Ancient Technology

honkhill

Hi, I posted this at another forum but might as well ask here, but I am interested in making a robot from an ancient civilization, rather than the usual modern company. Before I go making up my own, I figured I'd check to see what civilizations in the pen and paper lore might be able to produce one.

If so, is there a particular design aesthetic associated with them? I'm looking at straight up tech, rather than anything magic-imbued. I believe Empyreans are on the high tech side, for example.

bulgarex

For the sake of other interested parties, I'll repost my reply to your inquiry on that other forum:

Assuming for the moment that you want an Earth-native technological robot, the only candidate I can think of to create one would be the Empyreans, the hidden immortal superhuman offshoot of humanity. Empyreans are the only official Champions prehistoric civilization that have always made significant use of advanced technology. And they are really ancient, predating Homo sapiens by hundreds of millennia. Empyreans in their home city of Arcadia employ servitor robots for a wide variety of tasks, but there's no mention of a particular design aesthetic. However, the Empyreans have had contact with nearly all human cultures throughout history, and many of them fill their immortal lives mastering artistic pursuits; so a given robot created by or for one of them might have almost any style. (The Empyreans are described in great detail in the PnP source book, Hidden Lands.)

Although the Empyreans' hidden city and valley are currently on Antarctica, that isn't their original location. The Empyreans moved there after the Atlantean globe-reshaping cataclysm destroyed the first Arcadia, around 30,000 years ago. Arcadia previously stood on a site which is today not far from Athens, Greece. It's conceivable the Empyreans might have accidentally left something behind.

As a corollary to that, Atlantean civilization was strongly reminiscent of Classical Greece in its art, architecture, and weapon/armor design (although very magical).

While there are a number of official advanced alien civilizations with histories vastly older than that of Humanity -- Odrugarans, Naxari, Malvans, Mandaarians, Zurites, plus others now extinct -- aside from the Elder Worm (who you probably want nothing to do with, for several reasons) none of them had much if any recorded contact with Earth before the modern era. Whether any of them would have dropped off a robot in the distant past would depend on what you want its purpose and motivation to be.

bulgarex

BTW the oldest CU civilization for which we have defined dates, as revealed in Champions Beyond, was actually on Mars. The Martians were a humanoid species who developed high-speed FTL spacecraft, teleportation devices, disintegrator weapons, and comparable advanced devices, roughly 1.5 billion years ago.