"The Protheans were not the first. They did not create the Citadel. They did not forge the Mass Relays. They merely found them, the legacy of my kind."
— Sovereign, Mass Effect 1
Precursors are a staple of a great many Science Fiction and Fantasy settings. While precursors come in many different varieties, the defining aspect is that they existed in the time before a setting's contemporary civilization.
Recursive Precursors occur when the concept of precursors is applied recursively; such beings served a similar role to precursors as they do to contemporary civilizations. In these cases, the odds are high that precursors to these precursors had even had another race that served as their own precursors, and so on, forming a long line of ancient civilizations.
Of course, having a long series of precursor races carries some disturbing implications. Beyond the fact that precursors existed in the time before the setting's present civilizations, another important aspect of precursors is that they are no longer around — and the existence of a cyclic succession of such fallen empires raises uncomfortable questions about the ultimate fates of advanced civilizations, including the ones active in the story's timeframe. After all, if all those godlike empires all collapsed one after the other, what's to say that your civilization will be spared from this fate once its turn is up? Perhaps it is In Life's Nature to Destroy Itself. Perhaps they were wiped out by their creations. Bonus points if those creations went on to become precursors to another young civilization. Maybe they were wiped out by an unrelated group of Precursor Killers. Maybe there's a long history of artificial or natural global disasters that caused each civilization to collapse in turn. Or maybe they were Sealed in Some Sort of Can. Less pessimistically, it's possible they've just ascended to a higher plane of existence, died out for mundane reasons, or simply left the immediate area for whatever reason.
Naturally, this is a Sub-Trope of Precursors. When Creating Life is involved, this trope is highly compatible with Recursive Creators, but is otherwise not related to other "Recursive Tropes" such as Recursive Reality and Recursive Fanfiction. See also The Cycle of Empires.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Gall Force: The Solnoids from Eternal Story are the precursors of humanity; in Stardust War, it's also revealed that the Solnoids also have precursors. Finally, in New Era, it's revealed that due to a Stable Time Loop, all the races in the story are each other's precursors.
- Lyrical Nanoha has Al-Hazard, which served as the precursors of the Ancient Belka empire after Al-hazard destroyed itself, which in turn served as the precursors of the current setting after Ancient Belka destroyed itself.
Fan Works
- Pony POV Series:
- The first set of precursors was the Centaur Empire, the greatest empire of its day and well on the way to being Benevolent Precursors. They were also rather nice to the ponies before they were uplifted and became sapient. Unfortunately, Lord Tirek is the Sole Survivor of their species because he killed them all and is most certainly an example of Abusive Precursors.
- The G1 ponies were this to the Golden Age civilization (depicted in Tales), and were the ones to wipe out the monsters, witches, and other horrors wreaking havoc on the world. The Paradise Ponies continued to safeguard the Golden Age civilizations due to the Rainbow of Light making them immortal until Discord damaged it and they eventually passed on of natural causes.
- The Golden Age was this, being the most advanced civilization on Equus has ever gotten. Unfortunately, the civilization was destroyed in the magical equal of a nuclear holocaust when the wish spell they tried to make a utopia with. Also Benevolent Precursors, as said wish spell created the Lost Age, which was indeed a utopia until things went horribly wrong and many members of it did everything they could to minimize the damage of the apocalypse and preserve their advances for the civilizations to come.
- The Writing on the Wall: The mysterious ruin's opening chamber is filled with a warning repeated in progressively younger languages — the first, and the only one intelligible to the archaeologists, is about five thousand years old; the rest are the only known examples of increasingly more ancient lexicons suggesting a previously unguessed-at series of civilizations succeeding each other. The oldest set, which is seventy thousand years old, turn out to be the languages of modern humanity.
Film
- Star Wars Expanded Universe: There are multiple races of precursors, starting with the mysterious Celestials, who created the hyperdrive triangle that makes galactic civilization possible. After them came the Rakata, who built a massive Empire, created the basis for all hyperdrives, and left behind things such as the Star Forge. Contemporary with them were the Gree, who among other accomplishments built the infrastructure that makes Coruscant's planet-wide city possible before withdrawing to a handful of worlds where they survived until the 'present' of the series.
Literature
- The Beginning After the End: The djinn are the ancient race of aether-wielding lessers who left behind ruins that laid the foundations for modern civilization across Dicathen and Alacrya, whose civilization came to an end when the Indrath Clan committed genocide upon them for surpassing them in wielding aether. It is eventually revealed that the djinn were Not the First Victim as there were many other civilizations ancient to even them whom the Indrath also committed genocide upon.
