Editing Old Ones (section)

== Traveller ==
The old-ones in [[Traveller]] are called the "Ancients," and their sites can be found in any random place.  The architecture can vary wildly, from habitrail tunnels hermetically sealed and protected from a benign environment, to hollowed-out crystals hundreds of feet high with no ladders or stairs.  None of the sites have any documentation, many of them expect visitors to be able to fly or use telepathy, and all of them are empty and inert... except maybe whatever one your adventurers carelessly step into .  Each Ancient site predates the literacy of every civilization, and doesn't seem to have anything in common with other Ancient sites other than being built for inhabitants that are 1-2 metres tall.  Ancient sites make for good dungeon romps in what is otherwise a hard sci-fi campaign about making mortgage payments on your spaceship.

The Ancients also explain why there's so many humans in space.  The first great human empire was the Vilani empire, built by the humans that first discovered faster-than-light travel.  They were pretty surprised to find out there were other aliens around; even more surprised when they encountered another FTL space-faring empire of humans called the 'Zhodani.'  Scientists concluded sure that the two-arms & two-legs body shape was just naturally better for most environments, and stopped being surprised that everyone was "humanoid" shaped.  This all went to shit when a third race of humans showed up with FTL drive, calling themselves the 'men of Sol' ("Solomani" in Vilani), and it turned out that they came from a world where the entire ecosystem was integrated, not evolving in parallel like everywhere else.  Vilani scientists were certain this was a sign that the Solomani were an engineered race of humans made by the Ancients, what with everything fitting together like clockwork.  Instead, they discovered the opposite: the undeniable conclusion that Zhodani humans, Vilani humans, and all the other humans from minor races were "seeded" from Sol-3 and transplanted to every other world by the Ancients.  Even the biology of the lupine Vargyr major race were seeded from this 'Earth' world.  This gives the Solomani a superiority complex that makes them pretty insufferable to be around.

This continues the trend of hard sci-fi ignoring 'hard biology'.