Example: Making Literary Scenes for Multiple Cultures

13 Jan, 2025

Last week I provided an exercise for sketching out the literary scenes of multiple cultures. In this post I'll do the exercise myself as an example, in case it's helpful to anyone. As was the case the last time I did my exercise as an example, I don't have a current campaign that needs this treatment, so I've had to make up a setting for the purposes of this exercise. That's not ideal: it's a bit artificial but, more importantly, without a game or specific players with styles and interests I can't tell which details of the cultures are most important to communicate. Nonetheless, on we go, and I'll do the best I can.

1. What cultures or subcultures are you working on?

I've decided to use a far future science fiction setting with extensive space exploration. The specific milieu in which I imagine the game taking place would be centred on a single planet, which I'll call Pheme. Pheme is the only inhabited planet in its solar system. Terraforming is still underway; portions of the planet's surface are habitable without exosuits, but nowhere near all of it is. Pheme has multiple regional cultures which are now, but have not always been, politically independent. I have not yet decided whether there are aliens in the setting; however, if there are, they don't have a significant presence in this milieu. The inhabitants are all human or transhuman. In some populations genetic modification is now ubiquitous, but unfortunately this means normal reproduction results in strange, unpredictable phenotypes if not carefully managed by further gene therapies or selective breeding based on genetic screening.

Pheme was originally settled by seedship arcologies governed by a single technocratic authority. Scientific and administrative specialists made decisions for everyone, not always in the best interests of the people working in the terraforming facilities, the lunar colonies, and the arcology manufactories. After a series of scandals, calamities, and subsequent unrest, that authority was dissolved, and now there are three independent self-governing nations: 1) the arcologies, 2) the lunar-orbital colonies, and 3) the outlying surface settlements.

These are the cultures I'll be representing:

• Seed culture (past): the original culture of the seedship arcologies that landed on and began terraforming Pheme; a few hundred thousand people
• Three present-day descendents of the seed culture
  • Arcological culture: the culture of those people still living in the seedship arcologies, either permanently or seasonally; a few hundred thousand people
  • Lunar-orbital culture: the culture of the lunar colonists inhabiting Pheme's two moons, as well as the inhabitants of Pheme's orbital station; tens of thousands of people
  • Outlying culture: the culture of the outlying settlements on the planet's surface, mostly agricultural communities within the terraformed regions but also those living in terraforming stations on the frontier; tens of thousands of people
• Hauler culture: the culture of long-haul starship crews and those working at their waystops; a hundred or so people at a time, but over a million hauler crew members across the galaxy

2. What are the primary media of your cultures' literary scenes, and how are they distributed?

Nearly everyone has some kind of personal tablet device which is connected to Pheme's network. Physical publishing exists, but most people read books on their tablets instead. Pheme's network is not well-connected with other planets' networks; you can technically email someone on another planet, but it takes a long time to get there, and sending image or video is prohibited. (Of course, there's nothing stopping you from uploading video to a drive and physically mailing it to another planet.) Most extra-planetary communication is text-based, except for news reels and popular media that are brought in by hauler.¹ Live performances of all kinds are popular on Pheme, as they are everywhere.

3. What genres are your literary scenes very likely to have? And what genres do you want your scenes to have? (Optional.)

Despite what some people say, novels likely aren't going anywhere, though they might look different on Pheme and Phemeans will read them on their tablets. So that's something likely.

What I want is a small puppet scene. In my professional life I've been learning more about puppetry, which is why I think of it at all, but I also just like the image of a blue-collar-looking guy operating a marionette in a grubby industrial lunar colony. I think it's an interesting contrast, so I'm going to find a way to use it if I can.

