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>>78142363
I'm thinking something like the abyss civilization in hollow knight...

>>78142385
Hard to see much with the mood lighting, but it gives me a love craft vibe

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>>78142426
If you want the whole area was more less inspired by Geiger and Aliens Franchise.

>>78142502
Ahh, so cities made of flesh. Going by the alien idea, them using shed exoskeleton as a base material has potential.

Hmmm, glowing alge and shit, domesticated coral polyps. We got options for aquatic cities.

>>78142363
So Anomolocarid and Euripterids would basically be dragons to them, the question is, did they domesticate them?

>>78142363
Trilobites were cool, but how would they have formed a civilization with no way to handle tools or forge metal into useful items?

>>78142385
>Abyss
>Civilisation
It's literally just a dumping pit for the Pale king's failed children

>>78144192
In a different way than us, isn't that the point of this whole imagination game

>>78144192
they used telekinesis
alternatively, magnets

>>78144192
Magicc :-DDD

>>78142363
Where'd you get the premium trilobytes?
All mine are like horseshoe crabs and shit.

>>78142554
Piled shells with the smooth line aesthetic. Not soft flesh but solid, organic looking, organically grown "stone".

>>78144576
Horseshoe crabs endure, they were there before plants took the land, and they will be there after mammals are but a memory. That is their way, and they have become excedingly efficient at it.

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>>78144686
Bold of you to assume so.

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>>78144246
Nah there are signs that before it became a trash pit it was being used for something else by something a lot older than hollow nest. Like the statue, the cave with screaming effigies, and the arcane eggs.

>>78144192
Prehensile antennae

The crabs do a dance and then a big crab appears and does a dance and then all the crabs get food and experience a crustacean form of joy.

>>78144793
>>78144686
This reminds me of something I saw on WoD, he was playing with a concept for a horse show crab spirit, and also stopping magadon from doing a planned extinction disguised as these blood operations.

>>78144793
How hard would it be to keep a stock of cloned HS Crabs on hand for harvesting?

>>78142760
Presumably, though the image of them using the things as mounts looks rather silly to me, what sort of language would they have?

What are things about the little buggers that could exist but not be preserved by fossil evidence?

>>78142363
Honestly you're so far in the realm of unbelievability that you should just make up whatever you want and leave realism at the door. Make your primitive society however you want.

>>78148451
Ooze
They were all covered with a foot thick layer of ooze.

Literally At The Mountains of Madness

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>>78142363
I browsed wikipedia. Interesting, had no idea trilobites were so varied. Some ideas.

-The whole group has a lot of different anatomies. Perhaps the trilo civilization focused on breeding itself according to their general needs. This could lead to several castes. For example, the warrior caste could be capable of volvation, have spines and even a sort of natural trident like pic related.

-Expanding the above, their tech might include plenty of domesticating and breeding other species.

-Their wheel/helical mills use sea currents and volcanic vents to provide power.

-The shells left after molting might be preserved for symbolic reasons? Associated with aging and thus history, they could be used as writing mediums and/or building material. Each trilo could carve his year-long diary upon his shell, then after molting, store it in their library/museum equivalent.

-They could discover that roman concrete that sets underwater.

-Like humans, they seem to have vision as their main sense.

-I can see their antennae becoming the manipulator organ.

-Trilobites could have as few as 2 segments and as many as 103. As a trilo ages and molts, the number of body segments increases. The elders could resemble centipedes. Perhaps the number of segments equals their age in years.

-Some trilos could walk on land. These become the smith caste, which not only forge metals but establish a whole parallel civilization dedicated to providing the related infrastructure, like charcoal-making. They might be equally respected and feared, as well as being seen as some sort of wizard/miracle-maker. The concept that they tame fire alone seems very bizarre for aquatic beings.

-They probably favor brass and bronze over iron because it lasts longer in contact with seawater.

-Perhaps they put eggs which are kept inside their bodies. After hatching, the babies, or baby(?), has to molt or further develop before being born. Basically mixing insects and marsupials.

>>78149187
Cool stuff, this isnt even taking into account the likely magic stuff OP might blend into this.

>>78149187
Good luck making alloys underwater.

