How do we refresh the concept of Ancient aliens?

Make them be humans perhaps?
>The party sees an ancient shinto-esque temple upon the peak of olympus mons

>>53374415
>humans are actually ancient aliens
God no, that's the only *twist* more overdone than ancient aliens in general.

There's usually an implication that ancient aliens have influenced ancient human cultures in a big way, but not in this setting. They were just explorers who came and went to investigate some other weirdness and didn't care about humans one way or the other.

meant >>53374481
for >>53374431

>>53374566
This. Just stay away from "As it turns out those wacky non-europeans got their tech from ALIENS WOOOO" and you're already more interesting than 90% of ancient alien stuff.

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I've been toying around with a homebrew scifi setting where ascetic mantis-moth people tried to teach us but left due to our overly violent nature, they didn't stay long enough to leave much of an impact but when we finally figured out ftl they were pleasantly surprised, they aren't super arrogant like most ancient aliens, they just enjoy our company and cooperation.

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>>53374415
Ancient aliens landed on earth and fucked OPs mum.

>>53374693
is that why she's dead

>>53374415
Go full illuminati/lizardmen/conspiracy theory mode

I feel like even though the thought is well known nobody actually uses it for their settings

They're still around, of course. UFOs ain't a joke. "Atlantis" has been here the whole time under a cloaking field.
Humanity is an ongoing experiment.

>>53374415
The ancient ayyums don't come from outer space; they come from inner space. They're fucking with us from the Center of the Earth!

>>53374415
The aliens aren' actually aliens but angels. Cast by God.

>>53374415
They aren't actually ancient nor did they influence human cultures, they just say they're that to give them more legitimacy than they really have

>>53374481
It's literally never done.

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>>53374415

All plant life on Earth is actually aliens.

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Ayylamos are suppressing latent human psychic powers because they're jealous

>>53374481
provide examples for this claim.

>>53374415
We discover a big old ship buried in the desert filled with technology we can't even decipher and records that we can about how these beings shaped human culture in the days before record keeping, but strangely it doesn't make any mention of where they came from.

Turns out there were no aliens, this ship belonged to Ra, and something sometime in the distant past shot it out of the sky.

>>53375458

Whenever Starfleet interacts with less developed lifeforms this scenario takes place.

>>53375458
Gaylo

>>53375467
Thats an awesome concept. Would Ra be a human? something like Atlantis, ancient advanced people who ruled over the more primitive continental types

>>53374415
> How do we refresh the concept of Ancient aliens?
There are actually aliens of two kinds - the ones we can relate to - whether they are friendly or not - that live in our galaxy, and the mysterious threat from the other galaxy.
It turns out that humanity went back to the past and created the aliens in our galaxy so that they act as meatshields against aliens from another galaxy.

It's not actually aliens but messengers to a real god figure. Make them think it's science fiction and then add in Strong religious notions.

>>53374415
Make them Phoenician Dwemer shit. Explorers with advanced technology but really they were explorers and just liked to create some colonies along the way to do some trade and whatnot.

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They're not aliens, they're people from the true surface of the planet coming down to monitor the progress of the people on the inner planet.

>>53374415
They're not actually that advanced. They're a race of sentient rock creatures with geokinisis or a bunch of weird ethereal spirits.

They travel thrpugh space by being functionally immortal and just using their weird abilities to get off world.

Thus there's not really any fancy precursor or FTL tech to find

>>53374415
Dogs are the descendants of ancient aliens that were no match for human strength and decided that the only way for survival was to become our best friends.
Wolves are the descendants of aliens that dind't want to surrender.

>>53375458
Halo, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape (to an extent).

>>53374415
We are the ancient aliens.
>we actually developed into a powerful empire
>created countless races
>created a God
>ascended to being angels
>now there are no humans around

>>53375541
Soo evangelion?

>>53376577
No, Shin Megami Tensei.

>>53376121

In stargate, we're native to earth. We were taken abroad by various alien races. So we're not the aliens, exactly.

>>53376682
I assume he was referring to the Ancients with that one

>>53376707

Yeah, that works.

I am a really big fan of the "not really Ancient Aliens, but Earth is populated by a lost colony ship."

Anyone hung up on: "How do we make [thing] [relevant] again," or some other wording, is summary evidence that you're not actually writing a story, you're chaining together tropes and prepackaged thematic elements to try and make something that looks like a story.

>>53374415
we don't make them all that advanced

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>>53374431
I've thought about doing that before
A game where all the players are aliens and know about the hyper advanced civilization at the edge of known space that basically ignores everyone else and fucks up anyone who gets too close to their territory
Eventually the players would come across a multi hundred kilometer long ship crewed by one of these aliens and discover they are humans, but they would be post singularity techno-biological organisms that blend the best of organic and synthetic life together

Never went through with it though

>>53377143
That could work. Just examples of differently constructed technology and visually alien architecture.

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Ancient aliens are humans, but space-wizard humans no longer recognizably related to their lost and feral colonies.

>>53376121
Halo's ancient humanity sounded so damn stupid when I first heard about it but reading the background it's not actually too bad. Certainly doable in scifi, although frankly I'm still not convinced Halo needed it specifically.