- The Book of Lost Tales: The pagan Anglo-Saxon mariner Eriol knows of 'the gods' (the Valar) but an Elf has to tell him about Ilúvatar, "who was not of the Gods, but made them".
- Book of the New Sun: The Hierogrammates from The Urth of the New Sun were created by humanity in an earlier cycle of the Universe. They now forge humanity of the current Universe.
"Your race and ours are, perhaps, no more than each other's reproductive mechanisms."
- Contact: When the humans make First Contact, the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who sent them the blueprints for the device used to access the setting's Portal Network, they reveal that they were not the original creators of said Portal Network. It is also revealed that whatever being(s) did create the Portal Network had their own Precursor(s) in the creator(s) of the universe (who may be God), and left a message in the form of the numerical sequence of pi.
- Corum: The Vadhagh and the Nadragh were replaced by the Mabden and Shool's unnamed race came before them. Justified when Shool says the gods make the new races wipe out the old ones when they get bored of them.
- In The Gray Prince by Jack Vance, each of the pre-human colonist species claim that they are the true owners of Koryphon and have the right to expel all others. It turns out that none of the intelligent species on the planet are indigenous: the true natives are the orcish cannibals who by now exist only in fenced-in preserves.
- The History of the Galaxy initially has Absent Aliens for about half of the thousand year timespan of the setting. Then one extinct and three extant aliens races are discovered whose heyday was three million years ago (humans have actually surpassed them in certain areas such as hyperdrives and cybernetics). Then two more races are discovered whose heyday was billions of years ago (they survive by the first being a race of Energy Beings who helped the other one Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence). They also talk about a race of Abusive Precursors who nearly wiped them out and may yet show up in future stories. There are creatures that everyone calls Forerunners, but they are not sentient and appear to be a swarm of Planet Eaters. What takes the cake is an Energy Being that some call "God" who may actually be the unintentional creator of all biological life in the galaxy and is the actual creator of the Forerunners (the ones eating planets have programming errors).
- Known Space: There are two sets of precursors.
- First there were the Thrintun (aka "Slavers"), who seeded the galaxy with the ingredients of life so that it would grow and evolve into unique delicacies for them to eat (being hypnotic slavers, they were defeated by the Tnuctipun
in the inevitable Turned Against Their Masters, and they took all sentient life with them. Talk about bad parenting). Their empire covered a much larger span of the galaxy than that explored by modern species, and remnants of it in the form of extremely advanced technology and resilient feral biotechnology, such as rocket-like "stage trees" that have taken to seeding themselves across star systems. The most notable remnant are their yeast farm-worlds, which in the four billion years since the Slavers' extinction have given rise to the biospheres of most worlds across the known galaxy.
- Second were the Pak, a race of more recent aliens with three life stages (child, breeder, Protector) only sapient in the third stage, and programmed to be homicidal to anything that could conceivably threaten their descendants (mutations were not recognized). They evolved near the galactic core, far away from known space but also from a former Slaver yeast world. Earth and the Ringworld are far-flung Lost Colonies of Pak who couldn't advance to Protector stage when their supply of tree-of-life root ran out due to a lack of thallium in the soil; the fossils of Pak breeders are known to modern humanity as early australopithecinesnote .
- The Ringworld in particular has a third set in the form of the City Builders, a hominid culture that ruled the Ring for millennia before collapsing around the real-life 1700s, a little over a thousand years before the books' time. While they never developed FTL flight, they created elaborate flying cities and ruled an immense empire over both the Ring and nearby planets using slower-than-light vessels. After their empire's collapse, they became heavily mythologized and often conflated with the Ring's original builders (probably the Pak) as the godlike "Engineers".
- First there were the Thrintun (aka "Slavers"), who seeded the galaxy with the ingredients of life so that it would grow and evolve into unique delicacies for them to eat (being hypnotic slavers, they were defeated by the Tnuctipun
- Kull is set in an age long before the Conan the Barbarian tales, and occurs in the "fading, degenerate" land of Valusia, a place "living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires", and considered so ancient that the "hills of Atlantis and Mu were isles of the sea when Valusia was young".
