{"id":1986,"date":"2008-11-19T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T17:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1986"},"modified":"2008-11-19T12:20:44","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T17:20:44","slug":"gm-adviceculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1986","title":{"rendered":"GM Advice:<br\/>Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"?p=1955\">I&#8217;ve said before<\/a> that one of my goals in designing a campaign setting is to add a few touches that makes the world seem larger or deeper than it really is.  Giving the impression of a strong and robust setting can make the world come alive for players and encourage them to approach things in-character.  If done right, those extra details can also serve as a starting point for additional detail when the players dive into the blank areas of the map or engage NPC&#8217;s you&#8217;ve never written or even envisioned.  <\/p>\n<p>The cornerstone of this approach is in coming up with plausible or interesting cultures.  It&#8217;s also my favorite part of the process. It certainly gives the largest dividends in terms of how much time it takes versus how much (percieved) detail it adds.  A few minutes spent adding cultural flavor can make a simple village seem almost Tolkienesque in scope.  Culture is a fa&agrave;\u00a7ade behind which the thrifty GM can hide his lazyness and lack of prep time.  <\/p>\n<p>And note here that when I say &#8220;culture&#8221; I&#8217;m mostly talking about the customs that surround basic life events like birth, marriage, and death, and daily habits that surround basic activities like eating, sleeping, bathing, and recreation.<\/p>\n<p>Note that I don&#8217;t suggest using <strong>all<\/strong> of the things listed below. This is just a list of some cultural ingredients that amuse me, or that I didn&#8217;t get a chance to use in any of the games I&#8217;ve run.  I suggest taking the standard off-the-shelf setting and adding a couple of these ideas for flavor.  Obviously the more you change, the more strange and foreign the place will seem.  <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div class=\"date\">Superstitions &#038; Random Customs<\/div>\n<p>Superstitions are easy to devise and add a nice bit of color to the NPC&#8217;s in the world.  They&#8217;re just repackaged advice, or an effort to influence the outcome of something over which you don&#8217;t really have any control.  Some of it might be rooted in some sort of truth, some of it can just be random action.  It can even be counter-productive!  It&#8217;s easy and requires no research whatsoever.  Just think up something amusing or plausible and have your NPC&#8217;s believe it.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s bad luck for both people to fish out the same side of the boat.<\/li>\n<li>Well water drawn after dark is unhealthy.<\/li>\n<li>Wear lots of flowers if you&#8217;re trying to get pregnant.<\/li>\n<li>When the harvest comes in, we take the first loaf of bread and scatter it for the birds.<\/li>\n<li>If at all possible, unmarried women and unmarried men should not sit on the same side of the table.<\/li>\n<li>At dinner, nobody may eat until all the guests have tasted the food. (This should freak out overly suspicious players.)\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"date\">Language<\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;m no philologist, and making up a fake language (or even the roots of one) is far beyond my abilities.  More importantly, doing so would be a lot of work, and hard work is for suckers.  <\/p>\n<p>I get a lot of mileage out of seasoning the local language with a few words that might reflect a bit about how the people in the given city think.  I don&#8217;t generally make up new words, but instead just slap together new ways of using words or new phrases. <\/p>\n<p>I often make these up as I go, but sometimes I&#8217;ll jot one down in the margins if it comes to me ahead of time.  Some examples:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn a mining town, talking about someone who is a hard worker: <em>Oh him?  That fella is a stonedigger.  He&#8217;ll give you a day and a half of work for a day&#8217;s wages. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a fishing village: <em>I wouldn&#8217;t ask the mayor for help, she&#8217;s already got more fish than she can fit in her boat.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A Farmer, talking about a brute:  <em>Stay clear of that one.  He&#8217;s all ox and no plow.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A peasant, talking about someone who doesn&#8217;t worship any gods:  <em>That fella&#8217;s knees don&#8217;t bend.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a large city, &#8220;Alley-Prince&#8221; is a derogatory term commoners use for illegitimate sons the King has fathered with various peasant women.  The idea being that these children are born in an alley.  I like this because it tells us a lot about the king (hedonistic and callous) and the people.  (Concerned over matters of birth and lineage.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A phrase here and there can make it feel like these folks have <em>lots<\/em> of phrases or words. <\/p>\n<div class=\"date\">Marriage<\/div>\n<p>Just about every culture has a boatload of customs dealing with courtship and marriage. The players probably won&#8217;t run into this unless they hang around for an extended time, but they&#8217;re effortless to devise and I like to have them handy. Some of these customs can double as quest hooks.<\/p>\n<p>You can present a more modern view of things if you want players to feel comfortable, but I find it&#8217;s interesting to present a more authentic (i.e. blatantly sexist) culture and see how players react.  This can be interesting in moderation.  (If players run into the &#8220;women as cattle&#8221; attitude <em>everywhere<\/em> they go they&#8217;ll either get used to it or grow to loathe and resent the world, and you might not want that.)  