Alternative methods of setting creation

[Gold Roger]

This really is a good take on inside out, world building. Especially if you're like me and most people I play with: We don't care to much about exact scientistic sociology, geograph or natural laws. For the player that does, fine, than he can take care about that part of the world, because I don't know enough about it (except maybe sociology). It's a take I'll try in my upcoming games, my only concern is that some of my players may not care enough about it. But this kind of player world building has already sometimes sneaked into the more trivial aspects of our campaigns and allways been fun then.

 

[fuindordm]

This is a very interesting post. I've clipped bits of it more to serve as referents for myself in writing my responses than as representative of Fungasite's complex arguments; please do not, therefore, take the shortness of the quotes as lack of context.

The worlds I make, in many respects, are experienced like mystery novels... Essentially the entire world, campaign, etc. is a puzzle that both the players and characters ultimately decipher and solve, rectifying whatever flaw or evil act I have built into the system.

Such campaigns, I agree, are immensely satisfying when all the players are on board with it. I love to play in games like this; I love to figure out (or try to figure out) what's going on, and to participate in a grand story. The downside to this approach, which I've successfully implemented only once myself, is that the players are often not 'on board'. That's not to say that they're not willing to follow the story you've set out, but even with a good group of players they *will* miss clues and go in the wrong direction, probably more often than not. Even very good players will do this more than you expect simply because they are not as invested in the world or story as the DM is. They are invested in their characters, and unless you create characters for them to play that match your expectations for the story, it's highly unlikely that you'll end up with a party that has all the proper motivations.

So you as the DM have to strike a balancing act between coherence of the story and free will of the players. My own personal GMing style pushes me more towards the latter; I'd rather sacrifice aspects of the story so that the players feel in full control of their actions and goals, than have the players leave the table with the feeling that they've been railroaded.

Good DMing takes, above all, adaptability, and the ideal 'Story World' has a rich enough symbolism that even if the players go in the wrong direction, you can work with their actions and link them back to the central theme (or even adopt another, equally satisfying theme mid-campaign).

Are there blank areas on the map?

If I create a world based on certain principles and a player unilaterally creates a piece of it that violates those principles, then the central plot, theme, etc. of the world can easily fall apart. Because I don't tell my PCs what the big universe-building equation behind my world is, we have to work a little differently. The player has to ask "If I wanted to play someone from over there, what would they be like?" Now, plenty of things about "over there" are up for grabs but some portion of them has been predefined because they inhere in the structure of the world itself.

This relates back to what I said above; for a Story World to work well, you need at the very least to put some strong limits on what kind of characters the players can create. My own experience in this kind of campaigning asked for characters that, broadly speaking, came from the more important viking-like culture and had reason to enter the service of the current king looking for fame and glory. Most did this, but there will always be people who want to be the exception--that party also had an asian-style ninja-like character and a female celtic druid, whose culture and politics brought them in conflict with the story at certain points.
Nothing insurmountable--actually, it was the most Viking-like character of the bunch that caused the worst problems, simply because he was the leader of the party in a lot of ways but also the most insular.

Between juggling player personalities (which people are most likely to direct the party), character motivations, and player investment in your creation, it really takes some luck to get one of these campaigns going.

Every world has a structure that implies that certain things can vary locally and individually and certain things are universal. Many people who play RPGs seem to like putting new things in the the "local and individual" column but rarely take anything out of that column and slot it into the "universal" category. I find the most vibrant and interesting worlds are ones that switch a few (not too many) between the two columns.

This is a very interesting point, and one that's already given me some ideas...

This is my favourite long gaming anecdote that I have tried to reduce so that it doesn't take 30 minutes to tell. This is the experience which sold me on metatextual gaming.

I played in a game in which the characters lived in a world called Midgaard. It was one of the nine worlds which were, in this specific order, Vanaheim, Elfheim, Midgaard, Asgaard, Jotunheim, Svartelfheim, Niflheim, Utgaard and Hel. There is no way I can replicate the incredible richness and genius of this campaign-- it is the second-best campaign I have ever been in.

A most enjoyable anecdote. It begs the question as to what the best campaign was, though...

Most fantasy worlds resist a metatextual reading because they are not designed to be figured out in this way. Most people who create fantasy worlds use the Jungian/HP Lovecraft method of reaching into the collective unconscious and pulling out whatever jumble of myth, history and invention they find. But I think the best writers and GMs create worlds that can be understood on both a textual and metatextual level.