- Manifold: Space: Every few hundred million years, there's a gamma ray burst powerful enough, or well-directed enough, to wipe the whole of the Galaxy clean.
This is the equilibrium state for life and mind: a Galaxy full of new, young species struggling out from their home worlds, consumed by fear and hatred, burning their way across the nearby stars, stamping over the rubble of their forgotten predecessors.
- Perry Rhodan: A million years ago, the Barkonids settled the galaxy as their planet was shot out of it. New colonies weren't given a lot of technology to prevent them from becoming decadent, which led most of them to become low tech. Over 50,000 years age the 'First Mankind', the Lemurians, settled the galaxy again, but they were wiped away in an interstellar war and fled to Andromeda galaxy. Then at least 20,000 thousand years ago we get the Akonids, who spread out but become really isolationist after a colonial war of independence with the Arkonids, who are currently becoming decadent, the next step will probably be humanity.
- Planet of Adventure: The humans of Tschai are broken down into groups based on which alien species that they are associated with. Each group regards their masters as the "real" precursors, while the independent human tribes think of themselves as the planet's original inhabitants, although an outsider can tell that ultimately, the only true natives of the planet are the ancient, reclusive Pnume and their solitary Phung relatives.
- The Psalms Of Isaak, by Ken Scholes, has several layers of precursors. The direct precursors to the novels' modern civilization was the empire of the Wizard Kings, who conquered the world out from under the hands of the Weeping Czars. Both groups were preceded by the Younger Gods, who were in turn preceded by the Elder Gods, though these were so ancient that little knowledge remains of them other than the name.
- The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: Scathach is a ten-thousand year old vampire, and that seems impossibly old. However, as a Next Generation, she is thousands upon thousands of years younger than the other Elders, who in turn are a good deal younger than the Great Elders who built Danu Talis. Before them were the vaguely humanoid Archons, who once ruled the Earth through science, and they were preceded by the Ancients, of which nearly nothing is known. Before these were the monstrous, scaly Earthlords, who created vast cities and may very well have created the planet.
- The Ship Who...: When representatives of The Federation reach the human Lost Colony on Ozran in The Ship Who Won, they find that some of the population are "mages", using magic-seeming technology they do not understand to rule an oppressive feudal society, lording over their fellows whom they drug into forgetful stupidity. Where did the technology, plus a certain gestural language, come from? The Old Ones, who in turn got it from the Ancient Ones. Looking at a bit of preserved Old One furniture, a representative realizes that the Old Ones were aliens, but almost nothing is known about the Ancient Ones. As the story progresses one representative notices that a species of froglike creatures she'd dismissed as animals makes those same gestures. It turns out the frogs are the Ancient Ones; they taught the Old Ones only for the Old Ones to steal their tech and relocate to mountainous regions the small, water-loving frogs couldn't reach on their own. The Old Ones, dying off, had then gladly welcomed and taught the humans. When the human serfs were distributed into the damper lowlands, between the language barrier and the drug-induced idiocy humans literally kicked the frogs around and First Contact wasn't made until those federation members figure it out.
- Strata: Archaeology has uncovered several layers of precursors that died off for various reasons (including one race that died of shock on discovering that they had precursors). At the end of the book, the heroine meets a representative of the first ever precursors, who reveals that they are actually the only precursors, and they planted all the archaeological evidence of other precursors to give the universe more of a sense of history.
- Superluminary: The race that created the Infinithedron were themselves started by a remnant of an earlier Precursor civilization.
- Uplift: The original precursors, the Progenitors, existed a billion years ago. They uplifted non-sapient races into intelligent beings. The races they created themselves uplifted more species, and the process has continued to the present day. Most species can recount generations of their precursor lineage, with the "wofling" humans being seen as outcasts because they have no known precursors, and generally deny having any.
- Way Home: The oldest known civilization were the Vartags, although evidence of their physical existence is extremely scarce and mostly consists of various sealed entities. The Reptokh, Reptokhors and Log dragons were heirs to the Vartag civilization. The Reptokh learned elemental magic, the Reptokhors astral magic and the Log dragons learned dimensional magic respectively from the Vartags. These peoples are now also extinct and were succeeded by the Sunset Empire. That empire has possibly witnessed the final fate of the Vartags and was possibly involved in the destruction of the Reptokh and Reptokhors. The Sunset Empire itself fell and was succeeded by the United Colonies of Sunset, which were the last coherent state to follow the Sunset Empire's tradition. Technically, the United Colonies don't count as Precursors any more since they were ultimately defeated by light elves and the emerging Republic of Nold during relatively recent recorded history (give or take some bias about the records). K'irsan, one of the protagonists, has a very special kind of luck: he met a surviving Log dragon dimension traveler, got taught by a Reptokh data repository, escaped from possibly the last remaining Reptokhors city's ruins and had to reseal an Abyssal Harrier from a decayed Vartag seal.