Farscape's version was interesting. Certainly doable but a bit curious they had to go so far out of their way to collect a primitive species to elevate. But, okay, they didn't want any being connected to any government or anyone's territory whose peace they might be brokering.

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>>53374415
the ancient alien is another human from another dimension named Rick.

Got you, senpai, thank me later:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3113319/How-did-mummy-mummified-body-melting-ice-high-Mexican-mountain-ISN-T-wearing-climbing-gear.html

The obvious thing to do: immense steel-like dropships make a sudden descent all over the globe and looming menacingly over major cities, waiting until just after the heroes assemble and get their briefing before showing any signs of activity.

So instead of doing any of those things, do none of those things.

I'm not being obtuse. Write your own damn scenario, and then cross out anything that matches my paragraph. Dropships. Cities. Briefing. Anything.

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>>53374415

Ages ago, a spacefaring race saw a primitive planet threatened by eldritch abominations. They came down, wrecked c'thulhu's shit, and set defenses to prevent it from happening again.

Minions of the original invasion and traitor/corrupted humans were still a threat, and the race had other people to protect, so they uplifted some of the locals to watch over the planet until they could return and clean it out properly.

PCs belong to a secret order of paladins/jedi/techno-wizards protecting the world from evil aliens, and occasionally get a visit from their teachers who are pretty cool guys, but overworked dealing with all the space monsters and evil empires out there.

>>53374415
Ancient aliens remains are not exactly that. They're actually from a stable time loop of your own civilization.

WHAT WILL BE WAS. WHAT WAS WILL BE.

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>>53379488
Quinn doesn't get enough love here or /co/. Lot of fun species that otherwise tickle /tg/s love of slimegirls/monstergirls.

>>53374415
>there was no ancient aliens
>no humans who were ancient aliens
>it was universe trying to communicate with humans
>approach has failed so bad that universe's "mind" gone awry, and it gone to sleep
>the mind of universe is universe itself and every creature born in it
>literally all of sapient beings are pieces of universe's schizophrenic "mind", death is returning to majority of it
>that's how you can explain magic and space magics: people argue with universe on it's language so it believes them
>like putting your finger in cup when you sleep will make you wet your bed
>and communication was so bad that sleeping mind of universe actually don't cares or hates every sapient being
>that's how you get eldritch enlightment right and make madmen blabber about death as salvation really matter something
I can go deeper if you wanna.

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>>53379488
>Mentioning Cthulhu even though the Elder Tings created Humans and are the reason Cthulhu is sealed underwater
>implying Nyarlathotep or another Great Old One wouldn't be able to penetrate these defences

>>53376707
we're more of a sub species that the ancients developed/created.

Humans and Alterans are related, but Humans were either 'created' before the Asuran/Ancient split, or was a cause of it as the Asurans needed lesser species to worship them after ascension and the ancients rescued a few and took them with them when they fled Avalon to the milky way and then Pegasus

>>53379932
>Spaceship is literally dick&balls

>>53374415

1. They're actually future humans who traveled back in time.

2. They've never left and have been slowly aiding our development to make us ready to join interstellar society.

3. They've never left and have been blocking our development because they see us as a potential threat, but don't have the heart to wipe us out.

>>53376121
>>53377783
I actually preferred the old stuff with Humans being the forerunners rather than the 343 retcon.

>>53380887
You really need to brush up on your Stargate as Asurans were replicators built by the Ancients in the Pegasus galaxy millions of years after they first arrived in the Milky Way/Avalon.

The split you are referring to is the Ancient/Ori split and that occurred over 50 million years ago at which point none of them were ascended and both were the same species. The little evidence we have points to the Ancients achieving Ascension first as the Ori were oblivious to everything outside their own galaxy until Daniel and Vala fucked that up

>>53374415
The Ancient Aliens you discover we're themselves moulded by another race of Ancienter Aliens.

>>53374415
Humanity finally makes contact with another sapient alien race.
After initial diplomacy has begun someone half-jokingly tells the aliens about our old ufo/abduction and ancient alien conspiracies.
To humanity's surprise the response is equivalent to "Holy shit that happened to you guys as well!?".
Turns out the ancient aliens are still around and just enjoy fucking with everyone humanity was nothing special to them.

>>53379932

The main character (the pirate) is the worst kind of Mary Sue. Only the ancillary characters are actually likable.

>>53377400
>blending synthetic and organic life
>not being something entirely unique
>"synthetic" in the literal sense, but as far removed from flesh and blood as it is from plastic and metals
I like my posthumans to be physical thoughtforms, really fucking advanced nanobots, or other such hyperscience.
The only reason they look "human" at that point is because the surviving human culture that became posthuman likes the aesthetic.
Naturally, they all look like greco-roman ubermensch.

>>53381468
That happened? Hoi that's dumb. 343 plz stop

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>>53382504
>The only reason they look "human" at that point is because the surviving human culture that became posthuman likes the aesthetic.
Naturally, they all look like greco-roman ubermensch.

