D&D General The Three Levels of Culture in a D&D Setting

[BookTenTiger]

So as an experiment, what if I create a dominant culture for a kingdom, and then differentiate it for a few subcultures? I'm changing the names of the three levels to Presented Culture, Interpersonal Culture, and Moral Culture.

Darkenward
A thickly forested kingdom ruled by a clan of werewolves.

Presented Culture:
Clothing is simple and earthen-colored, but decorated with stitched patterns of birds, flowers, and forest animals. Nobility wears furs and some jewelry.

The homes are low stone buildings with thatch roofs. Most villages are small, a wall of raw wooden spikes protected the meager fields.

The people speak using a lot of nature-based simile and allegory. "Ah, the seasons pass swift as a frightened deer..."

Interpersonal Culture:
Voices are expected to be quiet unless it's an emergency. People stand close together and speak so few can hear.

The only time folks speak up is during songs, which are usually sung as a group.

The gift of lycanthropy is a sign of nobility. Low folk can be raised to higher class by being given the gift.

Long term friendships are often valued even higher than family or marital ties. A highly trusted friend is called a Root Brother or Root Sister, and can ask for favors that are given unquestioningly.

Moral Culture:
Might makes right. Morality is based on the wolf. Those whose lives more closely match it are seen as moral and right. Hunters are revered; farming is seen as a necessary but shameful job. People are fiercely protective of their "pack," though it is also culturally appropriate to cull the herd and rid a community of a weak or corrupted individual, such as someone who steals or refuses to help.


Okay, now within Darkenward there are obviously other cultures. They're going to share some things with the dominant culture, and have some differences... Maybe something like:

Moonhaern
Those who belong to the people known as Moonhaern worship the moon itself. Their culture is similar to Darkenward except for the following:

Presented Culture:
Moonhaern wear a moonstone somewhere upon their body. Otherwise they favor extremely spare, simple clothing.

Interpersonal Culture:
The Moonhaern have their own hierarchy of moon-worshiping priests, and do not recognize the werewolf-based power structure of Darkenward.

Moral Culture:
Nature is seen as something to be respected and honored, not harvested or hunted. Moonhaern live very spare lives, eating mostly vegetables they raise in their own gardens. They believe lycanthropy is a greedy, corrupted use of nature's power.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Yeah, I seem to design my cultures with those three depths in mind though I hadn't put it in those words before. But the sad truth is that I don't think most players care about whatever setting I come up with. So I don't put a lot of effort into going deeper than the shallow end of the pool because whatever I come up with is unlikely to come up in game play. Most players are going to use their own modern points of view when playing their characters rather than attempt to role play as someone from a very different culture. Which is fine, and it's one of the reasons I think D&D is so popular.

Maybe this would be a good day for your players to interact more with a location's culture?

Let's say you have a group with an Outlander Barbarian and a Sage Wizard. The first culture they encounter has the Deep Culture of "Might makes right. We revere strength and those who wield it to accomplish great things." Well without even trying your barbarian is going to have a great time and be really influential.

Later they come to a community with the Deep Culture of "Knowledge is power. Those with the knowledge of arcane magic are worshipped as gods." When the townsfolk fall to their knees and start worshipping the Wizard, it'll create a really different dynamic!

 

[MichaelSomething]

If you want to see battles of deep culture, check out any thousand post long thread here.

 

[MGibster]

Let's say you have a group with an Outlander Barbarian and a Sage Wizard. The first culture they encounter has the Deep Culture of "Might makes right. We revere strength and those who wield it to accomplish great things." Well without even trying your barbarian is going to have a great time and be really influential.

This would be surface level culture and one my players would readily engage in. In defense of my players, it can be hard to get into a different culture. It's hard enough figuring out how ours works let alone someone else's culture. And especially hard to figure out a culture you know nothing about that was made up by some dude you game with.

 

[overgeeked]

This would be surface level culture and one my players would readily engage in. In defense of my players, it can be hard to get into a different culture. It's hard enough figuring out how ours works let alone someone else's culture. And especially hard to figure out a culture you know nothing about that was made up by some dude you game with.

That’s why you make it all tangible stuff the PCs can see or interact with. Not an abstract idea. You ground it in objects or actions. It’s one more mode of worldbuilding for the referee and the PCs to explore. If they’re not interested, no harm no foul. If nothing else, it would add a lot of texture to the various cultures in the world.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it would be more useful, for the D&D context, to re-phrase these layers. That is, I think they are more useful as:

(External) Stereotypes
(Overt) Protocol
(Internal) Values

External stereotypes often (though absolutely not always) arise from something that is true of at least a significant portion or visible slice of a culture. For example, stereotypes of Americans paint us as loud (which may of us are), obese (which many people everywhere are, it's a worldwide pandemic, but America is somewhat moreso than other countries), and uncouth (which may say more about differing etiquette standards than anything else.) They rarely give any amount of nuance and paint whole groups with very broad brushes, often in a condemning or judgmental way. Other, less judgmental examples include things like the British "stiff upper lip," the extreme emphasis on politeness in Japan, or the idea that Canadians excessively apologize. In fantasy cultures, this is usually the "Hat" that each race wears in a Planet of Hats.

