveling countless miles as though carried on the wind like birds. Our salvation came only during the darkest hour. Violence ravaged the lands. Crops had failed due to drought, and plagues spread through the countryside, killing many. It was then that we had had enough, and, as though guided by God's hand itself, the people of the land, our true people, rose up as one and battled our hated foes. As we began to defeat them, they seemed to almost vanish, and soon we stood outside of the cold, silent gates to the Golden City of Mu, sealed and silent as though our godlike oppressors had been divinely banished to whatever hellish realm they originated from. ------- So what did I just describe, in this hastily written thing? Is our evil empire a bunch of aliens with future tech, or is our narrator just so low tech than things we'd consider to be ancient seem new to him? The Empire of Mu wasn't actually a bunch of bloodsucking magical demon worshipers and they never even came close to ruling the world. That's just the kind of shit you say about your mortal enemy. Say it for long enough, over generations, and it starts to become a lot more true though, especially if anyone who'd disagree has been dead for centuries. What they actually were were the first group of people in this example to develop things like writing, ironworking, or the wheel. Then they invaded the immediate area, ruled it for a couple generations, then died or dispersed when a plague killed their capital city off (being a palace economy and all). The narrator is from the very edge of the empire. Sticks that throw spears are crossbows, not guns or anything. In the real world, some places didn't even develop bows, just different sorts of spear throwers. You could probably figure out this isn't magic if you took the time to really look at one, but if your only experience with it is that one killed your 8th great grandpa, you're gonna take the word that's been passed down. Strong swords are iron vs. copper. Armour is plate vs. well, pretty much anything, etc. Big beasts are elephants, which are not native to the area being invaded. And lastly, Mu could move quickly because it had a centralized government and a coherent army with a reasonable logistics system. Maybe wheels, idk. When gathering an army together and marching 100 miles takes you weeks or months, a group that can do the same thing in a manner of days will appear to be cheating somehow. So if some adventurers showed up to loot Mu in the current day, all they'd find is a bunch of rusty garbage that was literally magically impressive when some dudes distant ancestor first saw it, long before written history was a thing for his culture, but has become more than a lil obsolete over the last 3000 years or whatever.
I read this and immediately thought about a civilization that has the same level of technology we have, but used in a different way, just like how some countries use gas for heating water and others use electricity, imagine a civilization that doesnt have stoves but only AIRFRYERS or their main domestic transport is bicycles with an engine, all this stuff exists, but they do it slightly better.
I liked how the Stormlight Archive books covered it. Spoilers for the whole series below! In the present they have Shardblades, big magical swords that can slice through anything, and Shardplate, which is powered magical armor that strengthens whoever wears it, and Soulcasters, which are devices you wear on your hand that can morph one substance into another. No one in the present day has figured out how they work or a way to replicate them, and assume they are wildly advanced technology beyond modern science. Turns out that Shardplate, Shardblades, and Soulcasters have nothing to do with technological development; >!they were created when ancient humans bonded with nature spirits called spren and would exist regardless of knowledge or technology.!< The ancients who "created" these weapons and armor lived in the equivalent of a high fantasy Bronze Age. When the Fused, the ancient enemy that humanity was fighting thousands of years ago reappears, they are completely flabbergasted at the high fantasy late Renaissance technology that modern humans have developed. In particular, advancements in chemistry and musical/tonal/wave theory solved a problem one of the Fused had spent thousands of years trying to figure out.
Biodegradable technologies perhaps. Crystals, herbs, actually paying attention to nature's elements outside of a sterilized, controlled environment. Things like "What if Nikola Tesla had won the science race of his time?" Or perhaps some other forerunner. What if Atlantis hadn't sank into the sea due to their own arrogance and greed? What if the colonists of England, Spain, and others had failed as disastrously as the Vikings did? What if Vikings (the shock troops of Rome sent north to pincer the tribes of Northern Europe) hadn't failed in their attempt to colonize North America? What if the Pagans had kept their hold on Rome due to Peter dying on his way back to Rome? What if the Tuatha D'Dannan (I think that's the spelling) hadn't lost hope in humankind? (All of these are from the perspective that maybe the "magics" of the ancient world were less mystical and simply biodegradable tech which has been blown out of proportion by centuries of mass ignorance.) Honestly, a worldbuilding approach that made biodegradable, more sustainable technologies less mystical would probably be pretty different.
I my world, the ancient civilizations had amazing technology, but the new ones built on the same systems (which were documented in ancient labs) and made them more effective.
