The New Culture Challenge

[InVinoVeritas]

In the Reinventing Fantasy Cliches thread, we discussed cliches and how to avoid them. One thing mentioned was Eurocentrism, and how to get around it. So, I briefly described one culture I made in my homebrew:

In the "new nine races" campaign I described earlier in the thread, someone wanted to make, essentially, a dwarf samurai. There weren't any "dwarves" per se in my campaign, so he ended up making a High Man Fighter who carried a katana, a brusque attitude, a beard, and a mock-Scottish brogue. He said he came from a land called Dikama, which had recently closed itself off from the rest of the world. At a certain point in the campaign, I had to balance some new stuff I wanted to add to the campaign, and the party was just about to find a way to cross Dikama.

I started with a culture of disciplined samurai and angry Scotsmen. I started seeing hordes of angry mounted swordsmen in formation, and it looked Turko-Mongol to me. So, I created a people with onion-dome castles whose leader was called a Caliph (not a true Caliph by the Islamic meaning of the word, but I stayed superficial here) and wore a turban and long, neat beard. Instead of Islamic geometric art, I replaced it with Celtic knotwork. Armor was based on classic samurai designs with an armored kilt, and rice and fish were major crops.

What was I looking to add? Raptor mounts. So, now we have fields of rice paddies overseen by raptor-mounted, Scottish-brogued, bearded samurai, protecting onion-domed castles decorated with Celtic knotwork.

So, here's the challenge: Take three cultural references, from anywhere around the globe, or well-known from fiction. The next challenger should develop a little snippet of how the culture looks or functions. It doesn't have to be deep. Then, the challenger posts a new set of three references, and the game continues from there. Let's see what we can come up with as a cool D&D place.

So, combine:

Angkor Wat
Tezcatlipoca
Saint Jonas' Festival