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Kiero
2009-03-05, 07:41 AM
I'll admit from the off that I'm no fan of sci-fi, so if this breaks various conventions of the genre, then bear that in mind.

I was listening to a Radio 4 article about NASA's Kepler space mission, and Dr Boss' comments that there might be billions of Earth-like planets (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7891132.stm) out there. Which started the seed of an idea.

Let's say even if there aren't billions of them, there are still hundreds, maybe thousands of human-habitable planets. But, there's no intelligent life on any of them. Some have life, but nothing sapient or civilisation-building. Because (and this is the "secret history" of this setting idea) all the other intelligent life in the universe is dead. Many killed in a massive, galaxy-spanning war a million years ago, the rest slowly dying out or giving up in the time since then.

Earth was a backwater which hadn't yet developed it's own sapient life, and was thus ignored/spared the end of everything else (or maybe one of our extinction events was a not-entirely-successful attempt to wipe us out). So human beings emerge on the galactic scale, and find there's no one else there. We find their tech in some instances (jump-gates that allow FTL travel, say, to avoid the tedium of sleeper ships and other concerns about how to cross the vast distances of space within one human lifetime), possibly records of their civilisations and what happened, the odd signs of how they once lived. But critically, there are no aliens. None.

Could this work? When should it be set - in the early days of our exploration finding these eerie, dead worlds? Later on when we've colonised several planets or systems? Much later when we have rival empires and galactic war?

Thoughts.

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 08:10 AM
Could this work?

Yes. The idea of either a) humans as the only known intelligent race or b) humans as the only surviving intelligent race has been explored a few times in sci-fi.

Personally I'd be inclined to explore the aliens more thoroughly than it sounds like you want to: who were they, why did they die, are there remnants (sleepers, transcendants, viral AIs), is whatever killed them still extant? Human social and political movements inspired by learning about how aliens did things, automated defense systems to be disabled or circumvented, ruins to explore. It would seem a waste to have them just as a source for technomagic maguffins. Might as well just say "there are no aliens, nor were there".

I suggest reading the Dune books (for humans-only) and the Revelation Space and Altered Carbon series (for the-aliens-are-dead).

Kiero
2009-03-05, 08:20 AM
To be honest, I'm not that interested in the aliens; this is a setting about spacefaring humans without the usual contrivances or convolutions of dealing with alien species as well.

That said, I don't think anything in my OP was ruling out the kind of exploration you are talking about. You can still have all the impacts of finding relics of their passing, without necessarily having to explain how it happened. The only thing you said I'd be opposed to is surviving remnants (unless they are devolved and no longer sapient). I was deliberately vague about that - it's for people to develop themselves rather than necessarily start specifying who these various aliens were and so on.

As I said, I'm not a fan of sci-fi (though I have read Dune, and had the misfortune to suffer the sequels, and prequels...), but this was a little idea that came to me.

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 08:31 AM
To be honest, I'm not that interested in the aliens; this is a setting about spacefaring humans without the usual contrivances or convolutions of dealing with alien species as well.

But that's been done plenty. Not all sci-fi involves aliens by any means (not even all sci-fi with humans operating over interstellar distances).

If you don't want there to be aliens, it's simplest for there to never have been any. If there were some in the past, it becomes difficult to explain why no alien intelligences still exist (or are still evolving).

Essentially, while this is not in itself a bad idea, it's a long way from being the germ of a setting by itself. It's one rule or limit imposed on the design of the setting, with the other details (how long has humanity been spacefaring? What technologies have they found or developed? How do they get from world to world? How sophisticated is their terraforming? Do they have space habitats, orbitals, ringworlds, Dyson spheres, matrioshka brains? Do we have strong AI, uploading, hive minds, machine-mediated telepathy, resleeving, nanotech? How are societies and governments structured?) much more important in how it all turns out.

Thane of Fife
2009-03-05, 08:38 AM
To be honest, I'm not that interested in the aliens; this is a setting about spacefaring humans without the usual contrivances or convolutions of dealing with alien species as well.

Have you ever watched any of Firefly (http://www.hulu.com/firefly) (that link will only work if you're in the US - otherwise check the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)).

It was a fairly popular sci-fi setting with no aliens. And there's stuff (http://www.strolen.com/content.php?node=5286) which people have made for the purposes of role-playing there.

Icar (http://www.icar.co.uk/) is another example of a setting with no aliens (though, in fairness, one of the premises is that the vast majority of space has been taken over the killer robots made by humans).

But yeah, it's all perfectly possible. And those are just two of the many examples.

CthulhuM
2009-03-05, 08:38 AM
Indeed, having the aliens all gone is a fairly interesting idea, and rife with possibilities for mystery and adventure hooks, but only if you actually do something with it. If you just don't like aliens, then don't have them - you are by no means contractually obligated to have aliens in your sci-fi. Most of Asimov's books (specifically, the entire robot, empire and foundation collection) involved no aliens whatsoever.

Ascension
2009-03-05, 08:39 AM
I'm with kamikasei. If you want human exploration sans aliens, then do human exploration sans aliens. If you want to explore the ramifications of the rest of the galaxy's life killing itself off, then have the rest of the galaxy's life kill itself off. Introducing a backstory involving aliens without having any payoff other than old tech to loot seems like a waste of a backstory.

Swooper
2009-03-05, 08:41 AM
Look at the backstory for Eve Online (www.eve-online). It's pretty close to what you're describing, with an important distinction: Humans are the ancient high tech dead race. Except they're not extinct, but after a massive cataclysm, the technology was lost and small pockets of human colonists survived on planets here and there in another galaxy. Tens of thousands of years later, they are rediscovering FTL travel, unearthing the relics of their ancestors.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 08:51 AM
I'm with kamikasei. If you want human exploration sans aliens, then do human exploration sans aliens. If you want to explore the ramifications of the rest of the galaxy's life killing itself off, then have the rest of the galaxy's life kill itself off. Introducing a backstory involving aliens without having any payoff other than old tech to loot seems like a waste of a backstory.

I don't think it is a waste. It side-steps all the stuff about how humans got FTL travel (and other tech), for example, and potentially gets us there before all-encompassing AI and nanotech arises.

As before there's absolutely nothing I've described that's stopping people exploring the dead aliens worlds - there just won't be any live ones to be found anywhere. But I don't agree that it's better for them to have simply never been.

Partly it's avoiding some of the things I don't particularly like. Yet another "war against machines" is another one.

I've seen Firefly.

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 08:51 AM
I can't believe I didn't think to mention Firefly, though strictly speaking it's not interstellar. EVE is a good example, too.


I don't think it is a waste. It side-steps all the stuff about how humans got FTL travel (and other tech), for example, and potentially gets us there before all-encompassing AI and nanotech arises.

Blech. Seems too contrived and/or too much of a cheat to me. I get the feeling that you don't want to think too hard about the aliens and focus on the humans instead, but realistically the aliens in this setting would have to be thought about quite carefully, because of the cultural impact of living in the shadow of a more advanced, extinct race. They had all this great tech that we're using without even understanding it properly, and they died out - what does that say for our prospects? Etc...

