I’m one of those writers who believes conflict is inherent in setting. While I don’t advocate spending more time on the world than the plot (you can hamstring yourself later, I’ve found, if the world is the shining star instead of the plot), I advocate having a general understanding of how your culture behaves.

I also love adapting real life cultures to fantasy settings, and often find myself muttering the title quote as I look at a real life culture that simply doesn’t fit very well with what I want to happen. I want the feel of that culture, and I want readers to get a sense it’s a certain culture, but copypaste doesn’t work.

Over the years, I’ve found a few key areas to focus on in order to have the “easiest” time creating something (often drastically) different that still reads as the original culture.

Note: These also apply to creating your own culture, either from borrowing from others or trying to generally create something new.

1- Government Policy

And by this, I mean the rules of government conduct and ways power is gained. I do not suggest you go changing a committee-run democracy into an empire unless you have a very good rationale for pulling it off.

Government policy is the way nobles gain power, laws are passed, justice is served, cities are managed, resources are allocated, and power is distributed. These are keystones of a government, yes, but they are also nitty gritty details that change very readily from culture to culture. Study three opulent empires next to each other and you’ll find they handle them all very differently. The way they handled resources often determined their success or failure.

In my novel, I take Mughal India and maintain the fact it’s an Empire, ruling over multiple provinces that were once independent, with money flowing up until it’s the Emperor who controls all the wealth. The Emperor determines who is in favour or not, and who ends up as the richest because of that favour. Laws are bent and broken without reprimand if the winds of favour blow the right way. Each nation is ruled by a warrior bloodline that has a lineage to be proud of.

Past that, things get a little fuzzy.

You see, Mughal India was a very broken system. It eventually collapsed under its own weight, wealth not flowing fast enough over the whole Indian subcontinent and far too much emphasis placed on whom could provide the most gold to the Emperor to gain favour. The land was drained dry as nobles didn’t actually own any segment of land and just tried to get as much as they could out of the people they were ruling. Province rulers were moved around every few years so they would never gain loyalty from their people or get too comfortable where they were. This was done to prevent rebellion.

My alterations included having nobles stay ruling over certain provinces for generations, and they are allowed a much larger amount of resources so they can work on improving the people’s lot (magic that lets nobles sense either the land’s or the people’s states helps this). Instead, it is marriages and partnerships that determine who is favoured and not; rebellion is controlled by limiting the size of each province’s standing army.

In the end, I still get the sense of an Emperor Who Controls Things and lots of petty fights over who can give the Emperor what. But the way that happens is completely changed to suit what I want, and make the empire able to survive.

I had more factors to consider, as well. Magic being the primary one. A properly done magic system influences every aspect of life, especially the nitty gritty. If a real world kingdom likes punishing nobles by banishment but, in your world, teleportation magic is common, you’d run into a few problems. Either barriers need to be put up, or justice is doled out a different way.

The important part is to boil a government down to the reasons why it does something. If you keep the reason why, you manage to keep the essence of a government. Most people only know the essence of a culture when reading, and it’s what they remember when they think of a culture. Once the essence is preserved, you can muck around as much as you want.

2- Religious Roots, Rituals and Rites

Religion is a critical part of most cultures. For thousands of years villages were built around some sort of sacred structure; saints and gods were named for every unknown, everything that could go right or wrong. Religion helps a culture determine its morals and values, how to live their lives, festivals, and provides a much needed explanation for unknowns.

But after studying a half dozen religions, I’ve found they all end up saying the same thing at their roots. What differs is how they show it. Christianity and Buddhism both say there’s a reward for those who live their lives well — Christianity calls it Heaven while Buddhists call it Nirvana. Only, Heaven is eternal while Nirvana is not.

