I've talked about mingling Norse and Iroqouis traditions when creating the culture of the Vetrur, and how the Doro people are a mixture of Mongol and Apache influences. It's very clear that the other Allied Nations of Angarn, Cymrik, and the Cualish Free States are drawn from Medieval and Renaissance influences: predominately Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern in their origins. Kever is drawn heavily from historical Egyptian and other Super- and Sub- Saharan cultures. Harak-Ur, if you haven't guessed, was influenced heavily by Babylonian and Sumerian mythology and culture.
Why?
Why not just create my cultures out of whole-cloth, and come up with really new, interesting, novel stuff?
Easy.
Because creating entire cultures and their respective idioms, biases, traditions, and methods is really amazingly difficult to do believably.
No, I mean, it really is. It is phenomenally hard to come up with truly unique and novel cultural concepts that haven't been done before, and then, on top of it all, to do it believably.
Don't buy it? I'll prove it to you.
Star Wars.
Star Wars?
Star Wars.
The universe presented to us in Star Wars is one of strange alien races, with enormous walking carpets, snooty robots, and so many aliens. Man, look at all those aliens. Oh, and laser swords! And crazy mystical magical powers!
And Star Wars just all fits together, man. It is so interlocking and well woven, it is a brilliant piece of world-building. Every planet is one of extremes, which leads to an interesting Mono-Climate scenario for each planet - which in turn influences all manner of behavior in the way people develop culturally. The people of Tattooine are so completely different from the people of Coruscant, who are in turn super different from the cultures on other worlds that aren't monolithic City Complexes. The aliens are alien and they aren't just people in funny suits.
It's an amazing piece of whole-cloth world-building, isn't it?
Except, it's really not.
There is absolutely nothing in Star Wars that doesn't come from somewhere in Human culture and history, somewhere. The reason the Rebellion fighting the Empire strikes such a chord in us when we watch the movies is that we understand the struggle between the underdog and the oppressor. The reason we identify with the people of Coruscant and their hustle-bustle city-planet life, and we can so easily contrast it with Farm Boy Anakin Skywalker, is because we are familiar with the disparity between the country boy and the city boy. We immediately accept Obi-Wan Kenobi's explanation that "sand people always ride single file to hide their numbers" because this is a plausible scenario for a culture of savage, desert dwelling nomads. And we understand the concept of "savage, desert dwelling nomads" because (for better or worse) we have grown up on the idea that such things exist. The "oh-so-alien" Aliens? Not even they are exempt from this. They are bombastic and prone to overblowing their own importance. They are crime lords and shady junk dealers and jittery-nerved co-pilots. There is nothing about any of the aliens in Star Wars that doesn't resonate with us as part of the Human experience somewhere, somehow. Even the concept of The Force comes from a place buried in the Human psyche and in our collective experience - The Force is an analog to magic, to mysticism, to the careful and controlled application of martial force in pursuit of a higher ideal. It at once combines Western magical theatrics with Eastern mysticism. It is at once a fencing school combining longsword techniques from Middle and Northern Europe with Japanese techniques and the type of balefire-and-lightning sorcery that we reserve for the most powerful of all fantasy magicians.
Star Wars combines our world's historical trials - all-consuming wars that bring upheaval on a cultural level, the desire for freedom, the need for spiritual guidance, and the cautionary tales of granting too much power to any single body - and distills them down into a series of adventures and stories that speak to us of a time long ago, in a place far away. How does it do this? If all that's being done is taking these aspects of the Human experience and moving them around, then how did the universe of Star Wars become so unique?
Simple: Because Mr. Lucas and the others involved in its creation knew that story telling, world building, is like making a quilt. You don't make a quilt from whole cloth. You make it from scraps, from pieces. You have a few large pieces of cloth, you have a few medium-sized pieces of cloth, and a very large number of smaller pieces. Scraps, bits, leftovers. Ask any quilter - a quilt is a story. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to the story of the quilt. The quilt can be made to a pattern, sure, but more often than not, the quilt builds itself from what you put into it.
The same is true of game worlds. I put it to you that it is easier to build a believable, enjoyable game world (or heck, any work of fictional world-building) if you take familiar aspects of the real world (the oft-mentioned Human experience from this essay) and turn them ever so slightly on their ears, than if you sit down and say "Today I am going to build a world where everyone lives in magical trees, no one ever uses gender pronouns, and the word for 'war' doesn't exist."
I am not saying it cannot be done. In fact, that kind of sounds like a neat idea, and it would be awesome to see someone do it. I am saying that you will have more luck if you take a cue from the world we live in than if you attempt to go it without. The Human experience is a vast and amazing tapestry. It's full of myths and legends that are begging to be adapted to your story.
You don't have to recreate the entirety of Regency Era France in your game world (unless that's your thing), nor do you have to fall prey to the temptation to make your Sub-Saharan African analog cultures into skin-wearing savages (which is not only really annoying and overdone, but is also buying into "dark skinned savage" tropes that I am really truly tired of seeing in so many fantasy RPG worlds... sorry. Got away from myself, there). You can grab the bits of Norse and Iroquois culture you find coolest and mingle them liberally with the cosmology of your world, turning them into a long-standing, proud people. You can, if you choose, grab Late-Period Victorian England and run it headlong into 1950's Americana, if you really want to. (And as a side note, if you don't think those two eras are story- and culturally- compatible, you're not paying attention.)
When you are building your world, then, look around at your favorite periods of history and your favorite bits of culture and philosophy, and ask yourself "How can I make this work in my game world?"
Odds are, when you figure that out, you'll have the basis of a really amazing quilt.
This is definitely solid advice. A lot of people will say that "it's all been done before" and use that as a derogatory statement towards modern stories, that they can't be better than what happened before because the stories have all been told.
ReplyDeleteWhich, frankly, is preposterous. There's nothing wrong with telling a story that's already been told. Shakespeare's stories were all told before he was and now people consider him the greatest who ever lived. You just have to take those stories and make them YOURS.