The significance of any individual species can be reduced if humans are inheriting the remains of a whole meta-civilization of different species, but then it becomes harder to answer why, in so fecund a galaxy, they would all have died and no new ones arisen.

This is why it's a waste - to my mind, these are interesting questions, but they're being used as mere setup for more of the same old human drama! Man, we've being going around and around that stuff for tens of millenia, can't we get something new?


Try some Mass Effect for "What happened to the Aliens?". Although new ones evolved from several backwater-at-the-time worlds.

See, this kind of thing is more plausible because it's just a fall-of-civilization story like we've had on Earth more than once (and as has heavily influenced our mythology and storytelling). If it was the fall of a dozen different contemporary civilizations followed by only one place anywhere with new progress being made, that requires more explanation.

Uin
2009-03-05, 09:11 AM
Try some Mass Effect for "What happened to the Aliens?". Although new ones evolved from several backwater-at-the-time worlds.

mcv
2009-03-05, 09:34 AM
I don't think it is a waste. It side-steps all the stuff about how humans got FTL travel (and other tech), for example, and potentially gets us there before all-encompassing AI and nanotech arises.
Then why not simply have humans invent FTL before nanotech and all-encompassing AI? Why not have the techs you don't want simply not work?

If you say humans got their tech from dead aliens, people will want to know more about those aliens, and they become the focus of the campaign. If you don't want Precursor civilisations, then simply don't have them. Humans got there first. Turns out the Grand Unification of QM and Relativity opened up the possibility of warp drive, antigrav and whatever else you feel like.

Don't include stuff you don't want. Although personally I'd find a galactic battlefield of dead civilisations very interesting.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 09:36 AM
Blech. Seems too contrived and/or too much of a cheat to me. I get the feeling that you don't want to think too hard about the aliens and focus on the humans instead, but realistically the aliens in this setting would have to be thought about quite carefully, because of the cultural impact of living in the shadow of a more advanced, extinct race. They had all this great tech that we're using without even understanding it properly, and they died out - what does that say for our prospects? Etc...

The significance of any individual species can be reduced if humans are inheriting the remains of a whole meta-civilization of different species, but then it becomes harder to answer why, in so fecund a galaxy, they would all have died and no new ones arisen.

This is why it's a waste - to my mind, these are interesting questions, but they're being used as mere setup for more of the same old human drama! Man, we've being going around and around that stuff for tens of millenia, can't we get something new?

Well as far as I'm concerned, the same old human drama is the interesting stuff. I don't find it old or boring. And even if it is a cheat, I don't see it as problematic.

As I said, there may be non-sapient alien species, but nothing equivalent to humans in terms of intelligence and civilisation-building.

Maybe it's my unfamiliarity with the genre showing, but I don't think it's important to lay out the answers to any of the big questions in the setting. That's for individual GMs picking up an idea to make up for themselves.

estradling
2009-03-05, 09:37 AM
In addition to those already listed
Asimov foundation is a human only galactic empire.
The new Battlestar Galactica is human only (Human and their creations)

As for the reasons it simple really... There is no hard math that shows how many intelligent life forms will come about. The only thing you need to worry about is it being internally consitant. If the Galaxy use to produce a lot of intelligent life forms then you need a very good reason why it stopped on a galactic level. And why Earth was spared, Earth would not be the only primitive planet on the outskirts.

Another option is to say that intelligent life is rare, and that humans are only the second one to make it to star travel. And they find the remains of the 1st groups galactic empire. You can remove the 1st group how ever you wish, standard tropes are war, plague, or moving on to somewhere else

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 09:52 AM
Well as far as I'm concerned, the same old human drama is the interesting stuff. I don't find it old or boring. And even if it is a cheat, I don't see it as problematic.

I was being tongue-in-cheek, but it is true that I don't see much value in a sci-fi story that's just about people who happen to be on a spaceship. The sci should have a part in the fi. The exploration of human nature should be taken to the places other genres can't go, by changing that nature, or at least subjecting it to pressures only possible when you have aliens, time travel, uploading and AI.


As I said, there may be non-sapient alien species, but nothing equivalent to humans in terms of intelligence and civilisation-building.

How things are in the setting isn't the issue, but how and why they got to be that way.


Maybe it's my unfamiliarity with the genre showing, but I don't think it's important to lay out the answers to any of the big questions in the setting. That's for individual GMs picking up an idea to make up for themselves.

This I fundamentally disagree with. It's not proper sci-fi if the answers to those big questions aren't known well enough by the setting creator, at least, to influence a dozen other things about the setting not obviously connected to it. That's the basic principle of the genre: make a change and explore the implications. If these big questions are sketched out, but it's left to GMs to decide the answers (and not just the specific details, but the general shape of the answers), you have a recipe for internal inconsistency and broken verisimilitude in a genre where these things are vitally important.

To be honest it sounds like you're trying to assemble a sci-fi setting for people who don't actually like sci-fi but do enjoy the trappings of Star Trek and Star Wars (minus the aliens). Which in itself isn't a bad thing, but is probably better done with more self-awareness ("no that doesn't add up, no it doesn't matter, because this is not a hard sci-fi setting, just RP in Spaaaacce!").


If you say humans got their tech from dead aliens, people will want to know more about those aliens, and they become the focus of the campaign.

Exactly.


Although personally I'd find a galactic battlefield of dead civilisations very interesting.

As would I - but not if it was a background detail and given no real attention.

Winterwind
2009-03-05, 09:54 AM
Sounds quite good to me. And I don't think the campaign would automatically focus on the aliens - depending on who the characters would be, they might as well not care about them at all, if they happen to be the type more concerned with everyday life and personal profit, and then the aliens would come up only as much as you wanted them to.

If you don't mind a bit of criticism though - I think you are wasting potential with your explanation as to why Earth was spared. Firstly, as estradling pointed out, it's not even a particularly good explanation - in a big galaxy, it is unlikely Earth would be the only backwater world, and there would be no reason why new intelligent life should not have developed elsewhere. And secondly, even if it was a good explanation, it's not a particularly interesting one.
I'd rather go for one of the two following options.
Option one, keep it a total secret, making it one of the big questions that haunt mankind - why were we spared? - thus potentially even becoming a major matter within human society. For example it could lead to a massive insurgence of religious movements or one particular religion due to wide-spread "We are God's chosen people" thinking.
Or option two, drop vague hints for something far more sinister. Maybe mankind is actually a very long term plan of a long extinct species? Or maybe mankind is directly linked to whatever exterminated all other intelligent life? And maybe, even, there are some people in high positions who know the truth...

hamlet
2009-03-05, 10:25 AM
It's a good idea, but not entirely new.

Check out Assimov's Foundation books (including the Pebble in the Sky trilogy) as well as his Eternity and Nemesis books for ideas.

