Exercise: Making Literary Scenes for Multiple Cultures
Last time in this series I gave you an exercise for making a literary scene for a particular culture, and then went through it myself as an example. This exercise is especially useful for times when your players enter a new milieu which you hope to elaborate through elements of that milieu's culture. I modeled the exercise on my own process for inventing drow literature in anticipation of my players' characters exploring the Underdark. I think the exercise also works well for the example I made, a subculture in a relatively self-contained local conspiracy.
However, it is not always the case that your players will encounter cultures one at a time, nor will each culture they encounter be isolated from the others. Just as often their characters will come upon larger regions containing neighbouring cultures. Maybe it's a kingdom with coastal urban populations, pastoral hill-folk, mountain-dwelling miners, and sylvan enclaves, all maintaining distinct customs and modes of expression. Or maybe a string of mutant and robot settlements in a post-apocalyptic wasteland are each weird in their own ways, despite being descended from the same pre-catastrophe society. Or maybe it's one civilization at different points in time: the players might be time travellers, or they might just want to understand the people who made the ruins they're exploring. Regardless, in such cases your task as the GM is not to lay out a single culture for your players to navigate and eventually understand, but to lay out multiple such cultures, with key differences and relationships between them.
Heinrich Kley's Demons of Krupp, 1911
This exercise is meant for such cases. Here the point is not to produce complete literary scenes for each culture, but to use sketches of multiple literary scenes to highlight the differences or similarities you as the GM feel it is important for the players to notice. I based this exercise on how I made storytelling forms for Planegea. To save myself some time, I will assume you're familiar already with the previous exercise, linked at the start of this post; I advise that you read it now if you haven't read it already, as I don't plan to repeat some of the general advice. Be warned, too, that this exercise will take you a bit more time than that one will.
In theory, you can use this exercise and the previous one in tandem. If you've already made a literary scene for one culture, you could use this exercise to explore how the genres and conventions from that literary scene are taken up and adapted by neighbouring cultures.
The Exercise
As before, I'm going to put the questions and prompts in numbered headers, and below each I'll explain it further. For your own purposes, I suggest you just copy out the numbered questions and prompts, leaving a block of space for your answer after each.
1. What cultures or subcultures are you working on?
You always need a sense of the scope of your project. This time the scope is likely wider than before, but it does still need to be manageable. For now I think it's reasonable to clearly delineate three to five cultures or subcultures you wish to work with. These could be neighbouring regions, but they could also be sections of one region (divided perhaps by class, gender, age, or religion), or they could be different time periods for one culture, or some combination of these. I think it works best if you already know a lot about these cultures, but I suppose this exercise could be part of your process for generating ideas about them instead.
For instance, in a high fantasy game you might limit yourself to the living cultures of a single kingdom: the cosmopolitan half-human populations of the western coastal cities, the agrarian human villages inland, the mixed halfling and frogfolk hamlets of the southern wetlands, the elven enclaves in the eastern forests, and the giant nomads of the northern mountains.
2. What are the primary media of your cultures' literary scenes, and how are they distributed?
In the previous exercise, I recommended deciding what media are available in your setting and then selecting only a few to work with. This time, you might want to keep more media options available, for two reasons. First, media common in one culture might not seem likely in another. In my main campaign's early modern (ie. Renaissance) setting, for instance, it makes sense for the cities to have a robust print culture, but it makes much less sense for mountain nomads to have one. But second and more important, the point here is contrast: even if it's wholly possible for all of your cultures to use the same media, you can heighten the differences between them if they don't tell or distribute stories in the same way. Of course, you don't want to make your cultures' literary scenes entirely dissimilar, either; one of the major techniques here will be to explore how genres change as they are taken up by other cultures, which means those other cultures have to be able to take them up at all. For these reasons, instead of using this question to limit your scope, use it to list some ideas and figure out a place to start, while noting any media that some of your cultures will use and other cultures realistically will not.
3. What genres are your literary scenes very likely to have? And what genres do you want your scenes to have? (Optional.)
