One thing I’ve noticed about most fantasy fiction and roleplaying is that many cultures are ultimately humans with a slight tweak. Elves and dwarves are humans who are timeless, but more snobby or great craftsman, but more greedy. The good reason for this is to make the characters relatable. It’s relatively easy to like and support Gimli and Legolas in Lord of the Rings, even though neither of them are human. They are different from us, but not so different we can’t see anything of ourselves in them.

This only becomes a problem when the cultures become only that minor difference. Elves being really long-lived (or even immortal) humans explains how aloof they are, but is that all they are? How does succession work if people don’t die for hundreds or even thousands of years? If their birth rate is really low (how have they not taken over the world if they live for thousands of years and reproduce at the same rate as humans?), is the birth of a child a huge deal? Is it a cause for concern, due to resource issues? How do they view war? Are warrior types revered because they are protecting their society, reviled because they take lives, or (most likely) something in between? Do they treat murder differently? Perhaps killing an elf is more severely punished because they had so much more life than the shorter lived humans.

Dwarves traditionally value craftsmanship, but again, is that all they are? How do they pass their trade and education on to the next generation? Perhaps scholars and teachers are highly respected members of society, master crafters are highly sought after for apprenticeship, or apprenticeship is viewed as having too much potential for spawning competition. Are there guilds representing different trades? Perhaps there are schools, complete with rivalries that extend beyond sports into philosophy and which method of mining or shaping metal is truly the best. If money and craftsmanship are so important, how is a monarch chosen? Is it a plutocracy (the wealthiest rule), a meritocracy (the best craftsman rules), or something else? What if the king is no longer the richest? Who decides if a master weaver is better than a master smith?

Then we get into the realm of the truly strange. At least elves and dwarves are something vaguely human, but what about intelligent spiders or trees (both Tolkien constructs). These are beings that have different metabolisms, gender dimorphism (or even lack of gender), and technology. When dealing with such creatures, you have two choices. You can still base their culture on human cultures with some sort of change, similar to how the more common fantasy races are handled or to make them truly alien.

The advantages of keeping with standard fantasy tropes are keeping characters relatable and relative ease of creation. Culture creation, world building, and coming up with interesting characters is difficult at the best of times. Making it easier is good. Trust me. The disadvantage is that it’s unrealistic. Creatures descended from dragons simply won’t be all that similar to humans culturally. It just doesn’t make any sense for them to be similar to human societies.

Making the culture entirely alien solves this problem. You can increase the realism by doing some research on how the analogous creatures work in our world, then extrapolating from there to create the culture. For the intelligent spider example, one thing to note is that female spiders are almost universally larger than males, often by orders of magnitude. In addition, males often die right after mating, either from being killed by the female or from natural causes. Spiders don’t have lungs, so how do they communicate? Can they communicate with other species? How does the fact that they can create webbing change their technology? If you have magic, how do they make magical gestures? There are a lot of questions, and if you make the whole thing from scratch without any human-like basis, it will take a lot of work. Any characters you create from that society will automatically be difficult for your readers or players to understand.

Thank you for reading this. I was not feeling well, yesterday, but I wanted to get this out today. I’ll be trying to take some other bloggers’ advice and work ahead of schedule. I’ll see you next Sunday!