As far as I can tell, Nemesis is the only book by Asimov that actually features extra-terrestrial life forms.

Neithan
2009-03-05, 10:26 AM
I'm surprised that people are advising to leave the aliens out completely. As I understand it, the concept is not, that there are no aliens, but that they are not there anymore!

And I think the idea is just great!

Simply having sci-fi without humans has been done a thousand times and is not interesting by itself at all. But the concept of going out into space, and realizing that the galaxy has been devestated and humans are the only people left in the whole galaxy! seems just awsome to me.
Humans have been dreaming about traveling to the stars and meet other people (or even possibly join an interstelar community) for generations. And when they finaly find the first traces of other cultures, they become to realize that space is just one massive graveyard.
As a huge fan of creative sci-fi, this sounds just awsome to me.

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 10:34 AM
I'm surprised that people are advising to leave the aliens out completely. As I understand it, the concept is not, that there are no aliens, but that they are not there anymore!

The concept seems to be that there are no aliens now, because it's easier to ignore them or skim over them if they're just ruins and graves, and Kiero doesn't like them so wants to ignore or skim over them.

So my point is that it's better to just leave them out completely if your motive is to ignore or skim over them anyway.


As a huge fan of creative sci-fi, this sounds just awsome to me.

Seriously, read the Revelation Space (Alistair Reynolds) and Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) series (though the latter doesn't have much about aliens in the first book).

Also, Winterwind and estradling expand on / make good points. Basically, if there were a lot of species in the past then their simultaneous and total disappearance and the current scarcity of life requires more explanation. If there was just the one, then their spectre should have a huge impact on human society. Neither option allows for them to be brushed aside as a setting element - not in the setting material, at least, though obviously any individual or group of humans might not spend much thought on them in either case.

estradling
2009-03-05, 10:35 AM
I'm surprised that people are advising to leave the aliens out completely. As I understand it, the concept is not, that there are no aliens, but that they are not there anymore!

And I think the idea is just great!

Simply having sci-fi without humans has been done a thousand times and is not interesting by itself at all. But the concept of going out into space, and realizing that the galaxy has been devestated and humans are the only people left in the whole galaxy! seems just awsome to me.
Humans have been dreaming about traveling to the stars and meet other people (or even possibly join an interstelar community) for generations. And when they finaly find the first traces of other cultures, they become to realize that space is just one massive graveyard.
As a huge fan of creative sci-fi, this sounds just awsome to me.

It does.... While awesome is a matter of personal taste I do like the idea. I also know that if I was a player in such a game I'd have questions about the why and the how.

None of the current answers given make a whole lot of sense. While it is perfectly acceptable for a setting to have multiple conflicting answers, but at least some of the answers need to be workable. The easiest way is to figure out the 'real' answer at a metagame level and then work out rumors and spins and distortions of the 'real' answer. While the players might never find the real answer it is kind of important for the GM to know as he sets up his story.

dspeyer
2009-03-05, 11:20 AM
One important aspect of this setting is *when* the aliens died. If it was a few thousand years ago, their biggest works will remain on planets and a lot will survive in space but highly-useful things like magnetic data storage will have disintegrated. If it's hundreds of years, there will be a lot more around, but you'll have to answer the question of why timing is so close. If it's tens of thousands, there will be very little left. The only high tech that survived will be things that were deliberately built to last forever, and maybe a few lucky finds in deep space where there's nothing to degrade them.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 11:28 AM
This I fundamentally disagree with. It's not proper sci-fi if the answers to those big questions aren't known well enough by the setting creator, at least, to influence a dozen other things about the setting not obviously connected to it. That's the basic principle of the genre: make a change and explore the implications. If these big questions are sketched out, but it's left to GMs to decide the answers (and not just the specific details, but the general shape of the answers), you have a recipe for internal inconsistency and broken verisimilitude in a genre where these things are vitally important.

To be honest it sounds like you're trying to assemble a sci-fi setting for people who don't actually like sci-fi but do enjoy the trappings of Star Trek and Star Wars (minus the aliens). Which in itself isn't a bad thing, but is probably better done with more self-awareness ("no that doesn't add up, no it doesn't matter, because this is not a hard sci-fi setting, just RP in Spaaaacce!").

And perhaps this is our disconnect. I don't like sci-fi, and I'm not really bothered if it isn't "real sci-fi" by avoiding the explanations.

I'm quite happy with RP in Spaaaace. That doesn't mean you simply toss out all versimilitude whatsoever, though. What I'm trying to get here is something plausible.


Sounds quite good to me. And I don't think the campaign would automatically focus on the aliens - depending on who the characters would be, they might as well not care about them at all, if they happen to be the type more concerned with everyday life and personal profit, and then the aliens would come up only as much as you wanted them to.

If you don't mind a bit of criticism though - I think you are wasting potential with your explanation as to why Earth was spared. Firstly, as estradling pointed out, it's not even a particularly good explanation - in a big galaxy, it is unlikely Earth would be the only backwater world, and there would be no reason why new intelligent life should not have developed elsewhere. And secondly, even if it was a good explanation, it's not a particularly interesting one.
I'd rather go for one of the two following options.
Option one, keep it a total secret, making it one of the big questions that haunt mankind - why were we spared? - thus potentially even becoming a major matter within human society. For example it could lead to a massive insurgence of religious movements or one particular religion due to wide-spread "We are God's chosen people" thinking.
Or option two, drop vague hints for something far more sinister. Maybe mankind is actually a very long term plan of a long extinct species? Or maybe mankind is directly linked to whatever exterminated all other intelligent life? And maybe, even, there are some people in high positions who know the truth...

Actually, that's why I edited in the alternative which I think is better: one of the extinction events was an attempt to kill off life on Earth, but wasn't entirely successful. We weren't spared because we were a backwater, we were spared simply because we got lucky.

I really don't like the "secret machinations of ancients" type explanations, because they add a level of predestination that I don't think is helpful. I don't see the need for any reason besides the usual human ones for religious movements and such.

An unknown can remain unknown, and still have interesting impacts on the setting. There's really no way anyone could go back to the event that was supposed to kill us and see what happened, but that doesn't really change anything in-setting.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 11:31 AM
One important aspect of this setting is *when* the aliens died. If it was a few thousand years ago, their biggest works will remain on planets and a lot will survive in space but highly-useful things like magnetic data storage will have disintegrated. If it's hundreds of years, there will be a lot more around, but you'll have to answer the question of why timing is so close. If it's tens of thousands, there will be very little left. The only high tech that survived will be things that were deliberately built to last forever, and maybe a few lucky finds in deep space where there's nothing to degrade them.

As I think I said in the OP, most of them died off a million years ago. Others in the few hundred millenia after. It's been tens of millenia since they were all dead.

So most of the finds are in deep space, maybe there's an ancient battleground somewhere, where a lot was salvaged by the first people to find it, then reverse-engineered. Where we could understand their tech at all.