4. Choose 2-4 facts about each culture you want to convey.

I'll be honest: I spent a lot of time trying to flesh out each of these cultures for this exercise. I found it surprisingly difficult; far future science fiction is outside my comfort zone. In the end I leaned on Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, basing each of Pheme's cultures on one or two of the regional cultures Woodard describes, and borrowing from a few other sources to bring it together. For the purposes of this example I'll give a brief overview for context, and then list the 2-4 facts I want to use below that. In your own work, since you know the context, you should only list the facts. Note that I don't include any of the cultures' political or economic arrangements among the facts because, although these could influence what works get made, they aren't details that I'd want to communicate to the players with the literary scene. The party is going to figure out whether a region is capitalist or socialist the first time they try to buy anything, so I don't really need to worry about how I convey that.

Seed culture (past): a hierarchical culture which highly values specialization in the workplace; largely secular; technocratic and nominally meritocratic; run by specialists (there is no democratic representation), whose distance from the people actually taking risks influenced their decisions; the availability of gene therapies let them marry for love; combined the utopianism and intellectualism of Yankeedom (in Woodard's terms) with the aristocratic ethos of Tidewater, as over generations the technocrats became aristocrats in all but name

1. The original government of Pheme was technocratic and authoritarian, meritocratic more in name than in practice.
2. Pheme's seed culture was secular and utopian.

Arcological culture (present-day): urban, socialist in a centralized way, mostly secular, with bicameral governance: an Assembly of representatives (who vote on legislation and who are elected democratically) and a Committee of specialists (who draft legislation and forward it to the Assembly, and who appoint their own replacements meritocratically); availability of gene therapies let them marry for love and also allows a greater tolerance for a less diverse gene pool, which in turn leads to a greater tolerance for plural marriages, usually in small stable triad or quad situations; much like Yankeedom, though more strictly secular

1. The arcologies have a utopian and highly-educated society, attempting to fuse technocratic and democratic governance.
2. Stable, small-scale polygamy is normal in the arcologies, with marriage for love possible thanks to widely available gene therapy.
3. Arcological culture is mostly secular and non-religious.

Lunar-orbital culture (present-day): pure form is on the moons, while the orbital station's culture is also influenced by the arcologies and the haulers; capitalist and in theory democratic, but more technofeudalist in practice; reliance on corporate investment creates a pervasive deference to those corporations that is at odds with this culture's emphasis on self-reliance and rugged individualism; highly industrial, with economic reliance on resource extraction; low access to gene therapies but also no interest in arranged marriages, so there's a high number of transhuman byproducts here (ie. the "moon mutants"); high-risk environment means they are highly religious, and they're not very pluralist, with one overwhelming majority religion (a distant descendent of Reformed Protestantism, with Dharmic characteristics) and a second minority religion making up nearly all the rest; tend to be strictly monogamous; based on the Far West

1. Lunar-orbital culture is blue-collar-coded, emphasizing manual labour, individualism, and deference to corporate directives and interests.
2. Lunar-orbital culture is strictly monogamous and not interested in marrying based on genetic compatibility, so abnormal phenotypes are common.
3. Lunar-orbital culture is highly religious, with most colonists following a distant descendent of Reformed Protestantism that teaches predestination.

Outlying culture (present-day): agricultural, socialist in a decentralized way, small networked communities; strictly democratic; most of those who are religious are a kind of Buddhist with Quaker characteristics: politically quietist, unobtrusively disobeying laws they don't like rather than protesting them; monogamous, and less access to gene therapies means they practice arranged marriage in order to minimize the risk of transhuman byproducts; much like the Midlands, with a bit of artsy Left Coast style

1. The culture of the outlying settlements is democratic, politically quietist, and radically welcoming to outsiders.
2. The outlying settlements practice monogamy with arranged marriages, decided by genetic and psychological profile.
3. A slight majority of the outlying settlement population practices a form of Buddhism influenced by Quakerism.