I'm in full agreement with you here in principle, but it takes a *lot* of effort to put together a world that contains both levels of meaning along with enough diversity to adapt to the typical adventuring party's shenanigans without railroading them.

Most campaign worlds are constructed pixel by pixel -- some gigantic bitmap that someone has lovingly created; let's call that the imaginative campaign world. The kind of world I find most exciting is one which is, instead, generated by a single complex equation; let's call that the mytho-poetic campaign world. The difference between the two types of world is what happens if you zoom in or move off the screen.

I think that most people's first effort at a campaign world is very similar to the imaginative model that you describe. They take bits and pieces out of their favorite stories and myths, mush them all together, and if they have some talent as a writer to begin with make the result feel like a unified whole. If it never gets any deeper than that, then it's not a very satisfying world to play in on the storytelling level, although it can support a perfectly good game of D&D. (This is what Greyhawk feels like to me.)

The mytho-poetic world model that you describe, however, is no more satisfying to me to play in. If every aspect of the world is governed by the set of correspondances that the DM has chosen as the unifying theme for their campaign, then the world feels sterile--maybe not so much at first, but definitely after the players have figured out the theme. An ideal campaign world needs an element of historical and cultural randomness to it to give it verisimilitude.

What you haven't described is the middle ground. This is something I learned (of all places) from reading White Wolf products. You can have an imaginative campaign world that does not grow blocky and uninteresting when you zoom in. The key to creating such a world is layering your complexities. You can have a set of nations, OK--give each one a central theme, a metaphoric purpose, and enough distinguishing traits to spark role-playing interest and some political conflict. Again, the typical first effort at a campaign world stops here, and this is the appropriate place to stop if the DM wants their world to develop in full cooperation with the player's input.

Now focus on the nation where you expect the story to start, and zoom in. Identify a dozen or two regions, ethnicities, subcultures and movements within that nation that also provide interesting role-playing hooks and potential for interesting conflict.

Now focus on the story that you want to tell, and zoom in on elements of the story that are particularly important. Subdivide those elements again, adding a layer of complexity where it matters. Does it revolve around the inheritance of a throne? Plot out an extended family tree for three generations, and stat out some of the more important courtiers and their interests. Does it involve travel across a dangerous wasteland? Add a layer of complexity to the culture of the natives, rather than making their attitude universal.

In physics simulations, this technique is called adaptive gridding. The beauty of it is that you don't have to do it all ahead of time, and if the players go in an unexpected direction, you don't have much work to do to maintain the level of detail.

A single city can be just as satisfying a campaign setting as a whole world. What matters is whether you have enough complexity at the level of the story to drive the story, motivate the characters, and challenge the players.

Anyway, this is the approach that I prefer as a DM. It allows for symbolically meaningful storytelling, but I don't feel as constrained by it because the themes that I want to work in can be expressed at whatever layer the players happen to find themselves spending the most time.

Thanks again for a very informative and thought-provoking post.

Ben

 

[fusangite]

This is a very interesting post.

Oh good. When one maks such dangerously long posts, there is the danger that nobody will wade through the whole thing and, if they do, find it a rewarding experience.

The downside to this approach, which I've successfully implemented only once myself, is that the players are often not 'on board'. That's not to say that they're not willing to follow the story you've set out, but even with a good group of players they *will* miss clues and go in the wrong direction, probably more often than not.

When I do this kind of thing, I build worlds that fit with the mainstream classical Greek theory of how philsophy comes into being. Because the philosophy is part of the physical structure of the world itself, wherever you are and whatever you look at will reflect this structure. Unlike a murder mystery in which the truth can only be discovered by investigating phenomena proximate to the event, the nature of my universes is pretty much discoverable at any location within them. In a campaign I was co-GMing back in my home town and on which I continue to consult by phone, the place is littered with clues all referencing the same thing. We assume that 90+% of all clues will be ignored or missed but that's okay because the world is signifying to the characters everywhere all the time. As a GM, I don't know which aspects of the structure will be apprehended first and what the PCs' interim models of the universe will look like as they acquire pieces of knowledge in an unpredictable order.

So you as the DM have to strike a balancing act between coherence of the story and free will of the players. My own personal GMing style pushes me more towards the latter; I'd rather sacrifice aspects of the story so that the players feel in full control of their actions and goals, than have the players leave the table with the feeling that they've been railroaded.