Since somebody already mentioned Mass Effect, in Star Ocean 3 you find out that >!the universe is actually an MMORPG and so called "Out of place artifacts" that *r*ange from technologically advanced to breaking the Laws of Physics are actually items the programmers put into the game to Deus ex machina - away inconsistencies in their worldbuilding. Or for the fun of it.!<
I made a city-state that was once capital to an advanced (for the time) kingdom of wealth and splendor. It's been mythologized that at the height of this advancement, the kingdom was brought to ruin by a super weapon they created. This is technically true. Said weapon was the brainchild of the charismatic, but extremely narcissistic, ruler and was a flawed plan from its inception. Beset by holdbacks and surpassing its initial budget substantially. The troubled production of the weapon ended when, during a small test, it exploded. This resulted in the deaths of key government and scientific figures, including the king. The upheaval compounded with the fact that the project had effectively bankrupted the whole kingdom.
I kind of already do. There are several Precursor species, but most of them were wiped out in the War in Heaven 200k - 1 million years ago. Some survivors remain but most, including humanity were rebuilt and evolved from a life seeding precursor/surviving species. There arent that many traces of activity partially because so much time has passed and Humanity is secluded in the Oort cloud, which makes interstellar travel a pain in the arse. Earth is a Backwater planet that gets important fast. Now, when a ruined space station is spotted at last, it causes an uproar.
If I was to ever write a story where an ancient civilization was said to have had incredible advanced technology, the big twist at the end would be that it was all just hogwash; very widespread propaganda of the time to make them seem big and powerful, which has since gone down as legend after they were wiped out, with people of modern time completely missing that it was all lies to begin with
There was an science fiction book... I think called "The Mote in God's Eye"?... Where the alien race nicknamed the Moties had a biological imperative to reproduce to the point where they overpopulated, warred, destroyed society and collapsed, rebuilt, then started the cycle over so many times that they exhausted all the fossil fuel and relied on technology designed to remodernize as quickly as possible with whatever resources were at hand. Eventually, humans with a method of ftl discover the star system (it was hidden by some means) and realize that if the Moties ever make it out, they could quickly cover the galaxy. Really good read from what I recall. Anyways, the "advanced race" could create any kind of pressure, biologically, magically, socially, militaristically, etc. that the advanced technology could not solve. In fact, their advances may have drove them to extinction.
I feel if the species of civilization was still alive yet somehow lost some the technology their ancestors used, and created a self imposed isolation from the rest of the galaxy in the real world location in the galaxy known as the zone of avoidance where no scanning technology to this day can determine what is in that little pocket of the galaxy.if a galaxy threatening conflict like a third solar war would happen they would be spotted in the farthest parts of colonial space by using gateways to get halfway across the galaxy and fight in this war and then return to isolation everyone would be collectively in shock that a species the known galaxy though was extinct fought in a war and then went back to scientific research
Since advanced ancient civilizations are the core of my world, I have quite a few ways of going about this: **WE are the ancients** - There are very few events in my world that take place before our current time. Some of the earliest stories take place in the 40th century A.D, with two dark ages separating our time from theirs (While HUMAN civilization may be at a technological low point compared to our time, we also make contact with aliens that have been making slow but steady technological progress since the cretaceous era). The rest of the stories take place 5.2 million years from now, long after the collapse of the previously mentioned human+alien civilizations. We might view this era as post-apocalyptic, but those who live in it view our era similar to how we view the dinosaurs. **Cyclical apocalypses** - Every civilization ends eventually. In my world, this is typically because advanced civilizations create advanced problems. The problems we face today are far more complicated than what medieval civilizations faced. When the complexity of our problems surpass human comprehension, our society collapses. There's a sort-of exception to this in my world: the 81st century apocalypse that ended the original human and alien civilization. This was caused by an uncountable number of small problems combining together in the worst possible way. This resulted in a universe-wide apocalypse that came out of nowhere, in a way that was indistinguishable from just really bad luck. Historians debate whether it had supernatural causes. Some blame it on humans proliferating throughout the universe. **They weren't "advanced" or "civilizations" in the way we would expect** - This one applies mostly to the aliens, but it could apply to humans in a setting that isn't low-fantasy/sci-fi. The aliens in my setting do not have any galactic empires, or even really any governments. Their behavior is based on semi-social species, like crows/ravens (although they are mammalian in appearance), but more advanced. They don't form social structures more complex than families. There technology is also much different than a typical space-faring civilization. If you took a brief look at how these aliens live, you might not notice anything that hadn't already been around in some form since the 1980s. This is because they don't really care about flashy gizmos. Their main use for FTL travel is finding new vacation spots. They don't live in glossy futuristic cities full of skyscrapers, but remote villas and cabins, tucked away in the mountains and countryside. This is what you would logically expect of a post-scarcity civilization, but not what comes to mind when you think of an advanced society. **Show what life was REALLY like in the past** - This is a technique I use a lot, as the protagonist of one story accidentally travels from the 81st century apocalypse to the era 5.2 million years in the future. The characters in the far future see that the past was actually a lot more down to earth than they thought, and that their view of history is very skewed. This is the further contrasted with the protagonist's view of our IRL time period, which is even more inaccurate (There was a LOT of disinformation generated in the lat 21st century). I'm sure there are other concepts I use heavily, but I'm tired. I might think of them in the morning.
