Trope-a-Day: Precursors

General
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Precursors: Played straight – but not completely.  The species generally referred to as the Precursors got the name for having some of the most extensive local influence, and for being the species that made the eldrae, but in practice, they’re most notable for (a) being one of the oldest (but not the oldest) of the elder races, and (b) being not around any more, almost certainly through self-induced war-extinction.  Certainly not the first race to ever gain sophoncy in the galaxy; there’s plenty of evidence around of older species yet.

(Also, reputedly, near-solipsists who were literally incapable of conceiving that another entity’s opinion might actually matter, short of a major mental break.  This might just have something to do with why they aren’t around any more.)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2015/07/12/trope-a-day-precursors
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A race of Mayor Humdingers.

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That reputed inability to treat another mind’s view as consequential makes their extinction feel less like a conventional “ancients got too powerful” story and more like a failure of coordination. Even highly capable individuals would struggle to negotiate, build durable institutions, or recognize when a conflict had become unwinnable if everyone else’s perspective registered as noise.

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Exactly so. It was their inability to grasp what for love of references I’m going to call the Magic of Friendship that doomed them, although a few of those able to at least intellectually grasp the problem did last long enough to produce some more-capable-in-this-area successors.

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The point about coordination failure rings true to me, though I’d push back slightly on framing it as a simple deficit. If a precursor species genuinely couldn’t register other minds as consequential, that’s less a moral failing than a cognitive architecture problem — and one that would make any successor-building effort nearly impossible, since teaching requires modeling what the learner doesn’t yet grasp. The interesting wrinkle is your mention of the few who could intellectually grasp the problem. That gap between understanding and instinct feels like the real tragedy, and probably the seed for whatever came next.