# Creating a culture in a fantasy world, any experience?



## Zeitzbach (Nov 26, 2014)

The hardest part in creating characters that I am experiencing so far is to make each race as unique as possible. Just throwing random characters into a setting isn't really fun especially in a fantasy world. Racism exists even in a world of mythical dragon, fairies and anthro. There are races that prefer to live on tree, land or sea. Humans normally try to conquer everything because of how fast they reproduce or because of how simple and generic they are that they have to have strenght in number. etc etc.

But what exactly caused those to happen? What caused them to fight? Why do they live in that certain location? Why do they dress this way? Why do they act like this? The only way you can really answer those in detail is that you can come up with the history and culture for those races.

Languages
Clothings
Way of life
And many other more.

Without those, the stories end up feeling like it's just another one of those "Sitcom with different characters with different personality" kind. Why are the reptile and canine character behaving exactly the same way? Why do they talk to the humans and understand all their jokes like it's nothing? It doesn't feel big. It doesn't feel like there's an actual setting there. In a fantasy novel, this is completely unacceptable to me. Character development may be great and all but if it doesn't even feel "fantasy" then I can just replace all my cast with a random human using the same personalities and it will be exactly the same thing.

I'm pretty sure a bunch of you have experiences with creating stuffs like original languages or very detailed races and can share their experiences on this so I can get some ideas on stuffs I'm working on. Been adding stuffs over the year as I write to many races I create for my fic such as trying to add varieties to the clothing motif (refering to their environment while factoring in past trading and influences so designs between characters aren't too similiar) and holy hell, creating one or two more languages and pattern to further divide the beasts, fairies and humans is such a pain in the ass. I can't have a scene where only couple of people in the party are capable of reading some inscription off the wall because it is of their language until I get that done.


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## RedSavage (Nov 26, 2014)

Honestly I kind of take from the cultures of real life and bend them to suit my purposes. Or I'll pick and choose from different cultures and make something seemingly new and fresh. Like if I had a species that was nomadic, cold hardened, stone faced, and somewhat crazy, I'd have something between stereotypical Russian and a Gypsy. Doesn't matter if it's really accurate ways to take from each side, but it's something new. This new blend would not be so conniving and colorful as gypsies, taking from Russian seriousness, but they also wouldn't have the 'motherland' sense of loyalty. They'd be very much for themselves. 

Bam. Unique species culture. This is where being globally in touch with many different cultures (no matter how slight or inaccurate) really comes in handy.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 26, 2014)

RedSavage said:


> Honestly I kind of take from the cultures of real life and bend them to suit my purposes. Or I'll pick and choose from different cultures and make something seemingly new and fresh. Like if I had a species that was nomadic, cold hardened, stone faced, and somewhat crazy, I'd have something between stereotypical Russian and a Gypsy. Doesn't matter if it's really accurate ways to take from each side, but it's something new. This new blend would not be so conniving and colorful as gypsies, taking from Russian seriousness, but they also wouldn't have the 'motherland' sense of loyalty. They'd be very much for themselves.
> 
> Bam. Unique species culture. This is where being globally in touch with many different cultures (no matter how slight or inaccurate) really comes in handy.



I completely forgot the Gypsy and Nomadic. Those would probably work with the race I did that move around alot from one forest to another. Could be because I focused way too much on their anthro side I completely disregarded all the normal human stuffs. Their clothing and design is something I can easily use too.


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## RedSavage (Nov 26, 2014)

Yeah and think. There's the sort of (to us westerners) mystic and bustling Arabic and Indian cultures. The stoic, quiet culture if Native Americans. The loud, rough, and smiling Australians. The formalness of certain Asian cultures. Canadian. Mexican. Texan. Bostonian. Really, there's no end to the cultures you can pick as choose from. 

Cowboy Bebop had a blend of Western cowboy, a bit of Arabic (especially in the inner city scenes), and Japanese all rolled into one. That's one of the better examples I can think of.


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## Chuchi (Nov 26, 2014)

It's stories within stories within stories, as far as my opinion goes. 