That's why I (as opposed to my players) primarily navigate my campaigns metatexually rather than textually; having a unifying metatext drastically reduces the number of requirements that the text look a particular way. If I had a textually grounded definition of what the City of Glass was, then I would end up forcing the characters to end up in a city that was in a particular location, looked a particular way, was run by particular people. But because my only requirement is that the final place they go be, in some way symbolically readable as the City of Glass, there is minimal perceived railroading. The richer the metatextual level of the game, in my experience, the more the players' acts of discovery and acts of creation/invention collapse into one another at the textual level.{QUOTE]Good DMing takes, above all, adaptability, and the ideal 'Story World' has a rich enough symbolism that even if the players go in the wrong direction, you can work with their actions and link them back to the central theme (or even adopt another, equally satisfying theme mid-campaign).[/QUOTE]Exactamente!

This relates back to what I said above; for a Story World to work well, you need at the very least to put some strong limits on what kind of characters the players can create. My own experience in this kind of campaigning asked for characters that, broadly speaking, came from the more important viking-like culture and had reason to enter the service of the current king looking for fame and glory. Most did this, but there will always be people who want to be the exception--that party also had an asian-style ninja-like character and a female celtic druid, whose culture and politics brought them in conflict with the story at certain points.

Yep. I had two players quit in episode one because they didn't want to co-operate with the Venetians in their plan to find and seize the grail, in one case because the character wouldn't accept patriarchal authority and in another because he wouldn't accept Christianity. But then, I think that this problem plagues all kinds of campaigns that require the party to function as a team.

A most enjoyable anecdote. It begs the question as to what the best campaign was, though...

It was completely different. It was one of Teflon Billy's superhero campaigns called the Justice Hurricaine; it had no metatext; it was navigated primarily by the GM's incredible improvisational skills and unerring sense of genre. I used to commute to it 4.5 hours each way every week it was so damned great. As the GM expressed it, he had been planning for the campaign to be like The Watchmen but it ended up being The Tick; I've never laughed so hard or reliably in my entire life. We had a professional artist in the group who drew comic-book style frames of the action in the game. We had a guy who played a Japanese superhero who could move his lips independently of his words playing a Japanese superhero who was being dubbed into English. I played a creature who had been created by Soviet scientists as a spying device (it was a super-intelligent AI stuffed inside a teddy bear who could shoot deadly laser beams from his eyes). He was exposed to alien technology and turned into a 9' tall bear with glowing eyes and a tungsten carbide skeleton. But he still thought like a children's toy; his battle cry in every combat was, "Hi everybody! I'm Brown Bear!"

The mytho-poetic world model that you describe, however, is no more satisfying to me to play in. If every aspect of the world is governed by the set of correspondances

Not every aspect. The world would over-hint and be didactic. Like most systems, mytho-poetic world generators predict much but leave a lot of room for diversity and randomness, at least if done well.

that the DM has chosen as the unifying theme for their campaign, then the world feels sterile--maybe not so much at first, but definitely after the players have figured out the theme.

This is true -- it takes one campaign to figure out the world. Then, you make a new one. But usually, like a cryptic crossword puzzle, the realization of the general theme and operationalizing it are not simultaneous and, typically, the most fun is operationalizing the predictive model you have recently discovered, through play.

What you haven't described is the middle ground. This is something I learned (of all places) from reading White Wolf products. You can have an imaginative campaign world that does not grow blocky and uninteresting when you zoom in. The key to creating such a world is layering your complexities. You can have a set of nations, OK--give each one a central theme, a metaphoric purpose, and enough distinguishing traits to spark role-playing interest and some political conflict.

What is the nature of the system/physics where these different things intersect? And how does it not fall into the trap of being a signifying, predictive, potentially moral system too? Different levels of local complexity and randomness=good and your world building strategy sounds less dissimilar to mine than you might think but I can't figure out how you answer above question in your model.

I like your adaptive gridding concept, though. It seems like the big difference between it and my style is that you don't define universes that need to be "solved" by the players, allowing the party to just operate within them and fight battles within their context rather than having to transcend the context in order to complete the game.

Thanks again for a very informative and thought-provoking post.

Right back at you!

 

[fuindordm]

... the nature of my universes is pretty much discoverable at any location within them. In a campaign I was co-GMing back in my home town and on which I continue to consult by phone, the place is littered with clues all referencing the same thing. We assume that 90+% of all clues will be ignored or missed but that's okay because the world is signifying to the characters everywhere all the time. As a GM, I don't know which aspects of the structure will be apprehended first and what the PCs' interim models of the universe will look like as they acquire pieces of knowledge in an unpredictable order.