Exactly, sure you can change your form to look like anything but in an effort to preserve classical human cultures many choose to look like idalized humans when not taking more specialized forms
I mean really they are just a sentient mass of quasicrystalline goo and force fields

>>53374415
I always liked the story of roadside picnic for salvaged alien tech. Aliens crash/land and then take off again, leaving some stuff that for them, is garbage, but to us is basically magic. If the story sounds familiar, it inspired the movie that inspired the game STALKER.

>>53382780
I like the idea of their specialized "warforms" being physically perfect humans at their core, but with dozens of extra arms like you would see in hindu mythology, along with orbiting halos of weapon platforms and the like, wings of levitating engines, etc.
A generally abstract, quasi-angelic looking form of a pure human at the center, surrounded by a swarm of varying, specialized modules and tools that look like they're being controlled by pure thought.

>>53382930
And to expound on this, not even warforms, but specialized forms in general.

At the core, every human is a pure human form, but depending on what they do, they can have any number of personalized and unique attache swarms based on the same substrate they themselves are made of.

Workers and engineers might be surrounded by disembodied hands, arms, claws and so forth, floating probes with an obscene number of degrees of freedom, etc and so forth for other positions.

In fact, it'd be cool if human space ships weren't actually "ships" at all, just humans linked with specially designed CnC modules that drastically increased the number of units they can control at once, their "ships" just being massive swarms of engines, power generators, weapons, shield projectors, etc and so forth, all linked together in some forcefield lattice controlled by the human.

>>53379537
THE WORM IS WAITING AND HE DEMANDS ANOTHER SCIENTIST. WHAT WAS WILL BE, WHAT WILL BE, WAS [\spoiler]

>>53374415
Ancient aliens actually seeded the dinosaurs, and they're upset that their experiments are no longer around. But they think that's our fault.

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>>53382780
>>53382930

You might dig the Therians from AT-43.

Make them really dumb and incompentent ancient aliens part of larger interstellar community. Space Hillbillies who went out on a not completely sober abductin trip. Fucking with developing/primeval plants essentially there equivalent of mudding, stumping or equivalent reckless country folk sport.

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>>53383126
I do like them, but my heart will forever belong to the UNA aesthetic.

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>>53383126
Therians where the best part of that game

>>53382456
It's just a comic about fun and silly shit that isn't meant to be taken seriously or get too serious. I'm not really sure a Mary Sue makes sense in that context. It runs on rules of comedy 90% of the time. I mean if you don't like her antics, fine, but at least enjoy her lack of pants.

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>>53374415
They are actually pretty radical dudes, they just like to sometimes pretend to be enigmatically pretentious for fun. They have a somewhat hedonistic culture thats all about enjoying your job while remaining as stylish and aesthetically pleasing as possible. Sometimes they like to play incredibly complicated pranks on primitives.

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>>53383184
Post more space outsider aesthetics

>>53383203
Wut, I didn't spoil that.
Fucking gookmoot.

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>>53383203
I'll try.

>>53383214
He knows when you're posting pics of someone pinching the universe's clit.

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What if skeletons are the aliens?

>>53381954
Kind of sounds like the more active version of the "Enigmatic Observers" Fallen Empires from Stellaris. They are a archetype of randomly created, stagnant fallen empires that just kind of don't care about anything anymore, except that they observe the entire galaxy with mighty advanced technology to use the galaxy as a theater for them, from which they produce highly engaging reality tv shows. Those reality tv shows are basically the only thing they still care about, except for some vague semblence that they somehow represent xenophilia and diversity. Oh and if someone goes too much off the rails enslaving and purging xenos they occasionally teleport in, destroy all your warships, free all slaves, kill your leaders and teleport right back out again. If you try to interact they just tell you to fuck off and stop trying to break the fourth wall because you are but a puny little tv figure.

So "ancient aliens just do random shit to developing races with no semblence of decency".

>On one world they will just randomly kill every child and see what happens. On others they fly around anal probing random people.

>On others they just genetically engineer a few hundred plants that produce insanely strong hallucigenics.

>Sometimes they just plant all these obelisks, but in reality they just take random cooking receipts and jumble the words just to fuck with them when they read that on the obelisks wondering what it might mean.

>Elsewhere they act as these insane old gods with thousands of rules that make no sense.

>And sometimes they use their technology to make people belive magic is real; they just detect whenever someone is trying to do "magic" and use technology to make it happen; give it really detailed rules and put a lot of thought into it, making these people belive they are discovering real thruth about the world. When they finally "achive" interstellar travel with their "magic" they take the magic away and say "haha, gottcha, magic isn't even real!

>>53383258
WE'VE BEEN HIDING INSIDE OF YOU THE ENTIRE TIME HAHAHA JOKES ON YOU!!

>>53383258
But anon, skeletons ARE aliens. They've been infected with meat, made slaves to muscles to ferry organs and other tissues and various fluids around. We think we're intelligent beings but really we're parasites built around an eternally yet silently screaming skeleton praying for the sweet release of our deaths so they can be free again.

>>53383309
AW SON OF A BITCH

>>53383289
Sometimes they give a younger empire one of their warships, watching as they go off the rails and conquer an opposing empire using what amounts to a normal destroyer for the ancients.