Winterwind
2009-03-05, 11:50 AM
And perhaps this is our disconnect. I don't like sci-fi, and I'm not really bothered if it isn't "real sci-fi" by avoiding the explanations.

I'm quite happy with RP in Spaaaace. That doesn't mean you simply toss out all versimilitude whatsoever, though. What I'm trying to get here is something plausible.Hmmm... there is some miscommunication here, I believe. As kamikasei posted before, science fiction essentially means taking any unusual premise and then looking how the world would develop under the assumption of said premise. If you take the premise "there used to be aliens, but now they are all extinct and mankind finds what remains of them", and you construct a believable, consistent setting out of that, than this is, in fact, the very definition of science fiction. Contrariwise, if you do not concern yourself with how such a discovery would, realistically, impact the human society (technologically and psychologically), and just add such an element "for the lulz", then you end up with no verisimilitude and consistency, and I believe that this state, exactly, is what kamikasei means when he speaks of "RP in Spaaaace".

tl;dr version: If it is believable and consistent, it is sci-fi per definition. And not making it believable and consistent would do the setting no justice and waste potential.


Actually, that's why I edited in the alternative which I think is better: one of the extinction events was an attempt to kill off life on Earth, but wasn't entirely successful. We weren't spared because we were a backwater, we were spared simply because we got lucky.

I really don't like the "secret machinations of ancients" type explanations, because they add a level of predestination that I don't think is helpful. I don't see the need for any reason besides the usual human ones for religious movements and such.

An unknown can remain unknown, and still have interesting impacts on the setting. There's really no way anyone could go back to the event that was supposed to kill us and see what happened, but that doesn't really change anything in-setting.Well, hence why I included option one. The really important thing is not how exactly they died out (though it sure wouldn't hurt for the gamemaster to know), but how the facts they existed, they died out, the interaction of what remains of their technology, art, knowledge about their society etc., and the fact that mankind is alone impacts upon the human society and human psyche.

Actually, I'm not even sure whether we really have differing positions. By my understanding kamikasei (and I wouldn't dream about putting words they do not mean into others mouths, so my sincerest apologies if I misunderstand him here) is basically just trying to emphasise that simply using these aliens as cheap means to provide mankind with some technology (that they might as well have come up with themselves) with no afterthought how the existance of these aliens and their demise might impact mankind was both hurtful to the verisimilitude of the setting and quite likely frustrating to the players. And I don't think that's actually all that different from your own position, is it?

Thane of Fife
2009-03-05, 12:02 PM
I would like to point out that, in a galaxy with obvious remnants of multiple ancient civilizations and none still living, a fairly obvious and important line of thought among humans will be "Oh crap, something exterminated all intelligent life in the galaxy millions of years ago. We must find out what it was and make sure that it never happens again."

Kiero
2009-03-05, 12:32 PM
I thought the "why the aliens are dead" from the OP was comprehensive enough. There was a war. Lots of them killed each other. The survivors couldn't sustain themselves in the wreckage of what was left, and eventually they all died out too.

No great lesson for humanity, no impending doom that might recur. People messed up, and they all died because of it.

All the enemies and problems are of man's own making, in this setting.

Ascension
2009-03-05, 01:06 PM
I thought the "why the aliens are dead" from the OP was comprehensive enough. There was a war. Lots of them killed each other. The survivors couldn't sustain themselves in the wreckage of what was left, and eventually they all died out too.

No great lesson for humanity, no impending doom that might recur. People messed up, and they all died because of it.

All the enemies and problems are of man's own making, in this setting.

Except the war itself is a moral lesson. It's one thing to see the effect of war on a single nation, a single planet, but to see that sort of devastation writ large, an entire galactic civilization laid low by infighting... that's the sort of thing that could inspire actual peace. Or at least an attempt at actual peace. War itself is an "impending doom that might recur." The future problems may be of man's own making, but they will no doubt be affected by the obvious signs of the inevitable outcome of war that drift noiselessly through the void all around expanding humanity's territory. The ruins of this civilization would affect ours at least as much as the ruins of Roman civilization did while we were rediscovering that chapter in our history.

Winterwind
2009-03-05, 01:08 PM
I thought the "why the aliens are dead" from the OP was comprehensive enough. There was a war. Lots of them killed each other. The survivors couldn't sustain themselves in the wreckage of what was left, and eventually they all died out too.

No great lesson for humanity, no impending doom that might recur. People messed up, and they all died because of it.

All the enemies and problems are of man's own making, in this setting.Even if this was known it would still impact mankind. Technologically, by absorbing as much of their technology as possible - which might well include things that change everyday life and potentially even the way human society functions significantly (example: If one of the alien technologies included an apparatus that granted its user telepathic abilities, this might well quickly turn a society that embraced the widespread usage thereof into something that would not resemble a human society much at all anymore). Also, together with their technology, there might go along an absorption of the aliens' architecture, art and other aspects of their culture.

And psychologically: The knowledge of being the last ones left might have a various range of impacts on different people. As I mentioned before, there might be an insurgence of religion, as preachers would point to the ruins and say, here is the proof that Man is elevated above all other beings, chosen by God to survive where all others had to die. There might be even more emphasis of keeping peace, if a great war was what exterminated the aliens - maybe benefitial, leading to the creation of an United Planets Organisation striving to unify mankind peacefully, maybe detrimental, if people gave up fundamental rights in order to ensure there is no more war (extreme example of this: Equilibrium). Others yet might fall to nihilism and start doubting the meaning of it all, in the face of civilisations greater than mankind that all failed nevertheless. Quite likely there would be sects that would start to worship the long dead aliens themselves as gods, and consider their ruins to be holy places to be protected from infidels. Etc. The possibilities are legion.

In other words - yes, the aliens might not exist and provide mankind with enemies and problems anymore. But the fact they existed and how they ended would likely cause mankind to develop other kinds of enemies and problems (on their own, as you said) than they would have otherwise.



Also, unrelatedly: What conditions would lead to a race surviving some cataclysm, but dying out slowly in the millenia thereafter?

estradling
2009-03-05, 01:16 PM
I thought the "why the aliens are dead" from the OP was comprehensive enough. There was a war. Lots of them killed each other. The survivors couldn't sustain themselves in the wreckage of what was left, and eventually they all died out too.

No great lesson for humanity, no impending doom that might recur. People messed up, and they all died because of it.

All the enemies and problems are of man's own making, in this setting.

It doesn't address the fundamental question of "If humanity can do it why can't some other alien race?"

Why was earth special in avoiding that which killed off everything else?

There are some very good potenial answers to this question but it depends on your setting.

For example human could simply be the 2nd intelligent race to get into space. But think of what impact that would have on the setting.