That's a useful idea... I'll have to try multiplying the number of clues I hand out by a factor of 10 and seeing whether that's enough to get the PCs on the right track.

That's why I (as opposed to my players) primarily navigate my campaigns metatexually rather than textually; having a unifying metatext drastically reduces the number of requirements that the text look a particular way. If I had a textually grounded definition of what the City of Glass was, then I would end up forcing the characters to end up in a city that was in a particular location, looked a particular way, was run by particular people. But because my only requirement is that the final place they go be, in some way symbolically readable as the City of Glass, there is minimal perceived railroading. The richer the metatextual level of the game, in my experience, the more the players' acts of discovery and acts of creation/invention collapse into one another at the textual level.

...but then, if any city they decide to go to can be interpreted as the City of Glass, the symbolism is probably too weak for them to pick up on it. Or else the world has been painted in very broad strokes untli the point where the PCs decide on a course of action, and you fill in the details and the symbolism as you go.

Yep. I had two players quit in episode one because they didn't want to co-operate with the Venetians in their plan to find and seize the grail, in one case because the character wouldn't accept patriarchal authority and in another because he wouldn't accept Christianity. But then, I think that this problem plagues all kinds of campaigns that require the party to function as a team.

It's definitely a problem if you want them to share a motivation. This is why so many campaigns are a quest to save the world. At least that's something everyone can get behind.

Not every aspect. The world would over-hint and be didactic. Like most systems, mytho-poetic world generators predict much but leave a lot of room for diversity and randomness, at least if done well.This is true -- it takes one campaign to figure out the world. Then, you make a new one. But usually, like a cryptic crossword puzzle, the realization of the general theme and operationalizing it are not simultaneous and, typically, the most fun is operationalizing the predictive model you have recently discovered, through play.

It sounds like you should be writing novels rather than designing campaigns, and if you manage to make this work I envy you your players! Seriously, it's a good and very satisfying method from the design perspecive, and I would jump at the chance to play in a campaign like this. I've always had to settle for less, though.

What is the nature of the system/physics where these different things intersect? And how does it not fall into the trap of being a signifying, predictive, potentially moral system too? Different levels of local complexity and randomness=good and your world building strategy sounds less dissimilar to mine than you might think but I can't figure out how you answer above question in your model.

I don't think I've grokked the question. But when I create a campaign world, metatextual consistency isn't my primary goal.

It does sound like we have similar approaches in a lot of ways. Have you ever read Tolkien's letters and essays on The Lord of the Rings? One of his central themes is the passion of sub-creation--when thinking beings, up to and including the Valar, recognize the beauty and intricacy of the world they live in they feel compelled to imitate the act of creation. The Silmarils, the Dwarves, the Two Trees, and many other elements of Tolkien's world owe their existence to this motivation.

Your preferred style of campaign world, it seems to me, is like a beautiful jewel--strongly structured, self-contained, and beautiful to apprehend. I try to create worlds that are larger and more chaotic. I like to write histories for my nations and ethnicities, and to have lots of variety in cultures and attitudes. I try to create worlds that have a sense of historical verisimilitude, and worry about the stories I want to tell in that world later.

Of course I also try to put in a generous dose of 'secret history', symbolism, and metatextual structure to the campaign, but it's more on the level of the story that I want to tell and the parties involved, and doesn't spread out over the whole world. The players might miss a lot of the significance, but that's OK with me if they're enjoying their exploration of the world.

So that's a long answer to what I think you were asking, which is 'how do you impose a symbolic structure on the complexity of a nation, and how do you relate one level of complexity to another on the metatextual level?" The answer, is that I don't bother. If the story needed an analogue to the Greene Knight, then I would pull such a person from whatever nation or ethnicity happened to be convenient to the players, and dress the character up with blantant and hidden symbols identifying their role.

I like your adaptive gridding concept, though. It seems like the big difference between it and my style is that you don't define universes that need to be "solved" by the players, allowing the party to just operate within them and fight battles within their context rather than having to transcend the context in order to complete the game.

That's right. If they do need to apprehend the metacontext, it's at the plot level, not the setting level. And that's simply because I enjoy creating wide, sprawling, pseudo-historical settings. I also enjoy having culturally diverse PCs. That's for gaming, though--the novel I'm working on now, however, falls more towards your end of the spectrum.