Hauler culture (present-day): ethnically diverse, being cobbled together from people from all over the galaxy; high-risk lives means they are highly religious, but unlike the lunar-orbital culture they have a wild profusion of religions, with a high tolerance for religious pluralism; these religions tend to be syncretistic, with an underlying similarity (salvation-focused personal religions, emphasis more on devotion than on doctrine); capitalist; although some "family ships" encourage and enable strict monogamy, social instability (people moving from ship to ship by contract) means long-term relationships are usually hard to sustain, so serial monogamy, open marriage, and/or interleaving on-again off-again relationships are the norm²; does not have many transhumans in the first place, and virtually no access to gene therapies to speak of; has Greater Appalachia's sense of freedom and independence and New Netherlands' pluralism

1. Hauler culture has a monogamous minority among a non-monogamous majority as a result of social instability.
2. Hauler culture has extreme religious pluralism and a high degree of inter-religious tolerance.
3. Haulers usually have an attitude of rugged independence and ungovernability.

5. Come up with a genre for one culture, communicating one of the facts you have listed for it.

The first fact for the hauler culture, Hauler culture has a monogamous minority among a non-monogamous majority as a result of social instability, is interesting to me because I feel the haulers likely wouldn't be happy about: romantic stability seems to be better for people in the long term, so I suspect many haulers yearn for more committed relationships, if only on a subconscious level. The first genre therefore leaps out at me: haulers write romance novels which end with the protagonist settled down in a stable monogamous relationship.

Of course, that's just what our world's romance novels look like.³ What sets theirs apart? First of all, hauler romance novels are, until the very end, quite frank about hauler culture's romantic scene: the novels' protagonists might be in serial relationships, or open ones, or multiple alternating on-again off-again situations, but even if they're not, they still struggle to settle down with someone as much due to life circumstances as due to the misunderstandings or personality conflicts that usually postpone a romance novel's resolution. Second of all, in their final chapters these novels have to work out a fix for that problem, which almost always follows one of three formulae: the protagonist or their partner gets enough money to buy their own ship; the protagonist or their partner is promoted to a permanent position that lets them bring the other along with them; or the protagonist and their partner join a family ship. A fourth kind of ending is possible but rarer: the couple gets married, but accepts that it will be a long-distance relationship most of the time, and may or may not agree to an open marriage. A fifth kind of ending is rarest of all: they decide to settle down on a planet somewhere. Of these, only the fourth kind of ending is at all realistic for most haulers.

Just to make things interesting, I'm going to say that these novels are read equally by men and by women (which I do not think is true of contemporary romance novel readers, but was once truer than most men would admit) and the protagonists are as likely to be men as they are to be women. Although the final pairing is usually heterosexual, it isn't always, and even when the pairing is heterosexual it is not uncommon for the protagonist or the love interest to be bisexual.

These romance novels often never make it to print, being published exclusively as digital files for tablets. This makes them easy to pirate, and I think the haulers probably do pirate them quite often. However, very popular ones might get cheap print runs, which can be sold more readily at stations and don't have quite the same risk of piracy.

6. Consider how that genre is (or is not) adopted and adapted by each of the other cultures.

The Phemean culture with whom the haulers have the most contact is the lunar-orbital culture, and the orbital station in particular. It would make sense, then, for the orbital station to get ahold of the romances first. Still, I think all other present-day cultures would read hauler romances. The haulers' less monogamous mores are probably scandalous to most Phemeans, which means the novels are intriguing in a slightly taboo way; however, since the romances almost always affirm the value of monogamy in the end, their readers can insist they are actually quite wholesome. (Indeed, now that I write this out, I realize that if I were actually running this in a game, I'd want to prepare a set piece for the players to overhear in which a teen and a parent argue about hauler romances in exactly these terms.)