Or maybe as part of the war the aliens tried to 'sterilize' habitable worlds and earth got a near-miss (As been mentioned before) But that means that this tech humans discover has the ability to destroy worlds. And there really will not be a place that human's can colonize without major effort. (Major setting impact)

kamikasei
2009-03-05, 01:35 PM
Actually, I'm not even sure whether we really have differing positions. By my understanding kamikasei (and I wouldn't dream about putting words they do not mean into others mouths, so my sincerest apologies if I misunderstand him here) is basically just trying to emphasise that simply using these aliens as cheap means to provide mankind with some technology (that they might as well have come up with themselves) with no afterthought how the existance of these aliens and their demise might impact mankind was both hurtful to the verisimilitude of the setting and quite likely frustrating to the players. And I don't think that's actually all that different from your own position, is it?

Partly. I'm engaging in a little assumption-making about Kiero's thinking myself.

My initial assumption was that he didn't like aliens because he didn't think they were usually well-thought-out or plausible, and my point was that making them dead doesn't relieve you of the burden of giving them a lot of thought and work, so it doesn't give you any advantage; if you don't think living aliens can fit well in to a setting, neither can dead ones.

Subsequent posts indicated that it wasn't their treatment but aliens in general and in and of themselves that he didn't like, as a matter of taste, so my point now is more that just saying they're all dead doesn't relieve you of the burden of explaining them and their deaths in a sensible way and exploring all the implications for the setting, which means whether alive or dead you have to choose between avoiding the subject out of distaste or engaging with it for the sake of the setting's quality.


An unknown can remain unknown, and still have interesting impacts on the setting. There's really no way anyone could go back to the event that was supposed to kill us and see what happened, but that doesn't really change anything in-setting.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that people in the setting necessarily have to know the answers. I am suggesting that the designer has to know, or at least have a few equally plausible explanations in mind, when he's designing the setting, and has to communicate those explanations to the GMs. Otherwise you're just jumbling together a bunch of disconnected setting elements and leaving the GMs to fit something ad hoc to the data points you leave them.

Myrmex
2009-03-05, 02:30 PM
Maybe... maybe they all developed large hadron colliders, before we did?

chiasaur11
2009-03-05, 02:38 PM
I agree with a lot of the people in this thread. You have an awesome setting, a metaphorical tomb of the gods, with only ghosts and echoes greating mankind's moment of triumph.

And then you ignore it to do "Firefly". Now, I love Firefly dearly (favorite TV show ever kind of dearly) but its a setting with so much promise.

Finding a mad alien AI, and getting the first idea how the aliens thought. Incomprehensible monuments to the dead. Heck, the frozen half dead body of one of them, sustained by unimaginable machines, to waken who knows when would be an amazing find. Imagine what that would do to society. Heck, imagine what the guys who foud it would think. What a shame.

hamlet
2009-03-05, 02:49 PM
And then you ignore it to do "Firefly". Now, I love Firefly dearly (favorite TV show ever kind of dearly) but its a setting with so much promise.


Too bad it got "Foxed" eh?



In fitting with the whole cataclysmic war theme and joining it with the fallen empire theme, what about relics of automated and computerized warhulks roaming the galaxy on pre-programmed missions of genocide? The computers might get confused and mistake the lonely band of heroes for an enemy, or worse yet, a master.

Fjolnir
2009-03-05, 03:03 PM
my particular favorite story of that sort (nothing is really live out there but the humans) is the short story by norman spinrad called riding the torch, in this basically humanity screws up earth and is forced to leave via space ships that convert atomic material to anything using a magnetic ram scoop so no ftl but beyond that it works pretty well, when they find a planet that might be habitable they send out small scout ships to investigate. the truth is ALL the earthlike worlds in the galactic sector they're in for a ways around are completly uninhabitable though they haven't told the ships. it's worth a read, it's rather good

chiasaur11
2009-03-05, 03:16 PM
Too bad it got "Foxed" eh?



In fitting with the whole cataclysmic war theme and joining it with the fallen empire theme, what about relics of automated and computerized warhulks roaming the galaxy on pre-programmed missions of genocide? The computers might get confused and mistake the lonely band of heroes for an enemy, or worse yet, a master.

That's exactly the sort of fun I was thinking of. You're standing on the shoulders of giants, after all. And even the sturdiest of shoulders can twitch.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 03:42 PM
Hmm, some good points there. Though you might be crediting me with a bit much to call me a "designer" here, I just throw out ideas and hope people can riff on them with me. :smalltongue:

As before, Earth avoided the cataclysm through luck, nothing more. The thing that was supposed to kill off all of our life, for some reason, wasn't comprehensive enough. Enough life survived that things were able to recover. There was an extinction event, but not a total extinction.

I guess you could see that war as a moral lesson, but for humanity at least it's hardly a new one. At least in this game, I don't think humans yet have the power to repeat that particular feat. To be honest, I think any lesson in there would be lost on us, once people got to seeing how much money, prestige, and whatever else could be gained finding alien stuff to reverse-engineer.

Alright so we need societal impacts of alien stuff, that would necessitate some thought as to what they've given us besides FTL travel. I'd prefer to avoid the usual super-AI, nanotech and so on.

The allusions someone drew to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire is probably a good one. There's that same kind of decline (population fell quite a lot in the decades after). When the central co-ordination and control mechanisms fall apart, places at the peripheries, or without their own means of sustenance fail. That's how the survivors died, that and ennui.

As for the world-destroying stuff, some of their tech is just indecipherable to us. We haven't advanced enough to unravel what it is and how all of it works.

Myrmex
2009-03-05, 03:59 PM
Too bad it got "Foxed" eh?



In fitting with the whole cataclysmic war theme and joining it with the fallen empire theme, what about relics of automated and computerized warhulks roaming the galaxy on pre-programmed missions of genocide? The computers might get confused and mistake the lonely band of heroes for an enemy, or worse yet, a master.

Yeah, Berserker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen)) style.

One of my favorite short stories, The Hinterlands (http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_hinter.txt), by Willaim Gibson, the guy responsible for Cyberpunk, is a Lovecraftian tale of a future cargo cult. It is so, so good.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 06:18 PM
In fitting with the whole cataclysmic war theme and joining it with the fallen empire theme, what about relics of automated and computerized warhulks roaming the galaxy on pre-programmed missions of genocide? The computers might get confused and mistake the lonely band of heroes for an enemy, or worse yet, a master.

Again, I think the focus should be on human threats, rather than relics surviving the ancient war. I think that particular meme is over-used.

Maybe the survivors of that war deliberately dismantled the unmanned stuff, rather than risk it turning on them in their weakened state?

Yakk
2009-03-05, 06:40 PM
If "the aliens all died in an ancient war" isn't important, why include it in your setting premise?

When building a setting, you cannot deal with every feature of the setting. You have to pick things that matter to the setting, and bring them into higher relief.

It is easy to explain how you can get FTL travel, or that there are no aliens, without having "all the aliens died, and humans scavenged some technology" as part of the premise. In fact, by having "all the aliens died, and humans scavenged some technology", you bring that point into high relief -- that becomes a very interesting and haunting part of the setting, that massive super-tech galaxy-spanning civilisations got wiped out.

The knowledge that all of the aliens are dead is also something that is questionable -- I'd expect players to wonder about it.

