Building a Culture

Wrap up

This article set out to give you hints about building a culture, and to provide some questions you should ask yourself about a culture as you are creating it. I only want to include one more thing.

The most important thing to remember about culture, and the people who are a part of it, is that they believe in what their culture tells them. If a person's culture says that lights in the sky are demons, then they'll believe that and react to it appropriately. I read an article on this topic on GamaSutra once. The example the author gave was in regard to a rod of lightning, a powerful and rare magical item, used in a fantasy universe. The author stressed that if someone were to actually find such an thing, they wouldn't react to it in a humdrum fashion, "Ho-hum, a rod of lightning. Guess I'll put it on the shelf with the rest of my bric-a-brac." Their reaction would be more like "Oh my GOD, this stick shoots lightning. Do I really want to mess with it? What if it goes off and blows my hand off? What if the wizard who owns this thing wants it back? This is some powerful s*@t I'm messin with and I don't know if I can handle it," and so on. While part of this reaction is derived from the person's own personality, it's also derived from the person's culture. In this case, the culture says rods of lightning exist, and they're dangerous things.

Okay, so what about the people who don't believe everything their culture tells them. Well, these descendants will either be ignored or hunted down and exterminated, depending on what part of the culture they don't believe in, and how much of a threat they pose to the people in power. History is filled with people who didn't believe in the status-quo and paid for it with their lives. But even this outcome is culturally conditioned. If their culture didn't hold that some belief was true, it wouldn't be around for someone to refute.

I guess my only point in all of this is that culture is important and you shouldn't ignore it, otherwise your settings won't be believable and your characters will probably be two-dimensional.