World Building Formula pt. 3

World Building Formula
Section 3: People

by Panda-Bear-Hug-XD


Culture at a Glance
What sort of real life culture, or cultures, is your world copying or a blend of?
Is your world more globalization, with cultures mingling and perhaps homogenizing… Or are the cultures of your world more separate and distinct?
What does the language sound like? How difficult is translation?
Are there state religions, common sayings, and cultural beliefs present? Even if a particular culture is individualistic, common beliefs will be present.
How does the geography of you world interact with its inhabitants’ culture?


Government
What sort of real life or historical government are like the one your people in your imaginary cultures live under?

Here’s a list of real-life governments that have been used in our history and literature:

Tribal/Primitive
Theocracy
Communalism
Monarchy
Oligarchy
Dictatorship
Communism/Marxism
Totalitarianism
Socialism
Capitalism
Republic
Democracy
Anarchy
Utopian/Despotic


Economics
What is your world’s or country’s or tribe’s economy based off of? Who do they trade with? What are the kinds of typical jobs one might have if they are male, female, or a certain race?

What’s the currency like? Is there currency, or do people only barter? How available are shops and restaurants? How available are public services for the poor?

A job is usually the most defining attribute of a person’s life that defines how they spend their time. Because of that, and individual’s job is often essential to their worldview. Likewise, what an economy is based on in a huge factor in the worldview of a culture. One culture could use religion as a way to help establish social order and give members strength to improve themselves and their country, while another culture could accomplish the same, or a similar thing with the basis of pure science and scientific inquiry.

The economy also defines how a country provides its individuals food and other basic necessities. Every individual is interdependent on one another in the economy. When depressions occur it is because a large group or a core group of people who are important to the economy have been struck down. Who is this large or core group, why are they in this position? How would one strike the weak point of this economy? How would one help this economy grow strong? For instance, a merchant-based country would become an empire through drowning our foreign economies and having economic dominance. Meanwhile, an entire agrarian country could starve from a few years of severe drought.

Also keep in mind how each country would wage war. This is inextricably linked to their economies. It is commonly believed that the North won over the South in America’s Civil War because the North had an industrious economy and the South had an agrarian one. The North was ready to make their own weapons in mass production with interchangeable parts and could get the resources for their industries from the American Mid West. They also had far more trains than the South. The South had to buy any weapons they didn’t already have. The nearest industrious economies besides the North were overseas, so shipping the weapons would take uncomfortably long. The South also had fairly lousy transportation compared to the North.


Quality of Life
The quality of life of a person within your world largely depends on the following:

Environment
Social Structure
Government
Economy

The quality of life in an individual is probably the single most important factor to that individual’s identity and lifestyle. It defines his time, how he lives, how he works, how he interacts with those around him, etc. Of course, one may choose one’s own attitude about such things, but a beggar is going to have a different lifestyle than an oil tycoon.

Moving on to a more cultural or global scale, what is the ration of the social classes? How many beggars and tycoons are there? Is there a growing or shrinking middle class?
Something worthy of notice is that as globalism spreads, these social classes become entire countries. After globalism was acknowledged to be plenty at large on Earth, we coined the phrases First, Second and Third World Countries. First World Countries on Earth are generally industrious, technological, and managers of money (a la America, Briton, etc.). Second World Countries are less so. Third World Countries are primarily agrarian, provide raw materials for foreign nations’ industries and have poor access to technology or industries themselves (a la Libya).

It will be extremely helpful for your learning to research Maslov’s Hierarchy. It’s a summary, in priotiry, to the needs of a fulfilled human life.


Birth/Infancy Survival Rate
Birth rate is a result of the following factors:
Quality of Life
Fertility/Birth Process of your imaginary race
Cultural values and rules dictating such, ahem, business

Inuit of Greenland and Canada when they were still isolated had a very low quality of life. They were nomads, desperately searching for food and fighting the cold. This is not only why they had a low infancy survival rate but a high birth rate. They needed to try to have a lot of babies in order for a few of them to survive to adulthood. Their cultural values and rules concerning such things reflected this. For example, it was not considered murder to place an infant that you simply couldn’t feed out in the cold to die; instead it was considered the most humane thing to do to the infant. At the same time, the parents placed extremely high value on building and raising a family, and kept trying no matter how many times it would take. Sometimes the most essential part of a culture is defined by how they treat this universal human experience: raising families.

In fantasy especially, the most common reason that humans do not see the fantastic creatures all around us is that we multiplied too fast for other races too keep up. We took over by sheer number. In effect, magical races in fantasies often refer to humans as if we were like cockroaches. Birth rate is traditionally a crucial factor in long-term wars between races. The faster one multiplies, the easier it is to win. At the same time, races that have long life spans tend to have very low birth and/or fertility rates. It has some sense to it; elephants have a 9-month pregnancy while mice are only pregnant for about 18 days.


Maturity Rate
Maturity rate effects how each generation changes an entire culture by affecting each individual’s reactions to the world around him or her. You’re given more time to decide on your own worldview when your accepted length of childhood and adolescence lasts longer. If a generation is given more time to consider the big questions and question the prior generation’s wisdom, a culture will change more rapidly over time. When children are forced to work in mills starting age six they suddenly have no time for anything but working like their parents and pretty much becoming miniature adults. When this happens, they have little time for coming up with new ideas to rock a culture’s mindset, and new changes come very slowly. The new changes also probably come someone who does somehow have time to think things over.