A truly authentic world might be too dreary and grim for most groups, but the occasional dysfunctional (by our standards) town might challenge the players to confront issues like morality vs. law.  <\/p>\n<p>Some examples of marriage customs that amuse me:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One day a year is &#8220;Wedding Day&#8221;, and all engaged couples get married on that day.  (You&#8217;re not truly engaged unless you plan to get hitched this coming Wedding Day.  Otherwise, you&#8217;re just &#8220;courting&#8221;.) It takes place in a single large ceremony \/ banquet, and is presided over by the mayor \/ chief priest \/ sheriff \/ judge \/ innkeeper \/ richest guy in town \/ etc. You can have lots of fun devising what that ceremony would look like and what the procedures would be.  <\/p>\n<p>Men take two wives. One they take on as they enter adulthood.  This wife is chosen based on intelligence, skill, and work ethic.  She&#8217;s expected to help her husband get rolling as he begins his career.  The second wife is taken on once he&#8217;s established himself financially.  (Usually around thirty or so.)  She&#8217;s chosen based on looks and breeding potential.  Men who only take one wife are viewed as a failure.  Fathers tend to work to get their beautiful daughters married as a Second Wife of a wealthy man, and unload their ugly daughters as First Wives.  Note that for this to work women have to outnumber men by a good portion, which is common enough in warlike societies where lots of men die in war.  <\/p>\n<p>All marriages are arranged by parents, except that women (and only women) are free to leave one husband and take another after five years.  (Perhaps the custom was originally designed to keep women from starving in the company of a man who just couldn&#8217;t feed her, but later evolved into a system where the woman could leave any time she thought she could get a better deal elsewhere.)  If a woman leaves her man, he is disgraced as a failure. This leads to women having all sorts of unseen power in what is otherwise a stringent patriarchy.  Men in unhappy marriages end up bribing their wives to stay to protect their reputations and business relationships.  This would make a town where men hold all the offices but the real power is wielded by the wives of those men, which would make things very &#8220;interesting&#8221; for any visiting adventuring parties who wanted to conduct business with the local government.  Doubly so if any of them are [un]lucky enough to be attractive to the wives of those leaders. Do try not to grin when your players realize the trouble they&#8217;re about to get into.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"date\">Eating<\/div>\n<p>Nothing says &#8220;We&#8217;re not in Kansas anymore&#8221; like being invited to diner by some crazy foreigners.  If you want your world to feel different or strange, give the people some unexpected eating customs. A historical example might be useful:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>No disrespect to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)\">The Last Supper<\/a>, but Jesus and his followers almost certainly did <em>not<\/em> sit around a banquet table with dishes and utensils.  In that culture, tables were low to the ground, and they didn&#8217;t use chairs.  You propped yourself up on your left arm and ate with your right. Diners would tear off bits from a loaf of bread and dip it into whatever they were eating. (Some sort of meat or sauce, one assumes?)  Hence the phrase &#8220;breaking bread&#8221;. The bread did double-duty as a utensil. <\/p>\n<p>Suddenly all those customs about foot-washing before meals make sense:  The guy to your right was going to be very close to your feet, and simple decency would suggest that you get the funk off them before you recline at the table.  This also explains odd-sounding situations where it talks about someone &#8220;reclining&#8221; on Jesus.  That sounds goofy for guys in chairs, but when you&#8217;re propped up on the floor it&#8217;s perfectly natural.  You&#8217;re done with the meal, your left arm is probably tired, you want to lean back and have some conversation, so you lean against the legs of the guy to your left.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can come up with lots of interesting behaviors and customs by just changing a few assumptions about how people eat. Note how just changing something as small as the furniture led to a completely different experience.   The low table makes for a very intimate setting and brings about the need for foot hygiene.  It changes the food itself, since it has to be something you can eat with one hand.<\/p>\n<p>This is a pretty good approach to making your own culture.  Change something about the tools or furniture the people use to eat, and see how that would impact everything else.  Maybe people eat from a common trough with great big spoons. Maybe there is no table, and people sit in a chair and eat with their hands from a bowl in their lap.  Maybe they sit on long benches around a fire where everyone throws their bones and scraps. <\/p>\n<p>But really, almost any change from the &#8220;generic village of stock peasants with an Inn&#8221; is likely to make a world a lot more interesting. It might even get your players to stop quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a few minutes.  (But probably not.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve said before that one of my goals in designing a campaign setting is to add a few touches that makes the world seem larger or deeper than it really is. Giving the impression of a strong and robust setting can make the world come alive for players and encourage them to approach things in-character. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[126],"class_list":["post-1986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games","tag-gm-advice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}