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View Full Version : [Mass Effect/Setting] Prothean Auxiliaries - A prehistoric campaign premise



Kiero
2017-04-21, 09:58 AM
I've been thinking about some of those sci-fi series that feature humans as fish out of water, along with this thread about humans being the most dangerous species in the universe (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?520047-Making-humans-the-most-dangerous-race-in-the-universe). And I hit upon something I've mused on before, using Mass Effect's prehistory to build a setting from.

For me, using an established setting's past isn't a new idea, I often find it's much more conducive to playing games consistent with the themes espoused, or focusing on a particular premise, than using the present or future. Not least because there's often a timeline which tells you what's going on at the time.

In this instance, it's the reveal that the cache of Prothean (http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Prothean) artifacts on Mars were part of some sort of scientific monitoring station, the Empire was observing what early humanity was up to. Apparently the scientists there scrubbed their results before the Reapers destroyed them, to make sure they didn't harvest the Earth early. Anyway, none of that is relevant here, because it won't be set during their war against the machines.

The core of it is this: someone in the Empire's military comes up with a more interventionist project regarding Earth. Instead of merely observing the natives, they selectively "recruit" (ie abduct) humans for uplifting to current galactic standards (via sleep-teaching or some other appropriate tech), to serve in a special auxiliary unit (think janissaries or mamluks for historical analogues). That's the "experimental" option, assuming this is a relatively new practise that their piloting/proving. Alternatively, the Empire has been at this for a while, and they have an entire program where they fill auxiliary regiments with humans for their nastiest jobs.

From the humans perspective, there's a legend about champions being selected from those who can climb a particular mountain. All the PCs would start out as regular Neolithic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic) types motivated to test that legend. The first session or two would establish them in their original lives and feature that challenge. Not as a bait-and-switch, the players would be in on the "secret", that the nature of the campaign will change not long after starting. When the recruitment bit happens, they get to remake their characters to fit their new horizons, which might include biotic ability if they've chosen something as a precursor for it. After all, there was eezo on Earth before the 23rd century.

This whole idea has precedent in the way the Council races uplifted the krogan to fight their wars - this is a spin on the same idea.

As to what the point is, there's a mixture of the elements that are familiar in the ME universe (since tech is ubiquitous by design) with the added novelty of featuring pretty much none of the races we're familiar with, or the Council. It's carte blanche to do whatever you like with the lay of the land, but seen from a human's perspective. You could twist the Prothean Empire however you like, they might simply be functionaries for the evil empire, or there could be a genuine ideal they're fighting for.

Looking for thoughts to develop this idea:

Why might the Prothean Empire sign off on this idea, and what's in it for the project's leader?
What are these human auxiliaries used for - cannon fodder in some particularly nasty war? Loyal shock troops in some sort of civil conflict where the Protheans can't trust any of their established allies? Seeking a new edge in a war that's ground to stalemate? Something else entirely?
How weird do you make the Prothean Empire, and how evil for that matter?
How much of the PCs original lives should feature in their uplifted selves? Would it be interesting for them to retain tribal affiliations and customs, for example?
How long is appropriate to play out the "challenge" part before they're uplifted, or would it be better to just skip that and start them out as Prothean auxiliaries?

KillianHawkeye
2017-04-21, 12:38 PM
An interesting idea.


Just a couple of thoughts....

Was there Eezo on Earth before the 23rd century? I thought most of the biotics on Earth originated because of some space accident that caused certain areas to be contaminated. I forget the details since it's been a while since I've played ME1. Or am I just remembering wrong?

It strikes me that one use that human commando could serve to the Protheans is as an expendable infiltration unit. Nobody outside the program even knows what a human is or who it's working for, so it effectively leaves the Protheans' hands clean. And assuming that the process for uplifting and training individual humans in advanced weapons and tactics doesn't take very long, then dead agents aren't that much of a loss. There are plenty more where they came from.

That said, it seems odd to me how you're referring to the Protheans as an "evil empire". The Protheans were certainly militaristic, and from Javik we know they had a somewhat harsh outlook (at least by the ending days of their war with the Reapers), but I never considered them to be evil. None of the council races viewed the Protheans as being evil. There certainly would have been some individuals who could be categorized as bad guys, but also some genuinely nice ones. Even Javik never knew what the Empire was like during peace times; the war had been raging for centuries before he was even born. Personally, my impression of the Protheans was that they were ultra Lawful, but then again that's probably colored by Javik being a military officer.

Kiero
2017-04-21, 01:21 PM
An interesting idea.


Just a couple of thoughts....