- World of Tiers: The Thoans are a godlike culture who casually create artificial worlds as personal demesnes, and created the universe in which Earth is as well. In Behind the Walls of Terra, the Thoan home universe itself is stated to have been created by another, unknown race.
- Xeelee Sequence: The very first beings in the universe were the spacetime-defect creatures (ancestors of the Xeelee), who dominated the universe during the grand unification epoch, which ended 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang. After them came the quark-gluon based lifeforms, who flourished during the first millionth of a second of the universe. Then there are the quagmites, who lived for thirty times that period before another cosmic transition lets baryonic life like the Xeelee, and much, much later the starfaring human and qax civilizations, inherit the universe.
Live-Action Television
- Babylon 5: Lorien and the rest of his kind were this to the other First Ones, like the Vorlons and the Shadows before moving beyond the Rim. Humans and other species of the Alliance are to take over the cycle for the next group of species to evolve, before they too move beyond the rim.
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): The People of Kobol were precursors to the 13 Colonies and the People of the 13 Colonies are our Precursors, but there was presumably no one before them unless you count whatever "It" is that doesn't like being called "God" and the Head People.
- Doctor Who: The Eternals, some of which were apparently the seldom mentioned gods of Gallifrey, were precursors to the Time Lords who are themselves (sometimes) cited as the reason for there being so many races of Human Aliens, Rubber-Forehead Aliens, and Humanoid Aliens in the Whoniverse.
- Stargate-verse: The Goa'uld were originally thought to be the ones who had built the Stargate network, come to Earth to find slaves, and built the Pyramids to land their spaceships. SG-1 quickly discovers that while the Goa'uld were indeed the ones on Earth thousands of years ago, the Stargates were actually built by their precursors, the Ancients, millions of years ago. Stargate Universe revealed that the Ancients had found signs of their own precursors (or God), but the series ended before they could be revealed.
- Star Trek: The Expanded Universe is full of these. There's all the uberpowerful noncorporeal life, and the ancient humanoid Preservers and Progenitors (who may be the same beings), and a hundred or so other ancient powerful empires. The unexpanded universe has more than a few already, though not quite as many, and often a bit vague on timing. The clearest example comes in the Series Finale of Star Trek: Discovery, when Burnham finds herself in what she thinks is the Progenitors' home dimension, with portals to many worlds seeded with life, and a Progenitor tells her they didn't build this, they discovered it. The Progenitors think the builders also created them, but they've not ruled out the possibility it goes even further back. The Discovery writers stated the reason they retconned that the Progenitors didn't actually originate this life-creating technology was because they were uncomfortable with the idea of having a "Creator" that directly appeared on-screen and preferred to keep the ultimate origin of life ambiguous.
Mythology
- Classical Mythology: In the Hesiodian cosmogony, the first major figures are Gaia and Oranos, whose children were the Titans, many monsters, and the Gold race of men who died out by not reproducing. Then Cronos, the leader of the Titans, castrated Oranos and overthrew him, then Cronos' kids overthrew him (yeah, they've kind of got a children killing their parents theme here). Zeus created the Silver race of men, but they were too warlike and he had to destroy them, so Prometheus made the Bronze race who were our ancestors. Then the Olympians wiped them out with a flood, but Prometheus' son Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survived by floating in a chest. Zeus took pity on them and told them to throw stones behind them. The stones thrown by Deucalion became men, and the stones thrown by Pyrrha became women.
- Norse Mythology is kind of similar, with Odin and his brothers killing the primeval giant Ymir, making the world out of his body, and instituting the rule of the Aesir.
- Irish Mythology doesn't have a real "creation myth" per se, instead it recalls how the first Gaels came to Ireland and won the land from the Tuatha De Danann gods. The gods in turn took control of Ireland from the Fir Bolg and the Fomorians. But even before that, Ireland was ruled by the people of Nemed, who were the ancestors of the Fir Bolg and possibly even humans. The precursors of the Nemedians were the people of Partholon, who shaped the land itself with their magic. And some sources even have a race that preceded THEM!