Arcological culture treats hauler romances as blue-collar trash, though they are read widely enough. The non-monogamous elements don't scandalize most arcologists, however, so what appeals to them are the details about long-haul space life. Some arcologists write romances about haulers, modelled after these novels, but they often eschew the monogamous endings in favour of some kind of committed polyamory. (Although arcologists are in general accepting of polygamy, most are not actually in polyamorist arrangements, so for many arcologists this can be a fun fantasy.) I can use the arcological take on hauler romances as a peg on which to hang exposition about the following fact: Stable, small-scale polygamy is normal in the arcologies, with marriage for love possible thanks to widely available gene therapy.

Lunar-orbital culture, by contrast, is highly scandalized by the non-monogamous elements of hauler romances, to the point where the moon colonists read them less than any other Phemean culture (though the exception is the orbital station, whose inhabitants read them more than other Phemeans do). That said, lunar-orbital colonists see a lot of commonality between lunar life and deep space life, and they do like the hauler romances that end with the couple joining a family ship, especially if the couple joins that ship as part of a religious conversion. Lunar-orbital culture isn't much on writing in general, so few of them try their hand at hauler romances, but those who do emphasize the religious conversion aspect. The conversion narrative still isn't the main thing, but it helps sanitize the genre for a lunar-orbital audience. I could use this as a peg on which to hang exposition for the following detail: Lunar-orbital culture is highly religious, with most colonists following a distant descendent of Reformed Protestantism that teaches predestination.

Outlying culture is also scandalized by the non-monogamous elements of hauler romances but, because they are in general more open-minded, it is less of a problem for them. What they find very appealing about the hauler romances, though, is the idea of marriage for love. This is the fantasy these novels provide, besides all the space travel: an image of people whose reproductive futures are not controlled by genetic screenings. Members of the outlying culture are often amateur artists of some stripe or another, so they write their own imitations of the hauler romances: they tend to stick pretty close to the original formula, and like the lunar-orbital writers they prefer the family ship endings, though usually without the religious conversion focus. I don't think I could use this to introduce any of the outlying culture aspects, but I could use it to reinforce one of them: The outlying settlements practice monogamy with arranged marriages, decided by genetic and psychological profile.

Hauler romances might not have been around during the original settling of Pheme, so I'm not going to develop any adaptations from the seed culture.

7. Repeat 5 - 6 at least twice more.

A.

In prompt 3 I said I wanted to use puppets somehow, and in particular I enjoyed the thought of a marionette in an industrial setting, so let's start there for the second genre: why might the lunar-orbital colonists get into puppetry?

At first glance, I don't imagine they would: blue collar scenes in the Anglosphere tend not to go in for that sort of thing. (Elsewhere in the world that might not be true, but because I have Anglophone players, I need to build from Anglophone expectations.) But I can stretch my imagination a bit. Looking over the facts, I notice that in the first I mention lunar-orbital culture is deferential to the corporations that prop up their economy, and I realize puppets could synergize well with corporate branding. Maybe the puppets are mascots in some capacity? And from there I have an idea for puppets expressing a fact about the lunar colonists: Lunar-orbital culture is blue-collar-coded, emphasizing manual labour, individualism, and deference to corporate interests and directives.

The colonists of a particular lunar station want more entertainment, so they ask the corporate authorities to build them a movie theatre. The company accepts the proposal, but scales it back considerably; what they design and pay for is not so much a 4D megaplex as it is a small 2D screening room. To make up a bit for the disappointment while still keeping costs low, they also send to the moon colonies a few puppeteers and some marionettes. The puppeteers train some of the lunar and orbital colonists in puppetry, and the colonists are left to entertain themselves. The other companies running stations on Pheme's moon like the idea and replicate it; puppets of all kinds (but mostly glove and marionette) are sent to the lunar-orbital colonies and select colonists are trained in their operation.⁴ The puppets are, of course, the intellectual property of the corporations that supplied them, and the local puppeteers must abide by strict licensing which dictate each character's name and mannerisms and what kinds of stories can be told with them. (That said, puppets aren't just for children, neither in the real world nor on Pheme, and so while the licenses for most puppets forbid ribald plot points and situations, there are special adults-only puppet products for more mature humour and storylines.) Frequently these restrictions include corporate-friendly messages about workplace safety and shareholder value. Thanks to the tension between rugged individualism and deference to the corporations, the puppeteers push the limits of these licenses, but rarely break them.

