Most of my fictional cultures in Matters of Honor are made interesting by having them take on the **surface styles ** of one ancient culture (names, looks, architecture, all mildly vandalized to make it more fun/fictional) but they tend to have deeper similarities to an entirely different culture. For example, Breccians are vaguely Germanic in style, but they have a culture of paranoia and cultishness, debased royalty, and organized crime intertwined with government more reminiscent of modern day Russia. I didn’t come up with that process step a priori, I kind of noticed I was doing it and went back and did it on purpose. I think I do my best work this way, playing around and only later formalizing my process. It just takes ages, which is fine when you’re between groups.
Recently I figured out that the problem I’m having with Zerzuran culture was that there is no such definite juxtaposition. There are cool tidbits, but there is not much dynamism. I struck upon the idea of refining their surface styles as more firmly Persian (instead of a mishmash of middle eastern) while drawing out deeper similarities to a wild west American thing, specifically drawing on spaghetti westerns and the interplay between encroaching city life against a fading frontier spirit. They already had spice rangers to fill the niche of heroic cowboys, after all.
How do you write your own original cultures? Is there a better way than carefully laundering things you’ve stolen from real human societies?
For me sometimes ideas just come out of nowhere, but it’s quite frustrating if you’re just about to sleep, or, more dangerously, driving a motorcycle.
Besides that, I write my fictional cultures by looking at what I already have and expand on that, or carefully taking a little something from a real-world culture, like a style of clothing, and contextualize it to the fictional culture.
I think it’s easier to mix and match cultural elements from the real world and imagination if a race is non-human. It allows for more experimentation and less risk of cultural appropriation. It’s also easier if their built environments are already distinct from regular human environments.
For example, my human-dragon hybrids mostly live their lives out of single-family (magical) treehouses, and I think that serves me well if I ever want to apply some real-world cultural stuff into that. I find inspiration for those treehouses from postmodern/contemporary architecture, surprisingly enough.
Writing treehouses into the setting is always so irresistible, isn’t it?
True, but not only is it irresistible, but I feel like it’s also a practical necessity. I don’t think a winged humanoid species would work well under traditional human housing. They’d need extra space for their wings and more entry/exit points for flight.
You can do that with a regular house, but at the same time I wanted my species to have a deeper connection to nature, culturally and biologically speaking—and that’s how treehouses came into fore.
You don’t see many ground dwelling flighted birds, so that checks out for sure. For me it’s always that desire to create highly verticalized spaces for dynamic combat and exploration. So I tend to make excuses to promote that
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