The Art of World Building Podcast Transcripts Volumes 4-6 (eBook Bundle)

Episode 21 Part 1 - How to Create Cultures
Defining Culture

To get started, we should have a good idea of what culture is. Most of us have some idea, but, at the same time, we’re also kind of vague about that. So, let’s get specific.

One way of looking at culture is that it is the lifestyle for a social group, and that social group could be anything. On Earth it could be Christians, another religion, metal heads, punk rockers, nerds, jocks or pretty much anything. Each one of these groups has its own culture. At the same time, they belong to a larger culture. So, we could have all of the groups I just mentioned living in the United States, which has a sort of broader culture that encompasses all of those. You can think of this as a culture scope. And when we are trying to invent culture, we should figure out what scope are we inventing it for. Am I just creating something for a little group like the metal heads, or am I creating a culture for a region or a country?

Culture is also a set of expectations about how people are supposed to behave. Anytime we have a culture clash between one character and others, what’s usually happening is those expectations are not being met. Anytime an expectation is not met, that usually causes a negative reaction. That negative reaction causes some emotions, and it also causes judgment about the person who is not meeting our expectations — whether those judgments are fair or not. A simple example would be that if you’re driving a car in the United States, you’re on the highway and you’re going to turn off, you’re supposed to use your turn signal. That’s what our expectation is. That’s part of our culture. So, if someone doesn’t do it, you’re behind them and you don’t understand why they’re slowing down, and then, at the last second, they suddenly turn off the road, sometimes we get angry that they were rude to us by not letting us know what they were planning to do. At its simplest level, this is basically what culture is.

Culture Origins
The next question, then, becomes, “Where do these expectations come from?” The answer is basically values, beliefs and morals. These are what we might call the origins of culture, and they manifest in specific ideas. For example, if the value is being polite to people, then in the example about the car driver, they weren’t being polite to us, or they weren’t being courteous. And if courteousness is a value, then they have offended that value. The important point here is that we’ve got the points of origin, which are these values, beliefs and morals, and then we have the manifestations. To some extent, they really do come in that order, and that’s the order that we’re going to talk about them today.
In other words, when we are trying to invent a culture, we should start with those beliefs, values and morals, and then work on how they manifest.

That’s not to say that we can’t think of specific issues that are happening, the specific manifestations, but we always need to have some idea of what the original source is, otherwise we might be creating cultural aspects that conflict with each other. I think of that as cultural vision, and we’ll talk more about that in a few minutes.

So, let’s take a look at the points of origin for a culture. As we get started here, I want you to think about a kind of hierarchy where culture might exist at the sovereign power level, such as a kingdom, and then at the regional level within that kingdom, and then the settlements within that, and then within there you would have different social groups. That said, those social groups can exist across different settlements and regions. One reason we want to think of it this way is that there is a kind of inheritance from the larger picture, like the sovereign power level, all the way down to that small social group.

One reason to think of it this way is that we may want to focus first on the government type that this place has. Why does this matter? Well, a democracy is going to have a very different set of ideas that are being promoted by that government versus a totalitarian dictatorship. In Episode 14, which was actually three different episodes (14.1, 14.2, 14.3), we discussed in some detail the different types of sovereign powers. So, I’m not going to rehash those de-tails, but I want you to pay attention to that hierarchy when you are starting to create a culture.

Episodes Included

1: Intro to the Podcast

2: How to Use Analogues

3: How Many Worlds to Build

4.1 and 4.2: How to Create Gods and Pantheons

5.1, 5.2, 5.3: How to Create Species and Races

6: How to Create World Figures

7: How to Create Monsters

8: How to Create Plants

9: How to Create Animals

10.1 and 10.2: How to Create Undead

22: Assign Senses to Species11.1 and 11.2: How to Create Planets

12: How to Create a Continent

13.1 and 13.2: How to Create Land Features

14.1, 14.2, and 14.3: How to Create Sovereign Powers

15.1 and 15.2: How to Create Settlements

16: Travel Over Land

17: Travel Over Water

18: Travel In Space

19: Create Time & History

20: Create Places of Interest

21: How To Create Maps

23: Creating Names

24: Organizations

25: Armed Forces

26: Religions

27.1-27.4: Cultures

28: Languages

29: The Supernatural

30: Items

31.1, 31.2: Magic Systems

32: Other Systems

33: Conclusion

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