Given the puppets' origins, I think the arcological culture would not adopt them, seeing the marionettes as both low-culture and overly corporate. They can tolerate something low-culture and genuine, like hauler romances, and they can tolerate something corporate and middle-brow, like a blockbuster film or a triple-A game. Puppetry, though, is beneath the arcologists' high-culture interest. Their rejection of puppets could partly reinforce one fact about them–The arcologies have a utopian and highly-educated society, attempting to fuse technocratic and democratic governance–but not fully. It might be fair to say that there just isn't anything about arcological culture that the puppets communicate.

The outlying culture, however, is very likely to make the puppets their own. The impression I have is that these hippie farmer types enjoy off-beat DIY artfoms, which puppets capture perfectly (at least for Anglosphere players). They would reject the whole corporate culture around the puppets, of course. Either they'd quietly "liberate" puppets from their licenses, telling stories with the marionettes not in keeping with their corporate restrictions, or they would make their own puppets from scratch. While the lunar-orbital colonists have to be creative within the constraints the corporate licenses impose, the outlying settlers have a lot more freedom. In particular I am imagining the player characters arrive as strangers to one of these outlying settlements and are immediately invited to a puppet-show. I can use the show, and the manner of their invitation to it, as a peg on which to hang exposition about the following fact: The culture of the outlying settlements is democratic, politically quietist, and radically welcoming to outsiders. Combined with other details it could maybe be a clue for that fact instead.

As nomads and foreigners who only encounter Pheme intermittently, the haulers probably don't adopt or adapt Phemish genres very much at all. Although there's something charming about puppets on spaceships, I don't need it. And as before, the corporate puppets post-date Pheme's seed culture, so I can't use the puppets there.

That means I still don't have any genres at all for the seed culture, and not much for the arcological culture, either.

B.

To make sure my bases are covered, I am going to focus now on the arcologies, including the arcological culture and the seed culture from which it is descended.

Both cultures are educated, utopian, and technologically-savvy. If their novels are usually read on tablets rather than in paper books, is there some way their novels can use the technological affordances of electronic media that paper books don't have? The most obvious thing, to my mind, is the hyperlink, followed by search fields and easy rearrangement of files. Once upon a time humanities scholars were very excited by the idea of hypertext fiction, in which novels no longer need to be read in a linear order because the reader can jump around through the text's various internal links. Although not as much came of hypertext fiction in the real world as some people expected, they have both high-tech and high-culture connotations which work well for Pheme's arcological culture and seed culture. So that's what I'm going to go with: the arcology hypertext.⁵

In form I think arcology hypertexts would look almost as much like wikis as like novels. The experience of reading such a novel might be like going down a deep rabbit hole on some fan wiki, like Memory Alpha or Marvel Database. I think in particular of the Almeopedia or Serina wikis, both of which are the work of a single author and are, arguably, unique works of art. Other arcology hypertexts might instead look more like digital archives, collections of files which the readers can access in any order. (Some might have code that shuffles the files whenever the folder is opened, so that there is no default order readers might interpret as canonical.) In this case I think of something like the video game Her Story, which has the player solve a mystery by sorting through video clips of interrogation recordings, though the arcology hypertexts are not really games and only use text files. Altogether, these are fragmentary novels without any one order, that are instead structured by a web of associative links between the fragments. They nonetheless tell in a new way the same kinds of stories that novels tell: the formation or failure of a romantic relationship, or how a group of adventurers completed a difficult and dangerous quest, or the shape of an individual life.

