Welcome to the first of a tips and tricks series I'm calling Behind the Screen. Not the most imaginative name, but it fits.
This first series deals with creating cultures for worldbuilding. There are dozens, if not hundreds of guides out there on the internet but all the same I thought I'd share my thoughts on the topic. One of the most important, and in some respects least looked at, aspects of creating a fictional world is devising the cultures that reside within it.
In most homebrew settings that I have seen, the designers fall into a trap. It is an all too easy trap to fall into and it is one that I have gotten caught in more than once. Heck, I would be surprised if there wasn't an example or two in this very blog. The trap is to copy and paste a real-world culture into a fictional world. Sure, there are examples of cultures like the Dothraki from Game of Thrones that don't, but I'm not talking about million dollar entertainment projects.
I'm also not saying that taking extreme amounts of your inspiration from a real world-culture is a bad thing. Done well you get fictional worlds like Skyrim, which has an active modding community more than 6 years after its release (as of this writing). The difference between the trap and a well crafted world can be summed up in one word: laziness.
One major difference between a beautifully crafted world like Skyrim or Game of Thrones and a cookie-cutter world is the richness of their cultures. I'm going to share my method of determining cultures when I don't have a starting point to work from (IE: viking culture for Skyrim).
Step 1: Why?
Why do I need this culture? Are the PCs traveling to a far off nation spoken only in whispers? Is a friendly NPC from a distant land? So long as there a reason for it other than: just because. The why will get your creative juices percolating, even if you don't have anything yet.
Example: Jacob wants to play an outsider, a foreigner to the land that the campaign that Mike, the DM, focuses on. He is planning on playing a human ranger, with a wardog as his animal companion.
Step 2: Where?
What sort of environment does this culture call home? Is it a lush, humid rainforest? An icy, frozen tundra? A balmy island chain? Environment effects culture. If the Egyptians didn't have the surrounding deserts, would they have discovered mummification?
Example: Working with Jacob, Mike determines that Jacob's ranger is from a forested region far to the north. The kind of north where the ground contains a layer of permafrost a few inches down. This tells the DM that fire is going to be an important part of this culture's daily life.
Step 3: Cornerstones
The next step is to determine three to four core features of the culture. While not all real-world cultures can be broken down like this, it makes for less work on the part of the world-builder and depending on what the core features are it can create a surprisingly intricate culture.
Example: Based on the animal companion for Jacob's ranger, Mike determines that dogs will be a central part of the culture. Jacob is fine with Mike determining the rest of his ranger's home culture, so the DM eventually settles on astronomy, a reverence of death, and reincarnation as the other core features of the culture.
Step 4: Mix
Now take what you have, and sit to think about how each of the various aspects tie together. How does the where influence the cornerstones when guided by the why?
Example: The DM now has the basics for the culture that Jacob's ranger hails from. Hailing from the frozen north, these people worship a death god to protect the souls of their ancestors in the night sky until they are reborn. Sometimes they will be reborn in the body of a dog, and they have taken to breeding stronger, hardier breeds of dogs for both hunting and war. The souls of the dead can be seen returning to earth in the colors that wash across the sky.
Step 5: Details
Steps 1-4 provide a basic overview of your new culture. Next time we will be getting into the nitty gritty: holidays, cuisine, religious rituals, etc. Stuff that will help flesh out a culture but is more than is needed in some cases.
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