It does give you "there are a bunch of arbitrary-tech artifacts to work with", like worm-holes and star gates, which could be useful. But, as mentioned earlier, the Eve online backstory of "Humans spread, explored the galaxy, and found it empty of any signs of non-human intelligent life. They found nothing. Then civilisation collapsed, and is just recovering." That allows for super-tech leftovers, doesn't leave a tasty gap of 'what happened to the aliens', doesn't leave a gap of 'how do we know there are no aliens', and explains tech.

It does lead to a disconnect from todays society.

But, if you start a thread titled "our dead galaxy", and the main post is about how all the aliens are dead in a sci-fi universe, then it is pretty much a given that the discussion will centre around how a human society would interact with the fact that the aliens are dead.

In short, focus. Figure out what themes and feel you want to explore in your setting. Put those theses front and centre.

"Roleplaying in Spaaaaace where aliens aren't important" -- there are 100s of settings that fit that pattern. Few of them contain a galaxy-spanning wiped out multi-alien civilisation on whose ruins and cast-offs the current interstellar age is built, because that makes the aliens (even dead) very important. Which sort of defeats the goal of "where aliens aren't important".

mcv
2009-03-05, 07:19 PM
I'm surprised that people are advising to leave the aliens out completely. As I understand it, the concept is not, that there are no aliens, but that they are not there anymore!

And I think the idea is just great!

Simply having sci-fi without humans has been done a thousand times and is not interesting by itself at all. But the concept of going out into space, and realizing that the galaxy has been devestated and humans are the only people left in the whole galaxy! seems just awsome to me.
To me too. But then the aliens are more than just an excuse for FTL. It means that there are other traces of their technology, ancient battlefields, ruined cities, etc. It would still give the aliens (or what they left behind, at least) some sort of role


One important aspect of this setting is *when* the aliens died. If it was a few thousand years ago, their biggest works will remain on planets and a lot will survive in space but highly-useful things like magnetic data storage will have disintegrated. If it's hundreds of years, there will be a lot more around, but you'll have to answer the question of why timing is so close. If it's tens of thousands, there will be very little left. The only high tech that survived will be things that were deliberately built to last forever, and maybe a few lucky finds in deep space where there's nothing to degrade them.

I disagree. Stuff can last for a long time in vaccuum. There's plenty of room for derelict spaceships and space stations that are hundreds of thousands of years old. We can find tools from a handful of early hominids that lived a million years ago, despite their small number, organic nature and the presence of erosion. A big high-tech civilisation would leave a lot more traces.

Kiero
2009-03-05, 07:19 PM
"Roleplaying in Spaaaaace where aliens aren't important" -- there are 100s of settings that fit that pattern. Few of them contain a galaxy-spanning wiped out multi-alien civilisation on whose ruins and cast-offs the current interstellar age is built, because that makes the aliens (even dead) very important. Which sort of defeats the goal of "where aliens aren't important".

It doesn't make them presently important, if they haven't left things behind that are harbingers of doom, like AI fleets or the like.

Sure one direction a group might take such a setting in is to try to find out what happened, but more likely you've got more pressing concerns of a human nature to deal with.

The Rose Dragon
2009-03-05, 07:25 PM
It doesn't make them presently important, if they haven't left things behind that are harbingers of doom, like AI fleets or the like.

Sure one direction a group might take such a setting in is to try to find out what happened, but more likely you've got more pressing concerns of a human nature to deal with.

My players would definitely start asking questions about the aliens. If they could find something on any of the computers left behind. If they can find any writing on the artifacts (as mass-produced items usually have). If they can translate it. If they knew about aliens, they would want to know more.

Hell, they wanted to know more about a lady who had schizophrenia and was talking to imaginary children and spent an hour on her, trying to figure out whether she could see into other worlds.

((To be fair, I made that scene especially creepy for them by subtly playing down the absence of children - they only realized that when I told them "You don't see any children she's talking to - in fact, you don't see children anywhere".))

Kiero
2009-03-05, 07:48 PM
My players would definitely start asking questions about the aliens. If they could find something on any of the computers left behind. If they can find any writing on the artifacts (as mass-produced items usually have). If they can translate it. If they knew about aliens, they would want to know more.

It's like dinosaurs. What killed them is vastly important to us as a species, because had that not happened, mammals wouldn't have been able to rise to dominance.

Yet you don't have to explain your own theory of what made them extinct for a modern-day game to be plausible. Because frankly it's only of real interest to a few academics focused on it.

It's the same here. After a few centuries of study yielding little, most people no longer care about the aliens. They've got more pressing concerns in the now, like the guys trying to muscle into their business.

Want to know about the aliens? Tough, there's little to tell. Here's the places where they were. Here's the things they left behind that survived. Here's the things we were able to reverse engineer. That's it.

Thane of Fife
2009-03-05, 08:13 PM
It's like dinosaurs. What killed them is vastly important to us as a species, because had that not happened, mammals wouldn't have been able to rise to dominance.

Yet you don't have to explain your own theory of what made them extinct for a modern-day game to be plausible. Because frankly it's only of real interest to a few academics focused on it.

It's the same here. After a few centuries of study yielding little, most people no longer care about the aliens. They've got more pressing concerns in the now, like the guys trying to muscle into their business.

Want to know about the aliens? Tough, there's little to tell. Here's the places where they were. Here's the things they left behind that survived. Here's the things we were able to reverse engineer. That's it.

The problem is that you've defined your setting in terms of these aliens that aren't important. Imagine if I told you about a Modern game with the idea that "Millions of years ago, enormous lizards ruled the earth. These powerful creatures were the world's dominant lifeform for millions of years, and then, over a very brief period of time, they all mysteriously died. Even now, the occasional remnants are found of these ancient monstrosities. And yes, they really are all dead.

But our game isn't about them, it's about normal people doing stuff completely unrelated."

It's a fine piece for a setting, but don't define your setting that way if that isn't what you want it to be about.

chiasaur11
2009-03-05, 08:24 PM
Plus, even with them as something we've known for over a century, dinosaurs totally dominate the mind of most younger grade schoolers.

They're importantish even without inventing death ray tech.

streakster
2009-03-05, 08:32 PM
Incidentally, I've been thinking about the whole dead galaxy thing - it could make a really great dnd analogue. Parties raid alien cities, bases, and space stations (dungeons) using ancient alien artifacts (magic items), fight against robots and alien monsters and native inhabitants and human crooks while avoiding security systems (traps) and trying to loot up some valuable artifacts to sell.

Mages are psions, druids are genetic engineers, clerics are hackers of ancient alien galaxy spanning weapons networks, paladins are supersoldiers bred to know no fear, etc.

That's how cool that idea is, btw. If you don't want your players to focus on it, I really wouldn't include it.

Philistine
2009-03-05, 09:56 PM
It's very much a Chekov's Gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_Gun) sort of problem.

