Worldbuilding with Colin Woodard's American Nations

11 Feb, 2025

Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, published by Penguin, has turned out to be helpful for me as a worldbuilding tool. I expect I'll use it more extensively in future campaigns and I think my fellow GMs, and other worldbuilders, could get some use out of it, too.

"Sign for Plymouth Rock," happyskrappy, 2011, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

In American Nations, Woodard argues that the United States is not just one nation but instead contains several nations, in the traditional sense of a people who share a language, culture, history, and political order. He identifies eleven cultures which make up the United States, with several of these nations spilling over into Canada and Mexico as well, and he explains the origins and evolution of each culture's values and political alignment. Of particular note is the very different way each of these nations understands freedom; one thing Woodard wants to explain is how and why Americans of all stripes invoke freedom on behalf of very different policy preferences.

I think examples will help here. Consider the differences between the regions Woodard calls Greater Appalachia and Yankeedom. Greater Appalachia was settled by settlers from the war-torn border regions of England and Scotland, most of them Calvinists; as a consequence of both history and religion, these borderlanders were pessimistic, with a low view of human nature and little patience for any person's claims to superiority. They did not think that education, piety, social status, or wealth made any person better than another, and often reacted poorly when anyone claimed to have authority over them for reasons of learning, holiness, or rank. Furthermore, they were used to fighting in wars and had a stomach for violence. The borderlanders who settled in Appalachia, therefore, developed a pessimistic libertarian ethos, and valued a person's willingness to fight for their liberty or honour.

Yankeedom, on the other hand, was settled by Puritans, who left England and Amsterdam because neither place was willing to impose Puritan morality on their populaces; in New England they made a patchwork of settlements in which they could enforce the draconian laws they desired. Like the Greater Appalachians, they were Calvinists, with a pessimistic view of human nature, but unlike the Greater Appalachians they thought strict laws, good education, mutual support, and public religion could make people holy. Because of their history, they were suspicious of kings and they thought each community should have the ability to govern themselves. Though the Puritans' Yankee descendents are no longer Puritans, they have inherited some of their values and expectations: utopianism, civic-mindedness, comfort with moralizing, and a high value on education. While for the Greater Appalachians freedom is the ability for each individual (or perhaps each family) to do what they like, for the Yankees freedom is the ability and obligation for each community to decide by what set of rules it should govern itself.

Woodard is not saying everyone in each region has exactly the same ethics. What he does seem to be saying is that people in each region tend to share similar values and expectations. There might still be optimists among the Appalachians, but they will be rarer, and more often they will still end up following norms that were established by pessimists. His goal is not to propogate stereotypes, but instead to describe the different cultures that shape the people who live in them. Unfortunately, summarizing his work runs a risk of making these descriptions into stereotypes after all. If you want to read a summary regardless, Patrick T Reardon's review has a good one. For the purposes of this post I will just list the regions he discusses:

1. El Norte, on the border of Mexico and the United States of America;
2. New France, in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Louisiana;
3. Tidewater, a shrinking region in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina;
4. Yankeedom, in New England, parts of the Midwest, and parts of Atlantic Canada;
5. New Netherland, in parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut;
6. the Deep South, dominating the southeastern United States;
7. the Midlands, in most of Ontario and Iowa, and parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas;
8. Greater Appalachia, in and around Appalachia;
9. the Left Coast, a strip from coastal California to southern Alaska;
10. the Far West, stretching from northern Arizona and interior California up to Alaska and the Canadian Prairie provinces; and
11. First Nation, the cultural sphere of North America's indigenous peoples, still influential in Alaska, Greenland, and the Canadian territories.¹

Overall I find it a fairly compelling argument, even if I think Woodard's understanding of contemporary Quebec is incomplete and even if he does repeat the typical American absurdity that the United States was victorious in the War of 1812. Part of what makes it persuasive to me is that his descriptions of the places I've lived ring true². Of course, I can't say whether his descriptions of the other North American nations are quite as accurate – but for the purposes of tabletop games, it doesn't actually matter whether or not his claims are true.

There is a temptation when worldbuilding, I fear, to give your secondary world's inhabitants the same norms and values that you hold yourself. Though they are far from the only culprit, actual plays like Critical Role are where I see this most clearly: despite significant variation in dress, cuisine, architecture, civil engineering, and language, the inhabitants of Matt Mercer's Exandria often feel more-or-less American, especially in the Menagerie Coast and Tal'Dorei. I never get the sense that the citizens of Nicodranas or Port Damali have different values from the residents of Emon or Whitestone, despite their very different histories. Although individual members within a region have various expectations and norms, little or nothing characterizes each region as a whole, besides climate, food, fashion, and so on. Those props and set dressing are important for giving each place a distinct flavour, but all that isn't, in my view, quite enough. At the very least it doesn't satisfy my desire for anthropological realism. Quite a lot of Exandria feels to me like California.³

As I said, Critical Role is not the only culprit. I also am guilty of this. Although I am conscious that the characters in my home game are feudal subjects and I try to give them the kinds of political emotions feudal subjects might have, beyond that I did not put much thought at all into making a distinct ethos for Ewistar, nor for Ewistar's regions. I did put a lot of thought into distinguishing its provinces: each has distinctive biomes and demographics; the magic shops of each have their own unique inventories; and for each region I privilege different kinds of adventure. While I did consider what norms and values set the lizardfolk, ettins, or orcs apart from the neighbouring humans and half-elves, I did not put any thought at all into those humans and half-elves. I regret this now – but, in my defense, I had not yet read Woodard's American Nations. For this reason I can't really blame Matt Mercer, either.

And that's not the only reason I can't blame Mercer. I think it's important to consider another good reason a GM, rather than a novelist, might keep their game setting's norms and values the same as their own culture's, one I imagine you have already thought of: it is a lot easier for players to roleplay their characters if they intuitively understand what things those characters expect and value! Unless the game is some sort of portal fantasy, after all, the player characters should share the culture of the setting, and most players probably have difficulty getting into the mindset of cultures the GM just made up. Even if they can, they simply might not want to.

I think American Nations is a good resource for this problem. I now often make different regions of a setting correspond to the nations Woodard describes; one of the game setting's cultures will have a history that gives it the pessimistic libertarian ethos of Greater Appalachia, while another will have the utopian and moralistic collectivism of Yankeedom. This has the advantage of giving each region a distinct political and ethical character, which helps to bring the setting to life, to distinguish the game regions, and to provide some anthropological realism, without the disadvantage of these cultures being too different from the players' own cultures. Now, the setting will still be a fantasy or science fiction version of North America, but at least it won't be a flat and homogenous one.

It's too late to insert this easily into my main campaign setting, but for future games I imagine I will rely increasingly on this method. Indeed, I've done it before on this blog, when trying to quickly put together an example far-future sci-fi setting. And for a collaborative world-building exercise I did with some friends, I used Woodard's nations to flesh out the different regions that were emerging: while I modelled the northern Dwarro-Elfish culture after Yankeedom, for instance, the southern high elves were based on Tidewater, and the drow were split between the two. This was a helpful shorthand to help me understand how each culture ticks, which I could blend with or layer on top of what other distinctions might exist between elves, dwarves, and so on.

If you too want help making your game's regions feel different and feel real, or if you want to better understand North American culture or the history of the United States, I recommend borrowing Colin Woodard's American Nations from your local library.

See my non-fiction bookshelf for other books I've used in my TTRPGs.

#books #for GMs