I do suggest you pick the religions of your chosen geographic region and start seeing what they say. If you decide to be masochistic and go for a culture with a large variety of beliefs and a spectacularly big pantheon, prepare for a lot of research. Researching all of the religions and mythologies is Important because they ended up shaping how your chosen culture behaves. This is especially true if you plan on doing any sort of interaction between different sects/religions. And, let’s face it, conflict is fun!

And I’ll cite my world again, because I’m particularly masochistic about it.

Mughal India primarily had a conflict between Muslims and Hindus. And, digging deeper, I discovered a sharp difference in how classes viewed religion. Commoners were primarily Hindu or practitioners of Jainism with a minority Muslim population. I also realized that in my original worldbuilding, I’d managed to include a good chunk of Buddhist principles when I built the magic itself.

But, the difference in religions in different regions and classes is what made Mughal India. Muslims brought in the segregation of women and the architecture; Hindus brought in art and entertainment. The religions even prevented a peasant revolt — Hindus and Jains believed they were born into their lot because of karma, which meant there was no point in trying to get a better life.

To be honest, I’m still breaking my brain over how they all fit together. I didn’t have the capacity to have truly different religions; that was caused by the Mughals invading India, while no such invasion exists in my world’s backstory. So the divide in gods was erased and I ended up with one pantheon for everybody. I ended up getting creative with geography and what it meant in day-to-day life. The result is religion still dictates things like why women are segregated (or not, in certain circumstances), polygamy is allowed, and castes. I keep the concept of heaven, hell and reincarnation, twisted to make them fit the world. There are multiple gods and rituals everywhere.

I picked those aspects in particular because, to me, those are what make the religions I chose. Hindu weddings are a type of their own. Mughal India isn’t the same without a harem complex where women aren’t allowed out.

In the end, religion ends up being one of the most difficult to tackle because it’s so nuanced. If you want to keep the same essence, you have to take the superficial and keep it the same, but the way you get to the superficial can be far different.

It’s pretty much the opposite of government: religion is first seen by its results, but its structure can be manipulated to hell and back (pun intended) to get the same results; government is first seen by its structure, then the results are often forgotten details.

As brain-breaking religion can be, it is very important to consider it. By giving the same general feel to the religion in different trappings, you get two benefits:

  1. You can avoid accidentally slipping in morals that do not fit within the religion because there’s no reason for it to be there, like putting extreme punishment on sex before marriage without the context — in the West, that was Christianity and making sure a man’s child would be his.
  2. You can either find other reasons for those morals to be there (if they’re critical for the feel of the religion) or you can come up with unique morals that come directly from the world itself.

Both of these are huge perks to breaking your brain, and a lot of them can be answered for non-religious reasons (the “insuring-child-is-mine” thing for sex before marriage). All about what you dig up in the culture.

3- The Average Life

Because rare is a culture that actually wrote down long lists of details about the average folk.

This can be a huge advantage, because you end up with only a few superficial details people deemed important. On the flipside, you have next to nothing to build from. There’s not much info about that particular facet of culture to really have it read as that culture.

What I did was latch onto the superficial details, mix in a healthy dose of pop culture, then figure out why it looked that way. Yes, this does mean I’m personally doing a certain amount of borrowing from Aladdin — but that’s what people would expect a city in a vaguely Arabic nation to look like.

At the same time, it can be incredibly fun to do. You’ve already figured out government and religion, which will impact day-to-day life. The gods and geography itself are your biggest giveaways to where they live. Have fun with it.

Merchants, too, can be a bit hard to find info on. You get what they sold and the riches that item brought in. Study the old trade routes, and why such commodities were prized. Sometimes, valuable items were only valuable elsewhere, and that particular merchant realized it first. This means you need to have long distance trade in order for the item to be prized in your world. Other times, the item truly was valuable everywhere and no matter how the trade links changed, they’d still be doing well.

I ended up being fairly neutral on merchants. I got rid of other countries (therefore, no silk road) but made the country bigger, so there would still be a large variety in what was produced (not like India wasn’t diverse enough). I ended up with a very similar net result, with the same things being traded.