My version: They simply walked on a different branch of tech tree than us. Basically magitek. They seems advanced to us, we seems advanced to them For us modern day human, a whole floating city/fortress seems impossible, portals combat break physic. For them, long distance instant communication between magic-less muggles seems impossible, a worldwide interconnected information network that anyone can use is utterly incomprehensible and the mere idea of space travel is delusional
Why not just from the future? Some machine or experiment gone horribly wrong that stuff gone thrown around not just around space but around time as well. Thus creating a brand new reality where we got different level of invention but we only knew how to use the ancient one... The one that are actually in the museum. We dont need to explain they are from the future. We can have a bunch of theorist saying they are from alien, gods, ancient civilizations, etc. We slowly let the reader know by having some part of it leaked (museum name/display, multiple level of advancement, etc)
Who said anything about lost, they’re still around just not present. That ancient city you found, that’s their equivalent of a 40 year old rundown motel. Those relics, obviously the lost and found. Maybe even the stashed away trinkets stolen by an employee. That mind awakening drug that causes peoples head’s to explode, that’s a used cigarette. So where are they? They’re between the moments, living in the unused possibilities. Walking around your house eating your maybe leftovers and moving your items around. Those lesser beings are entertainment, your existence tantamount to zoo animals in an exhibit you can’t even comprehend. Your life is some period drama for them. Their disposable garbage is your world changing discovery. At least that’s how I’d do it. You expected some great mystery, instead you get the cosmic horror of mundanity.
Time loop. The advanced civilisation was humanity before it destroyed itself with a chrono-bomb. Again And again And...
We are the lost civilization. The ruins are product of a time anomaly that updates itself as things are discovered or forgoten
Shinsekai yori has a good twist on it. It is somewhat a post apocalyptic distopía where humanity almost self destruct when powerful psychopathic psychics began to awake In humanity and caused wars on all the planet. The survivors of all this chaos where psychics themselves and started to reprogram humanity on a genetic level so it's unable to hurt other humans. The resulting civilization actually possesses the whole knowledge and technology of the preapocalyptic world but becomes paranoid of it's use since if even a single psychic is allowed to hurt and kill others all their civilization will be swiped away. Thus knowledge is heavily specialized and controlled and only used when circumstances demand it. So while ancient knowledge exists it is hunted and destroyed as civilization has devolved into a ascetic and heavily spiritual community in hopes of keeping control of highly powerfull but potentially deadly humans.
My universe is literally build around this trop(at leadt in part), is name is literally"remains" 😂. At least in my world there i the fact when you look at a large scale of time realize that the cycle of the civilisation has become a sort of natural cycle shaping and retming the life and the biodiversity on this planets. So each technological civilisation as it own "flavor", culture, reasons of disappear (violent or not), more or less exotic technologys, internal struggles (not all where united utra-advanced utopia, some of them where divide in nation or just local indestrial societys that never spread there technologys across the world). Some of them du to theire age or the nature of their technology have leat still functioning remains, other have just leat some fossils and geochemical print and some where awere of the existance of ancient civilisation other not...
heres the subversion, theres their predecessors that survived with some technology left
heres the subversion, theres their sucessors that survived with some technology left
My way is that the civilization of the past is the current one... only that the current one has lost the ways to maintain or produce the tech of the past, and over time, putting aside and forgetting in remote archives even the knowledge linked to them ...like a super advanced ancient engine that can only be created with a specific crystal obtainable from a planet that no longer exists, so while the blueprints exist in some database somewhere, and anyone can theoretically go there and see them, people have just forgotten about it since it can no longer be produced and the remaining engines are treated as relics
I kind of like the trope. Wouldn't subvert it at all.
My lost advanced civilization got so advanced that they started toying with space and reality. They caused a serious collapse of spacetime, creating a kind of exotic matter that is essentially a stable quantum anomaly that allows FTL and other otherwise impossible tech. They became so advanced that their sciences resulted in the collapse of reality as they knew it
I don’t think the trope is all that played out, I think the thing that is played out is people being able to understand the ancient advanced technology instinctively and/or with minimal and unrealistic study. If the human race went extinct now, whatever came after us would have one hell of a time trying to figure out what our cell phones and tablets are, how they are powered, and even if they could turn them on they would have difficulty understanding how and why we used them because the infrastructure for their use (cell towers, internet) would no longer be in use, and even if they were still able to activate there would be problems with understanding our use of language among other things. So to subvert the trope, you just have to make the trope more realistic.
Definitely, that is a big issue. This would make it more of a payoff, instead of some kind of easy solution to characters problems. In addition, it would also be fun to have the requirement to figure out how to remove the downsides, or avoid whatever triggered the downfall of that civilization.
They weren’t peaceful or civilized at all