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Cultural Considerations

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 148
While such things are undeniably important, creating a world is more than merely drawing realistic geography and political lines and then slapping down analogues of real-world societies. World building is, at its core, about creating cultures and showing how those cultures have shaped the world, from simple farmers laboring for a lordly knight to fantastic sky aeries of winged elves or plane-shifting cities of ethereal horrors. But what is culture? Culture is not merely the social environment of a village or the quaint customs of the locals.

Culture is, in essence, the evolution of thought, and can span regions or even nations. It’s about the way that people have described their history and experiences and their continued growth as a people. It’s about creating a cultural “personality,” a quick sketch for understanding—but keep in mind that not everyone from a culture will have exactly the same personality.

One can approach culture building in multiple ways:

By looking at and adapting real-world cultures.
By choosing a desired culture as an end point and retroactively deducing the historical factors that led to it.
By starting from the emergence of the people, and following their growth logically and persistently along a timeline.
By any combination of these approaches.

All of these methods are valid, though each has its pitfalls and its benefits. A creative GM can certainly use real-world cultures as a starting point or base when creating new cultures for the game world; after all, these are proven points of history, and provide easy access points for players. The other options require significantly greater creative involvement. The following tips can help a GM get started.

Core Elements of the People

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 148
The GM can place each of the following elements on a spectrum; religion, for instance, can produce both fanatics and agnostics, and trade can consist of simple barter or complex financial instruments used to move vast sums of hypothetical money. Where a culture falls on each question is up to the world builder, but keep in mind that none of these elements exists alone, and the position of one may influence that of another.

Survival: The first things a GM should consider are the world’s people and their basic assumptions about life and survival. At the most fundamental level, their physiology defines their core needs: shelter, food and drink, mates, and a relatively tenable environment. Combine their physiology with their environment (both past and present), and one can begin to draw a picture of how the people have adapted to the world around them. How do they acquire food? What threatens them? What advantages do they secure by living here? What food do they eat? What do they drink? All of these also help to inform what character traits a society values—one culture might call itself clever, quick-witted, and fast to seize an advantage; its enemies might call members of that culture duplicitous backstabbers who would sell their children for a momentary gain.

Language: Once one can define a culture’s character, one can define the culture’s language. What sparks the language? It isn’t necessary to spell out the language, but rather to imagine its core. Language and culture are inextricable; concepts core to a people’s identity may be expressible only in their language, with translations grasping the idea only loosely. Is the language pure, with few words borrowed from outsiders, or is it a trader’s language, a complex tongue with origins in a variety of cultures? Is the language primarily oral or written, and if it is written, what is it written on and how? Does it share an alphabet with another language? Keep in mind that high literacy rates tend to combine with rapid invention, as knowledge becomes easy to transmit. How do the people tell each other stories about their past? Do they have methods for communicating with far-off friends? Are they telepaths, or do they use sound beyond the threshold of ordinary human hearing? Do they travel, and if so, by what method? Each answer has its own implications, and can help tease out a sense of a particular people.

Religion: What sort of relationship do people have with their god or gods, and why do they have it? Are the people devoted to their gods as worshipers, familiar with them as acquaintances and comrades, or contemptuous of them? Do the people require priestly intermediaries to hear the words of the gods, or do they have a direct relationship with their gods? How much influence do the religious exert in this society? How well do they tolerate the beliefs of others?

Foreign Relations: Is this a homogenous group, having lived and intermarried within a relatively small group of people, or the product of a series of invasions and raids? How much contact and commerce do people have with outside cultures, and is travel beyond the hereditary home feasible and encouraged? How are outsiders viewed, and who are the enemies and allies of this culture?

Government and Law

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 148
When cultures break down into nations, whether from tribal loyalties or other shifts in thinking, or grow too large for simple meetings or councils to oversee, they require more formal governance. Broadly speaking, there are three types of government: anarchic, or rule by consent of the governed; authoritarian, or rule by the few; and democratic, rule by voice of the people. In general, most fantasy nations fall into the first two categories, either too small or disorganized to have a central authority, or possessing a ruling class that keeps the rest of the nation firmly in line.

Authoritarian governments come in many forms, and each of these can combine with the other forms to create a different kind of government. Each culture has its own twists, and the world builder should consider the culture and decide which of the following is the most logical outgrowth of the people’s history. This style of government accords most strongly with the lawful alignments.

