OTU Only: Neighbors of the Ancients

[Nathan Brazil]

Looking into a few sources, I have come across other aliens that exist in the OTU back during the times of the Ancients:

MT Knightfall
Primordials - Yep, the slugs who bored themselves to extinction. Oh, yea, there's that relativity pistol.

MgT Campaign 1: Secrets of the Ancients
Varsheen - Nothing is mentioned of them other than they have a "Varsheen Caliphate’s fleet", perphaps Caliphate being an implication of the nature of their empire. (The Ancients are TL 16-19 at the time of contact).
Thao - hostile species of gastropod-like (snail-like) creatures, who are at war with the Ancients Empire due to a recent border dispute. The Thao have only recently hit TL14 (The Ancients are TL 16-19 at the time of contact).
Dyapyuse - self-replicating spacecraft and drones with telepathy. Their ship's armor consists of individual black globe cells, so if one globe is overloaded only that cell is destroyed and not the entire ship (The Ancients are TL 18-21 at this time).
Artificial Intelligence - Admittedly, a species created by the Droyne. They recognize that organics may fear them. They have learned patience due to this and the slow nature of organic thought.

Have there ever been other species around the times of the the Ancients besides the Vargr and Human experiments? Has mention been made of these species in other sources?

 

[mike wightman]

A sidebar in the MT RM page 9 entitled "the first starfarers" mentions races that predate the Ancients by a considerable margin.

Some of them could still be out there in the dark, waiting...

or safely hidden in their jump space palaces, waiting...

or cut off from our universe in their own pocket universes, waiting...

I'll dig out the original text in a bit unless someone else does it first.

 

[epicenter00]

A sidebar in the MT RM page 9 entitled "the first starfarers" mentions races that predate the Ancients by a considerable margin.

It's noted in that section that the first starfarers appeared two billion years ago. So there's significant room for a lot of starfaring races, most of them extinct presumably.

or safely hidden in their jump space palaces, waiting...

However, a major point of these starfarers is that they never developed Jump drives. By implication in the text bubble, they never developed any kind of FTL equivalent either; short-lived races simply confined themselves a few systems. Long-lived races used "generation ships, cold sleep, and even electronic personality transfers."

It's noted that until Grandfather came along, nobody had Jump drive.

 

[lspitz]

I've been wracking my brains trying to remember the source without success, but a little voice in my head keeps whispering that MM once stated that Grandfather created jumpspace.

If my recollection is true, then nobody could have had the jump drive before the Ancients. For older starfaring civilizations, you either have to assume that they only had STL travel, or you'd have to hypothesize another kind of FTL drive-- one that nobody since then has reinvented.

 

[mike wightman]

Nobody has jump drives before the Ancients, and yet the Primordials can use psionic based jump drives long before the Ancients.

TNE, and Dave Nilsen's Q&A on this very web site, made the case for the connection between psionics and jump space dimensions.

In addition T5 allows for the discovery of different types of ftl drive at higher TLs, without the need to develop the lower TL versions.

So jump space could be accessible by other means long before Grandfather discovered his jump drive solution.

 

[mike wightman]

I've been wracking my brains trying to remember the source without success, but a little voice in my head keeps whispering that MM once stated that Grandfather created jumpspace.

If my recollection is true, then nobody could have had the jump drive before the Ancients. For older starfaring civilizations, you either have to assume that they only had STL travel, or you'd have to hypothesize another kind of FTL drive-- one that nobody since then has reinvented.

That was me - not Marc.

Unless Marc has said it as well in which case I have been right all along

 

[lspitz]

That was me - not Marc.

Unless Marc has said it as well in which case I have been right all along

Oh, good! That means I can stop wondering where I heard it now.

Carry on.