Was there Eezo on Earth before the 23rd century? I thought most of the biotics on Earth originated because of some space accident that caused certain areas to be contaminated. I forget the details since it's been a while since I've played ME1. Or am I just remembering wrong?

You may be right; either way, we can handwave that pretty easily by saying that if a player wants to play a biotic, the Protheans have the technology to bestow biotic ability.


It strikes me that one use that human commando could serve to the Protheans is as an expendable infiltration unit. Nobody outside the program even knows what a human is or who it's working for, so it effectively leaves the Protheans' hands clean. And assuming that the process for uplifting and training individual humans in advanced weapons and tactics doesn't take very long, then dead agents aren't that much of a loss. There are plenty more where they came from.

That's definitely a viable one, especially if the project leader isn't working with official sanction, or under some sort of black bag arrangement where the whole thing is secret.

I would assume, for the purposes of this premise, that uplifting takes weeks or at most months, with the early part of it spent in a tank being re-engineered and sleep-taught the basics. Then they're decanted for military training.


That said, it seems odd to me how you're referring to the Protheans as an "evil empire". The Protheans were certainly militaristic, and from Javik we know they had a somewhat harsh outlook (at least by the ending days of their war with the Reapers), but I never considered them to be evil. None of the council races viewed the Protheans as being evil. There certainly would have been some individuals who could be categorized as bad guys, but also some genuinely nice ones. Even Javik never knew what the Empire was like during peace times; the war had been raging for centuries before he was even born. Personally, my impression of the Protheans was that they were ultra Lawful, but then again that's probably colored by Javik being a military officer.

When I read between the lines, I get an expansionistic, militaristic empire that assimilates other civilisations by force, adding them to the greatness of the Protheans. Not unlike the Romans or Persians in our own history. It isn't difficult to see lots of potential for evil there.

KillianHawkeye
2017-04-21, 03:39 PM
Another idea you might like was that the human program could be related to the Protheans' work with the Asari. Maybe it's a test for the same program, or maybe the Protheans are considering uplifting the humans as well or instead. It could be interesting if you can include an angle into why these human trials eventually fail. Like what if the humans prove too aggressive or unstable to be worth uplifting the species as a whole, so they go and find the primitive Asari instead.

Kiero
2017-04-21, 04:09 PM
Another idea you might like was that the human program could be related to the Protheans' work with the Asari. Maybe it's a test for the same program, or maybe the Protheans are considering uplifting the humans as well or instead. It could be interesting if you can include an angle into why these human trials eventually fail. Like what if the humans prove too aggressive or unstable to be worth uplifting the species as a whole, so they go and find the primitive Asari instead.

I like that idea - they could even be rival projects, competing for the same funding/attention. Perhaps the Asari programme is more science-oriented, whereas the Human programme is being pushed by the military?

I can certainly imagine the human programme failing for all the reasons you suggest, even if the fallout wouldn't be as severe as the Krogan Wars.

theasl
2017-04-23, 12:13 AM
WARNING: Mild spoilers for ME games (especially ME3's From Ashes DLC) below, as if you didn't already know that coming into this thread.

So I think a lot of the Prothean backstory is missing here, and that's kind of messing with the ideas. The Wikia (http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Prothean) has all the Codex info, but I'll copy the relevant parts:

Early in their development, the Protheans encountered a hostile machine intelligence which threatened to overwhelm them. To defeat the machines, the Protheans decided to unite all of the galaxy's sentient organic life under their empire. The other organic races were free to resist, but those that tried were crushed, and none ever managed to best the Protheans' might. In time, each of the subjugated races assimilated into Prothean culture and came to think of themselves as Prothean. United under a single cause, the Prothean Empire successfully held off the enemy machines in a conflict known as the "Metacon War".

The Protheans extensively observed primitive species such as the asari, hanar, humans, quarians, salarians, and turians during their time. They cultivated species they deemed to have potential. Numerous outposts were placed on or near the primitives' homeworlds, with Prothean interference and activities kept beyond their subjects' comprehension. In time, the Protheans would have given these primitives the choice to be part of their empire.