I've decided the original undemocratic seed culture has hypertexts written by a single author, much like novels today. This could reinforce one of their central facts: The original government of Pheme was technocratic and authoritarian, meritocratic more in name than in practice. The process of writing a hypertext is similarly centralized in one expert author. (This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but it will make more sense in a moment.) As unrest rocked the arcologies, a new approach to the hypertext novel emerged, embodying the nascent democratic ethos: groups of people started writing hypertext novels together, with each author contributing their own pages, which link to the other authors' pages and which will be linked to subsequent pages and so on. These collaboratively-written hypertext novels became the primary artistic vehicle for the arcological culture at its very emergence.⁶ The relevant fact for archological culture is this one: The arcologies have a utopian and highly-educated society, attempting to fuse technocratic and democratic governance. There's too much to this fact for the arcology hypertext to act as a clue, but it could reinforce or introduce the fact perfectly well. All collaborative art projects are a little bit utopian in my eyes. It's in contrast to the collaborative hypertext that the hypertexts written by single professional authors are more clearly representative of seed culture's technocratic ethos.

The outlying culture adopts any artform it encounters, I now believe. I like that about them: no artform has originated among them, but they've made every artform their own. The collaborative hypertext novel especially appeals to them, I think, given how communitarian and democratic they are. Although they likely don't alter the form of the hypertext novel much, the contents could be tailored to the outlying culture. All I have left for them is A slight majority of the outlying settlement population practices a Buddhist-Quaker syncretism that is heavier on the Buddhism, so maybe they make up hagiographies for fictional sages.

I said before that hauler culture does not adopt much from Pheme, but I actually like the idea that some haulers who come frequently into Phemish ports took a liking to the collaborative form of the hyptertext novel. Maybe the occasional nerd on a hauler ship cajoles the rest of the crew into contributing to a hypertext novel; a few of the other members do it begrudgingly, but secretly get into it after a little while. Maybe there are sprawling ones, never finished, to which crewmates add as they come and go, and the original authors have all long departed once the last entry is made. Or maybe, if a clique in the crew grows particularly close, they make a hypertext novel as a keepsake just for them, knowing that one day soon they'll all go their separate ways. Crews might introduce themselves to each other with their hypertext novels, shyly transferring their amateurish, rambling, nonetheless-charming works of fiction to each other on shortbeam channels in the cold depths of space. The author fields are always filled with the name of the ship they were written on, and nothing more.

This doesn't communicate any of the facts I've written for the hauler culture. I just like it.

Lunar-orbital culture is too individualistic, and too hard-worked, for enormous collaborative writing of this nature.

8. Make examples of each.

Time is running late as I do this exercise; typing up the exercise while I do it more than triples the time it takes. If I had an actual game to run, I would of course need to make examples, but for the purposes of this post I think I can skip this step for now. I may try to make some examples later.

However, it's worth noting that in a science fiction setting like this one, you might be able to get away with fewer examples. Almost surely there is a post about each genre on the Phemish wiki. A player character who looks it up can find a summary of each, with brief notes about local variations. If you have an Information Age setting, you could consider this kind of shortcut. If you don't have this kind setting, however, or the literary scene is too small and secret to appear on any website, then you'll have to make more examples.

9. Check that your work does what you want it to do.

I'm happy with everything so far. In a number of cases I do not think the genres are quite enough to act as clues, by which I mean the players could not deduce the information from the literary scene alone. That's just fine, though, as I can still use them as pegs on which to hang immediate or future exposition, or as details that help remind players of what they already learned about the cultures. (Of course, the specific examples I create might be enough to act as clues, but I haven't made them yet. That's something I might make a point to try when coming up with the individual works.)

The tone is exactly what I'm looking for, however. The specific combination of hauler romance novel, puppet show, and hypertext novel covers the range I want, equal parts fantasy realism, quirkiness, and needless erudition. The hypertext novels are adequately high-technology while the puppets are very physical. And each culture's version feels right, I think. My only hope would be to keep that intact when making the examples.

#for GMs #made-up literature