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Eberron has a long history of being ruled by demons, then dragons, then giants, then goblinoids (in Khorvaire), then finally the common races. Some of them are still around to some extent, from the Dragons of Argonessen to the Demon Wastes to whatever is happening in the depths of Khyber.
- Forgotten Realms elves dominated Faerûn before they tore both the continent and their civilizations apart in the Crown Wars, which left them weakened and gradually displaced by human expansion, all the while dwarven and giant kingdoms still fought each other. But the elves in turn took the world from dragons' claws. That's where we switch from merely mythical era to the Time Abyss of Creator Races about whom little is known. At their height, the dragons fought the giants after knocking the birdlike aearee out of Toril's sky; the aearee in turn rose to dominance when the froglike batrachi wiped themselves out, and before their time there were the serpentine sarrukh and fey. Before that was "the Time of the Rauth", a prehistoric era when something was going on too, but what is completely lost by now.
- Gods of the Fall: Numerous clues, like the progressively older and completely different (from each other) ruins in the Five Deeps, and the ruins in the Verge that predated the Divine Age, hint that the recent Fall was not the first such catastrophe suffered by the world.
- Numenera: The Ninth World is built on the bones of the previous eight epochs of civilization on Earth. Each former world stretched across millennia and played host to a species whose civilisations rose to supremacy before vanishing. Modern humans (and the assorted posthuman mutants, sapient machines, and Transplanted Aliens) of the Ninth World know nothing about the previous ones beyond the fact that they existed, although a few things can be inferred, such as that at least one was part of a vast interstellar empire, at least one could manipulate physical laws and dimension, and at least one was ruled by beings that saw humans as a source of food.
- Warhammer 40,000: Humanity originally established an interstellar civilization, referred to now as the Dark Age of Technology, that was utterly destroyed about 15,000 years before the present day by a Robot Uprising called the Cybernetic Revolt, which resulted in most human worlds being knocked back to the stone age; humanity eventually staggered back to stellar travel, but the modern Imperium has never come close to equaling the technology of its predecessor. In the distant past, the galaxy was ruled by the immense and powerful empire of the Eldar, until it was destroyed during the Fall of the Eldar, which occurred more recently and likely took down other interstellar cultures along with it, although by that point most humans had been back to fighting with clubs or swords amidst the ruins of their cities for about five millennia. The Eldar's history stretches millions of years before that, but they themselves were originally simply one of the many creations of the godlike Old Ones, thought to have been the first species to develop sapience. The Old Ones ruled the galaxy uncontested for ages, until being destroyed in a war against the Necrontyr and the C'tan Star Gods.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: During the "Dawn of Ragnarok" DLC, the dwarves of Svartelheim are noted to have built their cities on older cities belonging to someone else. Exactly what that means is unclear, given the events of the DLC are Past-Life Memories being filtered through a Viking's perception of events.
- Bloodborne: Implied by the Chalice Dungeons; the curse afflicting Yharnam began, partly, when scholars there started delving into the ruins of lost city of Pthumeru beneath it, which was destroyed by its own version of the Beast Scourge. Except when you complete the Pthumeru Chalice, that unlocks a new set of dungeons from a civilization called the Ithyll, followed by the Hintertomb, the Loran, and finally the Isz. Although not outright stated (very little in the game is) it's implied that each of these civilizations built on the ruins of the one that came before it, only to rediscover the blood of the Great Ones and unleash another Beast Scourge, making Yharnam just the latest in a line... and possibly not the last.
- Dead Space: The games have an almost identical overarching scenario: the Brethren Moons scattered Markers throughout the galaxy. When a civilization finds one, the artifact will compel them into worshiping it or attempting to replicate it (since it's a source of unlimited energy). The Marker triggers a Necromorph outbreak which eventually culminates with Convergence, the creation, of a new Brethren Moon out of countless Necromorphs. This is what happened to the natives of Tau Volantis, it's currently happening to humanity, and it's probably why space is dead.
- Death's Gambit: There were several civilizations that rose and fell where Aldwynn now stands. Before Aldwynn, there was Siradon, the ancient kingdom that built Caer Siorai. Before them all was Garde Tum, a highly advanced civilization that Dug Too Deep and was destroyed by Thalamus.