Everything I said in the previous exercise's corresponding prompt pertains here, but since writing that post I realized I should have included something else: is there anything you want your literary scene to have? If you are running a post-apocalyptic game and your table has a lot of Fallout fans, you might get a lot out of your setting's pulp comic books. Or maybe you're a decent singer of folk songs, so you want to include some sea shanties in your game. While you're jotting down any genres you can't believe your literary scenes wouldn't have, note as well anything you would like them to have.
4. Choose 2-4 facts about each culture you want to convey.
There are lots of ways of categorizing facts about each culture, but a simple one is this: what things do they have in common, and what things make them distinct? Both can be of interest to players and their characters as they try to understand and influence NPCs. So if you are having trouble generating facts for your cultures, one thing you can do is note correspondences; if for instance you've noted that the elves practice ritual cannibalism as part of their funerary rites, then maybe think about what each of the other cultures' funerary rites are like. However, the most important thing is that your literary scenes communicate details that matter to you and your players, either because they might come up in play or because they appeal to your players' interests.
Last time I said that you might list more facts than you use in later prompts. This is especially true now. Although you should expect each genre to do double duty, conveying one fact about one culture and other facts about other cultures, you should still expect to have several facts left over at the end. That's fine: it would be silly to rely on this one technique to communicate everything there is to know about your setting.
5. Come up with a genre for one culture, communicating one of the facts you have listed for it.
Start with one culture, whichever one you like, and make up a genre that that culture either invented or imported to the region from elsewhere. The genre should convey one of the facts you have listed. Alternately, you can look at your answers for prompt 3, pick one you want to use, and find a detail about a culture it can communicate especially well. Either way, you should have some idea about why the culture developed this genre. Bear in mind the suggestions I gave in the last exercise.
6. Consider how that genre is (or is not) adopted and adapted by each of the other cultures.
This is, for me, the fun part. What about this genre would appeal to audiences and artists in the other cultures? If they took it up, what would they change? If they did not take it up, why not? If you understand your cultures well enough already, you may not need to consult your lists of facts about them; I find that if I just go with what I believe the culture would do, I'll automatically express those important similarities and differences. But if you're having trouble, you can look at the list of facts for each culture and see which could be well-expressed in this genre, or see which of these facts could be a reason the culture doesn't adopt the genre at all. It's also possible that they read works in this genre but don't write any.
Write down whether and how the genre is adopted by each culture, and any information you hope this conveys about the culture.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 at least twice more.
It's up to you how many genres you want to make, but I suggest at least three total. I recommend iterating this process until each milieu has two or more distinct genres. If you find you're deciding one culture doesn't adopt any of its neighbours' genres or forms, you should probably make up a genre that originates there, or that they borrow from somewhere else entirely. Remember to draw on the ideas you developed in prompt 3 if at all possible, and remember the advice I provided in the previous exercise.
8. Make examples of each.
Once you're happy with the genres you have, come up with a few examples for each. It's highly unlikely that your players' characters will encounter a literary survey of the region; they are going to encounter specific books or stories, so you should have some books and stories prepared. Keep in mind how your players usually behave, and prepare ones that they are most likely to actually encounter. (That said, I have some advice for sticking a literary work or two in front of your players regardless of their habits.)
9. Check that your work does what you want it to do.
You won't know if you succeeded or not until you've actually run the game, but it never hurts to give your work a once-over anyway. Does each genre actually convey what you want it to convey? This matters less if you plan to use it as a hook for exposition, but it matters quite a lot if you plan to use it as a clue (see the second half of a previous post for more on that). If your genres, and the specific works you came up with to represent the genres, don't convey their cultural details as clearly as they should, consider why and rework them.
Furthermore, check that what you've come up with feels right, too. It might communicate exactly what you want it to convey while also introducing a tone that is at odds with the mood of your game. A small tweak might be all that's required to fix it, but it might also require that you replace one whole genre, or add a further genre to even things out.