>>78149548
Did you even read the third to last point?

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>>78142760
you could never tame this beast

>>78149187
I really like the idea of the taming, perhaps the smith caste is a tamed animal, along the mining ones, than enter a simbiosis state with the Trilos.

>>78149600
reading is for nerds

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>>78149621

>>78149699
That's good, because you're a total nerd

>>78149187
>-They could discover that roman concrete that sets underwater.
>-Like humans, they seem to have vision as their main sense.
>-I can see their antennae becoming the manipulator organ.
Lots of bas-reliefs.

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>>78149824

>>78142363
>I'm running a game that involves vision quests into earths past, so I wanna make some crazy shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

Larry Niven's Green Marauder. Earth had a whole anaerobic biosphere, including a sentient species, before the advent of photosynthetic microorganisms poisoned the atmosphere with oxygen.

>>78151130
Non-canon bonus, photosynthetic bacteria were meant as a bioweapon.

>>78142363
Just Google the Cambrian Era and see what comes up
Do some cool colony organisms too. Make it where slimes were actually fucking terrifying and intelligent

>>78144793
Fun fact: their tail and shell regenerate, so this kills the crab only 3-30% of the time!

>>78146816
Keep? Easily. Mud & sand, brackish water and food. Breed? That's harder. And they are developing the LAL, which will replace the need to harvest the blood of horseshoe crabs.

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>>78151864
Ah yes, the cambrian explosion. I swear, if I see a fucking hallucigenia again...

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>>78144192
>>78146604
>no way to handle tools
This assertion is so tiresome.
The mandlible is a de facto manipulator, midwits.

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>>78152054
Careful what yo ask for

>>78153144
They are also full of biramous appendages that can easily become claws.

>>78149187
>-Some trilos could walk on land. These become the smith caste, which not only forge metals but establish a whole parallel civilization dedicated to providing the related infrastructure, like charcoal-making. They might be equally respected and feared, as well as being seen as some sort of wizard/miracle-maker. The concept that they tame fire alone seems very bizarre for aquatic beings.
The smiths also colonize the tidepools and possibly even dig out their own private saltwater pond as impenetrable fortresses.

>>78142363
Elder things. Space aliens that build elaborate cities, but they don't *really* use technology or furniture or anything like that. And they don't have a written language, instead using heiroglyphics of themselves.

It really checks the boxes for unique, bizzare, and primal at the same time.

>>78156368
>they don't *really* use technology or furniture or anything like that. And they don't have a written language, instead using heiroglyphics of themselves.
These might be a case of flawed historic interpretation. Stone building and pictograms carved into stone walls survive a lot longer than tools and paper.

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>>78149799

>>78152054
Ah yes, the Cambrian burrowing fleshlight

>>78158964
They're all fleshlights if you're brave enough.

http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2012/06/r-dewitt-miller-within-pyramid-short.html

>>78149885
I'm sorry anon, was that too mean?

>>78158932
>>78158037
>>78156368
>>78160643
Wonderful. This is turning into an Elder Thing thread.

I will say that Elder Things do have *some* technology. Obviously, they didn't make shoggoths out of thin air. In Return to the Mountains of Madness the writers put in some crystal technology, like a tesseract and an energy beam/gun.

But since they apparently 'flew across the aether" they would presumably would not have space ships.

>>78160697
Potentially, all Elder Thing technology was Shoggoths, IE, essentially multipurpose nanoswarms that happen to be made of biological matter. They want a specific gizmo, they order the local Shoggoth to become it.

>>78160753
IIRC, the Elder things that settled Earth were a luddite faction, at the time of their fall the shoggoths were just about the only advanced tech (by their standards) they had left. I should note though, even the "Low tech" stuff they took with them to Earth was enough to fight the Flying Polyps and Star Spawn to an effective standstill

>>78142363
What sort of magic is in the setting is a major factor as well

>>78160753
A bit like nanobots, but with bio tech? Nice.

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Veins of the Earth has an interesting take.

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>>78142363

>>78164813
>>78164890
Well shit anon you beat me with the exact same cap by the time it took me to crop it

Here's to you then

>>78163983
Please elaborate further. How exactly does the kind of magic affect things?