In short, the Protheans wouldn't do that. The Prothean Empire was more or less one giant military machine even before the Reapers, which is part of the "evil empire" perspective: they were in a constant fight for survival, so they did whatever they could to win (if I had to pin an alignment on them, it would be LN). There were no "peace times". If a sentient race was useful as a military force, they would be uplifted. If they weren't sentient enough, they would be bred as biological weapons (see rachni, who eventually became too intelligent, and then the Protheans attempted to exterminate them). No halfway points. In the same vein, there were no "allies"; as Javik explains, the other races they encountered ("subservient races") were simply absorbed into the Empire or destroyed if they refused. The reason that the races of the current cycle didn't suffer this fate was that the Protheans discovered them late (and/or they evolved late), so they didn't have enough time to carry out all their observations and experiments and come to a conclusion and carry out the uplifting before the Reapers arrived and they decided to abandon the projects to focus on the new war (among other reasons, including saving them from harvesting as mentioned). Javik further reveals that had the Prothean stasis mission he commanded succeeded, the surviving races would have been given the same option as well: join the reborn Prothean Empire or die.

Regarding another point raised in the discussion, the humans first got eezo from Mars, but many human biotics were caused by eezo seeded by none other than everyone's best friend, the beloved Cerberus, in an "experiment". Biotics only develop in people exposed to eezo before birth, and even then a small percentage of those gain actual powers, though there can certainly be experimental Prothean tech to fix that.

And of course, this is all Bioware's lore, but you can do whatever you want and make it into your own alternate Mass Effect universe.

KillianHawkeye
2017-04-23, 07:49 AM
There were no "peace times".

The Protheans weren't a very peaceful race, but there still would have been times when they weren't up against a massive external threat like the Reapers or the other machine race they fought before that. Subjugating/assimilating or exterminating the population of a single planet isn't what they'd consider a war.


In short, the Protheans wouldn't do that. <snip> If a sentient race was useful as a military force, they would be uplifted.

Yeah, but the means they used to determine that isn't exactly known. It obviously included detailed observation, but there's no reason it couldn't also include experimentation on individuals. If I was going to uplift an entire species, I'd certainly want to see how a few individuals react to the process first.

I suppose it's valid to ask what the Protheans would need an armed band of primitives for? It could be that all of the missions that the group of uplifted humans gets sent on are set-ups designed as tests by the Protheans themselves and not real missions, and the humans are just never told (because it would taint the results of the experiment or something). That could make for a good opportunity to use information which blatantly contradicts the established lore, since everything the test subjects are told are lies anyway.

Martin Greywolf
2017-04-23, 10:55 AM
Cannon problems aren't really all that important here, it's extremely easy to say "like ME Protheans, but..." and make whatever changes you please.

The real problem with this idea, and why it wouldn't work as stated, are numbers. Present-day Earth has about 7 billion people on it, ME era Earth has over 11 billion, with largest colony having 4.4 million, and humanity is a relatively new race there (30 years of off-system colonization), so it's total pop is likely short of 15 billion, maybe as low as 12. Asari, salarian and turian populations are likely much, much higher, even is they aren't as expansionist as humans - there is no canon information, but they had several millenia to colonize off-system, so populations in the vicinity of 100 billion per race may not be that far off.

Even massively lowballing it, giving every Council race 20 billion, leaves you with something like 80 billion galactic population, not counting the rest. Protheans had, most likely, more than that, since they were single-race, and their tech level seems to have been higher than what ME era galaxy has.

Earth 50 000 years ago is just ending an epoch called Middle stone age, and what's more important, there was some disaster that reduced human population to about 2 000 individuals 70 000 years ago. Estimates are incredibly imprecise, but total human population at this point is probably no more than 6 million at the incredibly optimistic end of the spectrum - 6 million is estimated population of pre-agriculture ancient world 10 000 years ago, and there's evidence of population boom some 50 - 40 thousand years ago thanks to invention of new crafting techniques. More can be found here. (https://blog.23andme.com/news/the-first-population-explosion-human-numbers-expanded-dramatically-millennia-before-agriculture/)

So, total human population is 0.0075% of Prothean population, provided we lowball the bell of off our numbers. Unless you go full krogan - uplift and breed like rabbits - there is no way in hell something this insignificant would affect the galactic war.

You can still work with this idea somehow, but your/Prothean plans will need to be on a much grander scale - either involve more races than just humans (all council races are there in their warly tech levels), or have some very good reason why one human soldier per several thousand Protheans is a good idea.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-23, 12:06 PM
This is beyond my normal comfort zone for "an alien did it", but... what if the disaster WAS the Prometheans' project?

Kiero
2017-04-23, 12:17 PM
Cannon problems aren't really all that important here, it's extremely easy to say "like ME Protheans, but..." and make whatever changes you please.