Similar things being traded is one of the little details that helps maintain a cultural feel. Find the major trading staples and see how it fits into your world. Even mundane things can suddenly be valuable if put in the right market. But why they’re traded and how is very flexible.

4- Social Structure

Yup. You can mess around with this, too.

To define ‘social structure’: I’m talking about what positions are in certain wealth brackets and why. There are the broad classes of “rulers”, “earned money”, “peasants”, “artisans”, etc. But the place they can have in a culture and the respect they’re given can be incredibly different.

In England, poets and playwrights were some of the lowest in society because they ‘just’ provided entertainment. Meanwhile, in India, they were often kept in the Emperor’s entourage because Court always wanted to be entertained. Frivolity vs. necessity.

Fantasy worlds also tend to have that pesky magic thing to contend with. Are mages their own class? Does magic determine where people fall on the political power scale? Or does it not matter? I recently plotted a world where class was completely determined by magical strength, which meant the king was the strongest man in the realm. The only person who could be stronger was the heir, but he had to submit to his father because of age.

Another thing to remember is each job doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive to one class. A village craftsman might end up providing most of the carpets exported out of a certain region, but he’s a nobody until the ruler decides s/he wants a carpet from this man, because only craftsmen good enough for the king are paid well.

Thing is, most people don’t know much about each position in society. They tend to know where certain positions fall, but that can be sketchy at best. Sometimes merchants are above kings, and the true ruler is the priest.

Messing with social structure is incredibly easy because all you have to do is keep the general ornamentation the same. Kings sign all the documents while faced with heavy pressures from merchants, who are always careful not to overstep their limits to make everything look normal.

Social classes are all about looks. By keeping the looks the same but shifting power internally, you can get some very juicy twists to the mold. You can also use people’s ignorance of all social classes to your advantage. Jewelers might be middle class in the actual culture, but in your fantasy world they are among the most coveted artisans. Why? Up to you.

5- Education

Education is a funny thing throughout history. It has this tendency to change from generation to generation, and class to class. Which, again, works to your advantage. Since there is so much fluctuation, you can basically cherry pick what type of system you want.

But, it is important to consider because it was often a defining line in classes. Even in modern day, we break down earning potential by education received (regardless of how skewed that is but that is an argument for another day). What is available to each class in terms of education helps determine the skills of each class and their dialogue.

The way they receive education might also be flexible. Nobles and private tutors often go hand in hand, but you could have universities, or large debates where every person must come prepared for any sort of issue. All that matters is how each class is broken down by education, and whether or not education can have people change classes.

What NOT to completely overhaul

I hope you all like geography, ecology, and geology.

Seeing as natural resources tend to be the building blocks of any culture, it’s best to leave them alone as much as possible. If you’re expanding a rather small geographical area to cover, say, a continent, then you’ll probably have to pull from other cultures to account for general ecosystem differences. It is, in theory, possible to modify a culture so it stays somewhat similar across vast geographic areas, but a quick look at history reveals how difficult that is. Scotland, England and Wales are all on the same small landmass, yet have different cultures. India and Tibet are neighbouring countries, yet are vastly different because of the resources available and lay of the land.

This, of course, means knowing what natural resources are available and how they were exploited by the culture. Animals, plants, minerals… all of it can change how a culture develops. If you plan on having a larger geographic area than what the current culture inhabits, you will have to examine the resources available and see if your culture even knows how to use them. If not, you have more work to do.

You might have to add in a culture where you didn’t want to, but it will add a lot more depth to your fantasy world. And if you include a lot of travel, showing the slow cultural shifts can be all sorts of fun.

Summary

Change:

  1. Government
  2. Religion
  3. Average life
  4. Social structure
  5. Education

Do NOT change:

Comment

  1. LoneWolf on 25 November 2012, 04:47 said:

    The religions even prevented a peasant revolt — Hindus and Jains believed they were born into their lot because of karma, which meant there was no point in trying to get a better life.