>>53383324
>humans being born are actually a nascent parasite drawing a skeleton from the spookiverse, manifesting it in corporeal reality where it can know only pain.

>>53383373
I prefer that the mommy's skeleton gives birth to a baby skeleton which is immediately infected with the meat.

The meat is without mercy.

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>>53383184
>>53383289
They are just pic related but as aliens

>Dude what if we just shrunk everbody on that planet to a tenth of their size but make sure their brains are still as capable

>Haha, great idea, they will wake up like "what the fuck is this, why am I shrunk. They will have no idea what hit them!

>Yeah, haha, exctly dude

Drugs and post singularity tech make a hell of a combination.

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>>53383126
>>53383179

Therians VS Cravers VS Silicon Life

Who wins?

>>53383524
What can Therians do?

>>53375267
Battlestar galactica

>>53381642
my b, yes, the asurans were the replicators. the Ori/Alteran split was idealogical,

how would the Ori know that worhisp increased their power if there were not lesser races around to worship them?

i always got the feel that the Ori got the bare bones basic asension first, made a massive shitstorm of it, caused the rift between the factions of spiritualists who got there without all the fancy tech and on pure soul power, and the Ancients, who went with a more science approach

actually, that makes sense. a few people figure out how to ascend, keep it to themselves, indoctrinate other humans/Alterans, got a cult around them, then did a coup to get more worship. those few that ascended chased out the Ancients, then they became Ori

>>53383548
Be /b/tards living life like it's an MMO with access to posthuman tech and the goal to turn all of existence into dyson spheres.

>>53374693
Is OP Peter Quill?

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>>53383524
I want to say it is a close race between Silicon Life and Therians with Therians edging them out by sheer numbers but only barely since SL have a bunch of gravity weapons and other nonsense
But then again I don't know too much about the Cravers

>>53383524
>>53383680
What's the Silicon Life?

>>53376831
Writing a campaign is different then writing a novel.

>>53376831

It's more likely some guy just wants to talk about a thing he likes on /tg/.

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>>53383933
It is from BLAME!
Basically they are, if I remember right, the a.i./uploaded humans? for this giant city that after an indeterminate period of time went crazy and allowed the city to expand to stupid proportions

I don't really remember so just look it up the manga is pretty good, and so is everything else by Tsutomu Nihei

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>>53384784
I was kinda under the impression that while individually rather strong Silicon Life don't have a lot of numbers (Comparatively in setting anyway).

The biggest threat in setting is easily Safeguard, they start out rather strong and at higher tiers become stupidly OP.

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>>53384784
No, you're probably thinking of the Governors. Silicon Life are the loosely knit clans of hostile cyborgs that roam the City and fight with the Safe Guard/Authority.

>>53383933
Imagine raiders from Fallout or Mad Max, only except they passed the technological singularity so long ago that any attempt to quantify it would be meaningless.

>>53374415
F5

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>>53384864
They are limited in numbers but I rank their tech high enough to allow them to hold out against the Therians for a while

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>>53374415
we up the craziness to 11

>>53374415
Here's mine that I used in a Cyberpunk type world.

Cybernetics are based off of technology discovered when a probe crashed on Earth. The probe used an organic computer which was more or less a specially grown brain. The brain itself was long dead and the probe itself was thousands of years old. The interfaces were reverse engineered and propelled Cybernetics technology hundreds of years.

The only people that know is the company that originally discovered the probe. They managed to keep that part a secret, even though the technology ended up being used by several corporations.

>>53384933
The origin/nature of Silicon Life is never really explained. I'm not what the actual difference between SL, SG, and "humans" even is in a setting that's, like, post-post-post-cyberpunk.

>>53385094
So judging by the first dozen pages, this is Time Cube 2: Son of Time Cube, right anon?

Alrightey, here's the backstory. Let's say humanity is engulfed in a nuclear war and a few people manage to escape into space. A few thousand years later they come back to earth to find survivors and help them rebuild. Time passes and the spacemen naturally die out and some knowledge along with them. In another few thousand years ruins are found with murals depicting men from the sky that helped humans. The story starts with the excavation of said ruins and the group wants to find out what and who these aliens are.

>>53383599
>how would the Ori know that worhisp increased their power if there were not lesser races around to worship them?
They probably learned after they Ascended, and figured out what they now were and how their powers worked. Remember that you don't just get power when you Ascend, you get knowledge too.

I like to think that the Ancients were much more advanced along the Ascension path than the Ori (although mind you the Ancients are only "some" of the Ascended beings out there, probably not even a majority, and they don't all agree with one another, it's just the Others as a whole outnumbering them and enforcing the rules), so while they maintained that shield around the Milky Way + Pegasus + Ida to protect later generations from the Ori, the Ori couldn't break past it because the Ancients were stronger. The Ori got Ascension, but never advanced beyond the lower and more basic levels, so they relied on worship from servitor races that they created in order to increase their power. It's why they had to convert the Milky Way galaxy to following them, because with the worship of two galaxies backing them they could make up the power difference.