>>78161025
The really impressive thing about the Elder Things is that they were fully mundane biological beings (albeit extremely resilient and having some way to travel through space on their own power), but apparently fought Cthulhu himself to a standstill.

Ad meesa Gungan cities!

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i want elder thing humans/hominids, what can i do with million year old abhumans? Also what do you guys think of the idea of having layers to elder things so to speak? like theres a civilization a million years old but they knew of one even further back who likewise knew about an even old civ

>>78164890
Probably my favorite creature from Veins of the Earth. The idea that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (aka. the time when over 90 % of all life on Earth died, and Earth's biosphere and climate were fucked up so bad it took several million years to recover) was caused by some malevolent force and a race of trilobite-men are the only surviving civilization from before the extinction who remember what happened sounds like it'd make a good plothook. Like maybe whatever that tried to wipe out all life on Earth realizes they missed some and are coming back to finish the job, and the PCs must learn from the trilobites what happened on the first time in hopes of being able to spot it from occurring again.

>>78151951
...isnt that even more cruel? like just torturing the poor fuck alive for a large portion of it's lifetime. Idk if they can feel pain or process emotions tho so maybe it aint cruel if they are just incapable of registering it as torture.

The film Altered States is required viewing for this

>>78169080
That's a cool armor.

Bump for interests.

>>78166371
>a race of trilobite-men are the only surviving civilization from before the extinction who remember what happened
Are the trilobite-men still alive, or did they die out, but leave carved stone pictograms as warnings?

>>78160753
Imagine having a pet shoggoth that basically does everything for you. It is a chair, a bed, a ladder, a food digester, a knife, a BOBCAT tractor, a heavy-lifting crane, and a demigod-killing super soldier all in one.

The idea of Shoggoths being their only real technology is fucking cool.

>>78174495
>Imagine having a pet shoggoth that basically does everything for you.
Then imagine what happens when it decides it doesn't want to serve you anymore. No wonder the elder things went extinct.

>>78175451
Is it ever explained what happened to the other elder things? If the antarctica faction were luddite colonists, presumably the stars must be full of elder things, right?

>>78175497
Then why hasn't earth been visited since?

>>78166478
They tag and release them after meeting a quota. It's more like a blood donation than a horseshoe crab blood dungeon. They also don't cut their entire ass off for the procedure, if you look more closely to that picture they're just folded up.

>>78175526
Cause it’a a fucking hotbed crazy magnet for Yith, Mi-Go, polyps, starspawn, ghouls, ghosts, and is dominated by creatures with a connection to the dreamrealm who can sometimes pull extraplanar hunters out of their imaginations.

cool thread, bumping

>>78175595
It is a good question as to why, in the whole galaxy, about half of the lesser gods decided to hang out on earth and rape artists in their dreams.

>>78176437
Maybe the Fermi paradox is exponentially higher than we thought, and intelligent beings just go to other intelligent beings:
>a) to destroy them as a preventive major of their own survival (therefore, when the elder things came on to earth they were preyed upon by the old ones, and from there just chain-reacted to a full scale war).
and/or
>b) as rare resource for potential advancement of their own species (explaining why mi-go's harvest brains, Cthulhu wants more worshippers, etc.)
They're here because Earth and thereby humans are low-hanging fruits, in galactic relativity.

>>78156330
What would they even be pillaging?

>>78179177
Delicious bivalves!

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>>78179243
>Delicious bivalves!

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>>78180017
>Delicious Bibalbes! :DDDD

>>78180422
somewhat amusingly transformers actually has fossil transformers now.

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>>78179243
I think those evolved hundreds of millions of years later.

But presumably, wiwaxia should be a good substitute, what with being the ancestor of all the mollusks.

>>78180504
Are any of them trilobites?

>>78180504
>transformers actually has fossil transformers
Serious?? What will they come up with next?

>>78183286
Best part, these fossil bots can break apart and turn into gear for other bots, they turned partsforming from an ugly compromise to a feature through a simple reimagining

>>78142363
I imagine it would be small to us, a human time traveler would look to them like a kaiju film come to life.

>>78144192
Why wouldn't they use deep sea thermal vents for forging?