Rules | GM Screen

<- Return to All Rules (Group by Source)
<- Return to Creating a World

All Rules in Creating a World

Core Elements of the People +

⁺ An entry marked with this has additional sections within it.

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?

Archives of Nethys

Rules | GM Screen

All Rules in Creating a World

Cultural Considerations

Core Elements of the People