The real problem with this idea, and why it wouldn't work as stated, are numbers. Present-day Earth has about 7 billion people on it, ME era Earth has over 11 billion, with largest colony having 4.4 million, and humanity is a relatively new race there (30 years of off-system colonization), so it's total pop is likely short of 15 billion, maybe as low as 12. Asari, salarian and turian populations are likely much, much higher, even is they aren't as expansionist as humans - there is no canon information, but they had several millenia to colonize off-system, so populations in the vicinity of 100 billion per race may not be that far off.

Even massively lowballing it, giving every Council race 20 billion, leaves you with something like 80 billion galactic population, not counting the rest. Protheans had, most likely, more than that, since they were single-race, and their tech level seems to have been higher than what ME era galaxy has.

Earth 50 000 years ago is just ending an epoch called Middle stone age, and what's more important, there was some disaster that reduced human population to about 2 000 individuals 70 000 years ago. Estimates are incredibly imprecise, but total human population at this point is probably no more than 6 million at the incredibly optimistic end of the spectrum - 6 million is estimated population of pre-agriculture ancient world 10 000 years ago, and there's evidence of population boom some 50 - 40 thousand years ago thanks to invention of new crafting techniques. More can be found here. (https://blog.23andme.com/news/the-first-population-explosion-human-numbers-expanded-dramatically-millennia-before-agriculture/)

So, total human population is 0.0075% of Prothean population, provided we lowball the bell of off our numbers. Unless you go full krogan - uplift and breed like rabbits - there is no way in hell something this insignificant would affect the galactic war.

You can still work with this idea somehow, but your/Prothean plans will need to be on a much grander scale - either involve more races than just humans (all council races are there in their warly tech levels), or have some very good reason why one human soldier per several thousand Protheans is a good idea.

I said the Neolithic, which starts 10,000 years ago, so not sure where you plucked 50,000 years ago from. Between 10,000 BC and 4,000 BC, the population of Earth increased from 4-6 million to 60-70 million. So depending on how steep that increase was in the first 2000 years of the Neolithic, we could be dealing with something in the tens of millions.

Nor did I mention galactic wars, that's you thrusting your own assumptions onto the premise that wasn't there. I explicitly said this isn't during their extermination by the Reapers. Nor is there an immediate need to uplift en masse, this is a step before any sort of engagement with the whole population.

In any case, human population relative to Prothean is irrelevant, this is an experiment/pilot project. There doesn't have to be scope for the Protheans to be able to churn out millions of human auxiliaries for this to be of interest to someone.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-23, 12:23 PM
I think Martin was basing it on the fact that the Reaper/Promethean conflict started about 50k YBP.

theasl
2017-04-23, 12:25 PM
The Protheans didn't exist 10000 years ago. At least 50000 years have passed since their extinction, and probably more since they abandoned their mission to study humans. Given that, they may have even been studying previous hominid species on Earth (Homo erectus? neanderthals?). Remember that humans are late bloomers - the asari were around long enough as a species that a Prothean-era race tried to use them as "resources" (prompting a strong military reaction of course). The humans only got to the Citadel a few hundred years before the Reapers came back (and a few hundred after modern day), hence the 50000 years ago thing.

(edit: got hundreds and tens mixed up; Homo erectus died out about 70k years ago but neanderthals and humans were very much alive and competing up until ~20k years ago.)

Kiero
2017-04-23, 12:34 PM
Sorry, I was forgetting the Protheans were wiped out by then.

So we go a century or so before the "centuries-long" extermination war with the Reapers. Sure, Earth has a population in the low millions range, but again it doesn't matter. They're not simply looking for directly-recruitable cannon fodder to throw at the Reapers (or Metacons) at this point, just investigating interesting primitives who might one day be useful.

Even if they did decide they needed lots more, there's nothing to stop them applying technology to it and mass-producing their own if the pilot proved successful. They're looking for platforms, seeing if humans are a valuable addition.

theasl
2017-04-23, 01:26 PM
Sorry, I was forgetting the Protheans were wiped out by then.

So we go a century or so before the "centuries-long" extermination war with the Reapers. Sure, Earth has a population in the low millions range, but again it doesn't matter. They're not simply looking for directly-recruitable cannon fodder to throw at the Reapers (or Metacons) at this point, just investigating interesting primitives who might one day be useful.

Even if they did decide they needed lots more, there's nothing to stop them applying technology to it and mass-producing their own if the pilot proved successful. They're looking for platforms, seeing if humans are a valuable addition.