- Endless Space 2: The Endless previously ruled most of the galaxy until they were nearly wiped themselves out in a violent civil war. However, they were preceded by a species known only as the Lost who are the actual source of Dust. Specifically, their bodies were made of organic Dust, and the Endless wiped the Lost out in order to claim it for themselves.
- Escape Velocity Nova: The aliens known only as Those Who Came Before merged with the universe millennia before humanity achieved space travel. The epilogues to four of the storylines mention that humanity followed in their footsteps several thousand years later, becoming precursors to another alien race.
- FreeSpace: The series has some in-universe speculation on this. The Ancients were the precursors to the modern-day Terrans and Vasudans, but they were wiped out by a total enigma of an advanced species called the Shivans, who are now attacking the Terrans and Vasudans. One character speculates that the Shivans have been around for a really long time, and exterminating any civilization that evolves to a certain point like they did the Ancients, though there is no direct evidence that this is the case. Some Word of God statements about the never-made third game implied that the Shivans themselves are an engineered species, so that would be another Precursor race who did the engineering.
- Godherja: The Dying World: After the Godherja, the world of Aeras has gone through multiple stages of civilizational development and civilization having been reset to the stone age enough times to make the timeline after the Godherja a complete mystery, with the world being filled with ruins of not only the Aelfir but also previous civilizations. Atleast one of these civilization's is implied to have gotten to an industrial level, leaving behind mysterious metal machines to be found by the Kathraddi empire. Despite intensive study with magic the Kathraddi couldn't animate them, due to not realizing that these machines weren't magical but mechanical.
- Halo: The Forerunners, who ruled the galaxy and created immense megastructures across it, succeeded the even more ancient Precursors, who were rumored to have exceeded technology and become transentient. By the time of the Flood invasion, most of the Forerunners believed that the Precursors were no more than a legend, unaware that they had defeated the Precursors millennia before and that the Flood was their revenge. Literally, as a number of Precursors broke themselves down into a dust that, millions of years later, would become the Flood.
- Homeworld: The ancient Hiigarans left their hyperspace core to be discovered by their descendants 3000 years later. But the Ancient Hiigarans never built the core, they found it. It was made by a still older race known only as the Progenitors, who, according to legend, are said to have originated from beyond the galaxy.
- Mass Effect: The universe has a bunch of these. Of course, due to The Law of Conservation of Detail, only two of these races (the billion-or-so-year-old mechanical Reapers and the 50,000-year-old Protheans, respectively the first and last in the line of recursive precursors) are relevant to the plot.
- The Reapers deserve a special mention in this regard, because not only did they exterminate the Protheans, but they also exterminated every other precursor race that came before them as well. It’s initially believed by everyone that the Protheans are the ones who discovered Element Zero, formulated Mass Effect technology, and built the Citadel and the Mass Relays. In actuality, all advanced technology in the galaxy is actually based on Reapers technology in some form, with Prothean technology being used as the immediate basis for the current civilizations to develop Mass Effect technology. The Reapers, not the Protheans, are the true creators of the Citadel and the Relays, which ensure that galactic civilizations develop along the paths that they desire. Like with the current cycle, the Protheans simply found the Citadel and the Mass Relays when first expanding their reach across the galaxy, used them as the basis of their tech, and once they developed far enough the Reapers arrived and exterminated them. The Reapers have done this process of exterminating the current cycle of civilizations again and again for millions of years.
- Javik reveals that the precursors to the Protheans were the Inusannon, whose ruins on Ilos were where the Prothean first discovered mass effect technology, much like humans had from the Prothean ruins on Mars.
- Towards the end, it is even considered that the Citadel Races might become the precursors for the next generation of galactic species. In the Extended Cut, one of the options at the end is Refusal — revolted by the Catalyst and its options for ending the war, Shepard refuses to fire the Crucible. The united fleets of the galaxy are vanquished by the Reapers and all sapient, spacefaring life in the galaxy is harvested (again). However, the epilogue shows one of Liara's time capsules (which she mentioned compiling earlier in the game) being discovered and explaining to an unknown species the cycle of extinction, the Reapers, the Crucible, and the story of Shepard's war. In the final scene, an alien speaker explains to a child how, through the help of those who came before them, they were able to defeat the threat of the Reapers.