Aristocracy: The rule of the “best,” in which the most accomplished members of society make decisions to help guide the rest. This often begins as a meritocracy, but frequently devolves into a plutocracy.
Kleptocracy: A corruption-based government, generally based on a fallen version of other models of rule.
Magocracy: Rule by mages, wizards, or shamans.
Monarchy: Rule by a single person, with varying degrees of absolutism and heredity involved.
Plutocracy: Rule by the wealthy.
Theocracy: Rule by priests or by the church.

Anarchic governments are, by their very nature, limited in size. When people need to work together, they must do so by choice, rather than being forced through the threat of a greater government’s might. Some of these societies involve smaller tribal units, answering to a chief or matron, who sits on a (mostly) allied council of similar representatives. Members cannot (or do not) force each other into anything, except perhaps by threats of force or economic embargo. This form of government tends to give way to charismatic and ambitious leaders who establish an authoritarian government of one sort or another, and thus it usually exists for a relatively short time. But it can also arise in cultures with strong notions of individual liberty—both in expecting freedom and demanding it from others—which may make it more stable.

Democratic governments are a matter of definition. How free is the society, and who is free to vote? In ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy, the councils were open only to male citizens; no slaves or women had a voice in the assembly. It is up to the world builder to determine who receives a vote in these democratic societies. Does the democracy extend across more than a single grouping of people, as in a small nation, or is it confined to a people in one area? Do the people gather in citywide assemblies? How often do these assemblies meet? Do the people send representatives (as in a representative democracy), or do they vote by mass acclamation?

The laws of a culture grow out of its values, and the government grows from its laws. For the most part, law springs from one of the bedrock concepts of the culture: honor, religion, kinship, loyalty, money, power, tradition, and others. Using the cultural character developed earlier, the world builder should examine what this culture values and what behaviors it uses to reinforce these values. Who sets the laws? Who interprets them?

Another consideration: Do the laws permit precedent, meaning they build on previous judicial interpretations, or is every case decided afresh based on the statutes in ancient tomes? If it’s the latter, then the outcomes of similar cases may bear no resemblance to each other. If the former, then every case heard in court adds another wrinkle to the law that must be considered, and a new breed arises to deal with these interpretations: lawyers, advocates, or solicitors. Keep in mind also that a broad, national law with established precedent makes trade easier, since merchants no longer have to learn the vagaries of law in far-flung towns and counties—and this in turn strengthens the nation.

Economics

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 149
Every civilization that rises does so via the use of resources: goods that have both utility and scarcity. As noted above, people require shelter, food, clothing, and other goods simply to survive. Basic innovations help store food and create clothing faster, and these innovations free members of society to help produce still more inventions. At some point, communal wealth tends to move toward private ownership, which then requires trade. The earliest form of trade is barter, or the exchange of one good or service for another (or for social status). But what happens when one party needs something and the other doesn’t require his resources?

This leads to the introduction of commodity money, or trading for an agreed-upon middle resource such as obsidian, cocoa beans, bushels of wheat, or other useful goods. In time, intermediate forms of broadly accepted currency develop, based on stored value—in our world, a shekel indicated 1 bushel of barley, and basic coins were used as storage chits. With the invention of mining, metals could be extracted and used, and in time, the metal coins created came to represent stored value themselves. Thus the English pound came to represent 1 pound of silver. The appropriate coin could then be used to claim the value indicated from governments or banks.

An economy is a dynamic system, and what goes into it must affect another part. Using metal coins as money functions only as long as the supply remains relatively constant. If a major new silver mine introduces too much silver into the economy, the value of a silver coin decreases correspondingly. If a dragon hoards thousands of coins, they have essentially disappeared from the economy, causing the value of the remaining coins to increase; their reintroduction upon the dragon’s death causes the devaluation of the rest of the coins in circulation. That is to say: Too great a supply of anything decreases demand and therefore decreases value; too little increases the demand and thus increases value. It is the world builder’s job to determine what goods and services are valuable in the culture—be they hard coins, precious gems, or ephemera such as honor.

The following pages outline several types of societies.

Archives of Nethys

Rules Index | GM Screen

Cultural Considerations

Core Elements of the People

Government and Law

Economics