Overt protocol--which does not mean it is always explicit--is observable, but often requires a lot of explanation to an outsider. It's the part of the culture you really have to be "taught," as opposed to simply observing, which you can easily do with the previous layer. Building off the Japanese example, this would be where you get explanations of things that seem really inexplicable elsewhere, like the reason fire-starting fans are weapons in anime (they're a Journey to the West reference, which most anime reference to one extent or another), or the idea of children arriving through some sort of plant or rock generating a child (Momotaro and Princess Kaguya, who came from a floating giant peach and a cut bamboo stalk respectively.) Or more etiquette-related things, like how the way you show politeness in some contexts is by allowing your host to be more polite than you so they get the chance to show they're good hosts (which may apply, for example, in restaurants.)

Internal values are of course the hardest level to reach, because they require deep, nuanced understanding and can often be very difficult or even impossible to effectively communicate without direct experience. Again building off Japan, I just watched an excellent video essay about why JRPGs so frequently end by killing a god or gods, usually alien ones who have done something horrible, offered some sort of false bargain, or proven themselves incapable of actually living up to the mantle of godhood--and that the very idea of "godhood" simply means something different to most Eastern cultures (where it is heavily affected by the concept of "cultivation") from what it does to most Western cultures (where it is heavily affected by Greco-Roman and Abrahamic religious concepts of dispensation, for lack of a better term.) This requires really getting to know a culture, seeing it in action, watching how it reacts to similar but not identical circumstances and how subtle effects can lead to significant changes in behavior. That's difficult, and often takes years of acclimation even in a real place.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think the lesson here is you can't disentangle sociology from politics. The author is clearly going to be influenced by their own "Deep Culture" in how they choose to model society.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think it would be more useful, for the D&D context, to re-phrase these layers. That is, I think they are more useful as:

(External) Stereotypes
(Overt) Protocol
(Internal) Values

External stereotypes often (though absolutely not always) arise from something that is true of at least a significant portion or visible slice of a culture. For example, stereotypes of Americans paint us as loud (which may of us are), obese (which many people everywhere are, it's a worldwide pandemic, but America is somewhat moreso than other countries), and uncouth (which may say more about differing etiquette standards than anything else.) They rarely give any amount of nuance and paint whole groups with very broad brushes, often in a condemning or judgmental way. Other, less judgmental examples include things like the British "stiff upper lip," the extreme emphasis on politeness in Japan, or the idea that Canadians excessively apologize. In fantasy cultures, this is usually the "Hat" that each race wears in a Planet of Hats.

Overt protocol--which does not mean it is always explicit--is observable, but often requires a lot of explanation to an outsider. It's the part of the culture you really have to be "taught," as opposed to simply observing, which you can easily do with the previous layer. Building off the Japanese example, this would be where you get explanations of things that seem really inexplicable elsewhere, like the reason fire-starting fans are weapons in anime (they're a Journey to the West reference, which most anime reference to one extent or another), or the idea of children arriving through some sort of plant or rock generating a child (Momotaro and Princess Kaguya, who came from a floating giant peach and a cut bamboo stalk respectively.) Or more etiquette-related things, like how the way you show politeness in some contexts is by allowing your host to be more polite than you so they get the chance to show they're good hosts (which may apply, for example, in restaurants.)

Internal values are of course the hardest level to reach, because they require deep, nuanced understanding and can often be very difficult or even impossible to effectively communicate without direct experience. Again building off Japan, I just watched an excellent video essay about why JRPGs so frequently end by killing a god or gods, usually alien ones who have done something horrible, offered some sort of false bargain, or proven themselves incapable of actually living up to the mantle of godhood--and that the very idea of "godhood" simply means something different to most Eastern cultures (where it is heavily affected by the concept of "cultivation") from what it does to most Western cultures (where it is heavily affected by Greco-Roman and Abrahamic religious concepts of dispensation, for lack of a better term.) This requires really getting to know a culture, seeing it in action, watching how it reacts to similar but not identical circumstances and how subtle effects can lead to significant changes in behavior. That's difficult, and often takes years of acclimation even in a real place.

What does it say about my culture that I started by reading the last paragraph first, and the first paragraph last?