You make them sound like the Reapers! :smalleek:

To be honest, I don't think they would do that with other sentients. Animals like rachni, sure, but not already-sentient beings. More likely is a limited abduction to perform genetic tests and experimentation (e.g. asari biotics), and then large-scale intervention on-planet to raise the civilization level. Complicating it is of course the fact that the neanderthals were actually the dominant species at that point in time; humans didn't enter their range (Europe and Western Asia) until roughly the time of the Protheans' Reaper invasion. There's a point-of-divergence/retcon possible here: the Protheans identified the humans as the best species, and created the environment they needed to take over the planet; the humans weren't as "smart", so to speak, as the asari to recognize that it was the Protheans, so they remained blissfully ignorant until Mars.

So there's my answer. You have the Protheans bring in both humans and neanderthals, run them through genetic testing and experiments and probably mental enhancements, then physical and combat testing; they compare them and then come to a verdict. You could have the PCs be the abducted humans, competing with a NPC neanderthal party to prove their worth. Progressing through training and mock combat trials to possibly real combat vs the Metacons or even in the war against the Oravores over Thessia, if you want to bring the asari in too. In this case, I would skip the on-planet stuff (you could even have the players be raised by Protheans as babies, for biotics) and go straight to the "you wake up to 4-eyed bugheads staring at you" part.

Kiero
2017-04-23, 01:42 PM
You make them sound like the Reapers! :smalleek:

To be honest, I don't think they would do that with other sentients. Animals like rachni, sure, but not already-sentient beings. More likely is a limited abduction to perform genetic tests and experimentation (e.g. asari biotics), and then large-scale intervention on-planet to raise the civilization level. Complicating it is of course the fact that the neanderthals were actually the dominant species at that point in time; humans didn't enter their range (Europe and Western Asia) until roughly the time of the Protheans' Reaper invasion. There's a point-of-divergence/retcon possible here: the Protheans identified the humans as the best species, and created the environment they needed to take over the planet; the humans weren't as "smart", so to speak, as the asari to recognize that it was the Protheans, so they remained blissfully ignorant until Mars.

So there's my answer. You have the Protheans bring in both humans and neanderthals, run them through genetic testing and experiments and probably mental enhancements, then physical and combat testing; they compare them and then come to a verdict. You could have the PCs be the abducted humans, competing with a NPC neanderthal party to prove their worth. Progressing through training and mock combat trials to possibly real combat vs the Metacons or even in the war against the Oravores over Thessia, if you want to bring the asari in too. In this case, I would skip the on-planet stuff (you could even have the players be raised by Protheans as babies, for biotics) and go straight to the "you wake up to 4-eyed bugheads staring at you" part.

I'm not talking about any kind of intervention on-planet; this is a precursor to any sort of involvement with Earth directly. They abduct their subjects and take them away for uplifting on a small scale - perhaps to Mars - there's no attempt to raise Earth's civilisation level.

For the purposes of this premise, they're only interested in homo sapiens. Neanderthals, from what we know of them, were pretty specialised and adapted to their environment. It's one of the reasons our ancestors overcame them, being more flexible.

theasl
2017-04-23, 01:53 PM
I'm not talking about any kind of intervention on-planet; this is a precursor to any sort of involvement with Earth directly. They abduct their subjects and take them away for uplifting on a small scale - perhaps to Mars - there's no attempt to raise Earth's civilisation level.

For the purposes of this premise, they're only interested in homo sapiens. Neanderthals, from what we know of them, were pretty specialised and adapted to their environment. It's one of the reasons our ancestors overcame them, being more flexible.

I wasn't either; that's exactly what I'm saying. These tests and trials that your PCs run through are what convinces the Protheans to begin uplifting the humans.

And I wouldn't say that being "specialised and adapted to their environment" is exactly a drawback to them. That's how most "alien" races envisioned by sci-fi writers are; each race is specialized to a certain environment, and humans are generally better than everyone else at everything else (or even just everything). So perhaps: the neanderthals were the dominant species at that time in numbers and range, and the Protheans initially thought they were the best choice, but then they discovered the humans and were surprised at how adaptable they were, hence bringing them in for comparisons. You could even have a Homo floresiensis around - they died out at around the same time too.

LibraryOgre
2017-04-24, 10:23 AM
An interesting idea.


Just a couple of thoughts....

Was there Eezo on Earth before the 23rd century? I thought most of the biotics on Earth originated because of some space accident that caused certain areas to be contaminated. I forget the details since it's been a while since I've played ME1. Or am I just remembering wrong?


My guess is that there was, but it was very rare... so we get historical documentaries of uncontrolled, untrained biotics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_(1976_film)), but much fewer actual examples. Eezo is naturally occurring, but Kaiden intimates that biotics didn't begin appearing in large numbers until you had some notable spaceship explosions.