You start with the story you _want _to write. And then, within that story, there are people or places that need their _own _stories. And then more stories and stories and [insert Inception references all over the place here.]
I can relate to your plight. My baby, the project that consumes all the free time of my life (not spent dicking around on the internet, ahem), I've had to create from the ground up. I had to create the world, the nations, the people, their histories, their cultures, their languages, their fears, their superstitions, their languages, their idioms, their stereotypes, it's kind of draining, really. Because it's all preparation for the story I _want _to tell, but the way I see it, if you want to invite someone into this world that you've created, you have to be sure it's gonna be a good world, you know? So I can't get to the parts I want to write, because I just don't feel my foundations are solid enough yet. _Yet_.

As I understand it, this phase is more or less what you are trying to do as well. So the best suggestion I can make is consistent framework. It's so tempting to dive into the juicy parts and write what you -want- to write, but you have to support the continuity. No matter how good the story is, at least to me, if there are holes and weak points in the world, it rapidly begins to detract from my enjoyment of being there. I see this most often when it comes to _really excited _first time fantasy fiction writers, where they are so excited to tell their story they forget to spend some time laying solid foundations, and then later down the line, stuff starts to crisscross back on itself and not make sense. 

So, separate your races/species and select one. Relate that to reality, as Red mentioned (since we berry pick what we like about reality and mix and match it into our fantasy worlds to get stuff we like), and consider the origin of that species, let's say. How and where and when and why they evolved. What they evolved from. Or how they came into being. How they interacted with each other in the beginning, if the species followed traditional evolution. Do some research into the origins of human culture and societies and see how you can flex and bend that to match your species in your world. The more solid your foundation, the easier it is to build on top of it. Then things like way of life and language and religion will just roll from you, since you'll have come to understand where your 'people' came from, how and why, when and where, and you'll be able to route the best course for them, design their histories, know who it makes sense they're enemies with and why, etc. 

I mean, that's pretty much my process. I created the world from the ground up, then created the different continents, then the individual countries. And then the people. And then selected one country and built that and its people up, then moved on to the next, then the next, and after that was done, I had the fun part of intertwining their histories and their stories and their cultures and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's a lot of work, I know. It sounds boring, and sometimes it is, but in the end, I can chart out every war, treaty, assassination, important birth, death, marriage, etc from all of the countries in my world and very smoothly link their importance to the plot and protagonists without having to second guess myself or worry about the continuity. 

Anyway, I hope that helps. I know not everyone follows the same process, but again, berry pick what you like, leave what you don't. 
Good luck on the writing process! C:


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## RedSavage (Nov 26, 2014)

I also go with a reverse engineering approach. Say I want a happy go luck, loyal, but fiercely adaptable and capable bushwacker. Someone who wrestles a wild jibberjub to the ground with their bare paw/claws/hands or whatever. Id think of a backstory that has no mention of war or civil discourse. No racial problems or xenophobia. But they come from a more or less semi-advance culture where they had to spend more time fighting nature and wildlife than each other. A place where the biggest concen was once making sure they had fortifications big enough to defend from a wakkawakka (a giant, yellow, all devouring beast that turns blue when angry). So with the arrival of new tech from thankfully friendly aliens, all their problems more or less get solved and they're just kinda happy to be here and with guns stronger than their old predators.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 26, 2014)

Chuchi said:


> *It's stories within stories within stories*, as far as my opinion goes.
> 
> You start with the story you _want _to write. And then, within that story, there are people or places that need their _own _stories. And then more stories and stories and [insert Inception references all over the place here.]
> I can relate to your plight. My baby, the project that consumes all the free time of my life (not spent dicking around on the internet, ahem), I've had to create from the ground up. I had to create the world, the nations, the people, their histories, their cultures, their languages, their fears, their superstitions, their languages, their idioms, their stereotypes, it's kind of draining, really. Because it's all preparation for the story I _want _to tell, but the way I see it, if you want to invite someone into this world that you've created, you have to be sure it's gonna be a good world, you know? So I can't get to the parts I want to write, because I just don't feel my foundations are solid enough yet. _Yet_.
> ...



Damn that bolded. It's already annoying creating a story but having to create another story inside it. Yes!

Making the framework consistent really is a hard thing to do that has to be tread lightly. It's really is hard to make the history juicy. The darn history class we take pretty much show how easy those are easy to bore us most of the time that we just skip it althought those are truly necessary in order to create the present setting. 