Cheers,
Ben

 

[Hand of Evil]

It is no different from picking a place to live, campaign world, area, setting it all comes down to the questions a person/DM has to ask when starting:

1.What does it look like?
2.Who lives there?
3.Who are the people next door?
4.Where are the local schools/shopping malls/ruins/fun places?
5.How is this viewed or that viewed? (roads/job market/entertainment/churches)
6.What are the cons? (undead roam about/ramdom encounters/monsters/cultures)
7.Etc...​

The more questions and answers the greater the detail. You just don't have to have the answer all at once.

 

[fusangite]

...but then, if any city they decide to go to can be interpreted as the City of Glass, the symbolism is probably too weak for them to pick up on it. Or else the world has been painted in very broad strokes untli the point where the PCs decide on a course of action, and you fill in the details and the symbolism as you go.

Well, I'm not sure I can anatomize it. All I can say is that creation is an intense, enjoyable and rewarding cognitive process; and it provides fulfilment for me as a GM regardless of what the players choose to do with it.

It sounds like you should be writing novels rather than designing campaigns,

I'm not at all good at writing narrative fiction. Also, I need to random elements players and dice provide; I conceptualize these worlds in such an ordered way that I'm kind of a randomness/free will vampire. I can't bring one of these things to life by myself.

Have you ever read Tolkien's letters and essays on The Lord of the Rings?

Sadly no. I mean to but then I don't get around it it.

One of his central themes is the passion of sub-creation--when thinking beings, up to and including the Valar, recognize the beauty and intricacy of the world they live in they feel compelled to imitate the act of creation. The Silmarils, the Dwarves, the Two Trees, and many other elements of Tolkien's world owe their existence to this motivation.

And yet other parts I can see piercing through the metatext like the four ages of Middle Earth corresponding to the four ages of the Holy Roman Empire as described in the 865 Vision of Charlemagne. I think a great world is one that contains both types of creative process.

I like to write histories for my nations and ethnicities, and to have lots of variety in cultures and attitudes. I try to create worlds that have a sense of historical verisimilitude, and worry about the stories I want to tell in that world later.

I still occasionally take a break and make that kind of world. It is a fulfilling experience; and I do like sociological and historical verisimilitude when I can pull it off.

Of course I also try to put in a generous dose of 'secret history', symbolism, and metatextual structure to the campaign, but it's more on the level of the story that I want to tell and the parties involved, and doesn't spread out over the whole world. The players might miss a lot of the significance, but that's OK with me if they're enjoying their exploration of the world.

That's the spirit!

If the story needed an analogue to the Greene Knight, then I would pull such a person from whatever nation or ethnicity happened to be convenient to the players, and dress the character up with blantant and hidden symbols identifying their role.

Don't get me wrong: I do plenty of that too. But people are so unused to symbolic communication in RPGs it only looks like a sledgehammer clue to you.

That's right. If they do need to apprehend the metacontext, it's at the plot level, not the setting level.

Ever considered doing a Beowulf plot? I think it would be perfect for D&D: first the earth monster, then the water monster, then the fire monster. All the scenes work well too. But that's the risk with strapping metatext to plot rather than setting: it is way more likely to produce railroading.

And that's simply because I enjoy creating wide, sprawling, pseudo-historical settings. I also enjoy having culturally diverse PCs.

I find getting players into genuinely distinct non-modern cultures is really tough. Many insist on importing certain modern ideas wherever they go. It's one of the areas where I consistently have to struggle as a GM. In what ways are these cultures different? And how do you convey these differences to your players in a way they genuinely take in?

 

[barsoomcore]

I find getting players into genuinely distinct non-modern cultures is really tough.

Yeah, tell me about it. That's one of the main reasons Barsoom was designed with essentially "modern" cultures. I came up with an agency whose primary responsibility was eradicating superstition and parocialness, using sorcery and psionics to improve global communication and keep philosophical tyranny at bay. Mainly in order to facilitate character development and to make sure that I would have a world of NPCs who behaved more or less like the PCs.

I still run into problems with players who refuse to internalize pre-modern notions of community, obligation and honour. "Run into problems" is maybe too strong. But their behaviour is strongly disassociated from the NPCs' because they're so often focussed on "game-success-oriented" behaviour as they see it -- acquiring more power or toys or money or whatever. It still bugs me on occasion, but I take as indicated I need to do a better job of presenting alternate joys in the campaign.

 

[Afrodyte]

There are d20 settings that do this, you realize. Testament, Midnight, and Dimond Throne (Arcana Evolved) are ones that I would argue pull this off. Nyambe falls a little short, IMHO, but it's still a good book. I get the impression that recent book by Red Spire also does this, but I've forgotten the name of that setting.

These were the rare exceptions I had in mind.