>>53379195
underrated post

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>>53374431

>>53385526
not really it's crazy but it's not quite that level of crazy, cause Timecube is pretty incomprehensible, while for the most part Cosmos In Collision and the various theories it supports are comprehensible, if still quite ridiculous

Here are some that have probably been done:
>Ancient Aliens terraform Earth to their specs. They show up in 2017 with their first colony ship to find a polluted planet teeming with human vermin.
>Your favorite animal are decendants of Amish aliens who rejected technology. Their relatives come for a visit.
>Our planet is part of a long-term study in independent sapient development. Alien Sapient Rights Activists chain themselves to our planet.

They come to experiment and abduct cows cause methane is their main powersource.

Players ARE the Ancient Ayy, immortal scientists conducting the experiment of fast forwarding a primate species by splicing its DNA with Ayy DNA.

Players follow the orders of a superior so everything goes well.

One mission is to find the last family of Ayy hydrids on a corrupted city before the superior nuke it to "start again". Sodom and Gomorrah.

It doesn't matter how hard players try to explain, the primitive species think of the party as angels
Basically do any angel tale from the Bible with the players
Lucifer is a rogue scientist

>ancient aliens come to earth in the times of ancient egypt
>they learn many great things about the architecture in massive monuments from the mighty egyptian empire, and appropriate this method of monument building into their culture

Humans are the ancient aliens, being the first interplanetary settlers from Earth. The livable planet they land on turns out to already have several bronze age alien civillizations.

>>53375467
Stargate?

>>53387876
#1) is Pacific Rim, it's pretty great.

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>>53376469

Ancient Aliens return to check the progress of the species they introduced to the planet eons ago.
The species ISN'T humans. It's the platypus.

Start a modern day setting where it's revealed that David Icke Was Right (And Alex Jones Too) - they're all interdimensional lizard paedophiles, they've been here harvesting.. what, 'bionic gold' or whatever they're usually whining about in conspiracy theories, and the players are part of the resistance now that they're out in the open.

>>53388078
Ran a game once where the players were part of a group of 10,000 people, thrown into the year 8,000BC. After the initial scrabble for survival with a scattering of technology, and the mass starvation, etc, the survivors spent the next few thousand years sniping at each other and coalescing into their own little enclaves deciding how humanity should work, with a few pitched battles. Genewrights, AI scientists, non-interventionists, 'rule them like a fucking god'ers, a few doing something closer to out and out magic,

Basically just kept track of how the pitched battles went and extrapolated on human development from factional superiority. Time between pitched battles was spent teching up, gathering resources and trying to deal with the madness that living that long would inflict. Honestly a solid game, even if they ended up going insane and blowing up the planet.

>>53374415
They uplifted some other species.
We evolved by ourselves and wiped out weakiling uplifted and their alien overlords.

>>53374415
The ancient ayys were actually native to the planet and destroyed their civilization, etc.
Then millions of years passed and their species evolved into dumb animals because they no longer had a society that rewarded intelligence.

tl;dr platypuses

>>53374431
fpbp

>>53388678
>Then millions of years passed and their species evolved into dumb animals because they no longer had a society that rewarded intelligence.
That only works of being a fucking idiot is, across the board, more beneficial to their survival than being intelligent

Have you tried pressing F5?

>>53388706
More like, if they don't need intelligence, first it isn't taught. Then they start doing other things that mutations eventually aid. Evolution doesn't have to happen because it's beneficial, it just has to not kill them all off, or prevent the mutated ones from mating.

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In the game spore there are badges your captain can get in space stage for improving the quality of life on planets, badges you can get for increasing the intelligence and technological levels of planets, and badges for using the terraforming and landscaping tools enough times. These are things you usually do while exploring, or organizing trade routes, or while on your way to a war somewhere else. An interesting take on the ancient aliens concept would be just that: aliens came by and made/uplifted life here just to fill some arbitrary, mundane quota in their lives while on the way to do something more meaningful with regards to their civilization personally. You weren't the goal of some species, you weren't an experiment, you weren't even remembered beyond a datalog quickly forgotten by the crew involved. You, your civilization, and your species, were just a number to be marked down for some petty hierarchal reward within their culture.

>>53388754
>Evolution doesn't have to happen because it's beneficial
Sure, but it's not like they'd become dumb, they'd just have a vestigial intelligence, if there even is such a thing. Even if their society split up, an individual with intelligence has an edge over an otherwise equal individual without intelligence.

>>53388161
It was the final arc of Warren Ellis' tenure on The Authority ten years before that

>>53374415
What if the aliens are humans from the future?

>>53374415
>White people are the descendants of the Ancient Aliens.
There.

>>53391600
Shut up, 343Industries, humans as ancient neanderthals made no fucking sense.

>>53374481

so you're saying the set of all stories which include the concept of ancient aliens is *smaller* than the set of stories which include both ancient aliens and the twist that the ancient aliens are human?

i think you are bad at math.

>>53375005
>The aliens aren' actually aliens but angels. Cast by God.

That's my D&D setting. They pretty much made not Israel/Babylonia with Atlantean technology.

>>53391745
Just don't give the contrarians attention.

>>53391745
Although I don't believe his assertion is is possible for there to be more "humans are ancient aliens" than ancient alien stories if, and only if, one doesn't actually consider ancient super science humans as actual ancient aliens. Just super duper pooper stuff like Atlantis.