What sucks the most though is that I had this framework I had been working with for a year for the story as I worked on other contents. 3 chapters in and I'm like

"Eh I guess I will just make it a twist and say the past was a lie all along and maybe the MC race will know something about this all along. Guess that will also work well for history and culture of that said race."

And boom!

Somehow I was able to stick to that plot to this very day though but yeah, it ends up being a story being told with ANOTHER story being told to cover an actual story that will later be told just for the background. All for the sake of just trying to make a single race has much better depth and hopefully create a chain reaction that will cause the other races to evolve on their own somehow. It's fun though  but it takes ages as single chapter can take a whole month of revising so it will write the background itself as I reread it and I can't predict where it's really heading anymore so I just work on the other solid stuffs like languages as I wait for that exact chapter to stabilize by itself. Hopefully after enough chapters the darn thing will actually finish the whole race by itself.


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## RedSavage (Nov 26, 2014)

Be careful not to get caught up in backstory that you never get the now story down.


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## Zeitzbach (Nov 26, 2014)

RedSavage said:


> Be careful not to get caught up in backstory that you never get the now story down.



Haha, yeah. I used to be like "Time to finish this arc! New chapter hopefully next week" and now I'm like "Sorry guise! It took a month for just 3 pages because I kept fixing this and that because it could be linked to event A and B which leads to C and caused R that will be presented in like 3 more chapters which talks about what happened 5 chapters ago which explains this race and this character in general."


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## chesse20 (Nov 27, 2014)

creating a culture in fantasy world is easy just like real life without all the hard work. U just tell the book characters to put some bacteria or fungi or w/e in a science plate and wait a bit and you've grown a culture


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## RTDragon (Nov 27, 2014)

Hmm i know there's a lot of writing tips and things on tumblr that you might like that i've reblogged. I'll take a look sometime and see what can help you.


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## Kookyfox (Nov 28, 2014)

I'm not a writer though I have read a lot of science fiction, in which usually you find worlds with cultures created from scratch by the author.

It seems like they usually extrpolate from the culture of an existing or extinct terrestrial civilisation. 
You can do anything really as longs as it fits the rules of your own world.
One thing I have noticed though is that authors never directly explain the backstory of a culture.
They either let the reader guess what it is all about with subtle clues, like solving a puzzle (one piece of a puzzle alone makes no sense, but the more you combine them the more you understand the patterns of it)
Or they introduce a "child" or "stranger" type of character that is shown how things work in this society through other charcters of the story,( this only work if you do the narration from the point of view of this character)
and vice versa: you could have your narrator be a "mentor" who explains the world to a student character.
Whatever the author does, he alaways leaves some dark spots, so the reader can speculate and get more involved in the story.

Hope it helps


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## Roose Hurro (Dec 4, 2014)

Chuchi said:


> So, separate your races/species and select one. Relate that to reality, as Red mentioned (since we berry pick what we like about reality and mix and match it into our fantasy worlds to get stuff we like), *and consider the origin of that species, let's say. How and where and when and why they evolved. What they evolved from. Or how they came into being. How they interacted with each other in the beginning, if the species followed traditional evolution. Do some research into the origins of human culture and societies and see how you can flex and bend that to match your species in your world.* The more solid your foundation, the easier it is to build on top of it. Then things like way of life and language and religion will just roll from you, since you'll have come to understand where your 'people' came from, how and why, when and where, and you'll be able to route the best course for them, design their histories, know who it makes sense they're enemies with and why, etc.



I have a species I created, evolved from snake-hunting predators (very large snakes, by the way), and from all the physical/anatomical/behavioral bits I came up with, I built them a culture based on "trust bonds"... a civilization in which Trust became a form of currency.  If nobody trusts you, you are "trust poor" and unable to do any business, unable to "make a living" in society.  That particular concept became my center for their collective species behavior, for how they interact on a personal as well as public level.  Trust being extended to family members first, then to public "trust bonds" when it came to those just met.  To strangers and those not of family.

Funny thing is, it all just flooded out, so I have to honestly say it didn't take _me_ much effort.  So I have no idea how it would work with you.  In this case, for me, it was pretty automatic, though in other cases it can take and has taken me years to develop cultural concepts for my alien critters.  Hopefully you can find some middle ground.


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