    Eh, that’s quite simplistic. See Shivaji Bhonsle and the Maratha Revolt. Maybe not quite a “peasant revolt” in the strictest sense of the world, but Hindu revolts definitely were a major factor in the Mughals’ downfall!

    I didn’t have the capacity to have truly different religions; that was caused by the Mughals invading India, while no such invasion exists in my world’s backstory.

    Not quite. The beginning of Islamic rule in India dates from the 8th century, when the Caliphate conquered Sind (now it’s in Pakistan, but, well, Indian Islam is responsible for Pakistan-India distinction in the first place). The Delhi Sultanate, the Indian Islamic policy conquered by Babur, the Mughals’ founder, the “core” of the Mughal Empire was founded by a Ghorid general in 1206, long before the Mughals.

  2. LoneWolf on 25 November 2012, 09:59 said:

    Oh, and regarding religion – see also Mughal attempts at religious syncretism between Islam and Hinduism (Akbar, Dara Shikokh, esp. the latter, though the former is much more famous).

  3. Danielle on 25 November 2012, 11:05 said:

    Great article! Good overview of what you should and shouldn’t play with in worldbuilding.

    The only one I’d disagree with is religion, and even there all I’d add is: “Be careful.” I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t change a society’s religion—or the tenets thereof—to suit your story, but if you want to portray that religion in a positive or neutral light, doing so should be done very carefully. Somebody is probably going to get offended no matter what you do, but if you make an effort to preserve the heart of the religion you’re playing with (and to treat said religion with respect) it should minimize the damage.

    However, if you’re out to satirize a religion, almost anything is fair game.

  4. LoneWolf on 25 November 2012, 11:47 said:

    Any major religion is like a Rorschach blot anyway.

  5. Rosey Unicorn on 25 November 2012, 16:39 said:

    Religion seriously is a Rerschach blot.

    Wolf- Thanks for the corrections/additions to that. I will attempt to look that up, and I will concede to being simplistic. When talking about religion (when it doesn’t play a super major part in the plot) in a fictional setting, it can be very difficult to not be simplistic without spending a few years on just the religion alone. Real world religions have a few thousand years of history and fluidity to them.

    Also, I had done a little research into Akbar’s attempts to meld the two religions. Quite interesting.

    Danielle- Agreed, and thanks for adding that in. I suppose I should’ve included the fact social context is very important and should be where the changes come from (what society needs determines quite a lot about the religion)… but that somehow escaped memory. Sorry about that. >.>

  6. Juracan on 27 November 2012, 15:30 said:

    I love this article. I’m glad someone’s working on a society that’s not built on medieval Europe.

    I feel as if I don’t know enough about Indian history and society to comment on your points in it, honestly, but I find the society and religion fascinating. And I think in terms of picking an example for something to world-build off of, it’s great.

    Sadly enough, I think that this is all something not enough authors of speculative fiction actually think about when writing.

    Question, though— there’s a point where you said that you “got rid of other countries”. Does this mean that the country you are describing above is the only one in its world, the only one its inhabitants know about, or the only one the reader is exposed to?

  7. Rosey Unicorn on 27 November 2012, 18:48 said:

    Juracan- There are only two major landmasses in the world, one of which is vaguely based off Japan when it cut itself off from the world. Ie- there is no trade interaction at present and there hasn’t been for a few hundred years (nor will there be in the course of the story). Considering Mughal India had quite a lot of trade with the British, you could say that has altered the course of history quite a lot.

    Why I did this? Because, to be honest, I had no idea about trade and continent divides when I made the world so I am now stuck with it like so.

    Also one thing to note is this method can be built off Europe as well (I have a world like that, just not cited in this particular article), but it would create your version of Europe— why kings, why a Christianity-like religion, why castles. You might end up scrapping religion completely, in this case! (I heavily modified religion in mine)