>>53375267
halo, in a sense

>>53374415
>beings that are made of essentially data and electricity
>leave tips and hints on our world from time to time to jumpstart our technological growth
>we eventually evolve to create vast data networks. in the future we have basically virtual reality internet on steroids
>they infiltrate the network and consume pretty much all of the data, use it all to reproduce, then disappear, leaving us in a new technological dark age

>>53391745
He said "more overdone", meaning that it has exhausted a larger percentage of its potential for interesting stories through overuse.

>>53388193
I was going for literal human God, in a biblical sense (like all-powerful and shit), not just ascending to nanomachines or something

>>53383060
I just recently fed my civ to the worm, by accident.
My space Roman empire likes tomb worlds now :)

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The ancient aliens are actually natives of our planet who left the planet thousands of years ago. By the time they come back to colonize our planet and wipe us out in the process, they've completely forgotten this was their point of origin.

>>53398990
The Baily Community College Kids.

>>53399123
Whoops, guess if I expanded the thumbnail my dumbass would have recognized they aren't actually that old.

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>>53398709
> Created races
> Created the world as we know it
> Left behind all this cool shit
How is that not an all-powerful entity?

>>53379537
Oh no, absolutely not. The Worm can embrace the love of my plasma cannons, thank you very much.

>>53376577
That's nothing like Eva at all.

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>>53380989
There's worse

>>53399852
So disappointed by the episode I watched, it seems like Farscape but with no charisma.

>>53398928
What game?

I like Halo's take on it, probably the only interesting thing 343 added to the lore. Humans were once hyper-advanced in their history but were devolved back into cavemen.

Kinda defeats the entire paternal "Reclaimer" concept that Bungie was going for but I like lost ages of hypertechnology. What would be interesting to me is stage a game in those hyperadvanced settings

>>53400261
I don't know, they're still Reclaimers. The Forerunner, as I understand it, were pissed at the Precursors, who were even more advanced than they were, because the Precursors chose humanity to become the bearers of the Mantle of Responsibility. So naturally the Forerunner threw a temper tantrum and destroyed the Precursors, claiming the Mantle for themselves.

The Precursors, meanwhile, didn't exactly die out. The Precursors had a system in place to try and resurrect their species to avoid extension but it became corrupted until all that was left was this malignant mass of hatred that wanted the Forerunners all dead. Today we call it The Flood.

Only on the threshold of extinction the Forerunner the Forerunners were repentant enough at past mistakes to name humanity as their Reclaimers hoping they could take up the Mantle as intended and do right for the galaxy.

But this is humanity so, you know, good luck with that. If there is a way to fuck it up we'll find it.

>>53400146
Stellaris.

>>53385169
NOiSE gives a little info on that if you haven't read it yet.

Basically the Safeguard wanted to have a little coup by bringing in the Net Terminal Genes as the only means of accessing the Net Sphere and the Silicon Life are off pursuing their own route to transhumanism.

They all messed up and the City's out of anyone's control. At some point between then and Blame! the Safeguard went "Ah screw it, we'll just kill everyone and hope it all works out somehow."

>>53400865
I thought the Safeguard went rogue and the SL manipulated the NTG thing to destroy humanity

>>53374481
what if
>humans try to colonize galaxy
>some accidentally go back in time en route somehow
>rest of humans arrive when they are dead hundreds of thousands of years

>>53400865
>>53401008
At some point, silicone life started as a transhumanistic offshoot. I can't recall if it's mentioned if the first were uplifted/transformed humans or if they were completely synthetic but they were able to reproduce and coexisted with "normal" humanity in its various forms for some time.
They became associated with criminals and suffered discrimination and eventually decided to rebel. They released a bioweapon that quickly spread throughout most of the structure and targeted everyone with the gene to access the future internet of everything. The bioweapon is still active in the air and spreading when blame takes place thousands of years later.
Without anyone able to access the net the builders went wild with uncontrolled building like a cancer, putting an ever greater strain on the net making the situation increasingly worse.
Silcion life want to finish off and replace humanity and take over the structure and net.

The safegaurd automatically activates whenever anyone without the gene tries to access the net even though they want someone to access the net and fix things.

>>53379488
>>53379932
what comic is this?

>>53400123
Funny my experience was the opposite.

>>53379932
it's too short to give a shit about, anon.
I tried to give a shit but already ran out.

>>53407034
High five, man.
Brunnen-g fight chant is the hypest, right?

>>53405910
Stuff and nonsense.
http://www.cassiopeiaquinn.com/comic/archive

>>53376007
Better yet:
The tectonic plates are actually alive, and are these aliens. Earthquakes happen when they argue with each other.

>>53375672
This is good actually.

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>>53375267
Protector, Ringworld and other Known Space stories by Larry Niven.

>>53374431
So Forerunners?

>>53383631
>>>/co/

>>53375515
I too played Imperium galactica 2.