- And just to top everything above, in the Extended Cut of ME3, the Catalyst reveals that the Reapers had their own precursors, who also created him as means to solve the organic-synthetic conflict. His monologue implies that said precursors looked more or less like a organic version of the Reapers and were (not entirely voluntarily) harvested into the very first Reaper (believed to be Harbinger in the lore).
- In the "Leviathan" DLC, Shepard can meet some of the eponymous species, which created the Catalyst (and by proxy, the Reapers). Uncounted millions of years later they're still bitter about it, but after seeing so many cycles go by, they've become too scared of the Reapers to aid the species. Shepard's goal becomes convincing them to aid the current cycle and stand up to the Reapers. They're still very much Abusive Precursors, but they understand that the Reapers can not be allowed to go unchecked anymore.
- Master of Orion has this in its backstory. An ancient precursor civilisation sent out various groups through an unstable wormhole when its star was found to be close to going supernova. The descendants of some of those became the eponymous Orions, the main precursors for the first two games. By the third game the Antarans, originally enemies of the Orions who returned in the events of the second game and canonically won, have accidentally wiped out most of their civilisation and effectively become a third tier of precursors.
- Shadow Realms: The world of Embra has seen multiple civilizations rise to glory before annihilating themselves in various kinds of magical apocalypse (something which is made dangerously easy by Embra's magic-rich environment). The fact that the Radiant Empires didn't go down the same road is considered quite an achievement — but it didn't stop them getting attacked by an Outside-Context Problem.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Throughout the series, several different precursors have had an influence on the modern world, including the ancient Echidnas of the Knuckles Clan, the Black Arms, and the Babylonians. However, The Ancients, mysterious beings introduced in Sonic Frontiers, are the oldest of them by far. They were the ones who originally brought the Chaos Emeralds — the plot MacGuffin that most of those precursors sought and used for their own purposes — to Earth in the first place, and they are the ancestors of what would eventually become the Chao. Chaos, a Chao mutated by the Master Emerald's power back into a form reminiscent of its Ancient progenitors, would eventually destroy the Knuckles Clan in a rage after they tried to take the Chaos Emeralds and harmed its fellow Chao in the process.
- Star Control: The first Precursors we know of is the race that left behind the massive battleship that the Ur-Quan use, who themselves Turned Against their Dnyarri slavemasters, who themselves had killed their own precursors, the Sentient Milieu. The reason for the original Precursors not being around anymore was eventually revealed in (the often-ignored) Star Control III; they were wiped out by an Even More Advanced race, possibly their own Recursive Precursors.
- Stellaris has at least six generations of precursors, though generally only one generation's history is explored in a given playthrough. From oldest to newest, they are as follows:
- The Vultaum Star Assembly was a race of four-meter long worms who existed twelve million years ago. They believed the universe was a vast virtual reality simulation and attempted to escape by committing mass suicide. The few who refused weren't enough to form a self-sustaining society and they died out.
- The Baol Organism, Grunur, and Zroni all existed more or less contemporaneously about seven million years ago.
- The Baol were a Hive Mind of planet-spanning forests who turned the worlds they lived on into paradises.
- The Grunur waged a campaign of genocide against the Baol that either killed or reduced to pre-sapience the entire species. A lone Baol survived the Grunur as a sapient entity, but joins the rest of its species soon after learning their fate.
- The Zroni were the first known psionic species and gained access to, and shaped, the Shroud. The Zroni split into two factions, the Divine who sought to consume the whole galaxy to conquer the Shroud, and the Saviors who opposed this. The Saviors eventually won by telepathically erasing all Zroni of both factions. With the Nemesis expansion, the player may attempt to follow the Divine Zroni's path by becoming the crisis, building up Menace, feeding an Aetherophasic Engine, and destroying the entire galaxy.
- The Yuht Empire died out six million years ago. The Yuht became technologically and culturally stagnant after achieving space travel and never developed Faster-Than-Light Travel and instead depended on sleeper ships for their entire two million year reign. They never encountered any aliens for nearly their entire history, and dismissed what artifacts they found of their own precursors as hoaxes. They attempted to exterminate the first alien species they met, the Jabbardeeni, who advanced rapidly and wiped out the Yuht within ten years.
- The First League existed about two million years ago. It was a multi-species republic that eventually fell apart due to rising inter-species tensions.
- The Irassian Concordat existed about a million years ago. The Irassians were a powerful conquering empire that was done in by a plague called the Javorian Pox introduced by one of their client species that was immune to the disease. The Pox spread rapidly and, despite quarantine methods that included bombarding their own homeworld into a lifeless husk, the Irassians were completely wiped out.
