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The Core Idea
A warrior culture that's warlike at its weddings, its funerals and its markets gets dull after one scene. Real customs are messier, because people care about more than one thing and those things get in each other's way. This blueprint builds a culture from three values on the Character Values Wheel. Most of its customs come from moments when two of those values pull different ways, like a stranger at the gate in a hungry winter. For each custom, you'll note who pays for it. That list ends up being your cast.
What This Resource Is
What This Resource Is
1 Five Steps
Start with the hardest thing about how your people live, then work out their customs, their taboos, their classes, and where they clash with others.
2 A Misreading Table
The wheel has 12 pairs of opposite values. For each pair, the table shows how a culture on each side misreads the other.
3 One People, Built in Full
A snowbound valley of several villages goes through every step with you, and at the end it's all summed up on one sheet.
4 A Sheet to Copy
The same sheet, blank and in plain text, so you can paste it into any notes app or document.
The Five Steps at a Glance
Here's what each step has you do.
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1
The hardship and the value they pay for. Write down the hardest thing about how your people live. Then pick two values that hardship calls for, and a third that it makes harder to keep, which your people hold on to anyway.
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2
Customs. Pick an occasion and write down what two of your values each want from it. Then work out how the custom splits it between them, and who pays.
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3
Taboos. For each value's opposite, find where it still happens, and decide the penalty for doing it anywhere else.
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4
Class. Go through your list of who pays and work out who's honored, who's needed and kept apart, and who can move between them.
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5
Collisions. Find where your culture clashes with a group inside it, with a neighbor, and with one character who pays.
The steps won't write your customs for you. They show you where to look, and they give you a way to test what you write.
One Custom, Worked Through
Say snow cuts a valley off for five months a year, so its villages value Safety and Generosity. A stranger turns up in autumn. Generosity says feed him. Safety says nobody knows him, and there's only so much food to last the winter.
The custom splits it by place and time. He's fed at the gate house for three days, and he has to leave before the snow. There's a price, too: a household can keep him all winter if it answers for whatever he does. The stranger pays, and so does any household that keeps him.
Also on the Full Page
There's a list of 22 occasions to start from, the five ways a custom can split one, and answers to two common questions.
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