If you go out of your way to specifically mention that all this tech came from now-vanished aliens (and since you're making this all up from scratch, mentioning it at all constitutes "going out of your way" in context), you have to expect players to pick up on that. If you want to open that door, you need to be prepared for people to try to go through it. If you don't want to deal with aliens, that's perfectly fine - but then it's far, far simpler to just not open the can of worms in the first place.

So I'd say first, figure out what it is that these extinct aliens bring to your setting that you actually do want. If it's only for reverse-engineered FTL tech, then skip it. Just have it be a human development. Otherwise, the lost alien civilization will pull focus away from the "pure-human" setting and stories.

The Rose Dragon
2009-03-05, 10:07 PM
It's very much a Chekov's Gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_Gun) sort of problem.

You seem to be confusing Chekhov's Gun with Chekov's Gun (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitleurwof45r56ea).

Calinero
2009-03-05, 10:25 PM
There's a lot here to read, and I didn't make it through all of the previous posts, but here's my two cents.

Settings are made interesting by conflict. Encounters with aliens often make for great science fiction conflict--that's why they're used so often. If you want your setting to be appealing, there has to be some conflict that the players can engage in. If you're not going to have any encounters with these aliens, then there needs to be some other source of tension for the players to encounter, to derive adventures from. If you don't want your conflict to be with aliens, that's fine. It could just as easily be intergalactic human vs. human war, or the lawless condition of farther out planets. However, keep in mind that whatever you choose for your conflict is going to be what makes you setting interesting. If your conflict is the perils of exploration, then you're going to get a different type and pace of game than if you were caught in the middle of a spaceship battle. Never forget that once you have this setting, you need to be able to make playable, enjoyable adventures and campaigns out of it.

Doomsy
2009-03-05, 10:42 PM
If you don't like sci-fi, don't play it. Make it fantasy in space. It'll make things much easier for you.

Don't put in unnecessary mysteries. If you put in ancient galaxy spanning wars that are not even going to be used in your plots, your players are going to be understandably annoyed. Secondly, you are dwarfing the scale of your own drama by doing it - basically, whatever threat you put up is nothing compared to that of the past. It's like putting on a stage production of The Rock in the middle of an ancient Roman coliseum.

Myrmex
2009-03-05, 10:58 PM
You could definitely have a setting with dead alien races in it, but not actually explore dead alien races.

Just like in D&D, there's probably a king of the human lands somewhere, but you aren't going to deal with him because you're low level goblins in a struggle with Drow encroachment.

I see no reason why dead alien races and scavenged technology couldn't simply be the backdrop of being space bums or whatever you kids are into these days.

Kris Strife
2009-03-05, 11:12 PM
We do have real life fossil records of a few complex pre-Cambrian life forms with no related species anywhere else in the fossil record. Maybe earth didnt escape the galactic extinction a race of intergalatic horrors ala zerg, tyranids or Lavos maybe and earth was the spawning point/last battleground. The last ship of survivors was disabled and crashed on the sterilized Earth were the surviving microbes and climate control paved the way for current life forms.

Randel
2009-03-06, 12:13 AM
Here's a crazy thought: What if humans are the precursors, the beginning of all life in the universe... but time is circular?

Humans start on earth, develop space travel and colonize mars, developing nanotechnology and genetic engineering to let them terraform planets or even alter their own DNA so its easier to live on other environments.

Then they invent intersteller travel, but find out that as they move through space they also move through time.

People land on a barren frozen world and start setting up self-replicating robots to turn asteroids into reflector dishes to warm the planet up, meanwhile tweaking their DNA so they grow fur or blubber to survive on the new planet.

On the semi-habitable north pole of a burning cinder of a planet, the red-coated ruler tasks his Engineered Life Forms to work night and day to make the goods and medicines used by the masses of people who try to make a living on the hotter mid area. These people hope that if they are good enough then they will be given their supplies at the end of the year... delivered through the chimney-like vents to the planets surface.

Adrift in chronology, these various worlds are colonized and some even prospor, each developing their own cultures over the ages. Occasionaly, they meet eachother, only rarely can they regognize eachother. Even among non-engeneered humans the centuries and generations that can pass between intersteller travel and the time dialation therefrom can give them an alien appearence to eachother.

Then, at the end of the road, trillions of years in the future when the stars start to die out and turn to coal, the remnants decide to move on, sending themselves back to shortly after the big bang to colonize the universe again.

Those ancient artifacts that seem light-years behond human understanding? They were made by a highly advanced human civilization that had traveled to the past and colonized there. Those unnatural alien cyborg creatures you see? They are your great great grandchildren who had to adapt to living on a world with acid for air. The alien invaders and ruined civilizations? Automated seeding ships designed to terraform worlds into something its creators could live in... often surprisingly different from what good old Earth looked like.

And lets not forget what happens when a society breaks down, when these 'humans' who gave themselves gills to breath in the water-covered planet can no longer maintain their tech and have to survive in an ecosystem made half of terrestrial animals and half with genetically altered creatures... and the occasional self-replicating robot that somebody forgot the access codes to.


Then the folks on Earth, who are now on their way to inventing the tech that literally will and has shaped the universe more than the collong of planets ever did, runs across something out of time. An artifact of some type, lands on Earth that might inspire the invention of the very device that will eventually become itself. A team of squiggly humanoids manage to come to earth, either unaware that it is their ancestral home or perhaps desperate to get a hold of some original 'pureblood' human DNA to repair their own shoddily constructed biology.


And then there is news of the first pan-galactic cook off, a coalition of billions of space faring worlds who have joined hands not out of some need to ally with a greater threat or desire for friendship... but to get everybody's best chefs together and compare recipes. After all, everyone has basically the same metabolism (except for those who turned into clouds of digital dust) and who knows what rosemary will do to a steak when both have been sent through a millennium of evolution and five different planetary environments?

Nerd-o-rama
2009-03-06, 12:31 AM
I agree that the Black History of the Galaxy (I can steal terms from anime whee) is important to keep in mind when building the world - if nothing else, you want to have some internal consistency to the scavenged remains of various cultures, including your FTL system - but I also agree with Kiero that it's not terribly pressing unless the particular group playing it decides to go all adventurer archaeologist on it. A general idea and guidelines for what relic technology can be found would suffice.

Doomsy
2009-03-06, 01:00 AM
I agree that the Black History of the Galaxy (I can steal terms from anime whee) is important to keep in mind when building the world - if nothing else, you want to have some internal consistency to the scavenged remains of various cultures, including your FTL system - but I also agree with Kiero that it's not terribly pressing unless the particular group playing it decides to go all adventurer archaeologist on it. A general idea and guidelines for what relic technology can be found would suffice.

Fallacy. If the technology is from ancient dead alien species and gives the PCs power, guess what they are going to focus on?

Kiero
2009-03-06, 05:08 AM
Fallacy. If the technology is from ancient dead alien species and gives the PCs power, guess what they are going to focus on?

Nah, I don't buy it. Maybe some groups would go that way, but I think people are making rather sweeping and fallacious assumptions about how all gamers would behave.