- The Cybrex existed as recently as 600,000 years ago. The Cybrex were a race of sapient machines who turned against their creators and then continued to attempt to purge all organic life. The Cybrex eventually had some sort of epiphany and realized that they were in the wrong and disappeared to a hidden ringworld, but, when some of their former victims found the Cybrex ringworld, they wiped out the Cybrex, who didn't even try to defend themselves. The Cybrex actually still exist and may come to try to save the younger species of the galaxy from the Contingency crises, after which they depart the galaxy for good.
- The Fallen Empires are the remnants of the most recent round of galactic civilization, who still exist as powerful and advanced but extremely reclusive enclaves who have become culturally sterile due to millennia of societal stagnation.
- Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor — Martyr: The Fabricatus appear to have been a very advanced race, and what little technology that has been analyzed by Tech-Priests defies explanation and is considered unique in the galaxy. However, it turns out that the Fabricatus evolved on a ruined Necron Tomb World, and adapted, repurposed and modified the technology of the far more ancient culture to form their own, unique technology.
Webcomics
- Outsider: Several ancient empires rose and fell over the history of local space, impacting its development to various degrees. They are discussed in the side blog at some length.
- The earliest know civilization was active sixteen million years ago, and is known only from a large number of worlds bearing extensive cratering and having undergone mass extinctions at that time. Modern scholars believe this to be the testament of a devastating war between otherwise unknown powers, but nothing's known for sure.
- The Fenrias civilization arose long after these conflicts, but still over a million years back. It spread through local space and either subjugated or ignored the primitive ancestors of the modern sapient species. The Fenrias split into multiple factions early on and warred extensively against each other, eventually diverging into numerous distinct breeds. Two modern-day species, the Delrias and Morat, are descended from Fenrias populations that survived the fall of their empires.
- The Dreiman were small — lapdog-sized — but highly advanced aliens that arrived about a million years in the past from outside of local space and quickly wiped out the Fenrias nations, although a few fringe groups held on on the edges of their territory. They rarely settled planets and mostly remained in orbital stations, but engaged in extensive planetary and biological engineering — they seeded and terraformed multiple worlds, many of which remain habitable into the present, and seemingly uplifted many of the local pre-sapient species.
- Around 500,000 years back, the Dreiman suddenly vanished and the remnant Fenrias nations all collapsed, to be replaced by the Soia. They were more advanced than the Dreiman and, like them, seem to have come from outside known space. They traveled in massive and heavily armed artificial moons that they used to enforce their rule and created numerous genetically engineered species, referred to as the Soia-Liron species; most were hyper-efficient food plants and animals, which are still found on multiple worlds, but at least five sapient species are known from Soia sites and may also have been created in this manner — the ancestors of the modern Barsam, Neridi and Loroi and two now-extinct species. The Soia are thus believed to have been a multi-species civilization, although whether these species were naturally occurring ones from a single world, artificially created or a mix of both, as well as whether any of these were the "true" Soia, isn't really clear. The Soia empire collapsed 275,000 years ago, seemingly in a devastating conflict that subjected every settled planet to devastating orbital bombardment and caused every sapient species to regress to the stone ages — galactic civilization is technically still climbing out of this dark age.
- In Our Shadow: Between humanity and the current generation of sophonts was the Primate civilization, which achieved a similar level of technology to humanity and built the Shroud covering the northern hemisphere. After Schorl used the Flare, he broke into the Shroud's pylons and found the apes and monkeys plugged into virtual reality pods, and killed them.
- Schlock Mercenary: This trope becomes important in the later arcs. The current galactic civilization has a recorded history about 100,000 years old, but given that the Milky Way is about thirteen billion years old this leaves a lot of space for earlier civilizations. In the later arcs, the protagonists begin slowly unpacking exactly why this is, and discover that the Milky Way's history is littered with cycles of civilization. During each cycle, a number of trigger events (many of whom have already occurred in their cycle) tend to lead to all-out war and what few survivors are left retreating from galactic civilization and concealing their presence. Each cycle can be millions of years apart, and still last for thousands, sometimes millions, of years, and still leave little trace of its existence. This has been going on for so long that the characters eventually calculate that surviving precursors in their various isolated refuges collectively outnumber galactic civilization by fifteen entire orders of magnitude.
