So i’ve always had a fascination with ancient civilizations since like forever. It’s part of the reason i like PD so much (and also good gameplay/ and dragons). The ancients really captured my imagination and I couldn’t help but want to know more about them. Now I know apart of what makes this part of PD lore so great is the fact that very little is actually known about them but lets forget that for a moment and imagine how life as an ancient must have been like. Also long post ahead!
So my personal idea is that the ancient age lasted a really long time like really long. People in the modern PD world are closer to the end of the ancient age (10,000 years) than they were to the beginning of it. (+10,000) . (sort of like ancient Egypt) The towers themselves were created during the end of the ancient age specifically during a time of the decline of the ancient civilization. A lot of ancients reminisce about a “golden era” a time in which ancient society was at it’s peak. This is because during the golden era resources to fuel their society were plentiful, as they began to wain the nations at the time battled each other over what little there was turning the world into a wasteland and nearly destroying humanity (my head-cannon is that the ancients were really advanced humans).
Surviving in the destruction were only a handful of cities and small towns. As a reaction to the state of their societies two different groups developed among them to address the decaying nature of their world. The Technology Preservation Faction (TP) and the Technology Destruction Faction (TD). The TP wanted to create the towers to revitalize the world and create a new golden era for the ancients there plan was to store away a few members of their species in resuscitation chambers to await the reformation of the world. The TD didn’t want to recreate past mistakes and believed they should live more naturalistic and remove themselves from their advanced technology to start again and let the world rebuild itself naturally. The two factions fought in a bloody ideological war but ultimately the TP won and the towers were created and the rest was history.
As for daily everyday life, well life as an ancient was highly regimented. Traditional families didn’t exist at least not in the way we would think of them. People were born into a sort of clan based caste system and each person was given a role that they were suppose to fulfill to the best of their abilities, usually long before they were born. The clan’s founding parent pretty much decided what a person did with their life and what their social standing was. It was common for the average person to never have met the founding parent in person or even directly speak to them.
The founder of the clan held a lot of power and was also long-lived as well. The ancients had the power to create bio-engineered monster, the foundation of their technology was built on genetic manipulation I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to believe they would modify themselves as well. In the case of the founder they used their wealth and power to extend their lives and they could live for hundreds of years seemingly without age.
They controlled the genetics of the clan’s members as well. Every ancient had highly constructed pedigree. lineage was very important to the ancients so much so that genes of individuals of high social standing was equivalent to “gold” (does the PD world even care gold?). ( Most ancients didn’t give birth themselves and relied on tank birthing as the main method of reproduction, they retained the ability but it was highly looked-down upon.) If an ancient genes weren’t “good” or they reproduced naturally they were shunned by their peers and often cast out of society to live in the wasteland. Modern humans in PD world are descendants of these ancients.
The founders like to keep power within the clan, too much crossing over of genes between clans was something they liked to avoid. So most ancients within the clan are either direct descendants of the founder. So basically everyone was a son or a daughter or some type of clone in the clan.
A wall of text I know. But hey what do you guys think, got any headcannons of you’re own.