>>53374673
Sounds comfy
>extra brownie points if humans are less violent than before and the aliens are happy because we're getting better, so they don't mind helping us out with some tech

>>53374415

Try Niven's approach: intelligent dinosaurs, who emigrated eons ago to escape the Alvarez impact (which at the time they weren't advanced enough to stop). The small number of survivors eventually built up a multi-stellar empire. The homeworld was avoided, at first because it was uninhabitable, then later because it was sacred. Now, seeing a new intelligent race emerge on their homeworld, there's a renewed interest in re-settling. Or even anger at the damage to Earth's sacred ecology.

>>53374415
I've been playing with the idea in this fantasy land I'm working on.

You've got your !elves, !dwarves, and !orks, and humans. It's standard fantasy, but the humans are new to the scene BECAUSE

They were the slave race to aliens and staged a revolt, which caused them to crashland on the fantasy world. All the half-humans can be explained by genetic experimentation.

Why not literally just have fucking aliens that have existed for a long time monitoring Earth but have made literally no interaction or contact.

"It wuz ancient aliens" is such a shit way to pull it off, I quite like the idea of having them have always been right under our noses watching us but being sneaky enough to not get caught doing shit until the time comes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_the_Elephant

The OP's image just made me wonder how a society would evolve if they had the ability to levitate stone.

Like a select few well trained specialists, not the entire race.

>>53417624
Mass Effect's Protheans were implied to have done that in ME3 if I recall correctly.

>>53394098
Weren't the forerunners originally planned to be ancient humans?

>>53421363
The Protheans studied Earth and had limited contact, but they did have contact. Javik will talk about how they they would use primitive humans, asari, hanar, salarians as ingredients. Apparently salarian livers are delicious. No idea what selection of wine they prefer.

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>>53388773
>In the game spore
I read that and thought of "the game spore" as some sort of alien biotech gaming console. Now I'm wondering what kinds of games it would play.

>>53374415
They died off because space communists caused galaxy wide starvation.
After which they split up and tried again and again to make it work, regressing with each attempt.
We're descendants of a space an-caps trying to get away from it all.

>>53374415
the ancient aliens were actually primitive barbarians that destroyed the highly developed indigenous civilization.

>>53374415
Ancient aliens stayed behind and mingled with the population, becoming heavily humanized and enjoy wearing tshirts from uniqlo and eating in n out

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>>53374415
Earth is the spaceship and volcanoes are just exhaust pipes for the biggest thermal reactor.

Just like when a ship is abandonned underwater, over the millions of years, dirt and all sorts of materials has gathered over it pulled by gravity. Hell, it has even developped its own micro-environment and biology, like that sandwich you forgot in your locker when you were a kid.

Still runs like a charm, you only need a little bit of elbow grease to clean of the filth inhabiting it, and it's yours for a good price, friend! Some fixer-upper project for a young empire like yours, I'm sure.

>>53374566
>>53374660
Every huge impact they did was by pure accident and the myth around it was all thought up and engineered by human imagination over seemingly miraculous incidents that were entirely unimportant or trivial to the purpose of these explorers.

I had something like this at least to a degree. Basically character ended up on a planet and discovered this gigantic odd obviously alien machine buried way deep underground. The machine is ridiculous on a number of ways. Like it actively draws in races to the world and then takes samples of the races that land or what they bring with them to create new life on the planet it's entombed on.

I wasn't sure what exactly to do with it beyond that though. Especially since it was extremely unlikely the character would discover any of this except through conjecture based on what they discovered on the actual planet surface.

>>53376777
How would you pull that off in the story? Humanity eventually finds the ship via advanced satellites and submarines at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?

Makes me think of Homeworld.

>>53374415
Go back in time.

>>53402914
Are there any novels with this premise? Human crashing on an alien planet and trying to integrate with the natives. The only one I've read with the concept was A Fire Upon the Deep which was pretty great.

>>53408634
Neat twist, but I feel like that loses some of the point of them being aliens if they're just that massive and world-shaping.

>>53375467
Homeworld

>>53430066
Shut up, Jackposter.

>>53375330
>Cows are considered WMDs on the ayylmao homeworld

>>53375458
Hard to be a god (THe book the movies sucks)

>How do we refresh the concept of Ancient aliens?
make them hip young aliens instead

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>>53432331

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>magic not science

>God was an ancient alien with sufficiently advanced technology, and he left the secret to FTL travel somewhere on Earth
>Rapture is really just a metaphor for when humanity discover the secret and leaves Earth

Earth is a prison, and spooks have been and are our wardens.

>>53434908
>Earth is a prison
The skeleton inside you is your guard monitoring your every activity.

Like Futarama said, we taught aliens how to build pyramids, not the other way around. Aliens came to earth in ancient days and ripped off our cultures, taking them back to their home planets because they liked the aesthetics.

>>53375267

Eureka 7

>>53375267
>>53375458
You two have read/seen/played little or no science fiction.

>>53375267
Mutineer's Moon for another.

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>>53374415
They were Africans with homosexual desires that hail from space.

>>53374415
Make them children in our ancient times and we are discarded playthings neglected by the aliens in adulthood

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Variation on this: Humans are the ancient aliens of some other race in Deep Time. No matter how far humanity pushes into the galaxy, there are no other life forms higher than lichen, anywhere. We uplift weird forms and adapt our life to new worlds. If this is a game, the PCs are responsible for sleeping through the eons only to awaken and shepherd the life they created. Once various crises are averted, they go back to sleepy-time and await the next disaster.