The_Snark
2009-03-06, 06:05 AM
Just the same, you should be ready in case they do. It's not just that it's a source of power, it's that it's an attractive concept. It's all the attraction of unknown planets and species, plus the atmosphere of the post-apocalyptic genre. To me, for example, they strike me as the most interesting thing about the setting, because that's the part you've fleshed out most. Without that, there's just "people in space"... which isn't bad at all, of course. It just needs more detail.

You certainly don't have to focus on the aliens, but they should be as fleshed out as any other part of your setting; given how much impact. Since it's a rather major thing to find the ruins of alien races and that they're all dead, it will have had a number of indirect effects you can use to help flesh the rest of the setting out. My semi-coherent thoughts on the matter...

-You've said there isn't a moral you want to pin to the catastrophe, which is good; but in-universe, you can be sure people will try to read something into it. They will not all agree, and there will be controversy. Play around with this! It seems to be what you want out of the setting—a focus on humanity—but it uses the aliens, rather than shoving them into a corner. What effects has this had on society? How have different human societies reacted? What are the government policies on alien worlds? What social movements (past or present) arose as the result of these discoveries? I find it hard to believe that this sort of discovery wouldn't have a lot of impact; even if that's all in the past, this is a very good way to help figure out what the present is like.

-The aliens themselves ought to have been genuinely strange. It's possible, in one or two places, that preserved or mummified corpses have even been found, which would be of immense value to the scientific community. Even without that, though, xenoarchaeologists have probably pieced together facts about what they were like physically from the remains of their architecture; you could probably get a decent sketch of their size, general body structure, and maybe what senses they relied on. Their biology was strange, their language was bizarre enough that translating from any fragments humanity has found is impossible; some might have had records we don't even recognize as such. This is why xenoarchaeology is such a difficult field: it has very little to start off of, almost all it has is fragmentary, and human preconceptions are at best useless and at worst a hindrance.

-Alien worlds. This is an ideal opportunity for exploration... but it doesn't necessarily have to be a common thing. I would think that the governments have done something about claiming worlds, rather than letting people jet. There's also the fear of quarantine: no-one knows how the aliens wiped one another out, but they probably used a lot of different kinds of weapons. Some might leave dangerous amounts of radiation. Some might be biohazards or engineered diseases, and while not all of those would affect humans it's still risky. Some might be things we haven't even thought of. My feeling is that the governments would declare a general quarantine of uninvestigated planets. The process of inspecting worlds would be a long one, since a planet is a very large place and they want to be very sure nothing is wrong. The one thing you miss might be a contagious disease, after all.

So humanity has a slowly expanding ring of inhabited and 'safe' worlds. Some have been terraformed; others aren't suitable for human inhabitation no matter what you do to it but might contain sealed underground facilities, biodomes, or space stations; most of them have been left alone, or just tapped for natural resources. A few might still be under quarantine if they were thought dangerous. Alien ruins are probably considered government property of some kind, so while you certainly could go in and try to salvage what you could from the ruins, it would be a lot like tomb robbing is today. Only with the risk of discovering a doomsday device or catching a horrible contagious virus thrown in with the pillage of valuable technology and cultural artifacts. Risky, difficult, occasionally lucrative, and very much Frowned Upon by the government. You could make this as common or uncommon as you wanted, depending on whether exploring alien ruins is something you want to be a part of the game.

-Governments are something you should think about, too, though I don't have any specific suggestions. Saying humanity has only one central government removes a lot of potential conflict from the setting, so you might want to avoid that (then again, you might not; Firefly managed it fine). If you don't do that, the UN or something akin to it would be a good thing to have; otherwise, negotiating whose property new planets were and who has the authority to quarantine would be a major headache. It need not be powerful, because that sort of clash is a major conflict, but it helps you have a stable setting rather than a constantly war-torn one, and it's not farfetched at all. We have a UN now, after all.

My feeling is that the most interesting time to set it would be in the decades after the initial discovery, during the expansion outwards. You're almost forced to focus on exploring alien worlds if you set it during the initial discovery, and if you set it too long afterwards, when mankind has spread a long way, it becomes just another space opera. In the middle, you can capitalize on the dead galaxy without making it the sole focus of the setting. It's also a good time technology-wise: mankind isn't quite finished adapting to space, so it's easier to relate to than utopia, post-cyberpunk, or other far futures. You have enough technology for space opera, but not so much that you need to change our society unrecognizably. The aliens aren't new, but they're still largely unknown, and humanity is still dealing with the knowledge that it's now alone, and with the knowledge that there were other forms of life. There's really a lot of fun to be had there even if the PCs never set foot on an alien world.

Kiero
2009-03-06, 08:37 AM
Lots of good points there, The Snark. Lots to think about.

Philistine
2009-03-06, 03:34 PM
Remember that you're creating an entire world (or galaxy, in this case) from scratch, so there's nothing in it you don't choose to include. Remember also that your players cannot experience that world directly - they can't see or hear it for themselves, they don't have a lifetime of memories of things like basic geography (cosmography?) and culture and so on - so all they know of the setting is what you tell them. Given that scarcity of information on the players' parts, the fact that you as a GM choose to even mention these now-extinct aliens makes them stand out and take on additional significance.

That's why I say you should figure out what purpose you want your dead aliens to serve in the setting. Then, if you just really don't want to deal with aliens at all, write them out of the backstory. Figure out another way to accomplish whatever it is you had them doing. If it's just a mysterious, non-understood FTL tech, there are a number of ways to get to that which don't involve reverse engineering alien techology. All of them are more likely*, and none of them creates even a remote possibility of your players running off the rails and heading for the Buried Alien City to play Indiana Jones there.

tl;dr version - If you don't want aliens in your setting, don't include them. Not even dead ones. It's simpler, it's easier, and it doesn't risk pulling focus away from what you do want your game to be.


* The whole "reverse engineered alien technology" trope is very problematic. Imagine, for example, a USAF F-22 which is sent back in time to 1950 and left in the parking lot at the Lockheed plant. They would not be able to reverse engineer the aircraft and build copies, because they would lack the tools to do so. In fact, they'd be at least a couple of iterations of "building the tools to build the tools" away from constructing new aircraft. And that's with a functioning, non-broken, example of a machine with an immediately obvious purpose, without the massive linguistic and cultural differences to be expected if the precursor aliens were truly alien - so the difficulty is entirely due to the <40-year technology gap between 1950 and the 80's-tech Raptor. Really, reverse engineering only works if you're already at roughly the same level of technology.

Nerd-o-rama
2009-03-06, 04:54 PM
Fallacy. If the technology is from ancient dead alien species and gives the PCs power, guess what they are going to focus on?The power, of course.

Waspinator
2009-03-06, 06:39 PM
I personally like the idea of having the "alien" ruins be human time travelers who realized that they needed to go back and fake the ruins in order for their ancestors to reach the level of technology needed to have time travel in the first place.