I should probably start a different thread about it, but it'd be cool to design a setting starting with the abstract things rather than the concrete things.

 

[fuindordm]

I'm not at all good at writing narrative fiction. Also, I need to random elements players and dice provide; I conceptualize these worlds in such an ordered way that I'm kind of a randomness/free will vampire. I can't bring one of these things to life by myself.

Then focusing on the setting makes sense. In all honesty, I don't know if I can bring something like that to life myself either, but I'm trying.

Don't get me wrong: I do plenty of that too. But people are so unused to symbolic communication in RPGs it only looks like a sledgehammer clue to you.

Which is why your advice of having the setting signify all the time is so good. This gets back to the question of player investment... all too often your players want the game to play like an interactive movie or video game, where action and exposition alternate to build up the story.

I really want to run a campaign more like the Myst series of games, where the story doesn't progress unless the players study the world and invest themselves in its details. But it's so hard to find people willing to play that way... they come in from a long day at work, and just want to sit back and be entertained.

But that's the risk with strapping metatext to plot rather than setting: it is way more likely to produce railroading.

Maybe, but I find that plot is more flexible. If the players take things in an unexpected direction, it's easier for me to adapt the story than the background. That's probably because I have more creativity invested in the background, and I resist changing it.

I find getting players into genuinely distinct non-modern cultures is really tough. Many insist on importing certain modern ideas wherever they go. It's one of the areas where I consistently have to struggle as a GM. In what ways are these cultures different? And how do you convey these differences to your players in a way they genuinely take in?

This question probably deserves its own thread. It is difficult, extraordinarily difficult... I've been living in France now for a year, and have been married to a French woman for 6. French and American cultures have many more similarities than differences, but even the small differences can seem frightenlingly alien at times. My 'personal culture' has now evolved to an intermediate stage between the two, but it's taken a lot of conscious effort on my part to incorporate the alien attitudes and behaviors into my personality in a way that makes sense to me.

From a role-playing standpoint, I've found that players have an easier time adopting a fictional culture if it is strongly similar to one they are already familiar with, so I try to give the nations easy hooks--this country is kind of like Russia, but with a frontier mentality reminiscent of the Wild West... these people are gypsy-like... and so on. It's not at all original, but that doesn't bother me any more. Really it's just short hand for encouraging certain personality types that are independent of culture, and it's much easier and more rewarding for players to role-play something familiar than something alien.

Take a look at the 7th Sea player's guide for a good example. The cultures are extremely close cognates of European cultures, with just enough historical and cultural difference to make them refreshing. IS the setting boring? No, it's fun to read and great fun to play in, because the role-playing hooks are so plentiful and familiar.

I think a truly alien culture inevitably feels drab and lifeless, because we're incapable of becoming emotionally attached to it.

Ben

 

[fusangite]

I still run into problems with players who refuse to internalize pre-modern notions of community, obligation and honour. "Run into problems" is maybe too strong. But their behaviour is strongly disassociated from the NPCs' because they're so often focussed on "game-success-oriented" behaviour as they see it -- acquiring more power or toys or money or whatever. It still bugs me on occasion, but I take as indicated I need to do a better job of presenting alternate joys in the campaign.

This question probably deserves its own thread. It is difficult, extraordinarily difficult... I've been living in France now for a year, and have been married to a French woman for 6. French and American cultures have many more similarities than differences, but even the small differences can seem frightenlingly alien at times. My 'personal culture' has now evolved to an intermediate stage between the two, but it's taken a lot of conscious effort on my part to incorporate the alien attitudes and behaviors into my personality in a way that makes sense to me.

From a role-playing standpoint, I've found that players have an easier time adopting a fictional culture if it is strongly similar to one they are already familiar with, so I try to give the nations easy hooks--this country is kind of like Russia, but with a frontier mentality reminiscent of the Wild West... these people are gypsy-like... and so on. It's not at all original, but that doesn't bother me any more. Really it's just short hand for encouraging certain personality types that are independent of culture, and it's much easier and more rewarding for players to role-play something familiar than something alien.

Back home, not so much here, I found the biggest problems were with culture types people thought they knew -- people who had a kind of simplistic popular history sense of hunter-gatherer and feudal cultures with big cardboard cutout "superstitious" worldviews you get out of stories about the Columbus myth. So, I had one guy who played a shaman who thought about "nature" like a cross between a modern conservationist and the apocryphal Chief Seattle speech, another who thought "faith" was the ideological core of pre-literate society, etc.