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>>53425469
>>53374415

>a dozen ancient aliens stayed and mingled with the population.
>main host rocks up and starts gassing the cities, leaving something ridiculous like 1 in 100,00 alive.
>prevailing theory from those in the know about the interbreeding is they want us out of the way to claim the planet but didn't have the heart to kill their, by now pretty distant, cousins.
turns out they are radical believers in the natural order. they are horrified at the inbreeding from there ancestors perverting the predestined course of our history/evolution/destiny and were trying to wipe out the handful of half-breeds to give us a fighting chance at getting back on track. they just tragically and grossly underestimated the promiscuity of there forefathers. that 1 in 100,000 or so are the ONLY pure blood humans left. You have a couple of days to come up with a plan while they are to stunned by the scale of their fuck up to know what to do about it and haven't decided how to proceed yet

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>>53374415
By introducing xenoarcheology.

>>53400457
Yeah, then comes that "Created" bollocks.

>>53440122
As if the Forerunner position wasn't fucked enough.

The Mantle of Responsibility is for the protection and preservation of all life. Aw, sweet soundin' itn't it? So by all means, let's KILL THE GODDAMN PRECURSORS AND TAKE IT FOR OURSELVES! THEN WHO'LL BE PROTECTING ALL LIFE, YA BITCHES!?

They should have left them a mystery, even with the vague bits we knew from Halo 3. Exploring them just winds up with this fustercluck.

A religious sect that is summoned through various items left on earth, where all the members are immortalized humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenobite_(Hellraiser)

>>53440166
The Forerunners who did it ended up killing themselves or devolving themselves as a lesson though.

Also the Forerunner Saga gave us lots of tasty Flood lore, making them the best space zombie plague ever in my opinion.

>>53374481

>overdone

I think you mean the opposite.

>>53374415
we are the aliens, for some other race far away and far less technologically advanced than us.

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>>53374415
The Ancient Aliens used us as an experiment to see what would happen if they gave a sapient race a sense of right and wrong / no ability to simply flawlessly communicate with each other using telepathy / non-consensual relationship with the laws of physics.

Essentially, the ancient ones very specifically made us in order to demonstrate some principle so fundamental to the human experience that it doesn't even register to us that it might be possible to not have it, when in fact we are the weird-ass fucking space oddity that they've been looking on at in amazement, possibly being purged by their peers for the sin of interfering to such an extent.

>>53442040
https://www.genome.gov/12514551/

>>53442141
Fair point, I should have thought of knockout mice when describing that.

The whole "God made us in his own image, except obviously without the ability to create and destroy entire universes on a whim" meshes pretty well with it.

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>>53374415
The aliens came to earth to learn from humanity (specifically, subjects such as building pyramids and how to prepare their dead so as to scare Abbott and Costello).

>>53374415
>Before the stars became too cold, too distant, near the end of the universe, a last race of sentient beings finally invented time travel.
>In a desperate attempt to save themselves, they all went back to the early days of the universe, when it was not too hot, and the stars were just right for many sentient beings to arise.
>In the past they started anew, but unknown to them, they carried with them a virus from the future, which mutated with those in the past they came too, and killed them all.
>Just before they died they built great monuments and buildings, with hidden machinery and databanks with their most advanced technology, hoping one day in the future, their race (which was yet to evolve in this timelane) would find it.

>>53404196
With the time dilation issues inherent in interstellar travel, this isn't even that far-fetched. It's almost harder for a sci-fi author to write a setting so that this DOESN'T happen constantly.

Easily accessible examples would be the crew in Interstellar aging 20 years in 20 minutes because of blackhole gravity, or the lighthugger crews from Revelation Space appearing to be immortal demigods to people living planetside.

>>53374431
Technically that's what the annunaki are.

Make them agitatingly Australian.

>>53430732
John Carter of Mars is centered around that.

>>53435034
cultural appropriation!!

Triggered

Lets send our feminist to them as a WMD

Ancient aliens did vist, millenia ago, but they essentially used this place as a holiday resort, and then fucked off when they were done. The "ancient artifacts" they left are toys, food containers and other garbage. The ancient ruins were tourist resorts. and so on.

They didn't care about humans, and many of the things they left behind are accidentaly lethal to them. There was no malice behind it, it was just littering.

>>53432865
Birrin are /fa/ as fuck

>>53374415
>How do we refresh the concept of Ancient aliens?
Don't you mean,"How do we subvert the trope of Ancient aliens?"

>>53379932
>>53379488
This looks like Ava's demon with worse art

>>53449301
Not enough chicks puking lava for you to get an erection?

>>53445057
That's literally the plot of an old Russian book, Roadside Picnic. It was made into a a video game called Stalker and there's a movie based on the game too.

The ancient humans has already gone extinct by the hands of an alien species who don't think there's any traces of humanity left. They left a device on Earth to force something to evolve into humans in one last desperate attempt to ensure their species' survival. When the new humanity enter space age, they will learn the terrible truth.