Do the people of your imaginary culture grow up quickly or slowly? And while you’re at it, for how long do they live as adults afterward? When thinking on this, you might be reminded that elves (as in classic Middle Earth style) often have issues with living forever after a relatively brief childhood.

Is growing up a gradual process with no clear end, or has the culture intentionally set up milestones and trials to chart out to adulthood that has definite end? Reading this, you probably live in a culture in which stages of education generally put loose milestones on your process of growing up. You are most likely considered adult when you reach the age of 18 and can vote. Contrast this with tribal right-to-passage trials, like having a fight to the death with another teenager to prove your worthiness of becoming an adult. Compare that with teen gangs living in your culture who have their own rights of passage.


Relationship With Nature
How does your imaginary race treat the natural landscape, plants, and animals around them? Are they like the Native Americans, altering nature as little as they could, or like Socrates the first great Greek philosopher who nature to be something man must conquer?

If your race is concerned about conserving nature, the reasons could greatly vary. They could have religious reverence for nature and its beauty, perhaps seeing their selves as a small part of it. Or your race could see other values as a priority above preserving the natural landscape around them, such as building homes, jobs and civilization for people.

Remember, only recently have humans began wanting to protect the ecosystem because of scientific reasons, because only recently have we really looked into the idea scientifically.


Time Period
What time period from our history influences how you imagine your world?

Does the world seem large or small to its inhabitants? In ancient mythological stories such as Hercules, the world seemed like a huge place dominated by forces other than human. These forces include animals, raw nature and the gods (who were usually aspects of nature designed after humans).  

The Hellenistic Period is probably the first good example of the world shrinking according to the human-eye point of view. The Egyptians and Greeks dominated the Mediterranean and the coast around it.

Click here for a map: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/i… (Hellenistic states are Greek states)

The two cultures felt the world was smaller; they had interaction between two very different cultures and thus were exposed to contradicting worldviews and open, unknown range seemed little. Each had much more freedom to expand their won cultures and in held dominance over other cultures. They knew more about the nature of their world, helped shape most of that nature and felt more depressed. Being within the sweet spot of a successful empire also helped the Greeks have the ability to produce the philosophies that held dominant sway over human reason during the Renaissance and still have much dominance today.

If your world is quite futuristic, what sort of interpretation of the word are you using? The 1950’s Americans saw a quite idealistic and technological future. Today, people see the future as mostly despotic and decaying from our own actions.

Also if your setting is far off in the future, how do your people view history? Are the long-lost days of automobiles known historical times or myth?

Not to mention, time period effects how races treat less “evolved” or “developed” races. Once humans and animals were almost at par, each fighting the other for survival. The opposite extreme would be something like in the space age stage of the popular computer game, “Spore”. In order to colonize new planets, the player’s race must abduct plants and animals and ship them to populate new planets. The player’s race must do this in order to establish a better atmosphere on the planet for their colonies. You can also plant monoliths on tribal planets, alluring to the science fiction movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey”. In that movie, monoliths appear to be sent from a superior race as a catalyst for evolving the human race.


Abilities
What someone is naturally capable of largely helps to define what moral conundrums he or she faces. Is it wrong to open your eyes if lasers shoot out of them whenever you do? You probably haven’t thought about it, but Cyclops from the “X-Men” has. His visor is the only thing that lets him see without blasting everything in sight to kingdom come. What if an entire culture had Cyclops’s problem, without the visors? The sense of sight might become revered as a forbidden fruit.

Abilities are also is key in defining a race’s worldview. One only needs to look at a typical elemental magic story to notice this. The culture based on begin able to manipulate one element will look at the world differently than the culture based power over a different element. For instance, in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” the Fire Nation was the only nation that had metal machinery and faco because their use of firebending led to the development of steam powered technology. Meanwhile, the Earth Nation had mail systems powered by slides and tracks made of rock and were manually controlled by earthbenders. Keep in mind that earthbending metal is nigh impossible.

A history student may easily deduce that the Fire Nation had more militant prowess than the Earth Nation, because their machines didn’t need manual operation. That saved more manpower for the Fire Nation troops themselves. Not to mention that the production of weapons was faster for the same reasons.

If your nation has the ability to be more militant than the other nations, how would that effect the worldview your nation’s culture has?

Or perhaps your race is suddenly able to bring the dead back to life. What sort of rules might your race put on this ability, and how would it affect the cultural value of life?


Uniqueness
The uniqueness of a race, nation, culture or planet is an addendum to the rest of the above topics. How unique or special a group of people feels compared to their neighbors helps define how they treat their neighbors, beside other previously mentioned concepts including worldview. Most likely, whatever is unique about your people is related to your story's theme.

This topic is also probably the most crucial to your writing. How indeed are the people that the reader is learning about different from whatever other people they already know of through fact and fiction? When used well, imaginary groups of people are people the reader can simultaneously relate to and be fascinated by. If you can pull that off, your using a commonly overlooked resource fiction writers have in their stories for making their books stand out on the shelf.